Iron Spoke to the Trembling Trees on the Third Day

The world was three days old.

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That morning the ground had opened and pushed up everything green at once. Grass, seeding herbs, whole orchards already in fruit, cedars that had never spent an hour as saplings. None of it grew. It arrived. By midday the hills were forested and the figs were ripe on branches a few minutes old.

Then the same ground brought up iron.

And every tree in the world began to shake.

Why Are You Trembling

They had no lungs to say it with, so the shaking said it. Leaves turning the wrong way over. Whole stands of cedar moving with no wind on them. A noise going across the new hills like rain on a roof where there was no rain and would not be rain for another day.

Iron lay in the fresh dirt and listened to the forest be afraid of it.

Then iron spoke. Why are you trembling? If no wood of yours goes into me, not one of you will be harmed.

It was not a threat. It came out sounding like peace, and it was true besides. An axe head with nothing to grip is a lump on the ground. A spear point without a shaft is scrap metal. Every blade that ever came down on a tree came down because some tree handed it an arm.

Which is a harder thing to hear on your first morning than the fear you walked in with. The forest stopped being afraid of iron. It started waiting to find out which of them would be the handle.

The Day the Riders Were Seeded

Day three carried more than fruit.

Day three is also the day of the shalishim, the officers who ride in ranks. Warriors were laid down that afternoon alongside the grass. The earth was made on the third day, and the earth had ore in it.

Nobody had sinned yet. Adam was three days off and had not been thought of by anyone in the story. The equipment of every argument the human race would ever have was already lying in the soil, under the orchards, mixed into the day God looked at and called good.

Opened in the Language of Blessing

There was a decision made before any of it, at the first letter of the first word.

Alef opens the word for curse. Bet opens the word for blessing. Leave a skeptic an alef at the head of creation, the rabbis said, and he will lean back on his bench and ask how a world launched on a curse was ever meant to hold together, and there is no clean answer to hand him.

So the Holy One chose the other letter, and said something over the work that does not sound like a guarantee at all. I am creating this world in the language of blessing. Would that it endure.

Would that it endure. Spoken over ground that already had iron in it.

The Nest and the Handle

That letter is also a house. In wisdom a house is built, and the house in question is a nest, and what rests in it is freedom itself, the Presence come down to sit somewhere.

Her six sons, who are the six working days, fly up to her on the festivals. The chicks below are Israel, and when the house comes down they do not scatter. They go up with her and travel the roads of exile at her wing.

But a house has to be cut. Somebody walks into the forest with an axe and comes out with cedar for the beams, and the axe he carries in has a handle, and the handle came off a tree in the same stand as the beams.

So the forest supplies both ends of it. The wood that kills it, and the wood the nest is made of. Iron, lying in the dirt on the third afternoon with the trees still shaking above it, said nothing at all about that part.