John D. Brey
Well-Known Member
In Genesis, after Adam opens Eve's closed womb from topside the missionary position (conceiving the murderous Cain in the process) he's exiled form the holy land, from the sanctified heavenly temple of Eden, and made to wander in the world outside the temple precincts. He's told he must till and water the soil, as he tilled and watered Eve, in order to gain his offspring and his daily bread. Psalm 110:3, on the other hand, appears to be speaking of the people born the first time with the inborn birth-defect, being reborn a second time (theologically speaking on the eighth day) at which time they receive one of the pre-established number of pristine priestly souls stored in the stump of the Tree of Life; souls coming not through the blossoming of the male organ, but through a process that's sanctified by the blood of that organ, a rebirth affected through Abrahamic-faith, and in the blood of father Abraham's Gentile, or genital, organ, which is to say through the blood of that violent, malevolent, male-organ.
In Jewish thought, and we've referenced R. Hirsch on this too many times to count, the first birth is Gentile, affected by the genitalia. But the second birth, on the eighth day, is a rebirth not directly associated with either the first birth nor its physical mechanisms:
מילה [circumcision] is not a completion of, or supplement to, physical birth, but the beginning of a higher "octave." It marks the second, higher "birthday," man's entry into the Divine level of free and moral action. Physical birth belongs to the night . . . but מילה [circumcision], birth as a Jew, belongs to the daytime.
The Hirsch Chumash at Gen. 17:23.
These two births, physical, versus spiritual, are related to prelapse versus postlapsarian ha-adam:
All souls were originally included in Adam's soul. After Adam was created, God showed him all the souls contained within his soul, and all the future generations that would follow. Thus Adam is the source of all souls. That is why on Rosh ha-Shanah,the day that Adam was created, the entire world is judged, for Adam contained within him all the souls of mankind.
Howard Schwartz, The Tree of Souls, p. 162.
Howard Schwartz, The Tree of Souls, p. 162.
The quotation from Howard Schwartz (above) is remarkably comprehensive since if all souls are in ha-adam at the start, then judging ha-adam, redeeming ha-adam from any taint, would subsequently redeem all the souls within him simultaneously and prior to their entry into the world. The Talmud and various Jewish midrashim claim that atonement is affected prior to physical birth so that once a person sins, that sin already has a mechanism for absolution and redemption (a mechanism directly associated with rebirth).
As quoted above, Rabbi Hirsch speaks of two births: the physical and the spiritual. So too, there are two kinds of souls in ha-adam from the start: spiritual (prelapsarian), and physical (born after the lapse). And yet in the beginning, Genesis, the narration reveals only the mechanism for affecting the physical birth with its physical soul as ably modeled by the prototype physical person: Cain.
Human history raises mostly Cain until the rebirth of Abram. That rebirth is symbolized precisely by bleeding ---scarifying--- the physical organ directly associated with Cain's (and Abram's) physical birth. In this sacrificial offering of flesh and blood ("blood" always signifies death in Jewish ritual), Abram is prepared for the conception and rebirth of his spiritual soul. It's thus notable that all humanity are born first physically, and subject to sin, and only secondarily does a person receive (if he does) a second soul, come, as it were, not from the physical serpentine organ associated with physical birth, but by a mechanism that bleeds the physical serpentine organ, scarifies it, so that that scar becomes symbolic proof (even a memetic-prosthesis) revealing that the person wearing that scar possesses a secondary soul, come, so to say, from the tree of life (as it were): a spiritual soul.
John
Last edited: