{"id":3346,"date":"2017-12-04T23:09:46","date_gmt":"2017-12-05T05:09:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vegetatingwithleslie.org\/?p=3346"},"modified":"2017-12-05T10:57:34","modified_gmt":"2017-12-05T16:57:34","slug":"torah-ecology-vayishlach-gen-321-3643","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vegetatingwithleslie.org\/?p=3346","title":{"rendered":"Torah Ecology: Vayishlach (Gen. 32:1-36:43)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Part I: Speciesism<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve spent most of the last year focused on the broader Torah story, its worldview as I understand it through my study. This worldview is expressed primarily through a human lens and involves the relationship of human beings with Transcendence, Creation, and Other Life, which further divides into Other Living Creatures and Other Human Beings. Recently I have come to focus more narrowly on the relationship between human beings and their fellow creatures. Although the move was intuitive, it was generated by my growing certainty that our complex relationship with our fellow creatures signifies our core moral problem: speciesism.<\/p>\n

Speciesism requires two fundamental mental and spiritual dispositions: 1) the way in which we, personally, see the world is reality and is true, and 2) \u201cthe other,\u201d any living being who is different from us, is inferior to us. In reality, neither disposition has any evidence to support it.<\/p>\n

Our attitude toward other living creatures inspires \u2014 or infects \u2014 our attitude toward other human beings. Our vocabulary shows how we made that link subconsciously over centuries. Any group of humans we want to degrade we refer to as animals.<\/p>\n

The act of minimizing \u201cthe other\u201d occurs first with animals. As we subconsciously learned not to question the assumption that we are superior to the animals, it became easier to thoughtlessly apply that same assumption to our fellow human beings. Further if factory farms have taught us nothing, they have taught us that when things happen out of sight, it is much easier to escape any sense of moral responsibility that results from our unchallenged assumptions.<\/p>\n

So for me, one of the practices I have tried to strengthen in myself as I study is to discover and set aside any assumptions I hold \u2014 about the Torah, about animals, about other people \u2014 and to set aside any conscious or unconscious judgments that one kind of life or one idea or one time in history is superior to any other. I have wanted to look at what is in front of me and simply try to understand what it says, what was the worldview or life experience that produced these ideas and stories and practices? How could the mind that gave us the creation story, a world of harmony in which no creature, including humans, killed another for food, in which there was no violence, also bring us the idea that we could kill and sacrifice an innocent animal for sins that we committed? What made us think that our lives were so much more valuable than theirs that they should pay for something we did? What made us think we were superior to other creatures and so could eat them?<\/p>\n

It is our human tendency to judge ourselves superior that is at the root of any problem I can think of in the world today. \u00a0And that tendency was hinted at in the creation stories themselves, that beautiful vision of a world in harmony where animals were vegan and had moral responsibility and snakes talked and reasoned and planned. Right there in those creation stories, we have statements about human dominance over animals. Although there are other ways to understand these statements than as statements of superiority, for the most part, we have chosen to understand them exactly that way, and that has created a cultural blind spot.<\/p>\n

One of the things I love about the Torah is that it presents revolutionary \u00a0ideas, that it often even seems to contradict itself \u2014 but it offers these amazing perspectives in such a nuanced, subtle way that we are drawn up short, and we start to pay attention: men \u00a0dominate women, or so some interpreters would say… but wait, in the original Hebrew it actually suggests something different. G-d has no body… but if you read carefully, it\u2019s not so clear. The Land of Israel was given unequivocally and forever to Israel… but read that again, and you\u2019ll discover that too isn\u2019t so clear. We are supposed to dominate and can kill other creatures for food, no problem. Again, look more deeply, and the picture isn\u2019t so sharply drawn. I am continually invited by these ancient texts to dig more deeply, and the more deeply I dig, the more I find that it\u2019s not quite as black and white as it seemed.<\/p>\n

Part II: The Ethical Path…Not Always Easy to Find<\/p>\n

And so it is with this week\u2019s portion which includes the Rape of Dinah, Jacob and Leah\u2019s only daughter. It is a story that at first glance seems to present a series of actions that are clearly, undoubtedly morally repugnant. But then the details of the story draw us in to look more closely, to consider questions under the surface of the text.<\/p>\n

Now I\u2019m going to do something I don\u2019t usually do because I had the opportunity to see this point demonstrated so beautifully on Shabbat. I\u2019d like to share with you the highlights of our discussion, led by Rabbi Tom Samuels. The text is Gen. 34. The rabbi provided several texts to help us parse the text, and you will find them here.\u00a0<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

As we discovered, not one character in the story comes out with clean hands \u201cethically.\u201d Each character is both good and bad, and there are many unanswered questions which, if answered, would change the nature of the story.<\/p>\n