Bereshit: Furr

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For this year’s e-Torah, I will be looking at each week’s portion through the lens of a song.  The music will serve as a kind of midrash, a commentary on the sacred words.

Our masters taught: six attributes are ascribed to human beings.  In regard to three, they are like ministering angels; in regard to three others, like animals.  Three like ministering angels: they have understanding like the ministering angels, they walk erect like the ministering angels, they can use the sacred tongue like the ministering angels.  Three like animals: they eat and drink like animals, they procreate like animals, and they defecate like animals.   (Talmud, Chagigah 16a)

And now my fur has turned to skin
And I've been quickly ushered in
To a world that I confess I do not know
But I still dream of running careless through the snow
And through the howlin' winds that blow
Across the ancient distant flow
And fill our bodies up like water till we know

            (Blitzen Trapper, Furr)

It is hard and confusing to be human.

We are, on the one hand, animals.  As the Rabbis recognize, we eat and drink, procreate and excrete like any other creatures.  And we know that many of our actions are determined in the lizard brain rather than in our uniquely human prefrontal cortex.  Yet we are also separated from the rest of the beasts by virtue of our language, intellect and technology.   While these human distinctions bring many benefits, they can also leave us lonely, isolated from the rest of God’s creation.  We deny our animal selves at great cost, for as writer David Abram notes: “Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds and shapes of an animate earth. . . To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities is to rob our own senses of their integrity and to rob our minds of their coherence.  We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.”

In this week’s portion, Bereshit, which opens the Torah, we read of how our split human-animal nature is built into our DNA from the beginning. In the creation narrative, nascent humanity is told in the same breath to proliferate like the beasts—be fruitful and multiply—and to rule over all other living things.  As Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg puts it in her commentary on Genesis, “Here is an essential paradox of the human, as God conceives, blesses, and commands [us]: he is to live on the horizontal and vertical plane at once.  He is to transform himself into a creature preoccupied with swarming, proliferation, incorporating the strength of the animal world.  He is at the same time to rule, to conquer.”

The Portland band Blitzen Trapper beautifully captures this paradox at the heart of human nature in their song, “Furr.”  It describes a young man wandering in the woods until he is willingly taken in by a pack of wolves:

Howling endlessly and shrilly at the dawn

I lost the taste for judging right from wrong

For my flesh had turned to fur

And my thoughts they surely were

Turned to instinct and obedience to God.

On his 23^rd birthday, the young man/wolf meets a woman his own age and abandons his canine life to return to civilization with her.  He grows up, loses his innocence, and becomes human.

So I took her by the arm

We settled down upon a farm

And raised our children up as gently as you please

And yet. . . though he willingly chooses human life, he still longs for the simpler animal existence he leaves behind:

And now my fur has turned to skin

And I’ve been quickly ushered in

To a world that I confess I do not know

But I still dream of running careless through the snow

Through the howling winds that blow

Across the ancient distant flow

And fill our bodies up like water till we know.

His plight is ours.  We’re grateful for our humanity—and also a little perplexed and troubled by it.  Our big, complicated brains bestow wonderful gifts.  They can also leave us troubled and ill at ease with our environment, which we are destroying to our great peril and that of all around us.

Between angel and animal.