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Dov Lerea

Leviathan, a Jewish Ouroboros

Sukkot-First Day

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In the Babylonian Talmud, Baba Batra 74-75, we learn the legends of the Leviathan:

In the future, the Holy One, Blessed be He, will make a feast for the righteous from the flesh of the leviathan…..And with regard to the remainder of the leviathan, they will divide it and use it for commerce in the markets of Jerusalem.…

Not only with the Leviathan feed the righteous of this world in the messianic future, but Its skin will be used to manufacture a messianic Sukkah: Rabba says that Rabbi Yoḥanan says: In the future, the Holy One, Blessed be He, will prepare a sukkah for the righteous from the skin of the leviathan….If one is deserving at least of this reward, a covering is prepared for him, and if one is not deserving, a necklace is prepared for him, …And if one is not deserving even of this, only an amulet is prepared for him from the skin of the leviathan,….And with regard to the remaining part of the skin of the leviathan, the Holy One, Blessed be He, spreads it on the walls of Jerusalem, and its glory radiates from one end of the world until the other end. (baba Batra 74a)

However, the Leviathan was monstrous, a symbol of the all of the potential chaos and destructive forces in the world: 

The Sages taught: There was an incident involving Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua, who were traveling on a ship, and Rabbi Eliezer was sleeping and Rabbi Yehoshua was awake. Rabbi Yehoshua trembled, and Rabbi Eliezer awoke. Rabbi Eliezer said to him: What is this, Yehoshua; for what reason did you tremble? Rabbi Yehoshua said to him: I saw a great light in the sea. Rabbi Eliezer said to him: Perhaps you saw the eyes of the leviathan…When Rav Dimi came from Eretz Yisrael to Babylonia, he said that Rabbi Yoḥanan said: When the leviathan is hungry, he produces breath from his mouth and thereby boils all of the waters in the depths of the sea….And if the leviathan did not place its head in the Garden of Eden, no creature could withstand his foul smell….And when he is thirsty, he makes many furrows in the sea… After the leviathan drinks from the sea, the depth of the sea does not return to its normal condition until seventy years have passed… (Baba Batra 75a)

God had to curb and control the unmitigated power, chaotic potential and destructive power of God’s own creations:

(21) God created the great sea monsters, and all the living creatures of every kind that creep, which the waters brought forth in swarms, and all the winged birds of every kind. And God saw that this was good. (22) God blessed them, saying, “Be fertile and increase, fill the waters in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” (23) And there was evening and there was morning, a fifth day. Genesis 1:21-23

THE great sea monsters— the large fishes that are in the sea; and according to the statement of the Agada (Bava Batra 74b) it means here the Leviathan and its consort which He created male and female. He, however, killed the female and preserved it in salt for the benefit of the righteous in the time to come, for had they been permitted to be fruitful and to multiply the world could not have endured because of them. Rashi on Genesis 1:21:1

Rav Yehuda says that Rav says: Everything that the Holy One, Blessed be He, created in His world, He created male and female. Even leviathan the twisted serpent and leviathan the tortuous serpent He created male and female. And if they would have coupled and produced offspring, they would have destroyed the entire world. What did the Holy One, Blessed be He, do? He castrated the male and killed the female, and salted the female to preserve it for the banquet for the righteous in the future. (Herring) (Baba Batra 74a)

Why would God create monsters as part of reality? Why create evil? And why would the monsters nourish the righteous in the future? What is the vision of the world and for humanity that the stories of the leviathan project? The tradition of Torah wisdom recognizes that chaos is built into the structure of the natural world. Reality is untamed, unstructured, chaotic, filled with violence, cruelty, and overwhelming power. The existence of the Leviathan heralds the inclusion of chaos in nature and evil into the universe of humanity. Radak makes this point explicitly from a nuanced and careful reading of the verses:

(1) And God created the great sea monsters, we do not find the expression “and it was so” in this paragraph. The reason that the Torah had to introduce this paragraph with the words “God created,” as distinct from “the waters brought forth,” or something similar, is that the waters were not capable of producing creatures of such dimensions and capabilities without additional input by God Himself. Both God and the waters combined to produce these monsters, hence their creation is described by the word “And [God] created.”  (Radak on Genesis 1:21:1)

God wanted the world to be inhabited by monsters, by forces of chaos so brutal that God then had to resort to extreme measures to curb their passion, to make certain that the Leviathan would not couple and reproduce, thereby completely overwhelming the world, upsetting its balances, subverting the ecological systems, devouring humanity and civilizations.

It seems that forces of destruction, forces of chaos, of unbridled power, forces of insatiable, nihilistic appetite and death are part of the world. And just as these forces surround us, we have those forces inside of ourselves as well. The tradition called that the yetzer hara. The Leviathan is the externalization of this same power inside of each of us, inside of humanity. We are microcosms of the universe. Isaiah recognized that only the Creator could protect the world from the Leviathan:

In that day GOD will punishWith a great, cruel, mighty swordLeviathan the Elusive Serpent—Leviathan the Twisting Serpent; The Dragon of the sea will be slain. (Isaiah 27:1

King David recognized this same dimension of our world when he wrote in Tehillim:

(13) It was You who drove back the sea with Your might, who smashed the heads of the monsters in the waters; (14) it was You who crushed the heads of Leviathan, who left him as food for the denizens of the desert. (Psalms 74:13-14)

The Malbim, Rabbi Meir Leibush ben Yehiel Michel Wisser,  in Warsaw in the mid-19th century, wrote explicitly about the God’s decision to infuse the world with the potential for destructive violence and chaos:

The second mighty beast that Job should put down is the Leviathan. Beyond discipline or training, the Leviathan is the embodiment of ferocious and ungovernable violence; and it knows it and does not care. Many desperate attempts have been made to catch this rampaging sea-monster but all have been in vain. And even were it caught alive it would never submit; and if dead, its carcass would be of no use, as its flesh is too tough to be butchered.  (Based on Job 40:23:1)

I would go so far as to suggest that these traditions are teaching us that not only is chaos a reality throughout nature, but that the forces of chaos are an idea that cannot be killed, that once the forces of chaos are subdued, they will only rise again. These forces are indigenous to our nature as human beings, and reflect the unbridled power and untamable forces of nature–like the hurricanes raging through Florida. The worlds that God created are not awesome in a gentle, polite, guarded, curricularized, contained, controlled way–like a school project. God’s creations–humans, animals, the natural world, the forces at play, energy–are terrifying. That is the meaning of awe–yirah–there is a power at the heart of reality that forces even the most arrogant of humans to submit. 

This perspective makes us read the verse about the Leviathan in Tehillim 104, Barchi Nafshi–in the most radical way: שָׁ֭ם אֳנִיּ֣וֹת יְהַלֵּכ֑וּן לִ֝וְיָתָ֗ן זֶֽה־יָצַ֥רְתָּ לְשַֽׂחֶק־בּֽוֹ׃ “There go the ships, and Leviathan that You formed to sport with.” Chaos is God’s playmate.

So why feast on the flesh of the Leviathan, and project a vision of the sukkah made from its skin, a sukkah of righteousness in a messianic, perfected future? The Song of Songs says:

I would lead you, I would bring you / To the house of my mother / Of her who taught me—I would let you drink of the spiced wine/Of my pomegranate juice.

The Aramaic Targum of this otherwise erotic verse reinterprets the word mystically:

(2) “I will lead you, O King, and bring you up to my Temple. And you will teach me to fear before God and to walk in God’s ways. And there we will partake of the feast of Leviathan and will drink old wine preserved in its grape since the day the world was created and from the pomegranates and fruits prepared for the righteous in the Garden of Eden.”

The world is filled with the passions of destruction and life, of hatred and love, of deprivation and nourishment, of chaos and order, of tempest and calm, of lies and nuance, of deceit and truthfulness, fixation and diversity, myopia and vision. The Leviathan is the symbol of the possibility for transmutation of our passions, of the possibility for change, of the reality that from destruction and hatred can come nourishment and righteousness and love. At a terrible cost, the Leviathan needs to be devoured. That is perhaps why the נָחָ֖שׁ עֲקַלָּת֑וֹן, the “twisted Leviathan” is the Ouroborus, the serpent with its mouth in its tail,  twisted into a perfect circle. As it devours itself, the Leviathan simultaneously symbolizes the possibility of passions coming full circle. And there is one place where these transformations can occur: like Gan Eden, inside a perfected environment, an environment of simplicity, an environment where heaven and earth can almost touch, and a place where the heroes of the past come into the present–the sukkah.

May our sukkot evoke the skin of the devoured Leviathan, of the full cycle of life, allowing for an optimistic future that is civilized and tame and safe and loving, balanced and stable.  כן יהי רצון

 

About the Author
Rabbi Dov Lerea is currently the Head of Judaic Studies at the Shefa School in NYC. He has served as the Dean and Mashgiach Ruchani at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School, as the Director of Kivunim in Jerusalem, as the Dean of Judaic Studies of the Abraham Joshua Heschel School in New York, and as the Director of Education at Camp Yavneh in Northwood, New Hampshire. Rabbi Dov has semicha from both JTS and YU. He is married and is blessed with sons, daughters-in-law, and wonderful grandchildren. He loves cooking, biking, and trying to fix things by puttering around with tools.