So I’m wondering, if you had to describe yourself using an animal as your metaphor, how would you do it? Are you a wolf? A sheep? A caterpillar about to metamorphose into a butterfly?
Or a slightly different question. If there were an animal that you felt a special affinity for, that you think about as your guardian, your patron, your special symbolic buddy, what would it be? And why?
I’m also curious if an answer came to you instantly, or if you had to drey about it (or are still dreying about it).
Kids generally have no hesitation on this kind of question. In our Hebrew school we have new students who were not given a Hebrew name when they were born. So entering Hebrew school becomes an opportunity for them to choose a new name with which they have some affinity – a special virtue, a biblical character, a plant, an animal. And Hebrew is full of animal names. Jonah is a dove. Deborah is a bee. Caleb is a dog. Tziporah is a bird. Rachel is a ewe. And Joshua ben Nun is the son of a fish. A 3rd or 4th grader can instantly choose a name based on their strong and unfettered feelings about a particular animal.
Me, I’m never certain about my animal allegiances. There are the animals that I love to watch and study and admire. I pay a lot of attention to the deer and the vultures that I share land with. And I sometimes consider the vulture to be my spiritual patron – there’s something I see in the turkey vulture about the digesting and mulching of the materials of the past to make fertilizer for the future. This is kind of how I see my rabbinic calling. The digesting and mulching of the materials of the past to make fertilizer for the future. Plus: they are such beautiful flyers. But then I don’t know and I think I’m over-intellectualizing and I question whether the leap my heart takes when a turkey vulture takes off out of a branch right above me – whether that is deep connection or just my getting startled.
But using our fellow creatures of this Earth as our metaphor set in describing each other – and even in describing the Divine – is an instinct as old as humanity. Spiritual activist Caroline Casey says, “Metaphors are the incarnational garb by which powers enter the world.” In other words we invoke a lion’s fierceness or a gazelle’s grace in order to invite those qualities into our own lives, if not physically then spiritually. When I say I want my kids to leave the nest and soar, it is not just a casual turn of phrase; I am trying to invite something into manifestation for them. My metaphor is both magical invocation and prayer.
You might wonder why this is on my mind. It has to do, not surprisingly, with this week’s Torah portion, Vayigash. It is the third of four consecutive weeks devoted to the story of Joseph. As this week’s portion opens, Joseph is now a vizier, second-in-command to Pharaoh, managing the seven years of famine with an iron fist. His brothers, who had once abandoned in him in a pit, resulting in his being sold into slavery in Egypt, have now come to Egypt to buy food. They do not recognize Joseph. And Joseph engineers a turn of events that will require the brothers to abandon Benjamin, the youngest of them. It is a kind of purposeful replay of what happened so many years earlier – will the brothers abandon yet another one or will they try to bring about another outcome.
And so at the beginning of this parashah, Judah, who is not the eldest but is accepted as the chief among the brothers, steps forward. He approaches Joseph and pleads for Benjamin in a very moving scene. He argues that losing another son will kill their father.
Midrash notices that the word for “approached,” vayigash, is used elsewhere to mean closing in for a battle. So midrash supplies alternative dialogue, vaguely audible thought bubbles, in which Judah threatens Joseph that he will declare war on Egypt, and make its streets run red with blood. A very different energetic than the actual words of Torah.
Then another midrash steps in, from Midrash Tanchuma (Vayigash 4:2). It tells us another piece of this story. When Judah steps forward into this battle of wills with Joseph, the Malakhei Hasharet, the ministering angels, say:
בּוֹאוּ נֵרֵד לְמַטָּה וְנִרְאֶה שׁוֹר וַאֲרִי מִתְנַגְּחִין זֶה עִם זֶה
“Come, let us go down to Egypt and see a lion and an ox battle each other.”
The angels see animals where Torah sees people.
Judah is of course the lion. From the Book of Genesis onward, Judah and his tribe – including Judaism as a whole – are associated with the lion, as you often see in synagogue architecture and Torah mantels and Chanukah menorahs. Judah the lion is fierce and regal.
Joseph is the ox which to me seems an unlikely choice. I think of Joseph being clever as a fox. Or beautiful as a butterfly. But the angels don’t see it that way. They, I think, see a Joseph who had to be resilient again and again, growing in strength throughout his life until now he is the ox: powerful, heavy, dangerous, and the only animal that has a chance of standing up to a lion.
This midrash about the lion and ox, may just be playful. Or maybe it is revealing something about the power of invoking animal energies. That somehow animal descriptions are not just convenient words, but an evocation of spiritual qualities. We have a long history in using animal imagery to connect us with things inside and outside of ourselves. We use animal fables to instruct us and animal mythologies to draw certain natural qualities and powers into ourselves. We do it casually, almost unthinkingly, with astrology, which was known at the time of the midrash – maybe the angels were suggesting that Joseph was a Taurus and Judah was a Leo, and you shouldn’t leave a Taurus and a Leo in a room together.
We also connect to animal energies in our Divine mythologies. In Egypt, where our Joseph story was taking place, there was god with a bull’s head, Apis, and a god with a lion’s head, Maahes, each integrating animal and human form, suggesting the ways that the Divine is not just an expanded version of the human, but weaves together all elements of the natural world.
But we don’t have to look beyond our Jewish mythologies to see this. In the Book of Ezekiel (Ezekiel 1:10), the prophet famously sees a vision of the merkavah, of God’s chariot. At the center of the chariot are four chayot – a word that means living beings or animals. Each chayah has a human torso with four wings and four faces, each face looking in a different direction. Looking forward is a human face; looking backward is an eagle; to the right is the face of a lion; and to the left the face of an ox.
In a monotheistic religion with a formless and faceless God, having angelic beings with animal faces is the closest we’re going to get to that Egyptian pantheon. It allows us to maintain our abstract view of the Divine, while still managing to project something animal into it. Our desire to see the animal in the Divine informs our willingness to read Ezekiel’s vision as sacred text and not as crazy talk, and our commitment to remember these multi-faced Beings in our daily Amidah. Because make no mistake, whenever we say something in Judaism about Chayot Hakodesh, the Holy Beings, it is the ox-lion-eagle-human Being that we are pointing to.
Once upon a time we were animals alongside the other animals. Before we evolved the self-awareness that cut us off from the others, that got us caught in our heads, in our bodies, in our civilizations. That got us kicked out of Eden.
But now we only have a dim memory of what it is like to be the animals that we are. And so we seek out through our imaginations and our liturgy and our magic the connection with the animal world that even the ridiculous amount of DNA we share with other creatures can no longer provide. We imagine and we invite the animal energies as a healing of our isolation. We imagine actual animals imperfectly; we project so much upon them. But still, somewhere deep in there, we are trying to restore the Garden.
And so, nu, what animal are you? If the ministering angels popped down for a visit right now, and their vision allowed them to see your spirit in animal or vegetable or mineral form, what would it be? Imagine it now, and look around our circle and visualize the menagerie of holy creatures that we are. Imagine it and remember, this is Eden.
Spiritual and symbolic connection with animals exists in every culture, including Jewish culture. For the reason I don’t use the term “spirit animal” in this drash, check out this criticism, inter alia.