Law is Drugs pt 1: Sweet like honey from the rock

I heard a Gevalt Torah today, from Josh Lauffer. I had to share it with y'all.


Law is drugs.

Tachat ha tapuach hitorarticha, under the Apple tree, I aroused you. This line is mentioned in Song of Songs, and, inexplicably, in the Passover Hagada.

Why do we have Charoset, the Dee-lightful compound of wine, apples, dates, nuts, and asst. regional spices and/or fruits as part of the seder plate and ritual, the rabbis of the talmud ask?

Some say, as a remedy for the harshness (kapha) of the maror. If not for it's sweetness, the bitter herb would be too toxic to survive.

Others, counter, no! that's not it! If that's all it was, JUST SOME WATER WOULD BE FINE. We need the charoset for something else.

So finally, one older Rabbi comes and says, it's Zacher La Tapuach, in memory of the Apple tree.

What apple tree?

So Rashi tells the story of the apple tree. Cue romantic guitar:

"Under the apple tree
I aroused you"

Back in Egypt, things were bad, right?
But they were also so intense, so alive, in a way that things are only when they're bad.

There's an old Israelite legend, that, back in Egypt, one of the thing the Egyptian corporate power did was make the work so exhausting, that the workmen didn't have time to ever go home at the end of the day. They would just crash there in the fields, and wake up in the morning, get back to work. To boot, all the male children who were to be born had a decree of death upon them, right? So, not so much motivation to come home to your wife much.

So the women, they were really excited by the situation, the midrash records that our people were saved by the acts of the Nashim Tziddkanios, the righteous women. What would they do that made them so righteous? They'd come out to visit their husbands in the night, and make love out there in the fields. And then when the time came to give birth to the prodigy of those unions, they'd come back to the fields, to give birth under the apple trees, that they once copulated under.

The births, the legend goes, were FREE OF THE CURSE OF CHAVA(EVE) that is, they were utterly painless, taken gently from the womb by administering angels, the babies were then nursed from pools of milk and honey flowing from rocks nearby.

The Egyptians soon found about the whole thing, and promptly came to the apple orchards, ready to kill the babies, no worries! Our women just buried them under the ground, to come back for later when the danger was over.

The Egyptians caught on to this, and plowed the ground, dicing the newborn infants into like eight pieces each...

And Aha! A miracle happened so that each piece of baby grew into a full new baby! You can't stop us, Pharoah!

---------------------------------------------

Now, generally, when your child is killed, it's treated as irreplaceable, right? Don't worry, a new baby is on the way, a bunch of new ones, is not really much of a consolation, if individual life matters at all.

But, sometimes, there's a perspective that sets in, where the tribe and the movement is this more important thing, right? Where he individual loss is eclipsed by the life of the community, when it's happening, when it's real.

If the Maror is the harshness of oppresion, the charoset is the romance of it, the wild awesome party that only happens in the face of an enemy, in the heat of a revolution. What happened to rock and roll after Vietnam ended? What happened to the movement?

It get's worse, this Torah. Because the Tapuach is the testimony that we were on Sinai, too, and it might be the secret of the Omer counting.
to be continued...