Hevel wasn’t really there.

Please don’t misunderstand, I’m not trying to make excuses. I did what I did, what was was as it had to be. Agency was mine, I bear the punishment and the mark of it, and God is the True Judge.

But in the beginning was a word. And another. And another. And thus was the world created– with stories. And we, whose lives were the first lives and whose births were the first births, our lives were made of the stuff of stories. I was born to be Man.
Hevel was born to die.

I would sometimes prod him to see if he would dissolve into vapor at my touch. You have to understand, it wouldn’t have seemed so odd. In those times, things were as they were and we, the first three, were discovering a newly created world. We were each so different from each other, would it be so odd to have a man who was flesh and a man who was not? Well he was solid enough– solid enough to bleed, solid enough to kill– but though, as it turned out, he could be killed, he did not truly live. Hevel was not Named. Hevel did not speak. I was given to Mother Chava to be Man after Father Adam. Hevel was addded. Added to be My Brother.

To see what I would do.

My suspicions about my brother came to a head when we brought the offerings before The Lord. It was given to me to till the soil, to toil for our bread. This was the charge of The Lord to Father Adam and passed to me. How then could I not offer before The Lord that which is our sustenance? How would I not offer the choicest of what we were given by The Lord to feed and maintain us? Hevel was the keeper of a flock, something he silently took upon himself without our knowing why. As we learned, from the flock we could take wool for clothes and milk for cheese, but we knew nothing of flesh. How then would I have thought to bring flesh as an offering? For that matter, how would he?

And yet, thus he did. My offering lay before the Lord, and there was an uneasy silence. And I watched as he silently took a lamb of the flock. I watched as he took his knife in hand. I watched as he did the unthinkable.

The blood flowed forth from the neck of the animal, life drained such as I’d never seen, poured out at the base of the altar. The body, the lamb that was no longer a lamb, he offered by fire. This he did without a word, without a moment of hesitation, as though he had recieved instruction. As he did this inconceivable thing, I gazed at him, first in confusion, then in horror.

But when the smoke began to rise, and when the flesh began to sizzle, and the fat began to melt, that was when I understood. The aroma of roasting meat filled my nostrils as I looked at my grain offering, and knew suddenly that it was lacking. What I had to offer from my own, from myself, from who I was, from my experience, could not live up to what Hevel seemed to just know, seemed to have embedded in his very being directly from God. A perfect knowledge, a perfect understanding. My understanding was imperfect. My sacrifice was imperfect.

I was imperfect.

It wasn’t reasonable. It didn’t make sense. Who was he? What was he? He was silent. Insubstantial. He had no desire, no will, no purpose, no identity. He had no anger and no joy. No longing and no satisfaction. He was inert. He was futility, vanity embodied.

He was perfect.

God spoke to me then, as I sat hunched by the altars of our offerings, Hevel walking silently back toward his flock. The weight of my confusion was nearly too heavy to bear. What could this mean, to be so flawed and to be taunted by this vision of perfection? What did it mean to have my sacrifice rebuffed by God who had given no instruction, and yet have him, my brother, somehow just know?

“Will It Not Be That If You Do Well…”

Do well? What is it to “do well?” What can that even mean? How could it be that I should do well in the eyes of my God when my brother is His vision of perfection?

“Sin Crouches At The Opening, Its Desire Shall Be For You, And You Shall Rule Over It.”

And thus my fate. God is telling me my future. Like Father to Mother, I will be tied for all time to sin… it will be my bride. Because I am in an impossible situation.

This is a set-up.

I stood and began to walk toward the flock. I had to try to understand. And Hevel… Hevel knew. He had to. He knew about the flock, about the lamb, he knew about the blood, the flesh, about fire and flesh, the smoke, the pleasing odor– he knew what it meant to Do Well. It was all he ever did.

And thus I took Hevel into my field. I would talk to him, I thought. Ask him, beg him, plead with him to tell me how to do right in the eyes of God. This angel of a brother of mine, who knew the heart of The Lord, who knew the secrets of the smoke of the altar– he would give me those secrets. And maybe, maybe then, we could live together in perfect praise of the Lord, both of us doing Well in his eyes, with no sin to tempt and taunt, and no need to master it.

But it was not meant to be. And now I think that it never was. Because God is telling this story with my life, creating His Just-So world. Only God’s world is not “just so.” It can’t be. And like Mother and Father before me, I will take the fall so that God can have his complicated and conflicted world, full of turmoil and desire and anger, full of sorrow and pain, full of love and joy and comfort, full of sin, and of mercy, and redemption.

Hevel’s silence was maddening. I spoke to him softly, timidly at first. I spoke to him as a friend, a fellow man, relating from shared experience, new people in a new world. He was silent. I spoke to him then as a brother, with love, the love of a brother born of the same womb by the same seed, the love that I longed to feel from him. He was silent. I spoke then with anger, my voice strengthening, my face reddening, with jealousy as I felt he jealously guarded the secret to being God’s favorite. He was silent. My voice faltered and I spoke with baffelment, almost with awe. Who are you? I asked flatly. What are you? He was silent.

Finally, despair. I didn’t have a brother. I saw this Hevel for what it really was. Inert. Stagnant. Dead. This was the antithesis of everything that would drive God’s creation. If Hevel was Man, then man was dead at birth.

Hardly knowing what I did, I picked up a rock that seemed to appear from nowhere at my feet. It fit my hand as though made for this purpose. I raised it high as Hevel, this brother-thing given me to see what I would do, gazed blankly, serenely into my eyes, not a word, not a flinch, not a move. “Lord,” I whispered, “forgive me for doing your will.” And I brought my hand down.

The blood flowed more freely than I imagined it would, pouring out among the stalks, soaking into the soil, feeding the produce of the land given me to till. God’s perfect creature, this thing that had never lived, lay dead before me, life drained as I’d seen only once before.

As I sank to my knees before the body, the brother that was no longer a brother, I heard the whisper of God, a voice of sorrow, of pity, mocking me: “Where Is Your Brother Hevel?”

Where is he? Where was he ever? I wasn’t given a brother, and yet I was. This lifeless shell before me, how different was it really from when it was animated? He never spoke. He never felt. He never loved. He never loved me.

Was it given to me to guard this creature that belonged to no one but God? You, God, know much better than I where your puppet my brother is. For my part, I know not.

Even as I spoke the words, as they left my mouth, I knew what they meant. I was speaking the future of my offspring, of humanity. My question would ring throughout the ages. I, through my words, through my actions, was creating the story, creating humanity, creating the world. Yet, not me. In those early days, our lives were the stuff of stories. We were not people, we were the words, the hands of God.

And so I need you to understand. I’m not trying to make excuses. I did what I did, what was was as it had to be. Agency was mine, I bear the punishment and the mark of it, and God is the True Judge.

But in the beginning, the words were people, and the people words. And thus was the world created– with our lives and our actions. I was not destroyed for my crime, but protected, guarded, ensured that my seed would be sown, that my crime would live in the heart of every man, that the world would move, driven by the engine of my imperfection, so that man might strive. Driven by my anger, my sorrow, my pain, so that there may be in this world love, joy, comfort.

And thus was the world created in mercy.

And thus was born Redemption.

I just finished moderating my comments. 704 spam. One inquiry as to when my next post would be up, and a shabbat greeting from a month and a half ago. From someone I don’t know.

I guess it rarely occurs to me that I might have actual readers. I’m so rarely ever pleased with the quality of my writing.

Well, here’s what’s going on at the moment:

The domain beyondthenear.net has been renewed for another year.

I have moved out of my apartment.

At the end of June I will leave for Israel, where I will be living for a year, studying at The Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem.
I have just completed a book on XHTML and CSS, and am now beginning to study Ruby all as part of a bizarre self-improvement regimen that I am putting myself through with the help of Jason (and by help I mean, of course, frequent lashings and water torture).

I will make a sincere attempt (again) to keep this space in use. I’m hoping that being in Israel will help with this. Meanwhile, you can go bug Jason to update DSA.

I’m not a blogger. I wish I could be, but I’m not, I’m a journaler. I have a livejournal which I update frequently (no I will not tell you where, silly) with personal stuff, feelings, passions, anxieties… here I try to keep things relevant and within a certain standard of… cleanness. Cleanness in terms of the writing, and in terms of what I’m writing about. No kitty blogging, no talking about crushes on people or camping weekends or irrational anxieties about personal situations or family drama. That is not… pertinent to the world at large.

When things get heated, like with what’s happening in Israel, I know I should be writing here. What I write though tends to be very emotional. Often angry. I want things that I post here to be well thought out. I want things to be logical, to make sense. I need to be prepared for arguments that may ensue as a result. I’m terrified of saying something wrong because if Judaism teaches anything it is that words are something that you cannot take back.

I apologize to those of you who have commented in recent weeks. I have not been paying attention lately, and I’m so accustomed to the spam bot comments that flood my mailbox that I just tuned them out. Your comments are now visible and will be responded to shortly.

And I’ll try to do better here. Again.

So The Hunt is over. I’ve got my new job. And I start Wednesday.

And I’ll have a lot to say very soon. Let’s try starting over (yet) again.

I haven’t been updating because I’m in the midst of an intensive job search. Hopefully I’ll be back to reality soon.

There’s plenty more to write about Jesus and Judaism… and it’s fun too… but I’m gonna give it a rest for a bit. I’ll come back to it later (not dure if that’s a promise or a threat).

I’m currently in the process of laying out blueprints for my future. A lot of things are hinged on other things that are as yet indeterminate so it’s proving difficult at the moment. Wednesday I will be speaking with Rabbi Gillman to get his impression and opinion of what I should be moving toward.

Oh, in case I didn’t mention it, the question at hand is whether or not to quit my job, or find a new job, keep working or go to school, or keep working and go to school, master’s, doctoral, rabbinic, non-matriculated classes, etc.

This all has to be decided very soon. Frankly its got me scared shitless.

(Speaking of roadmaps… I think I’ll be writing about Sharon sometime later.)

Well, I’ve found my friend Noah’s blog at last. Not that it was hidden from me, rather that I kept forgetting to look him up. I think I like it. Not suprising considering the fact that I like and respect Noah a great deal. I have to say I’m a little bit jealous of the eloquence and prolificacy of his writing… but then again he is about 10 years older than I am, better educated and a registered Republican, whereas I am an early 20-something with a useless degree from a state college floundering through life trying to figure out who and what the hell I am.

We shall see what will become of me. Meantime, read Noah. He’s cool.

An odd thing has happened to me over the past few days.

On Sunday I was cleaning up after a gift-wrapping and bow-making demonstration with a couple of coworkers and for some reason I mentioned the Fibonacci series, and a brief conversation about Square One, the kids math show on PBS that I used to watch with my sibs when we were kids, ensued.

The next day, I found a note on my locker from one of my aforementioned coworkers with the Fibonacci series, the symbolic eqation thereof, and pictures of bunnies. That day I was on the registers and while things were slow I started drawing the rectangles diagram on my notepadnotepad. I started wondering about the ratio between each number in the series and its predecessor from looking at the rectagles and trying to figure out how to fold the paper to make the lines come out right… and I found that the numbers oscillate toward a mean. I got all excited and wanted to find some graph paper.

Later that night I looked it up and found that… duh… the numbers oscillate toward the Golden Ratio. Now I was all peeved at myself for not having known, remembered, or figured that. There was a point at which I knew that there was a relationship between the spiral and the “Golden Ratio” but I never understood fully what the Golden Ratio was, or how it related to the spiral, why it was significant where it appeared in nature other than in a nautalus shell…

Now I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ve grasped something that I never properly learned in school or subsequently. I had a flash of that joy of realization that I was always looking for in school and rarely ever found. I want more. I want to go back to it and learn it all. I want to learn calculus. I’ve said this before but now I feel like I might actually be able to do it if there were time.

Jason suggested the other day that I should go for a degree in math. I’d have laughed in his face if his face were here for me to laugh in. The idea seems, on the surface of things, absolutely ludicrous. I did worse in math than in any other subject in any school I ever attended with the exclusion of drafting. Everyone who knows me has heard the story of me in junior high school and the self-paced math program and how in that program I excelled in math for the first time in my life, and began to fail again as soon as I was put back into a traditional classroom environment. I’m not trying to displace blame by reiterating this point… I’m trying to convince myself that I’m not an idiot, that I am capable of studying and learning things that have caused me troubles in the past for a variety of reasons.

Anyway. I’m obsessing a little right now over spirals and pentagrams… but don’t worry, I’m not about to turn into Max Cohen. I’m not of priestly lineage.

Incidentally, I have no recollection of why I failed drafting.

I’m trying to remember what got in the way, why I stopped writing here. It seems to keep happening. I get busy, I get depressed, and I stop. Trying not to let that keep happening but I don’t know that I’ll ever get over it.

Anyway, I’m going to grad school. I don’t know when exactly, but it will be within a year. I’ve decided that much. I am currently contemplating a shift in employment for the meantime. It’s a tough thing to contemplate considering how much I love the people I work with.

I’m trying to learn new skills like microsoft applications such as Access and Excel which would make me more employable. Also I’d like to finally learn to touch-type. Meanwhile I also have to review high school math for the GRE. And still maintain my standard of excellence in my current job.

And my birthday is on Thursday.

Life is tough.

Cyclones kick Stankee booty tonight. 10-7. Dad and I left an inning early though… it was more a comedy of errors than a ball game. Starting with Marty Markowitz’s missing the ceremonial first pitch and deflecting it into Ed Shakespeare’s neck. Fortunately, his camera survived.