The Fashioner Who Paints a Living Child on Water

At Shiloh, with her boy weaned at last and handed to the priests, Hannah opened her mouth and did not weep. She sang. The years of a closed womb, the rival wife who counted her empty days, the vow she had whispered until her lips moved without sound, all of it broke open into one line. "There is no Rock like our God."

The sages who later bent over that verse heard something underneath the word. In the Hebrew, Rock is tzur, and one small turn of the same letters gives tzar, to fashion, to shape, to draw a form. So they did not read it as stone. They read it as a craftsman. There is no Fashioner like our God. Then, to prove it, they set the divine artist beside the human one.

The Sculptor Who Carves and Walks Away

Picture the mortal craftsman first. He wants to make a figure, so he gathers his pigments, and how many he must gather. One color for the cheek, another for the eye, another for the shadow under the jaw, a whole shelf of jars before a single likeness appears on the wall. He lays the color down, steps back, and praises it. "How fine it is," he says to the silent paint.

And the figure says nothing. It cannot. The mouth he painted will never open, the painted eyes will never turn toward him, the praising is all his own, spoken into a thing that hangs on the wall long after the painter is dust. The maker dies and the made remains, deaf, mute, finished.

The Fashioner Who Draws on Water

Now set the other artist against him. A man can draw his figure on a wall, on stone, on any steadied surface. Hand him water and tell him to paint a face on it. The brush touches and the image scatters, the colors run and drown. No mortal can draw on water.

God draws on water. He forms the embryo inside the belly of its mother, in the midst of the waters that hold it there, and the figure does not scatter. It takes a face. It takes hands with their finger upon finger. It grows eyes that will open and a mouth that will cry out, all of it set down on a surface no human hand could ever mark. Look at the peacock. From one drop of plain white seed the bird comes out wearing three hundred and sixty-five kinds of color, every shade the mortal painter had to fetch from a separate jar, here folded into a single colorless drop. And not the bird alone. The human being too, a whole person, out of one formless drop.

Half Water and Half Blood

The sages watched the Fashioner measure His materials. Make the human mostly water and a little blood, and he comes out an istenis, a frail thing that sickens at every smell. Make him mostly blood and a little water, and the skin breaks into the white scales of the leper. So God weighs the two against each other, half water and half blood, and only then does a whole human stand.

The wonder did not stop at the forming. Lock a man in a sealed room for one day and his soul frets in him. The infant, though, lies folded in the narrow belly nine whole months, in the wet and the dark, and his soul does not convulse, because the Holy One stands over him and keeps him breathing where no breath should be. Job watched a ship ride upright on water that should swallow it, and watched a woman carry a man inside her, and he was astonished, and said, "I will fetch my knowledge from afar."

The Form That Praises Back

Here the contrast closed like a fist. The mortal sculptor praises his statue, and the statue gives him nothing. But the human being God fashions stands up on his own feet and praises the One who made him. The form turns toward the Fashioner and speaks, the very voice Hannah had just lifted at Shiloh out of a body that had been as shut as carved stone.

There was one more turn the painter could never match. His figure, however fine, makes nothing. It hangs and stays one. But the figure God fashions makes figures of its own. He shapes the woman, and the woman gives birth and brings out a form like herself, and that one in time will shape another. The drop becomes a child, the child a mother, the mother a maker in her turn, the work of the Fashioner running on down the generations long after a painted wall would have flaked into nothing.

Akiva and the Roman in the Marketplace

Years later a Roman governor tried to break the same idea. Turnus Rufus the Wicked stood before Rabbi Akiva and asked which works were finer, those of God or those of human hands. Akiva answered at once, "The works of flesh and blood are more beautiful." The Roman thought he had him. "Then make me a heaven and an earth." Akiva waved the heavens away. "Do not speak to me of what no mortal can touch. Speak of what lies within reach of human hands." Then he called for raw ears of grain and fine loaves, for stalks of flax and the woven garments of Beth-shean. The grain was God's, the bread a man's. The flax was God's, the garment a man's. And the bread and the cloth were finer.

God hands over the raw drop, the seed, the stalk, and leaves the finishing to human craft, the way He leaves the infant to be circumcised on the eighth day rather than sending him out already cut. He fashions the drop. He lets the people complete it. There is no Rock like our God, because there is no Fashioner who draws a living, answering, child-bearing figure on the unmarked face of the water.