Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 40 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Sinning Like a Goat
We used to own goats. We had one goat, named “Gali Gali,” who had its ear torn off by a pit bull who lived next door. Gali Gali promptly earned the monicker “Gali Gali Van Goght.” (My father shot the pit bull with a shotgun the next time it came over, and the dog made it home to bleed out on its owner’s front porch.)
I loved that goat. He was smart, headstrong and inquisitive. He also liked to dance, kind of a “watch me look like I am going to flip over sideways” kind of dance. Specifically, when my grandfather would come up to our house in his fine Lincoln Continental, Gali Gali would take one look at that shiny car, and promptly skip onto its long hood and prance away, leaving lots of little devilish footprints. My grandfather did not think it was as funny as we did.
Goats are also famous in world lore for being deeply sexual animals – Pan is the deity of woodland frolicking, of giving in to lust and any other desire that happens to cross his mind – without any moral or longterm considerations. Consider Horny Goat Weed. The concept of a goat deity even makes an appearance in the Torah: “So that they may no more offer their sacrifices to the goats after whom they lust.” (Lev. 17:7)
The word for “goat” in the Torah is a seir, the same word as “hairy,” and the name of the place Esau chooses to live, Mount Seir. Esau, Jacob’s brother, is the embodiment of this word: The first one emerged red, like a hairy mantle all over; so they named him Esau.
And Esau is true to his name. Esau is described very much as a Pan-like figure – he prefers the woodlands, the company of nature instead of the company of man. Think of all that we learn from this short passage:
And the boys grew: and ῾Esav was a cunning hunter, a man of the field; and Jacob was a plain man, dwelling in tents. … And Jacob cooked pottage: and ῾Esav came from the field, and he was faint: and ῾Esav said to Jacob, Give me to swallow, I pray thee, of that red pottage; for I am faint: therefore was his name called Edom (red). And Jacob said, Sell me this day thy birthright. And ῾Esav said, Behold, I am at the point of death, and what profit shall this birthright do to me? And Jacob said, Swear to me this day; and he swore to him: and he sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Ya῾aqov gave ῾Esav bread and pottage of lentils; and he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus ῾Esav despised the birthright.
Esau is all about the Now – so much so that he sees fulfilling his momentary desires as essential to his very existence. Esau Lived In The Moment. He happily traded his future for temporary physical pleasure. Even when Esau eats, he does it by himself, unsociably, foregoing any opportunity to grow positive relationships.
The goat-god Pan stood for reckless abandonment of mature responsibilities in favor of emulating an animal pursuing his pleasures in nature.
In other words, Esau is the Torah embodiment of Pan. Making an offering to goats is literally pantheism.
Which might explain why goats in the Torah are only brought as sin offerings! Goats embody a certain (and very common) kind of sin: the sins of thinking, acting and behaving like an Esau/Pan, of succumbing to our animalistic natures. It is the sin of acting without consciously making a choice – like an animal does.
If we insist that we are what we are, and cannot change – then we are acting like Esau. If we decide we are slaves to our natures, to the essence of our inner beings, then we are sinning. Everyone who says, “I must do this thing: this act is what I truly am” is acting like an Esau, is committing a sin. This kind of sin, the sin that merits bringing a goat, is driven purely by naked self-interest. So is the sin of seeing ourselves as Esau did, as the Apex Predator of the natural world. Mankind may indeed be an apex predator, but that is not our mission; we are not commanded to be the king of the jungle.
And when we succumb to pantheism, we must acknowledge it, and always strive to do better. For we are meant to be more than our natures, and indeed, have a higher spiritual calling than nature itself.
Published in General
Our first goat was a beautiful Nubian we named Lady Ada Lovelace. She appeared to be extraordinarily vain, and would spend–literally–hours standing on the hood of our car gazing at her reflection in the windshield. It was quite difficult to nudge her off there when we needed to drive somewhere.
Jumping on things is what goats do.
Goats are always caught in the woven wire fence. They stick their heads through, and their horns act like barbs. They can’t pull out. And they never learn not to do it again.
Too bah-ah-ah-ad.
If you get your goats dehorned or debudded, they won’t have this problem. However, goats have a lot of other problems and so will you if you own any.
Mr iWe, have you ever encountered any commentary that suggests that this story reflects the conflicts between a hunter-gatherer way of life (and morality) and that of an agricultural way of life and morality, and even that it reflects ancient tensions of the Hebrew people from the days when they themselves made the difficult transition. (And maybe in such commentary the nomadic herder morality was treated as a separate category.) And if so, what did you think of such commentary?
A few months ago I read the following observation about the people of the Eurasian steppe north of the Black and Caspian seas who gave rise to the various Indo-European cultures and languages.
Source: The Horse, the Wheel, and Language : How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, by David W. Anthony (2007) in a section titled, “Beyond the Frontier: Pontic-Caspian Foragers before Cattle Arrived.”
There are other such observations in this book, but this particular one stood out for me because it reminded me of changes here in North America when indigenous people tried to make the transition from a life that was at least in part a neolithic hunter-gatherer system to the one of the European conquerors. The people who lived here before placed a high value on short-term impulsiveness and taught a disregard for the future when relatives needed help. This is why even those who started out with some wealth from treaty settlements and tried to invest it in agricultural or other land in imitation of the white people then tended to lose it within a few generations. When they had relatives who needed help, their moral system required them to help, regardless of whether it would leave them money to pay next year’s taxes. So instead of building up capital for their children, they would soon lose it. They came from a society that had no technology or material means to save for the future. Just because such means were now available doesn’t mean they could easily switch their entire moral system and worldview as well.
And when their wives would lose patience with young boys who were reckless hellions in camp while the men were away at war, and try to discipline the kids, men like the Shawnee leader Tecumseh would beat their wives when they found out about it. They knew that those qualities of impulsive carelessness were needed for the survival of their communities.
It’s not easy to adopt a new moral code. It can take many generations. The old neolithic hunter-gatherer-warrior moral code still has some hold on some parts of Native American societies. And maybe it has some hold on us, too. Some of the contradictions in the Christian scriptures seem to come about from our still cherishing some of the old value system: “Give no thought for the morrow…”, for example. And I think one can see some of this in the Hebrew scriptures as well. At one point the people of Israel were supposed to gather only enough Manna for one day, and not store it for the future. There are more lessons in that story than just for the then-current situation, right?
The difficulty of adopting a new moral system was brought home to me when I was discussing deer hunting with an acquaintance. I mentioned how some hunting laws have changed due to changing circumstances. A hundred years ago buck-only hunting seasons were adopted because deer were scarce and we wanted to protect the deer herds and allow them to grow. Now you can get licenses for killing does, and more people should do that because our deer herds are out of control. For the good of the deer as well as ourselves we need to reduce the deer populations, and for that hunters need to shoot does. “Yes, I understand that, and I understand why,” my acquaintance told me. “But I just can’t shoot a doe. My grandfather and my father and uncles taught me that it was wrong to shoot does, and I just can’t do it.”
It might not take so many generations to change deer-hunting morality, but to change to an overall agricultural morality from a hunter-gatherer morality is more challenging. Perhaps a thousand years or so are needed.
This also suggests the foolishness of those Californians who think they can remedy the problem of inequality in generational wealth by simply handing out money to people who don’t have it. There’s a lot more to it than the money.
This is a very interesting question. I think that the Torah was addressing a shepherding culture and teaching the people to adapt to becoming agricultural. But Jews in the Torah were never hunter-gatherers: all the forefathers were shepherds primarily, and the people in Egypt were incapable of any planning at all (they could not even plan the next day – hence the unleavened bread).
Good point. And there is another: hunter-gatherers live on the edge of survival, in a Malthusian world. They simply cannot afford to stray from that culture without risking extinction.
Indeed, when those cultures get an abundance of food, they lose their rason d’etre and collapse into ennui at best (see Native Americans and Eskimos). Their paganism loses its meaning when there is no survival risk.
They were commanded to plan for the Sabbath day, and keep double the day before. This was part of a transition: from slavery, to living directly from G-d, to the Land of Israel. The kind of transition you are writing about!
The wilderness generation was simply unable to grow out of their earlier mentality, which is why they had to die out.
I absolutely agree. Poverty in America is not material – our poor live better than 99.9% of humanity throughout history. It is spiritual, the poverty of hopelessness, of learned victimhood. It is entirely in the head. But that does not make it any less real.