PaRDeS

Four entered  the  Orchard (Pardes): Ben Azzai,   Ben Zoma,  Akher and Rabbi Aqiva. One peeked and   died; one peeked and was smitten; one peeked and   cut down  the shoots;  one ascended  safely  and   descended safely.
Ben  Azzai   peeked  and  died.  Concerning  him   Scripture says:   "Precious  in the  eyes of  he   Lord is  the death  of His  loyal ones" (Ps. 16.   15).
Ben Zoma  peeked and was smitten. Concerning him   Scripture says:  "If you  have found  honey, eat   only your  fill lest   you become filled with it   and vomit" (Prov.  25:16).
Akher  peeked  and   cut  down   the  shoots.   Concerning him  Scripture says: "Do not let your   mouth bring  your flesh  to sin,  and do not say   before   the angel  that it  is  an  error;  why   should God  become angry at your voice, and ruin   your handiwork" (Eccl. 5:5).
Rabbi  Aqiva  ascended  safely  and  descended   safely.   Concerning him  Scripture says:  "Draw   me, let  us run  after you, the King has brought   me into His chambers" (Song I:4).

Baffling, right? During our first study session together one of the fellows described it as a sealed metaphor. This concept let me relax a little; the puzzle solver in me retreated and I learned to take solace in its impenetrability, its mystery, its magic.

But now, as this year’s LABA Fellows program has come to an end, I think I found a way in – to the story, that is, not the pardes. I realized that these four Rabbis were doing the same thing we did all year when they made their way to the orchard. They were also sitting around, reading old texts, discussing their meanings, trying to adapt them to contemporary logic and arguing over their importance or relevance. Their reverence to, or what today would surely be deemed obsession with, words, the word, was their ticket in; the entrance, located in their study hall. I don’t dare equate our group’s communal exegesis with that of the great Talmudic sages, but, still, I think I kind of get it now.

We also felt ourselves get lured by ancient stories, seduced by the words and images, drawn into another realm distinct from the world outside our place of study on 14th St. and 1st Ave. in the East Village. We drank the Kool-Aid and then stretched open our palms to create dance, photography, theater, art, and writing, certain that we were reaching in the right direction.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal - yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

This is taken from the second stanza of John Keat's "Ode to a Grecian Urn," a poem that contemplates an ideal moment, frozen on a Grecian urn. In the poem, Keats depicts the young lovers as suspended for eternity in between not kissing and kissing, desire and fulfillment. Over the course of this year us LABA fellows have found ourselves in a similar place. We have studied, contemplated, imagined, and created the pardes in our study and work. But in the end it wasn't paradise we were moved by, but the state of longing for it.

Indeed, it is this in-betweenness that has beguiled us and, in turn, provoked us as we try to define and represent paradise. Our relationships to nature, religion, and one another are all shaped by the pardes in our minds and hearts and the reality in which we exist. The same goes for our work; we all long to achieve the magical garden, but, in the end are happy just to present a hint of its existence -- which is, in itself, a victory.

In almost every single chick flick, there is a pivotal scene during which the character goes shopping. It is almost always presented as a montage of different stores, outfits, looks, and expressions, and it signals for the character a passage to second chances, redemption, and, ultimately, a resurrection. I would like to be able to roll my eyes and see this as one of the many silly elements of the chick-flick genre. But I can’t, and the reason I can’t is because it has happened to me. More than once.

Just like the tan, blond lead of any given chick flick, I too have felt the transformative power of a new dress. I have witnessed how it can give structure, even if just for a little while, to the messiness of existence and inspire new, superior, personal narratives. This embarrasses me.

I get why I shouldn’t like shopping. I get why it’s dumb, and even at times morally wrong. I get how I am beholden to the profit-driven, constantly changing whims of fashion designers, I get how my affordable garments may have been produced in conditions I would find detestable, and I get how generally lame it is to believe in something so cockeyed as salvation by way of material goods. But then I put on the new dress, and the truth is, I feel a bit more beautiful, and, well, who doesn’t love beauty, fleeting and luscious.

The longing for physical beauty is often painted as a weakness, a shallow pursuit compared to the potentially more fulfilling desire for a deepened intellect and heightened spirituality. But most true admirers of physical beauty know that the feeling of redemption when they experience beauty, whether it be for a painting, landscape, or lovingly adorned person, is hardly shallow. And so the quest for beauty straddles these two sides, sin and goodness, repulsion and appreciation, chaos and order. This schizophrenia can be found in the Torah too, where asceticism and aestheticism commingle, sending mixed messages on physical beauty and the value of something like, say, my new dress.

One one hand, beauty for beauty’s sake is deemed trivial in Judaism. Eshet Chayil, or Normal 0 0 1 1 This Week in New York 1 1 1 10.1316 0 0 0 “A Woman of Valor, Normal 0 0 1 1 This Week in New York 1 1 1 10.1316 0 0 0 ” a hymn found at the end of Proverbs and sung on Shabbat, says:

Charm is deceptive and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears God shall be praised.
Give her of the fruit of her hands, and let her works praise her in the gates.

But then take a look at the way the matriarchs are described and we get a different message on beauty. Sarah is a woman of beautiful appearance. (Genesis 12:11) Rebecca is very fair to look upon. (Genesis 24:16) And Rachel is beautiful of form and beautiful of appearance. (Genesis 29:17)

Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel are praised in other places for their inner beauty, but the power of their physical beauty is not overlooked, nor is it just casually mentioned. And this is hardly the only time when physical beauty is presented in the Torah, from the Song of Songs to descriptions of Eden. Some argue that they are all metaphors, but the language is too rich, the images too deliberate, too precise, or, in other words, too beautiful to not acknowledge the power of physical beauty.

It is a bit of a shonde to link the matriarchs to a chick-flick shopping montage, but the representations of beauty are not that far apart. These are just two examples, one ancient, the other modern, of the enduring human desire for beauty. The debate about this desire, whether it is a weakness or strength, has also endured and is likely never to be resolved. And even if it was, I am not sure I would be willing to give up the pardes of a new dress, hanging in my closet just waiting for me to step in.

I feel that most people, at one time or another, have a utopian vision for the world. For some it is limited to imagining a place with well-marked bike lanes or deep respect for livestock. Others are more ambitious and desire an overhaul of capitalism or racial harmony. I have certainly dabbled in a number of utopian ideals in my time, based on my idea of environmentalism or  socialism, but my commitment was ultimately a bit wishy-washy, and the allure of a good steak (unorganic, shipped from across the country) or a cute and affordable dress (made of toxic materials in a Chinese sweatshop) proved stronger than my ideals. Though there is one change-the-world cause that I have managed to stay loyal to, a utopian vision that felt both practical and important enough for me to persevere, and that is equality of the sexes.

I first read about feminist utopias my freshman year in college in a survey course I took on political utopias. While I was somewhat turned off by the radical nature of these feminist utopias – including one about an egalitarian matriarchal  cosmological plane written by Doris Lessing and another where gender is dependent upon age by Elisabeth Mann Borgese – I was intrigued by their rigid messages. My university-born feminism never approached the radicalism proposed in those texts, but it did color my decisions and opinions from there on out. Gender equality became my daily tikkun olam and factored into everything from whether I would – or wouldn’t – wear lipstick to spending a year in Ecuador tutoring girls at an indigenous market.

The term utopia comes from Thomas More's 1516 novel of the same name. The book is about an imaginary island named Utopia where there is communal ownership of land, religious tolerance, and equal education for men and women. More, whose musings on an ideal society were inspired by Plato’s The Republic, created the word utopia by combining the Greek words for “not” and “place.”

In Judaism, Eden, which translates to “delight,” is traditionally seen as a utopia, a place of pure bliss and enlightenment. However, the end of the story, when Eve eats the fruit from the tree of knowledge, has not served as a source of bliss and enlightenment for those shooting for a feminist utopia. Instead, Eve’s transgression has greased the wheels of patriarchy for millennia.

Judaism hasn’t exactly been a model for gender equality throughout the ages, but it has established a tradition of exegesis that allows for fresh interpretations from time to time. And over the last fifty years Jewish feminists have done just that. Female characters who were once kept on the periphery are now part of the larger narrative. Lilith, Adam’s first wife, the one who was too aggressive and subsequently replaced by Eve, has been brought out from obscurity (her feminist-friendly story lived on more in folklore than in serious Jewish texts) and co-opted by Jewish feminists, even becoming the namesake for a great magazine on the topic. Moses’s sister Miriam, who protected her brother when he was a baby and led the women of Israel in song after the escape from Sinai, has gained a growing presence at the Seder table. Readings of the Book of Esther for Purim, which just happened last month, also have a new vitality with a feminist perspective. The story of Adam and Eve has also been subjected to revisionist readings in which the couple shares the blame for Eve’s mistake and subsequent exile from the garden.

I can’t say I honestly ever thought much about the connection between my feminism and Judaism. Growing up, I remember feeling some jealousy about how the men seemed so much more engaged in synagogue than the women, but it never occurred to me that things could or should be different. In college, a time when I was most likely to have passionate discussions about things like Virginia Woolf or ignorance about female anatomy, I would attend services at Hillel and not think twice about the patriarchal elements in the service. These were two separate spheres, a pardes for my soul and a pardes for the world I lived in, and I had no interest in reconciling the two.

During the 1960s and ’70s the phrase “the personal is political” was a popular feminist slogan, meant to underscore the fact that gender politics are real politics, and our personal lives and public lives are ultimately one tangled mess. Well, it turns out the pardes -- my pardes --  is political too, and may very well be a place where Adam and Eve were equals, or the spunky Lilith was too much too handle.

As you are reading this, the information on the screen is entering your hippocampus, which works with the frontal cortex to process new information. Scientists believe this is the first step in memory formation, where spatial and declarative memories are formed. They work simultaneously with the amygdala, which is responsible for emotional memories.

If you are still reading, the information is likely being encoded by way of an electrical charge in a synapse, which are the spaces between nerve cells where they communicate with one another. The new information passes through various brain regions where the memory is reinforced, and eventually consolidated in the neocortex, where it becomes permanent. Perhaps you just became bored or were barely paying attention in the first place and stopped reading. This might become a short-term memory. If you are even the slightest bit intrigued, this will probably linger a bit longer and become a long-term memory, another bubble of information in the labyrinth-like pardes of your mind. The neurons sparked and my story, this story, and your story are now irrevocably bound. This is now your memory.

Two years ago, a woman named Jill Price wrote a memoir about her extremely rare condition -- she remembers everything about her life. Called hyperthymestic syndrome by her doctors, a named coined just for this case, Price can recall every day since 1980 in thorough detail, including who she saw, what she did, what she ate, world events, and even the day of the week. Doctors have explained her exceptional ability to recall as a result of her strong emotional involvement with her past. While Price is an extreme case, the same is true for all of us, memories that have a emotional charge tend to be retained better than neutral facts.

I have often thought about the mind as a garden of thought, and have made attempts at various points of my teens and twenties (I recently turned 30) to nurture it through great literature, prayer, and meditation; alcohol and drugs; sex and love. Due to this obvious predilection for more ephemeral and artistic forms of cognitive nourishment -- and a general naivete about science and anatomy -- I was rather pleased to learn that there was a bit of poetry in the way the brain functions as well.

I think we put a lot of energy into separating the factual and emotional, the cultivation of the brain and the cultivation of the mind. We go to work, read the paper, prepare reports. Then, to balance, we go to yoga, read a novel, recite a prayer. We intentionally fragment our intellectual and emotional lives, somewhat fearful that our rational side will be corrupted by instinct and intuition, and vice versa. The process of memory belies this division.

This is the difference between learning vocabulary on flashcards and experiencing it in a story or in life; between reading the manual and just laying out all the pieces and putting together that Ikea bookshelf yourself. It is a physiological answer to the questions at the heart of Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintanence.

While our plots of land -- or hardware, to use a more modern metaphor -- may not be effected from this tendency to fragment, our garden (software) indeed suffers, and the broadness, richness and interconnectedness of our experiences may not be fully understood or absorbed.