Myth is Not a Four-Letter Word
Sermon, October 5, 2007
Rabbi Bruce Kadden

This Shabbat, we begin reading the book of Genesis.  As I am sure you are aware, Genesis does not begin with the story of the Abraham, who we consider the first Jew, but with a series of stories that tell us about the creation of the world, the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, Noah and the flood and the Tower of Babel.

These are wonderful stories, which introduce many important ideas and concepts to the reader, such as the origin of evil and avoiding and accepting responsibility for our actions toward our fellow human beings.

Now there are those who take these stories literally; they believed that Adam and Eve were actual persons, that Noah built an ark that contained two of every animal on earth and that God destroyed the Tower of Babel to scatter the people throughout the earth. 

Most of us, however, do not believe that these stories are an accurate record of the earliest life of human beings.  Rather, we recognize that they are stories that were designed to teach profound and lasting truths.  The word that best describes such stories is “myth.”

Now to some people the word myth is a four-letter word.  It is commonly used to mean a falsehood or lie.  The biblical scholar Nahum Sarna points out that “In the popular mind the word myth has come to be identified with fairy tale and associated with the imagery of the fantastic.” 

It is unfortunate that this word has been hijacked to this usage almost exclusively, because the word myth has another, more profound meaning.  In Greek, mythos means something spoken, such as a tale.  Greek myths tell of the gods, their relationship with each other and their relationship with human beings and the world.

Sarna writes that myths “have as their subjects the eternal problems of mankind communicated through the medium of highly imaginative language.  A myth may be a vital cultural force.  It can be a vehicle for the expression of ideas that activate human behavior, that reflect and validate the distinctive forms and qualities of a civilization, that signify a dynamic attitude to the universe and embody a vision of society.”

According to H. S. Bellamy, “Myths are fossil religion.  They are not the work of imagination, but the result of interpreted observation.  In them a great store of ancient and direct experience is laid up.”

To read the first part of Genesis literally means that we risk missing the deeper truths that these stories contain.  My Bible professor, Dr. Stanley Gevirtz of blessed memory, wrote that the stories in Genesis are true “not in the sense in which a statement of a physical law is true.”  Rather they are true “in the way that great poetry is always true:  to the imagination of the human heart and the orderliness of the human mind.”

The story of Cain and Abel, for example, teaches the important lesson that we are our brothers’ keepers, that we are responsible for one another.  Indeed, Adam, Eve and Cain all try to avoid accepting responsibility for acts that they have committed and are called to account for their actions.  These stories offer profound lessons, which is why we come back to them year in and year out.

The rabbis, who composed extensive collections of midrashim, drew many significant lessons from these stories.  For example, they asked why God created only one person and responded that this was “to teach that if anyone has caused a single person to perish, Scripture considers it as if he had caused a whole world to perish; and if anyone saves a single soul Scripture considers it as if he had saved a whole world.” 

But this is not the only lesson that the rabbis derive from the creation of single person, for they teach that it also was “for the sake of peace among people, that no one would say ‘My father was greater than your father.’”  A third lesson that the rabbis derived from the creation of a single person was that it demonstrated the greatness of God, for when human beings stamp many coins with one seal they are all alike, but although God stamped human beings with the seal of the first person, not one is like another.

The rabbis are not interested in asking if the story actually occurred as the Torah reports it.  They don’t ask if really happened some 5700 years ago.  Those are irrelevant issues as far as the rabbis are concerned. 

When they read a biblical text, they want to know what lessons it might teach us about our lives.  The truths that they derive from these stories are not based upon whether or not the stories happened, but whether they are meaningful.

Elie Wiesel makes the same point in recalling a conversation he had with a rebbe who had known his grandfather before the war.  The rebbe asked Wiesel what he did and when Wiesel replied that he wrote stories, the rebbe asked if they were about things that happened.  Wiesel replied that they were about things “that happened or could have happened.”  The rebbe pressed Wiesel, who admitted that some of them “were invented from almost the beginning to almost the end.”

“That means you are writing lies!” the rebbe responded angrily.  After a while Wiesel answered, “Things are not that simple, Rebbe.  Some events do take place but are not true; others are—although they never occurred.”

The truth or meaning of a story or an event, according to Wiesel, is independent of whether or not it actually occurred.  Applying Wiesel’s insight to the stories in the early chapters of Genesis, we can affirm that they indeed are true, although not in the same sense that a biblical literalist would affirm that they are true.  They are true because they teach us important lessons.

Just because the stories did not really happen, does not mean that they are not significant.  Nahum Sarna points out that “Literalism involves a fundamental misconception of the mental processes of biblical man and ignorance of his modes of self-expression.  It thus misrepresents the purport of the narrative, obscures the meaningful and enduring in it and destroys its relevancy.”

Sarna is saying that literalists focus on the wrong questions and therefore miss what is most significant in these texts. 

So, as we read our Torah portions this Shabbat and next, let us appreciate these stories as great myths offering profound truths about human beings and our world.  They answer many important questions about life and death, good and evil.  They demonstrate the human penchant for evil and the reality that committing a sin has consequences.  They show that we human beings have free will which means that we are responsible for what we do.  And they offer lessons about who we are and how we should lead our lives.  May we once again be influenced by these great teachings.

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