Trying to get back to the garden

I grew up in the backseat of our family Volvo station wagon listening to a lot of good music. Paul Simon’s Graceland. John Fogerty. And a lot of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

One of my favorite songs—which I later learned was actually written by Joni Mitchell—included the lines:

We are stardust, we are golden

We are billion-year-old carbon

And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.

It’s not just a great line—which it is. But as this song has traveled with me from childhood to adulthood, I can hear something that goes a little deeper.

An ancient longing.

I think I understand that longing. I suspect many of us do.

The feeling that there is a place that transcends time; a place that represents all that we idealize on God’s green earth: simplicity, beauty, peace. 

We imagine a garden where we could simply be.

And sometimes, we call that place Eden.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Eden, and exile, and what it means to live in partnership with God.

Last Shabbat, we began again: Parashat Bereshit and the story of creation. The Torah tells us that human beings are created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. And then, almost immediately, it tells us a story about human beings who become alienated from that image.

Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge. They become aware of their nakedness. They hide.

And God asks Adam a question:

Ayekah?

Where are you?

I would not be the first to point out: doesn’t God know where Adam is?

But this isn’t a question about geography. It’s a question about relationship.

Where are you, Adam? What has happened to you? How have you become someone who hides from Me?

Perhaps this is the first exile: the moment when being human becomes something we experience from the outside. We become self-conscious. We begin to wonder whether we are enough, whether we are safe, whether we can trust the One who made us.

We are still made in God’s image. But we no longer know how to feel at home in that image.

And perhaps the rest of the Torah is, in part, the story of what human beings do with that estrangement.

Because once we become strangers to ourselves, we have to figure out how to live.

We have to decide what makes us worthy, what makes us safe, what will keep us from being scattered. We have to construct some kind of answer to the question of who we are.

And sometimes, what we build in response to that uncertainty becomes so important that we forget the question we were trying to answer in the first place.

That, I think, is one way to read the story of the Tower of Babel.

The story that emerges from this week’s Torah portion is likely familiar.

The people of Babel want to build a city and a tower reaching heaven. They want to make a name for themselves, lest they be scattered across the earth.

We might look at the story and ask: So what’s the problem?

Everyone is working together. They share a language and an ambition. They are building something extraordinary.

What’s not to like?

In her new book, Pretend You Believe, Rabbi Noa Kushner points our attention to answers that emerge through the rabbinic imagination. The tower becomes a project of self-protection, a way of imagining that no one will ever have to leave.

The builders become so absorbed in their work that, as Kushner writes, “the building of this tower introduced forgetting into the world.”

Forgetting.

That is such a haunting word.

The people of Babel don’t simply forget God. They forget themselves. They forget their history. They forget what matters beyond the project in front of them.

Kushner describes how the tower becomes so important that when someone falls to her death, the loss goes unnoticed. The work continues.

The tower has become more important than the people for whom it was supposedly built.

And that is the real danger of forgetting.

We forget not only God, but the things that make us human. We forget that the people beside us are not merely contributors to a project, obstacles to our ambitions, or people whose approval we need. They are human beings who, like us, bear the image of God.

And we forget that this is true of ourselves, too.

Perhaps alienation begins when we can no longer recognize the divine image in ourselves except through what we accomplish, what we contribute, or how successfully we persuade the world that we belong.

We were created in God’s image before we built anything.

The tower cannot give us what was already there.

The story of the Tower of Babel suggests that alienation can come not only through some grand act of rebellion against God. Not even through a conscious decision to stop believing.

Sometimes we become alienated through the ordinary business of everyday life.

We get busy building our lives. We build careers, families, reputations, communities. We try to become good at what we do, to be good people, to make something of ourselves.

And none of these things is wrong, or bad on it’s own. 

But somewhere along the way, the building can become so important that we forget what we were building for.

We become so concerned with being seen that we forget how to see.

So concerned with making a name for ourselves that we forget the mystery of the life we have been given.

And perhaps the deepest tragedy of Babel is not that the people want to reach heaven.

It is that they begin to imagine that heaven is something they can build.

There is another story in Kushner’s pages, attributed to Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, that offers us another way of understanding that reaching and yearning that characterizes the story of Babel. 

The Kotzker rebbe would teach his disciples that all souls descend from heaven to earth on a ladder. But once they arrive, the ladder is taken away.

Then, one day, Heaven calls the souls home.

The souls respond in different ways. Some refuse to move. Without a ladder, they reason, there is simply no way back.

Others leap toward heaven, fall back to earth, and try again. They keep jumping until, exhausted by their failures, they finally give up.

But then there are those who understand that falling is inevitable. They keep trying, again and again, without surrendering to despair. And eventually, God reaches down, takes hold of them, and pulls them home.

I find this story moving because it offers such a different image from Babel.

The people of Babel build a tower to secure their place in the world, to make a name for themselves. They want to build something strong enough to overcome their vulnerability.

The souls in the Kotzker’s story face a different kind of vulnerability. They cannot build their own way home. The ladder is gone. Their efforts, however sincere, cannot bridge the distance on their own.

And yet they keep trying.

Perhaps the difference is not between those who succeed and those who fail, but between those who believe they must be able to save themselves and those who can keep reaching even when they know they cannot. Who take a literal leap of faith, and find their reach met by the hands of God. 

What if God, too, is searching for us?

This question is the heart of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s extraordinary book, God in Search of Man.

We tend to imagine that religion begins with human beings searching for God, trying to find our way toward something beyond ourselves. But Heschel asks us to consider the possibility that we are not the only ones searching.

In the Kotzker’s story, the souls do not build their way back to heaven. They keep reaching, even when their reaching is not enough. And finally, God reaches down.

Perhaps this is the difference between the tower and the ladder. 

The tower imagines we can do it all on our own. 

But I want to return to Babel, because there is one more detail in the story that matters.

The Torah tells us exactly what the people are afraid of.

וַיֹּאמְרוּ הָבָה נִבְנֶה־לָּנוּ עִיר וּמִגְדָּל וְרֹאשׁוֹ בַשָּׁמַיִם וְנַעֲשֶׂה־לָּנוּ שֵׁם פֶּן־נָפוּץ עַל־פְּנֵי כָל־הָאָרֶץ׃

“And they said, ‘Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; lest we be scattered all over the world.’”

Lest we be scattered.

That is the fear beneath the tower.

The people are afraid of losing their togetherness. Afraid of being dispersed. Afraid that without this enormous project, they might not know who they are or where they belong.

And God does scatter them.

The Torah tells us:

וַיָּפֶץ יְהוָה אֹתָם מִשָּׁם עַל־פְּנֵי כָל־הָאָרֶץ וַיַּחְדְּלוּ לִבְנֹת הָעִיר׃

“Thus God scattered them from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city.”

It is tempting to read this as a simple punishment. But what if we sit with the story a little longer?

What if being scattered is also the condition of being human?

We do not all speak the same language. We do not all understand God in the same way. We do not all experience belonging in the same way. We are born into different bodies, different families, different histories. We carry different wounds, different longings, different capacities for faith.

Perhaps the problem isn’t that we are different.

Perhaps the problem is that we keep trying to build a world in which difference will no longer matter. A world in which everyone will fit, everyone will agree, everyone will be safe from the discomfort of encountering someone we cannot entirely understand.

But the divine image (ie. God!)  is not a tower we all have to climb in the same way.

These early stories of our sacred text begin with hard questions.

How will we live with one another?

How will we live with God?

And perhaps most challenging of all: how will we live with loss, fear, and exile?

I think this is why I keep returning to Joni Mitchell’s song.

We want to get back to the garden. We want to recover a sense of belonging, a feeling that we are at home in the world and in ourselves.

But perhaps the spiritual life is not a journey backward. Perhaps it is the work of learning not to forget: that we were created in God’s image before we accomplished anything, and that the people around us bear that same image, even when we struggle to see it.

Heschel asks us to imagine that God, too, is searching for us. The God who asks Adam Ayekah? is not waiting at the garden gate for us to find our way back. God is already addressing us where we are.

And perhaps Shabbat offers us a moment to stop building, to put down the work of proving that we belong, and to listen.

Ayekah?

Where are you?

Maybe we cannot get ourselves back to the garden. But we can learn to recognize the divine image in ourselves and one another, and build a world in which fewer people feel exiled from it.