(Mis)Translations and (Mis)Quotes - Interpreting and Changing Tradition

אמר רבי סימון: אין לך כל עשב ועשב, שאין לו מזל ברקיע, שמכה אותו ואומר לו גדל

Rabbi Simon said: Is it not so that there is not a single blade of grass that does not have its Fortune in heaven striking it and telling it to grow.

I have long struggled with word changes and misquotes of traditional texts, not to mention incorrect citations.

The above translation is what it really says in the original. And yet, I much prefer the more common translation: Behind every blade of grass there is an angel telling it, "Grow! Grow!"  You can find that quote all over the internet - incorrectly attributed to Talmud. It's really in Mishnah Rabba Bereishit (ancient rabbinic commentary on Genesis), 11:6. 

Just instinctively I prefer the gentler version - no hitting.

Recently, I have seen מכה translasted as "tap" - as though the angels are tapping the blades of grass on the shoulder to get their attention. But מכה is the word for striking, for hitting, for giving punishing lashes to someone (as in the tractate of Talmud, מכות makot, in which we learn that one should never merit 50, so the worst punishment is 49 מכות, lashes.

And then there is a traditional interpretation of the original in which the hitting of the grass is meant to teach us that some things need to be hit in order to grow. Tell me how many heder (school) teachers or parents have used that one through the generations to justify striking a child.

And perhaps "change" is less true than borrowing a bunch of sources and putting them together: while the Midrash is based on a statement in Job, there is no mention of an angel. Where does the angel come from? In Sefer Hasidim (12th c.) it says, כי אין דבר שיהיה מלאך ממונה עליו, ואפילו כל עשב ועשב, "there is nothing that doesn't have a guiding angel over it - even grass." I like this version, though it doesn't indicate that the grass is being told to grow.

This also brings up the angel bit. In the Midrash, there is no angel - there is מזל mazal, fortune, or perhaps star or constellation. Yes, this is whence we get mazal (mazel) tov - not "may you have good luck," but "what you have (achieved) is a sign of good fortune," a sign from the stars.

Somehow, we get from Fortune to Angel, as well as from hitting and telling to telling (possibly with a gentle tap to get attention).

Perhaps it is a bit like the game of telephone, whereby a teaching is passed from one generation to the next, and on the way transitions in order to remain relevant, to speak to each successive generation.

Indeed, if we didn't need that, we could all simply sit down and read the Torah and never need the Mishnah, or the Gemarrah, or the Midrash, or the commentaries of Rashi, Maimonides, Nachmanides, Gersonides, Hirsh, Hertz, Eitz Hayim, or all of the rabbis and teachers offering Divrei Torah, interpretive words of Torah, in Jewish communities throughout the world.

There are good reasons to consider all words we wish to pass on, and how we choose to interpret them says something about our values. Some people don't want to talk about angels - ancient rabbis as well as contemporary Jews both. I like to talk about them - I like to think about the role of angels in the world, the angels who sit behind a blade of grass and what they do. Maybe, back in the day, they did hit the grass - and maybe, like we now don't believe in striking our children to get them to learn, just maybe those angels have also changed and don't any longer strike the grass to urge it to grow. Maybe they tap it gently, נגע to touch, just to get its attention. Or maybe they just whisper a little louder, or change their words, or step out in front instead of staying behind - just to get the attention of the grass.

With that in mind, I will stick with:
Behind every blade of grass there is a guiding angel whispering to it, Grow! Grow! 

And I will cite its origin as "Midrash, common interpretation."

St. Helens - I will never forget! 35 years

On top of St. Helens
All covered with ash
We lost Harry Truman
And his 800 cats.
     (sung to the tune of "On Top of Spaghetti")

Thirty five years ago today, Mount St. Helens blew her top. She puffed out ash and smoke, creating beautiful and terrifying visuals for miles to come, leaving anywhere from a dusting of ash here in Seattle and a lot of other places (apparently as far away as Minnesota) to feet of it in the immediate surrounds.

My older brother and I used to sing the little ditty above with a sort of glee, but the truth is that Harry Truman (not the president), refused to evacuate his home on St. Helens prior to the eruption. He and his sixteen cats (okay, our little folk ditty exaggerated a little) died there. One of 57 human and countless animal deaths.

Whenever May 18th rolls around, I find myself reflecting. 

We felt small tremors at our house in Settle - watched the red mushroom lamp swaying on its wire over our kitchen table.

I can still see the ash plume in my mind's eye - I don't need the photographs, though I don't think we could see it from our house (we had a good north view, but not south).

I can remember the dusting of fine ash that was impossible to clean, and stories from family and friends south and east who had a foot or more of fallen ash to contend with. I always thought, if it's so hard for me to clean one little layer, which scratched the heck out of the plexiglass in our front door beyond repair, how much harder for those who had not just the dust but the weight of piled ash.

For years, when we would drive down I-5 to Oregon, we could still see barren hills of ash, pushed off to the side of the road. Eventually, these became fertile, grasses and wildflowers covered them, and eventually trees made them essentially indistinguishable from the rest of the landscape, so that if you don't know where to look you would have no idea what you were seeing. 

Like St. Helens, who has welcomed the return of plants and animals to her reshaped landscape, I too have changed in these past 35 years. Sometimes inside I feel very much like the 9 year old child for whom the above events were so immensely important. But 35 years adds a lot of layers. For St. Helens, a mountain, those layers include the rebuilding of the inner dome and the reshaping of the outer flora and fauna. 

For me, those layers include growing up (still, every day), developing an appreciation for landscapes across our country and, indeed, our world, and learning to welcome the diverse nature of this world into my heart. For me, these 35 years have helped me to deepen the sense of human journey in the world, the way we are drawn from and to places. 

35 years later, May 18th, 2015 - and I have returned to the PNW, where the local news (see here and here, for example) is acknowledging, investigating, and commemorating this event that has been a natural marker in my life, in that "do you remember where you were when" way. In my call to return, throughout the years, I think I can understand a little of Harry Truman's refusal to leave, his willingness to stay in a place where death was almost certain. Where else would he feel so at home?


Note: I can find no reference to the little folk ditty at the top of this post. Did my brother and I make it up? Was it limited to our neighborhood? Did you, my Seattle readers, also sing this?