Shabbat Shalom! Gut Shabbes! Sabado dulse i bueno!
This week's parsha is Bereshit, Genesis 1:1-6:8. It covers the grand sweep of two creation stories, the separation of HaAdam, the Human, into Adam and Eve, sexes capable of reproduction, Eden, temptation, rule breaking, expulsion / emergence into the non-Edenic world, Cain and Abel, murder, generations, weird children of angels and humans, God gets angry. From formless emptiness to the goodness of creation to imminent destruction in one Torah portion.
The Torah scroll has been rewound. We start over. And so this Shabbat reflection starts with a memory from my youth rather than from Bereshit.
I first heard the slightly mangled, famous version of the koan "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" from my seventh-grade English teacher Mike Hartrich as he walked us through an analysis of the lyrics of Jewish duo Simon and Garfunkel's "Sound of Silence."
His age-appropriate minimal explanation of what Zen was and what a koan was were intriguing to my twelve-year-old mind. But looking back on it, I find it interesting that the idea of a koan was introduced by suggesting that it was the question that a song lyric answered.
Japanese Zen master Hakuin (1686-1769), originally devised the koan in this form: "In clapping both hands, a sound is heard. What is the sound of one hand?" I realize now that koans aren't about answers but about getting beyond linear thought, getting beyond either/or binaries, getting beyond the idea of a "right" answer.
But in seventh grade, I thought that a koan was a puzzle, a riddle with a right answer that one found by thinking the "right" way. I learned and "knew" what the sound of one hand clapping was. Silence - the absence of noise production - was the "right" "answer."
A good teacher could only introduce something new, not escort me to some final destination I must then have believed to exist.
Then as a middle-aged adult I discovered that one hand clapping is also Talmudic. In the lesser known Yerushalmi (Talmud of the Land of Israel) - rather than the Bavli (Babylonian Talmud) - we find a story about one hand clapping in the lives of Shimon ben Lakish, better known as Reish Lakish, and Rabbi Yochanan, Third Century CE teachers in the area around the Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee.
There are several interesting and amusing narratives of their lives apart and together. Rabbi Yochanan applied himself early to study and became a master, but Reish Lakish came to it late, after younger years as a bandit and a gladiator.
When they first met, the rabbi was bathing in a river, and Reish Lakish, mistaking him for a woman because of his delicate features, bounded to his side in the river with an amorous adventure - or worse - on his mind. Reish Lakish was not a man of refined intentions. From that day on, the two were fast friends.
Reish Lakish married Rabbi Yochanan's sister and took to the books with Rabbi Yochanan as as his chavruta, his study partner, as well as his best friend and brother-in-law. Eventually, Reish Lakish became as well known for his teaching as his friend.
The Talmudic one-hand-clapping story goes like this:
Once Rabbi Yudan Hanasi heard a teaching of Reish Lakish's and was outraged. He sent guards to arrest Reish Lakish, and they roughed him up. Reish Lakish ran for it and fled to Magdala, and some say, to the village Hittayya.
The next day, Rabbi Yochanan and Rabbi Yudan Hanasi went up to the meetinghouse. Rabbi Yudan asked Rabbi Yochanan, "Why does my master not give us a teaching of Torah?"
Rabbi Yochanan began to clap with one hand.
Rabbi Yudan said to him, "Do people clap with only one hand?"
He said to him, "No. For Reish Lakish is not here. Just as one hand cannot clap, I cannot teach Torah without Reish Lakish here."
(Yerushalmi Sanhedrin 2:1*, translated by Judith Z. Abrams)
Unable to teach without his friend, Rabbi Yochanan nearly wordlessly taught the relational nature of teaching, learning, and even thinking.
Christian European traditions of learning often made study into a solitary, monkish endeavor that you accomplished in isolation from the flow of life, whether in a study or library or in a cloister. The Jewish traditions made learning relational, something you do with a partner.
What is the sound of one hand clapping? Does one hand make a sound? Do people clap with one hand? No. It is not good to be alone. We need each other.
(Shabbat reflection by the Rev. Paul Oakley)
