This presentation of the meaning of the narrative is as naive as it is unconscionably absurd; it's as wrongheaded as can be. Only the most important doctrinal stumbling block could force brilliant Jewish sages, men who know the intricacies of scriptural symbolism and idiomatic matrices almost automatically, to feign stupidity in the face of perhaps the most important narrative in the entire Tanakh. They feign stupidity not because they're stupid. They're as far from that as can be. They feign stupidity since they don't have a schematic to make the narrative work in a way that doesn't transgress their understanding of God's Law. They feign stupidity because of the added nuisance and fear that a schematic that makes the Akdedah work without transgressing Jewish understanding of the Law could open a can of worms more damaging to a Jewish understandging of the Law than it is useful to understanding the Akedah.
. . . if man on earth had not failed and as a result become garbed in the pollutants emitted by the serpent, there would not have been such a thing as shame, negative aspects to the act of procreation. On the contrary, the act of procreation would have been the performance of a commandment exactly like that of putting on phylacteries and other commandments performed with one's body. The semen would have been an emission originating in the brain, and the person born as a result of such an emission would have come into the world with the same stature as Adam.
The Shelah HaKaddosh, Shney Luchot HaBerit, Torah Shebikhtav, Vaera, Torah Ohr, 39.
Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz's statement above lends itself to the task of piecing together a schematic that makes sense of the Akedah from the standpoint of Abraham rejoicing over the opportunity to offer Isaac. Horowitz's statement above appears to be a guarded acknowledgement of the Catholic doctrine of "original sin." Horowitz concedes that if man on earth had not failed, through the original sin, not only would his body not be garbed in sickly flesh polluted with the sin nature, but semen would come from the brain rather than through the biological sewer associated with the serpent winding his way through putrid soil.
What is genetically transmitted in the semen is human nature and, together with that nature, its sickness. The newborn child shares in the guilt of the first parent inasmuch as his nature is brought into being by a reproductive movement from that parent. . . Death has spread to the whole human race inasmuch as all have sinned.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia.
Rabbi Horwitz goes on:
. . . nowadays the origin of man is the proverbial תפה סרוחה, the "evil-smelling drop of semen" familiar to us from the saying of Rabbi Akavyah in Avot 3:1. If Adam and Eve had not allowed themselves to be seduced into sinning, all seed would have been holy seed. The whole subject of the covenant, the ברית מילה [brit milah, ritual circumcision], which is performed on the reproductive organ, is designed to reconsecrate it to G-d.
Ibid. 29.
The semen come through the biological sewer pipe is rightly called the "evil-smelling drop" associated with the polluted garment/flesh garbing all conceived in the newfangled manner associated with the original sin (seed, come, through the sewer pipe, instead of the brain). Rabbi Horowitz speaks of the fact that without the original sin, all seed would be holy seed. After the original sin, the seed and its means of delivery, must be "reconsecrated to G-d" through ritual circumcision (ברית מילה), which segues into Abraham's pre-Akedah reconsecration of the sexual organ (he knifes it till the reproductive flesh bleeds to death): what Adam added when the human body was cut for the first time (Genesis 2:21), Abraham ritually removes such that the letter
heh cut from the title
ha-adam after the descecration, is, ironically, added to Abram (Abra-h-am) after the reconsecration of the human body post
brit milah.
The whole subject of the covenant, the ברית מילה [brit milah, ritual circumcision], which is performed on the reproductive organ, is designed to reconsecrate it to G-d.
Ibid.
The Shelah HaKaddosh claims the male organ of reproduction is "reconsecrated to G-d" by taking a knife to it, bleeding it, emasculating it. In effect, it shouldn't have been there at all. Removing it is reconstituting the human body, making it what it was before the shameful flesh was added (Genesis 2:21).
The whole subject of the covenant, the ברית מילה [brit milah, ritual circumcision], which is performed on the reproductive organ, is designed to reconsecrate it to G-d. This ברית is no less holy to G-d than the laying of the תפילין [tefillin] . . ..
Ibid. [Emphasis mine].
In a thread here a few years ago,
Tefillin, Kotek, Eureka, the head tefillin of the religious Jew was juxtaposed against the koteka worn on the newly cut male organ of the aboriginees of Papau New Guinea. In context, Horowitz has already told us that if not for the original sin, then semen would be coming from the brain rather than the biological sewer pipe where it's become putrid.
Voila! Whereas the Wogeo men (of Pauau New Guinea) intern their newly cut male organ in a "phallocrypt" (koteka) signifying its death, the Jew, as the Shelah HaKaddosh implies, inters the phallus of the brain in a similar crypt (the
shel rosh, or head tefillin) in order to guard and protect it until the reconstitution or renewal of the time when holy seed will actually come, so to say, from the brain, through a sexual organ erected on the forehead, rather than through the serpentine gutter where it becomes putrid.
For the righteous Jew, the tzaddik, the wearing of the
shel rosh (head tefillin) signifies, ritually, symbolically, that he's "reconsecrated" the means of reproduction (by bleeding the serpentine flesh) so that holy seed comes through the brain rather than being redirected through the serpentine flesh. For the tzaddik, the kundalini has left the testemony of the serpentine septic tank between the legs and arrived, enlightened, at the two hemispheres which alone are the exclusive home of holy seed. It's therefore fitting that the circumcised male first dons his head tefillin at the bar mitzvah that's the mitzvah associated with his sexual coming of age. In effect, his first erection, ritually speaking, is a spiritual erection, the donning of the
shel rosh on his forehead.
Ever since the sin, when Adam and Eve became aware that they were naked and became ashamed on that account, and the whole rite of circumcision became connected to עריה, nakedness and shame, observance of circumcision has become much more crucial. Man's attachment to material values stems from the original sin. . . [Circumcision is thus] תקון, repair-work, performed to the damaged spiritual state of the universe.
Ibid.
John
