The Earth's Complaint and the Dew That Answered It

Click for full size

Two Servants Bought at One Price

The king came down to the market himself. He paid one price for two servants, wrote them into one contract with one stroke of the reed, and walked them home through the same gate.

The first he sat at a table inside the house and fed out of the treasury. The second he sent to the field.

By dusk that one had dirt in his teeth and a blister opening across his palm. He came back to the door and would not step through it. "We were bought the same way," he said. "One price, one contract, one morning. He eats what the king eats. I eat what I dig. Name the difference and I will accept it."

Nobody named the difference.

The servant at that door was the earth, in the second sentence of the world, unformed and void, tohu vavohu (תהו ובהו). (Genesis 1:2) Heaven had been made the same day out of the same speech, and heaven was already eating, fed on the radiance of the One who made it. Down here the ground had to be cut open with a plow before it gave anything up.

The Maidservant Put Outside the Gate

There were two maidservants as well, bought the same morning at the same price. One the king kept in the palace. The other he walked to the gate and set outside it.

She did not weep. She stood in the road in the condition the old word names, toha uvoha, astonished, staring at a door that had closed while she faced it.

Inside that house nobody is ever buried. The ones who serve up there do not sicken and do not go down into anything. The earth had the arithmetic before there was a creature alive on her to count. Everything she carried she would also have to swallow. The servant at the table kept his table forever. She would get a harvest and a grave, then another harvest and another grave, until the last one.

Tenants Settled in the Empty Air

The building went up anyway.

Any king builds a palace with an upper story and a lower story and puts occupants in both. Nobody rents out the space between the floors. Nothing up there holds weight.

The Holy One filled it. On the fifth day the birds came out of nothing into the middle of nothing and stayed up, holding themselves on the empty stretch above the earth's face. (Genesis 1:20)

Under them the water swarmed and the great sea serpents came up, written into the account with a letter missing, as though the word itself were short one partner. Behemoth and Leviathan broke the surface. One sage said neither of them was given a mate at all. Another said Behemoth has a mate and no appetite for her, and pointed at the knotted sinews in the beast's thighs. (Job 40:17)

Then, out of one white drop, a peacock, carrying three hundred and sixty five colors, one for every day the sun takes to come back around. All that extravagance was aimed downward, at the floor of the house, at the field where the second servant was working.

The Nurse Who Watches the Sleeping Child

The earth knew another way of keeping watch in the dark.

A nurse sits beside the king's son while he sleeps. The room is warm, the child is fed and wrapped, nothing is wrong, and she cannot take her eyes off the door. She knows how the accounting goes. When the boy grows up and does the unforgivable thing, nobody will send for the boy. They will send for her.

The earth was already sitting that watch. Nothing had walked on her yet. She had the shape of it in advance, the man she would be told to grow, the fruit he would take and eat, and the sentence that would not stop at him. "Cursed is the ground because of you." (Genesis 3:17) She would be cursed for a mouth that did not exist yet, for a child who was not yet awake.

The Glance That Took In Both Floors

On the sixth day the King came out to look at what He had built.

A human king cannot do that. He climbs to the upper story and inspects it, comes down and inspects the lower, and by the time he reaches the cellar he is remembering the roof instead of seeing it.

The Holy One took the whole house in a single look. Heaven and earth, the servant at the table and the servant in the field, and He called it very good. The words came a second time with one letter added at the front, and reached past this world into the world that has not arrived, so both stood inside the same glance.

Nothing had been obscured from Him since He stretched out His arm and made them both. Not the blister. Not the sentence at the door, which He had known before there was a servant or a tongue to say it with. "Even when there is no speech on my tongue, behold, Lord, You know it all." (Psalm 139:4)

The earth had thrown her complaint out into the dark. It had been heard before she was made.

The Dew That Falls on an Open Door

The answer came at night, and it came as water instead of a verdict.

Far down the line there was a man whose doors were never shut. Job let in anyone who walked up the road, lean years and fat, and while his neighbors scraped thin harvests off their fields his own came in heavy. "My root will be open to water, and dew will lie on my branch." (Job 29:19) A house begins at its door the way a tree begins at its root. His root ran wet because his door stood open.

Jacob reached the same water another way. He stayed bent over Torah the way a root stays in a stream, and the blessing he took at his father's bedside opened with the dew of heaven.

Dew, tal, is not the treasury. It is not a set table for a servant who never broke ground. It comes down in the dark, a little at a time, onto soil that has been cut open, and in the morning it lies on the branch of whoever left the door open all night.

The servant in the field never got the difference explained to him. He got the field, and the water on it, and the door.