Miles Whitney – An excerpt from ‘The Origin Story of Death’

The Origin Story of Death – Chapter 7

After my daughter died, people asked whether I had received any signs from her. I initially was repelled by the thought. A sign from her would make her death more real, and I could barely contemplate it as it was. 

As the months went by, I became less opposed to the idea. Still, as a dad, it felt wrong for me intentionally seek out this contact. If Bel had gone off to college in another state, or had taken a job in Japan, I would have wanted her to go fully into her new life without hanging back on my account. Her life was her own, she was not for me. 

The same felt true of her death. Shortly before she died, this young woman who had been hesitant to leave home started preparing to strike out on her own. The month before she was to go, Bel left in the most extreme way possible, exiting this plane entirely. If her spirit continued on somewhere, I didn’t want her lurking around, sending me rainbows and brushing my cheek when I was sad. Even with this, I wanted her to go spectacularly into her new adventure. I hoped she would spend no time looking back. She could not return; this place was no longer for her. 

One day I found myself stepping on a squeaky dog toy wherever I moved in the house. The toys weren’t even laid out in front of me. One was completely under the bed. Another one was in a corner by the window, hidden by the drapes. One, now that I think of it, was in the middle of the floor. After the third time I laughed. I knew Bel would have enjoyed this sequence. One of her favorite videos was a cart full of rubber ducks in a shopping cart that all squeaked in unison when pushed down en masse. This was something she would have pranked me with had she been able. I realized that if she was going to contact me, it would have been a prank or something expressing her singular sense of humor. I would know her by that; I knew her humor. 

Not long after came the day I tripped everyone. Karen was walking past me in the hallway, and I tripped them. I never fully understood the mechanics of how that happened. Karen was unhurt and we laughed a little. That night I went to dinner with a friend. My friend got up to go to the restroom and asked me to order for her if the waiter came in her absence. In my grief-fogged state, I forgot her order within two seconds of her standing up. “Wait!” I exclaimed, which somehow caused my friend to trip. My friend was also unhurt. This time I caught a case of the giggles. When I got home, I tripped the dog. This time, I belly laughed. Was Bel pranking me? 

A few weeks after the squeak parade and the tripping, I began to see the number 420 everywhere. I’d look at a clock and it would read 4:20. The number was everywhere, so often and in such strange ways that did not seem explainable either by my expectations or coincidence. A couple of weeks into this, I considered the number could be some kind of message from Bel. But what? Was she saying to smoke pot? To abstain from smoking pot? Or did she just think it was funny? I settled on humor and expected the message to stop appearing once I acknowledged its receipt. It did.

I forgot about the number for a few weeks. Then out of the blue I remembered that months before she died, Bel told me she was seeing the number 420 everywhere. She had asked me what it meant. I was perplexed as she was and probably did not provide a satisfactory answer. This recollection opened me more fully to the possibility that this was a message from my dead daughter, trying to get past my refusal to acknowledge her. 

Thus concludes my story of how I came to believe that Bel contacted me from beyond the grave, once I was ready to hear it and when I most needed it. By believe, I don’t know if it was her personality consciously reaching out to me or that I simply accepted that who she was in life stayed with me after her death. It didn’t seem to matter much either way. Bel was gone and a message or memory here or there was a poor substitute for life. 

On another level, it did matter. The possibility, however slight, that those messages were from Bel confronted me with certain theological questions. Somewhere in those first months after Bel’s death, my sister told me that the departed walk with the living, ever connected with the ones they loved in life. I also did not find this to be a comforting thought. 

I was not opposed to the idea of reincarnation. I had been a practicing Buddhist for years and my new religion seemed to be at least somewhat open on the matter. Within that framework, I failed to understand how my dad, who had died several years before, could be a baby somewhere now and yet escape his earthly existence to contact me in spirit. It did not seem that both things could be true, that he could be in two places at once. And not only that, how would he exist simultaneously in completely different forms, both a nonverbal infant somewhere and my 81-year-old-father with all his memory and experience?

It occurred to me that the answer could be found in time. Remember how God separated light from darkness, and thus began earthly time as we experience it? But before that day, before creation, how did time work? Was all time eternal, existing undifferentiated between past, present and future? If so, was this other kind of time destroyed by the creation of chronological time? If not, and both kinds of time existed and continue to exist at once, Bel could arguably reach out to me in my now and also have continued wholeheartedly on her journey. Perhaps where Bel existed now, she was at least partially unbounded by earthly time as she had been in life and as I was now. If she existed in spiritual time, the rules could be completely different. I admit my idea, which was not all that original, could simply be a way for me to substitute the reality I wanted in place of the one that was. 

I decided to keep searching, as if I had a choice. Because death took my daughter from me, I no longer had the luxury of looking away. Death accompanied me everywhere. I’d contemplate the face of my beloved and know it was one breath away from being attached to a corpse. I’d wake and know my days were numbered, not in the vague traditional sense, but with the knowledge that death would come for me too and that that ending had a specific date. I had never feared death before, even in its power to take, but now I knew its terrible power to destroy all meaning. This was a horror that had never experienced; one day I stood staring into the void for four hours straight and knew there was no escape. I saw the unbroken line back to the first life on earth continuing through me to Bel, snuffed out. No children were left in me, I was too old for second chances. I was no longer relevant to life; I was the dead vine shriveled on the ground after the harvest. The memory of that terror has never left me.

Paradoxically, I also welcomed death. I imagined myself falling into death’s arms gently, in peace and gratitude; a world without Bel was no longer one that held me as tightly. Maybe we would be rejoined but if not, I could leave behind the pain forever. What was the point of me staying here? So goes the shriveled vine blowing away in the October wind, forgotten. 

Because my life was now circumscribed and remade by death, I needed to pull it close. I would look it in the face and know it. I would start with death’s origin story. 

God finished all of creation in six days and found it to be very good. I have become literal enough after my conversion; I believed this to be true. 

The way I remembered the story, God created everything in six days and then declared it to be good. It seemed logical that if God created everything in those six days, death was included, as death is certainly a part of everything on earth. By implication, then, God would have declared death to be “good.” I remembered that shabbat was created on day seven although that fact appeared to be irrelevant to my quest; shabbat was not death. I did not remember the story explicitly mentioning the creation of death, but I was reasonably certain that not every single item of creation was spelled out. I was troubled by an inherent contradiction. If death is “good,” why then, did the text treat life as good and death as bad? Death a punishment; life a reward. Something about my understanding seemed off.

I asked Karen, who did not have an immediate answer, although they did have some theories. I resolved to seek the answer in the text itself, but I did not own a book. Karen offered to lend me theirs, but suspecting I might be in this for the long haul, I bought my own. 

The book arrived. I sat down with it and muttered what I remembered to be the general Hebrew prayer for blessings and for lack of more words added “study Torah” in English and kissed it. The pages were pristine, unsullied by my searching, my restless mind, my tears, my worthy and unworthy prayers. I started to read. 

The first creation story is beautifully minimalist, like poetry. In the way of poetry, all of creation proceeds from the spoken word. God’s hands stay clean. My memory had been accurate in that I found no mention of death’s creation in the six days. Death first appears as a topic only when God first introduces the tree of the knowledge of good and bad, in the second story. 

As I entered the world of the holy text, reading line by line, I found strange things there that I had either never noticed or had forgotten. Light was created, and the separation of night and day took place, before the creation of the sun. Earthly, linear time was arguably created on the first day when night and day were separated and thus arrived the first day. But only on the fourth day were the sun and moon created, to serve as signs for the set times, the days and the years. Time, as we experience it, was created days before the methods of marking time were. Men and women make their appearance on the sixth day, with God conspiratorially announcing, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” (Gen. 1:26.) Who is God even talking to? Karen said it was angels, or God talking to himself.  

Returning to death, besides it not having been explicitly created, also did not appear as necessarily inherent in creation. Seed-bearing plants and seed-bearing fruit were given to humans to eat. To every other creature God gave all the green plants for food. In this strange vegan world, no animals or plants had to die to sustain life. Collecting seeds and fruit did not necessitate death to the plants; eating green plants did not necessitate death to them either. Then again, it would take some doing to avoid death completely, even vegans inadvertently eat small bugs and some plants we eat are pulled from the ground entirely. Maybe annuals did not exist yet or all the exciting events in the first days concluded before the year came to a close. The point being, one reading of the text could support a new world without death. 

Abruptly comes the second story. The sequence of events here is hard to reconcile with the that laid out in the first. In the second story, God creates the man from the dust of the earth as opposed to speaking him into existence. The story tells us vaguely that the man was made “[w]hen the Lord God made earth and heaven.” (Gen. 2:4.) In this version, when the man was created, no shrub of the field nor grasses had yet sprouted, because God had yet to send rain or a person to till the soil. Remember in the first story, on the third day the earth brought forth every type of seed-bearing bearing plants and seed-bearing trees of every kind? God in fact said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation…” and it was so. (Gen. 1:11.) Certainly, God knew that grasses bear seed? The stories have already diverged. After God created the man in this grassless and barren land, He planted a garden in the east and set the man in it. Although in the first story, seed-bearing trees preceded men and women, in this version, God caused trees that provided food to grow only after the man was set in the garden. 

This is important. This is where we are first introduced to the tree of knowledge of good and bad, which was “caused to grow” in the middle of garden along with the tree of life. It is unclear on what day this happened. 

One reading could be that it happened on the third day, sandwiched between creation of the sky and earth and the earth bringing forth seed-bearing plants and trees. It could be argued that the garden was made sometime later. God planted the garden. (Gen. 2:8.) It could be that God filled Eden with trees that He had previously created, the same way a person plants a garden but does not create plant species from nothing. The language of the text leaves open this possibility: “God caused to grow every tree that was pleasing to the sight and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and bad.” (Genesis, 2.9.) 

Perhaps the versions are irreconcilable. In the second story, God creates the man followed by animals and then the woman. In the first version, men and women were created after the animals. It could be that humans were created in general prior to the man who was set in the garden. Like the idea of previously-created trees, this particular man was made and set in the garden to till it and tend to it, but humans already been created. But outside this possible explanation, the whole order is shifted around, which cannot be explained by the failure to mention days in the second story. 

One last idea arrives. The first story proceeds according to earthly time, with its days marked and numbered like ours, the acts of creation placed in chronological order accordingly. The second story is set in spiritual time, with no mention of specific days, because days do not exist there, nor does our chronology. Past present and future, like our God, are one. Or even, God and all time are one. 

In this second version, creation is relational and according to need. In the first story, humans are simply given the task to multiply and to master the earth and rule over its inhabitants. (Gen. 1:26; 1:28.) There is no explanation of how this rulership will work. The humans seem as wild as the beasts, with no real job other than to eat seeded plants and procreate. Although God instructs the humans, they never respond, they do not speak. 

In the second story, the man begins his existence in relationship with the plants in the garden. Although a flow would rise to water the entire earth, the plants await the man’s arrival before sprouting. Even the rain is held back, clouds gathering and darkening with anticipation. The man is placed in the garden, “to till it and tend it.” (Gen. 2:15.) The man has a responsibility to the plants. The plants do not exist solely to be consumed, they must be attended to. The man is made a farmer. To farm effectively, the man must know the plants intimately, to understand the times of planting and harvest, to know their enemies, to hear their unspoken needs. 

God declares that the man should not be alone sets about creating a fitting helper for him. God starts with the animals. Like the plants, God does not create the animals only to be consumed or ruled over. God creates the animals in relationship to the man, to be helpers, to share his home. 

God creates the man and the animals out of the earth. In dog circles, a person says, “I have had my hands on him,” to express a deep knowledge of a particular individual. God is down on earth in the dirt and dust, putting His hands on everything he makes. I imagine God shaping the velvety nose of a mare with His muddy hands, smoothing the ridges of her curved nostrils, standing back to look at this undeniable beauty with a critical eye. God’s countenance shines. He breathes life into her; she snorts and heaves her muscular body up from the ground of which she so recently was a part. She shakes her mane, ears moving forward and back, and takes off in a gallop in the fresh rain. God laughs and shouts with delight, “This is good!” 

I imagine God sitting in the mud, shaping a tiny seahorse in His lap. Fashioning the delicate curved feet of a wren with its clever levers made of tendons; pinching clay into the shape of a flea. I smell the clay. I wonder if all creation still bears slight imprints of God’s fingertips, the way archologist finds the maker’s whorls on excavated pots. Maybe God starts with the most functional of animals. A brown hen. A minnow. Then God explores His talent for outrageous beauty. God, the artist, adds iridescent feathers on a hummingbird. He blows into His closed hand and counts. He opens his fingers, the bird zips upward in a spiral, singing praises. He builds a peacock out of gravel. He makes the improbable, a huge sunfish. He blows life into its strange small mouth with one big puff. The massive fish thrashes as God throws it overhand into the sea. The golden sun glints against the waves as the sunfish sinks beneath the surface, trailing bubbles. God falls back upon the sands of the beach and laughs. A platypus emerges from His hands, flat and glossy. God giggles, “This is good!” 

God then brings all the creatures to the man to name. God made the creatures, they were His, why did he bring them to the man to name? God named the other things He created earlier. The text suggests the motivation to be curiosity, as God “… brought them to the man to see what he would call them…” (Gen. 2:10) What is art, without a viewer? What good is a bike ramp to a kid if his friends can’t watch him go over it? God, the artist, is childlike in his desire to know what the man would make of His work. Would the man, who had only just been created, get it? Would the names the man chose fit? Would the man see God, understand God, through His work? Or would the man throw up his hands in defeat or get bored and quit after first 20? Would he lack the ability to create new words out of nothing, again and again? Would the man have a favorite? Was God nervous? 

This was the first real interaction between the man and God, other than a few words of initial instruction. At least the first exchange worthy of being recorded for eternity. The man comes through for God and names them all, no small accomplishment. There must have been millions of creatures, even including those yet to be discovered today. I suspect the dog was the man’s favorite. Maybe it was a puppy, toddling forward with its rolls of skin and breath mysteriously smelling of milk. I can see the man reaching out. They touch; it is electric! The man scoops up the puppy and tucks it under His arm, forever. 

But then, maybe God brought the animals to the man because they were meant to be his helpers. To name them is to contemplate them, to see them. Relationship.

Returning to the first story, God tells someone, “Let us make man in our image, after our likenesses.” (Gen. 1:26.) In God’s image and likeness, we are artists. We see a sunset, fog rolling over coastal hills, a greyhound stretched out in full stride; we see beauty. We know beauty, without it ever being explained to us or taught to us. It is innate. We create, we appreciate creation, that of God and that of other artists. Later in the second story, God makes sure that in the garden, all the trees caused to grow are pleasing to the sight, besides being good to eat. (Gen. 2:9.) Why does God need beauty as much as sustenance? Why do we? How God must have felt at this first exchange with the man, to have another like Him who loved His work enough to name so much of it, who would see the beauty of the trees. 

Having found no fitting helper amongst the animals, not for lack of the dog trying, God created the woman. I imagine her to be beautiful in a rough-hewn way, brown-skinned, long-limbed, curvy. Tapered fingers and maybe a slightly masculine set to her jaw. She stands up easily with her strong thighs, her eyes so full of the light of life so recently given her. God brings her to the man. I picture the man slowly rising from the rock he had been sitting on, overwhelmed by an ache that he has no words for at first, even after all that naming. She’s so beautiful. The man finds his voice and proclaims, “This one at last…” (Gen. 2:23.) At last indeed. After mastering His craft, God’s masterpiece. In the second story, the woman is God’s final act of creation. 

I know the man’s feeling; I had it when I first met Karen. I blurted out, “you’re pretty,” something I have never done before or since. And within the hour I knew that we would be married, like I was looking backward from the future. The thought arriving in my head from somewhere, a rough translation being, one day I will have seen this face a million times. In that moment, both earthly and spiritual time existed at once, or I had the ability to perceive that co-existence. I was there that afternoon in May, with the days stretching out before us. Yet I had already spent years in Karen’s arms, looking back at the sum of my memories. This one at last. The relationship between the man and woman is so close; they are each other’s bone and flesh, the same dust and the same breath of life. 

If the two types of time exist simultaneously, that which has yet to come into being in the second story (the woman, the animals) co-exist with that which has been made manifest by the spoken word in the first (the woman, the animals). If spiritual time and earthy time existed simultaneously in Genesis, they could continue to co-exist. There is no mention otherwise. Is this how the prophets were able to prophesy? Is this how God knows the future? If time existed only according to earthly standards, the future would be hidden and unknown to all, branching off in unexpected random ways. If both coexist, one type is undifferentiated, eternal, the past, present and future both known and knowable. 

There are cracks in this theory. God doesn’t seem to know what the man will name the animals in the second story. I will leave this for another day. 

Through all this furious creation, however, I find no direct mention of God creating death. Death is mentioned only obliquely, in reference to the tree of knowledge of good and bad. 

In the second story, God tells the man he can eat from any tree in the garden, presumably including the tree of life, but he must not eat of the tree of knowledge of good and bad. The man is told that as soon as he eats of that tree, he shall die. When God tells this to the man, the woman had yet to be created. Even the animals had yet to arrive. This sole mention of death occurred before all of creation is finished and the people start to be exactly who they are.  

The relationship between the creation of death itself and the proclamation that eating of the tree of knowledge will result in death is unclear. It is at least arguable that at least the tree of knowledge was created within the six days. The tree of life and the tree of knowledge are not mentioned in the first story. However, in the first story, on the third day God created seed-bearing trees with fruit that could be eaten. It is not said that the two mystical trees bore seeded fruit, but neither does it say they did not. The fruit of both trees could be eaten. If they bore seeded fruit, both extraordinary trees are (or could be) included in initial creation in the first story when all seed-bearing trees are made. In the second story, God caused the mystical trees to grow in the garden, so either they had been created earlier or the garden is where and when they were created. According to this interpretation, then, in both stories the mystical trees were created within the six days. No matter what interpretation, in the second story, the creation of the mystical trees was bracketed between the creation of the man and the creation of the animals and the woman, another argument that they were made in the six days.

If the tree of the knowledge of good and bad has the power to kill within it, death either was made in the first six days or existed as an idea, as potential, something that would spring to life upon humans eating its fruit. Then again, the fruit of the tree could have been entirely innocuous other than being wisdom-giving and delicious, death was simply the punishment for disobedience. But God at least had imagined death by then, and perhaps created it with speaking the words of instruction, as other things were made by God’s speech. 

As I read the lines word by word, however, I was surprised to find that my initial assumption that everything was made in the first six days might have been wrong. Certain things appeared to have existed prior to the six days of creation. Darkness. Waters. Wind. There is some indication that there was pre-existing land as well, the first story states that God said, “Let the water below the sky be gathered into one area, that the dry land may appear.” (Gen. 2:9.) This suggests the land that would end up being called earth was submerged below the waters that preceded creation, by gathering the water, that which existed is revealed. 

To these items that had been spelled out, I added language. God started the process of creation by saying, “Let there be light.” Words preceded the first created thing. In both stories, humans arrive with language pre-installed. God just sets to speaking to them and they understand. The man speaks, through the naming. 

Of course, God pre-existed. 

So too, death could have pre-existed creation. The things that pre-existed creation were not alive. Waters did not have the breath of life, nor did wind. Perhaps like darkness, death was the default. Before God started the process of creation, all was dead and all was dark. If light is removed, the default returns, darkness. If life is removed, the default returns, that which is dead. Later, this is hinted at when God proclaims,

“From dust you are, 

And to dust you shall return.” 

(Gen. 3:19.) It is life that is the anomaly, not death.

After embarking on this quest, I learned that tradition provides that other things preceded creation, including Torah. Another list exists for things created in the twilight between the sixth and seventh day, including a donkey and the rainbow. Neither of these lists mentioned death, so I put this aside.  

Then there is the mystery of the tree of life. It grows in the middle of the garden along with the tree of the knowledge of good and bad. There is scant information about this tree. The man is not forbidden from eating from it. There is no indication whether he did or not. Nor is there any indication whether the animals did, or the woman. 

It comes to pass, of course, that the man and the woman eat from the tree of knowledge. Confusingly, although God said that the man would die “as soon” as he ate from the tree, the man did not immediately die, but lived on for centuries. The most straightforward reading is that the man and woman would not have otherwise eventually died. Upon learning that the people ate from the tree of knowledge, God proclaims that now that the man had become like “one of us” (who is He talking to?) he could stretch out his hand and also take from the tree of life, and life forever. (Gen. 3:27.) This phrase could be of two meanings: the man lost his initial immortality as a result of disobedience, or he had always been mortal, but now had become dangerous. Had God not considered this possibility when placing both trees so close together, perhaps with roots and limbs intertwined, like the souls of spouses? 

Why is there a tree of life planted in the middle of the garden in the first place? If death did not exist as part of the original creation, except possibly lying dormant in the tree of knowledge, why have the tree of life? It would be redundant. Did death exist but was held off so long as all the created were taking of this source of immortality? Did the man’s disobedience affect all other living beings, so that they too became mortal when he did? Or were all those with the breath of life within them driven out of the garden with the man and woman, so as to prevent them now maintaining immortality by continuing to eat from the tree of life? Why didn’t God just destroy the tree of life? Was its continued existence now beyond His control, itself to live forever? Was the tree made of spiritual time, or existing therein? Was the entire garden?

It occurred to me that I had read the word “creation” too broadly, rather than as a term of art. The text says that God began creating on day one. It repeatedly refers to “creation” or “all creation”, God ceased creation on day six. In other words, it wasn’t that God created everything in those six days as I had remembered; rather God created creation, the particular mix of people, plants, animals, earth, sky and planets in which our specific story would unfold. Death was not part of creation, it existed, it always existed. Like darkness or wind, language and God Himself, death remained to interact with creation, perhaps with all creations, but was not of creation.

In inhabiting the text, I found one interesting detail. All through the first story, God finds individual acts of creation to be “good”, but only upon looking at the entirety of all He had made on that sixth day, did God find it to be “very good.” But look: God looked on all He had made. Death was not what God had made, not in this creation. It was not included in what God found to be “very good.” 

Death is here, existing as a possible necessity. It is wielded by God as a punishment, it takes our forbearers and children. It comes gently for the righteous in their time, or violently for the martyrs. It allows for the generations that are required to pass down Torah. It may be bad, it may be neutral, it may even be good as an end to suffering. 

Life, the anomaly, is very good. Death is not, as the rest of the story reveals.

 

_________ Miles Whitney is a Jewish lawyer living and working in Sacramento, California. Miles started writing creatively after the unexpected death of his daughter in 2022.