Friends – "Excuse me, sirs… but… you wouldn't happen to know where all my… my… kumquats have gone, would you?" asked Farmer Bob in a rather frazzled voice, stumbling disorientedly over the large, craning ladder lying discarded across the entrance path to his field. He had, of course, expected to find an entire summer's worth of ripe, juicy, marmelade-worthy kumquats ready to be harvested this very morning when he tractored in, but had instead been greeted by the sight of row after row of his kumquat trees as empty of their fruits as the world is of kosher pork frankfurters. Brushing himself off and cursing his bruised ankle, Farmer Bob slowly turned to cast a half-quizzical, half-accusing gaze upon the two grimy, overall-wearing, toothpick-chewing trespassers, one short, one tall, who had nonchalantly propped themselves against the nearest tree.
"Kum-whats?" asked the shorter one peevishly, adjusting the brim of his marmelade-stained ball cap to deflect the light of the sun, which at that moment peeked its way from behind a dark cloud to illuminate his two stump legs. Farmer Bob's face immediately fell, destitute, to be met with the sight of a "Percy and Joe's Expert Farmcare and Harvesting Service" sticker brazenly embossed aside the ladder which had just assaulted his ankle.
"Yeah, uh, me an' Percy here din't see no kumquats 'round here now, did we, there, Perce?" the taller one managed, his eyes completely masked by a set of dark, heavy sunglasses. Farmer Bob stared for an odd moment at this taller man's obscured face, noticing that his gaze hadn't once shifted since they had begun speaking. Was he totally blind, this tall, dark, unbidden stranger?
"No, Joe, I don't suppose we did, now," said the legless one. "Now if you'll excuse us, there, my fine farmer-like friend, my associate and I'll just be findin' our way home after such a lovely siesta under your beautiful, kumquat-less tree over here…"
At that moment, Farmer Bob, who had already drawn significantly closer to his two vagrant visitors, emphatically bolted himself between them and, trembling with a rage bordering on the paranoiac, excitedly exclaimed, "I don't believe you! Not for a moment! Why, you're Percy and Joe, of Percy and Joe's Expert Farmcare and Harvesting Service, and you've stolen all of my summer kumquats, I just know it!!! Give them back to me, you thieving scalliwags, or I'll…I'll… !!!"
The legless man, scrambling for leverage against Farmer Bob's enormous, muscle-bound shadow, removed the spittle-soaked toothpick from between his stained orange teeth and pointed it back at Farmer Bob, shouting menacingly, "Now, just you wait one second, mister horn-tootin', know-it-all farmer-man -- what exactly are you accusing us of, there? My associate here, Joe, blind-as-an-African-fruit-bat since the day he was born, wouldn't know a kumquat if it came up and bit him on the gallbladder! He could never see straight to pick any fruit from any tree, simple-as-that! And look at me - legless -- could I just leap up from the ground on my two stumps, grabbing any fruit I wanted?! And for a whole harvest, at that?! Looks like you need some serious work on your logical problem-solving skills, ol' farmy-man!"
No sooner had the words left Percy's lips than he found himself suspended above the ground, flailing and struggling against the vice-grip that Farmer Bob's beefy hand had enforced on the scruff of his neck. Squealing hysterically, he found himself, a moment later, propped snugly and comfortably atop the broad shoulders of Joe, whose arms had stopped groping for some invisible assailant's throat and now lay dormant at his side, clamped down forcibly by Farmer Bob's own.
"I've got the whole picture together now, you vagrants… Neither of you could've taken my kumquats alone, but together, legless Percy atop blind Joe, it didn't take you long to strip a whole field's worth of my produce! Now, WALK - I'm takin' you boys in for further questioning, and you better not try nothin' FUNNY…"
Such are our bodies and souls - neither can accomplish anything without the other. We cannot be truly judged, by God, our family and friends, society, or ANYONE, unless the totality of our body/soul matrix is accounted-for; how could your body, an inanimate blob of protoplasm, alone motivate the entirety of your actions without the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) promptings of your soul? Conversely, how could your soul, a fleeting, incorporeal wisp, ever find a medium with which to effect its deepest mission in the world without the body which provides template and structure for possible action?
Have you allowed your soul to guide, discipline and structure the actions of your body (consequently allowing the body to give form and expression to your soul's stirrings) or have you allowed the opposite to happen? Is the body simply a barrier to the spiritual life, or can the body become an instrument for the soul to harness and channel its holy impulses into the world? Will you have "Jacob's voice with Eisav's hands," which according to this week's parsha, is worthy of the highest blessing because it combines Jacob and Eisav's most vital characteristics (an internal relationship to God with an external willingness to fulfill that relationship's most extreme dictates in the physical world) without compromising either, or will you have "Eisav's voice with Jacob's hands," an internal tendency towards favoring material acquisition coupled with an external, practical inability to even cope with the simple vicissitudes of the physical world?
With thanks to Rabbi Y.M. Poupko for bringing us the above Talmudic parable with his usual brand of animative description, and to Rabbi Daniel Kohen for the inspiration
Jerry Silverman
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Jerry Silverman is a former student of Yeshivat Bat Ayin. He is working in new media, designing and managing media projects. He lives in Riverdale, NY with his wife Sarah and their two children. |