Confused and Tangled Times

My favorite words of Torah are the very first: "In the beginning." They beg us to ask, what was there before the Creation that made God want to do more? And the answer provided in the text is especially fitting for our own warring time: tohu va’vohu, which Rabbi Samson Hirsch, the sensitive linguist, translates as: "confused and tangled, and darkness was over the turmoil," just as we are now.

Judaism provides sanity in moments like ours today. It stands in opposition to everything that existed before the beginning. Ours is the attempt to install meaning over chaos, peace over turmoil.

On a recent journey to the inner passage of Alaska, I saw clearly how difficult and unnatural is this effort. The farther north we went, the fewer people there were to see, the more biblical one’s thoughts became.

Surrounding our ship was all the evidence of divinity that one could need, physical proof of the challenge that God faced in trying to make a world out of nothing. The fjords — rolling carpets of tormented ice, taller than skyscrapers — are the resonant blue of "darkness on the face of the deep." This is the world primeval, void, without form; massive, distant and alone.

Natural trouble and natural beauty are everywhere. A few days before the fjords, on a seaplane ride from the rough-and-ready city of Ketchikan, I came to the village of Neets Bay. "Village" is too generous. The encampment has 14 people, employed by the local salmon hatchery, and 30 bears.

In the midst of a quiet, pristine cove, many hundreds of mature salmon whose meat was too old for commercial fishing were lined up head-to-tailfin. Passive, compliant, they were coming home to die.

I stood among a group of tourists less than 100 feet from a grove of trees. This is what I saw:

One by one, tall black bears emerged from the grove. Ignoring our little circle of tourist humanity, they worked individually. The first one pawed his way into the water and picked up an aging salmon with his teeth. Sniffing a male salmon, the bear threw the unwanted fish back into the bay. Smelling a female, he heaved her into his snout, ripped her open in a cesarean section without anesthesia, ate her eggs with barbarous glee and tossed her living remains back into the water, her tail flapping pathetically. Soon she will be food for the gulls.

This happened over and over. Throughout the afternoon, bears came out of the grove, high as a kite on power: slaughtering salmon, feeding all they wished. Males were dismissed: females disemboweled and tossed.

Stop it! I thought, stop the cruelty! There was not a woman among us who did not identify with the female salmon, nor a man who did not see himself in the vicious tableau, as both victim and perpetrator.

What a wretched course is wondrous nature.

We could do nothing at all about it. Reason was de minimus to the bears, who were programmed to do little but survive. This is how they acted in times of plenty. We could only imagine what it would be like when the weather got warm, and the fish died and stank.

Yet what really was wrong with this picture? It is only from a human perspective that fairness and pain had meaning, or interest. Nature had a pecking order, but only humanity tried to parse through the ethical wilderness, establishing objective standards to protect the weak. Perhaps it was pathetic human nature, filled with empathy, that was doomed to try and fail and suffer unnecessarily.

Better human pain than animal terror.

On a recent edition of his public radio show on KCRW, Joe Frank argued with God (his voice drenched in irony) about the struggle with belief: Atrocities of the bear-salmon variety, the kind shown weekly on television’s National Geographic specials, stop him from going to synagogue, because how can he praise a God who builds cruelty into the very natural order?

My own faith argues that God wants more from us than blind surrender.

When it comes to Afghanistan, just what will restrain the bears?