A number of years ago I shared the essential thought in the essay below with subscribers to my mailing list at the time. But I believe it’s a thought worth repeating, for the benefit of new readers, and worth re-pondering for the rest of us.

My wife and I recently accompanied our second son to the chuppah.  It was an elating experience, understandably, and the sight of the new couple recalled to me the unsettling, if simple, observation of the Netziv.

The Netziv – an acronym meaning “pillar,” by which Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehudah Berlin (1817-1893), the famed dean of the Volozhin Yeshiva, is known – noted that the first marriage in history differed in an essential way from all the matrimonial unions that came to follow.  Because, according to a widely cited Jewish tradition, Adam and Eve were created as a single entity, a man-woman coupled back to back, with the “forming” of woman described by the Torah more accurately envisioned as a separation.  The word often translated “rib” is in fact used elsewhere in the Torah to mean “side,” and so should be understood in the light of that tradition as referring to the woman-side who was part of Adam-Eve before Divine surgery provided her an independent personhood.

So, notes the Netziv, Adam’s subsequent union with his wife was in fact a “re-union” – of two entities that had originally been one.  That idea, says Rabbi Berlin, lies in Adam’s declaration when Eve is presented to him:  “This time it is a bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23).  Comments Rabbi Berlin: “Only ‘this time’ is it so, since she is a ‘bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh’; [here, Adam’s love for Eve] is like a person who loves his own hand.”

Not so, though, every marriage to follow, where the two people creating a relationship will have been conceived, born and raised as independent individuals before becoming a marital unit.

Yet the Talmud directs that, among the blessings recited at a Jewish marriage ceremony and at the festive “Sheva Brachot” (“Seven Blessings”) meals attended by the bride and groom for the week thereafter, are several references to the First Couple (Eden’s, not the Obamas).  Not only is the creation of Adam and Eve explicitly invoked, but the bride and groom are reminded of how “your Creator made you joyous in the Garden of Eden.”  How, though, can the comparison be made?  The essence of post-Edenic marriages, their emotional and spiritual components, would seem to be of a qualitatively different nature from that of the original one.  As per the Netziv’s observation, they are mergers, not homecomings.

Or, to carry the Netziv’s own simile a bit further, they are not like reattaching a severed limb but like transplanting a newly donated one.

Interestingly, the medical metaphor itself may hold the answer to why we hold up the example of Adam and Eve to those marrying.  Maybe it isn’t a comparison that is intended but a spur to thought – the thought that a successful marriage entails striving for a relationship like that of Adam and Eve, who began their lives as a single being.

Consider why transplantation is no simple matter: It commonly entails a risk of rejection.

The natural reaction of a normal body to the introduction of an “other” with its own distinct genetic identity is to seek to show it the door, so to speak.  There is good reason for that immune response, of course; it helps protect against the introduction of foreign elements that could be harmful.

Likewise, the natural response of a normal human psyche to the intimate introduction of an “other,” with its own discrete emotional and spiritual identity, is to similarly seek to protect the threatened self.

Doctors help ensure successful transplants by administering immunosuppressant drugs, chemicals that prevent rejection.  They operate by lowering the threshold of the immune system’s integrity.  Or, put more simply, they weaken the body’s sense of self.

Might it be that we focus a contemporary bride and groom on the original ones in order to teach them that marriage needs its own form of “immunosuppressant” to succeed – that, in other words, no less than in an organ transplant, marriage requires a weakening of self?

Here, of course, no drug will do; what alone can work is a conscious, determined reorientation of attitude, a force of will born of love.   In the Netziv’s words about post-Edenic brides and grooms, only “deep connection [“d’veika”] will bring them together, to become one.”

Like everything truly important, of course, that is more easily said than done.   But knowing one’s objective is the first step of any journey.

And the second, here, is acting – whether or not one’s actions reflect purity of intent – as if it is not one’s self that is calling the shots.  Jewish tradition stresses that simple deeds can beget essential changes.  As a Jewish aphorism sourced in the 13^th century work Sefer HaChinuch puts it: “A person is acted upon by his [own] actions.” What we do, with determination to become someone who naturally does what we are doing, brings us closer to becoming that person.

And so newlyweds might disagree over whether the window should be open or closed.  But the chilled spouse should be the one insisting that it remain open, for the comfort of the overheated one; and the latter should be running to shut it, to keep the other warm.  Even if the result is a compromise, like leaving the window open a crack, the acts of selflessness themselves are priceless.  And they are not limited to windows.

And the marriage-message borne by the Netziv’s observation is, of course, not only for newlyweds.

Transplant recipients, after all, generally need to take their immunosuppressants for life.

© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran

The thought, a staple in the writings of the celebrated Jewish thinker Rabbi E. E. Dessler (1892-1953), is best known to people unfamiliar with his thought and writings from a famous and evocative paragraph written by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

 
“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years,” Emerson mused, “how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of G-d which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.”

 
Rav Dessler, who wrote poetry too but was above all a keenly incisive philosophical thinker, explains that there really is no inherent difference between nature and what we call the miraculous.  We simply use the word “nature” for the miracles to which we are accustomed, and “miracles” for those we haven’t previously experienced.  All there is, in the end, is G-d’s will.

 
That we are inured to the magnificence of the stars in the sky is unfortunate.  We city dwellers can still capture some of the grandeur of Emerson’s “city of G-d” if we journey to less light-polluted places.  I recall the shock I felt as a young man driving with some friends through West Virginia on a cross-country trek and suddenly seeing, for the first time in my life, the Milky Way.  It was a moonless night and the river of white across the sky so struck us we stopped the car and got out to gape at the splendor.

 
It’s important, though, to try to capture some of the miraculous in the mundane wherever we are and whatever we are surveying.  The short Jewish prayer on awakening – “I am thankful before You, living, everlasting King, that You have mercifully returned my soul to me…” – sets the day’s stage for acknowledging the Divine gifts we are daily given.  That our sleep was not permanent, yes, but also that our hearts have been beating all the while, and our lungs filling and emptying; that arms and legs do our bidding, that the food we eat nourishes us and allows us to live, to think, to do…

 
But human nature makes it hard to be filled with gratitude at the sight of the rising sun, much as we should be.

 
And so it’s a special occasion when we are able to see something in nature that reminds us of Rav Dessler’s nature-equals-miracle equation.  And one such occasion is near, at least for those of us in the northeast of the United States.

 
The more perceptive among us might notice in coming days small holes appearing in the ground.  And the least perceptive will find it impossible to not notice what will quickly follow: billions of large dark blue insects with strikingly red eyes and beautiful lacy, orange-veined, nearly transparent wings.  People who are not blessed with the miracle of vision will know of the sudden visitors through the miracle of hearing.  The noise that large numbers of Magicicada septendecim generate en masse can be overwhelming.

 
As another poet, born Robert Zimmerman, put it, “And the locusts sang, yeah, it gave me a chill.”
What will allow us, if we’re sufficiently sensitive, to see the upcoming “natural” happening not as an infestation but an inspiration will be the knowledge that the members of “Brood II,” the cicada group soon to emerge, emerge only every 17 years.

 
Although they are commonly called “locusts,” cicadas are not biologically related to locusts (which we Westerners call “grasshoppers”).  But they are impressive creatures, ferocious-looking but entirely harmless to humans and animals (who readily feast on them).

 
After the insects mate and the females among them lay their eggs, they quickly die.  The nymphs that will emerge from the eggs several weeks later will then burrow into the ground, to make their own grand entrance, G-d willing (meant most pointedly) in 2030.

 
No one really knows why the cicadas spend so much time waiting to emerge, and how they “know” when 17 years have elapsed.  John Cooley, a research scientist at the University of Connecticut who has been studying Magicicada septendecim since the early 1990s, was asked about the 17-year wait.

 
“Man,” he responded, “I wish I knew.”

 
No doubt science will eventually provide a good hypothesis or two  for the marvel.  But anyone who wants to experience the frisson born of recognizing the miraculous in the natural, who wants to see the phenomenal in the phenomenon, can just open his ears and eyes to these unlikely envoys of beauty.

 
And consider, as Mr. Zimmerman did, that “Yeah, the locusts sang, and they were singing for me.”

© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran