Creation Series Day 6 – Land Animals
Ana Levy-Lyons
March 13, 2016
First Unitarian, Brooklyn
Creation stories, religious and scientific, invite us into a headspace of humility. They call us to zoom our camera out and see ourselves in the context of literally everything. To see time and space as realities that didn’t have to be and may some day no longer be. To see ourselves as tiny dots in the vast universe – dots that didn’t have to be and will some day no longer be. They call us to ask ourselves, what is the relationship we ought to have to the rest of this mysterious and wondrous creation… the interdependent web of which we are merely a part?
If you notice in the Biblical creation story, we humans don’t get our own special day of creation. We’re thrown in with the other land animals. We are, in fact, land animals, you and I, although it’s hard to remember that in the lives we live here today. We share 96 percent of our genes with chimpanzees. We share 92% with mice. So on the sixth day, before even getting to the humans, God makes all the other nefesh chayah (if you remember from last month, that’s “living soul” or “living self”) – the wild beasts and the cattle and the creeping things. And God declares them “good.” All by themselves. Full stop. Good.
Then humans get created, without a special day of our own, and without, I have to point out, a separate pronouncement as “good.” But we do get something that no other creature has gotten: power. The text says, “let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” Dominion. Ouch. That word is pretty problematic for religious liberals. Especially because, when you look around, this vision of humans having dominion over animals is clearly the reality we live in. We do have dominion over animals. We use them for food and we harness their reproductive systems for more food. We make clothing out of them. We keep them as pets, put them in zoos, and hunt them for sport. We destroy their habitats for money. We deplete the oceans. We drive 150 species to extinction every day. So there is no question that we have dominion over the animals. The question is, is this what dominion should look like?
When you continue reading the passage it lays out in more detail the relationship between humans, other animals, and plants. God gives humans power and then immediately limits how we may use that power. The first thing God says to the first humans after giving them dominion over animals is, “I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.” Do you notice anything missing from the menu here? What’s not given as food? … In this story, the first humans were supposed to be vegan. It wasn’t just that they weren’t supposed to eat animals; it was that animals were not food. As Alice Walker wrote in the quote at the top of your order of service, “Animals exist for their own reasons. They are not made for humans.”
Before humans had done anything good or bad, before humans had done anything at all, this was the understanding. We were like an operating system with no software and no data yet. The initial factory settings were vegan. And for that matter, organic, local, and seasonal. Now, remember, I’m not talking about what early humans actually ate. I’m talking about this mythic tradition that’s been passed down through the generations. This was the depiction of the pure, literally Edenic start to the world. And it’s fascinating that this is the depiction because the guy who wrote down this story (and it was probably a guy) was most likely a meat-eater himself. Already at the time of the writing of Genesis there was a sense of a painful gap between the world as it is and the world as it was meant to be.
Fast forward to the flood story, which, if you remember, comes about because of humanity’s violence. The text actually says that God regrets having made humans. And when you look at the totality of our impact on this planet in our brief tenancy here, maybe the author was prescient. But finally the rain stops and God relents and brings the goal posts in a little closer and says to Noah basically, “Okay, fine. You guys can’t handle the factory settings. So from now on you can kill animals for food, but don’t eat their blood and don’t kill other humans. And by the way, I promise I will never bring another flood and destroy all of you ever again.” It’s kind of sweet in a way, because God is now seeing human nature and accepting the humans as they are. But it’s also sad because it is clearly a fallen state. There’s still a sense that everything would have been better if humans had just been able to stick with the program.
What eating animals has become today, the way it has impacted this planet, the author of Genesis could not have envisioned in his wildest dreams. Think climate change. Animal agriculture as an industry is responsible for at least a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and massive deforestation, which makes it one of the biggest contributors to global warming. It uses huge amounts of water. I’m not going to bury you in statistics, but here’s one shocking one: it takes 2500 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef. Animal agriculture is the leading cause of species extinction, ocean dead zones, and water pollution. The whole spectacular creation that we’ve been reading about, the skies and the seas, the grasses and trees, the delicate interwoven systems of life are being damaged by humans violating that very first boundary on our power.
And then there’s the animals themselves. The living souls. The meat and dairy that we get as a matter of course, in grocery stores and restaurants, come from animals that have generally led lives of nightmarish suffering. Just the normal meat and dairy that most of us eat. The slice of pizza at the corner pizzeria. The chicken in the salad. The bacon in the quiche. The life of an animal on a factory farm is too horrific to speak of from this pulpit. Don’t worry; I’m not going to do it. But it’s heartbreaking to me.
Slaughterhouse workers are also real victims in this. These are very low-wage, dangerous jobs where humans are made to do violence to other living souls at high speed, day in and day out. Small studies are starting to show that there’s a great emotional and, I would say, spiritual toll – higher rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse among these workers, and more domestic violence in towns with a slaughterhouse. As a matter of survival, these workers have to shut down their natural compassion. I ask you, if you are not already aware enough of these realities that it is changing what you eat, look at some of the information that’s readily available online. It’s not going to be fun. It’s a really, really inconvenient truth. And make your decisions from there.
The question of dominion raised by day six of the creation story is even broader than how we treat animals and the earth. It’s the question of – how do we use power when we have it? How should we use power when we have it? Every one of us in this room has power of some kind. Power in personal relationships, power in a family, power in institutions like this one or a workplace, a classroom. Some of us have employees who report to us; some of us have children (who, in my experience, do not report to us). Some of us have power through physical strength. Some of us have held power as members of the police or military. Some of us have power by virtue of our social position – privileges of race or gender or class. That kind of power tends to be invisible to the person who has it, but it’s very real. And collectively we humans have godlike power. That, too, is invisible. It turns out that our atmosphere – our rakiya – is so thin, we can actually change its chemical composition by what we do here on earth.
We all have power of some kind, some a lot more than others. And when people abuse or misuse whatever power they have, this is what produces all the various evils in this world. Everything from the police killings of unarmed people of color to schoolyard bullying to the suffering of factory farm animals to the starvation of children in Madaya by Assad’s regime all come about from the abuse or misuse of power. When the slaughterhouse worker beats his wife, he is abusing the power of his greater physical strength. But he in turn is a casualty of abuse of power by the corporations that employ him. Their much greater financial power has forced him to take the job available: poverty-wage work that wrecks his health and shuts down his heart. Take an even wider view, and those corporate executives themselves are mired in the massive systems of abuse of our human power – the power to do violence to animals, humans, and the earth itself in the name of money. Surely this is not what “dominion” was supposed to mean.
But what was it supposed to mean? What on earth did the first tellers of the creation story think God was thinking in giving humans “dominion?” One way to try to understand the intent of words in the Bible is to geek out a little bit and look at how those same words are used in other contexts. So the Hebrew verb “lirdot,” to have dominion, aside from appearing in the creation story, also appears in one of the psalms. This particular psalm is Psalm 72, composed for the coronation of King Solomon, the Biblical great and wise king of Israel. The psalm uses that same word:
May he have dominion from sea to sea,
and from the River to the ends of the earth…
For he delivers the needy when they call,
the poor and those who have no helper.
He … saves the lives of the needy.
From oppression and violence he redeems their life;
and precious are they in his sight.
Dominion is power, and as such it’s neutral. But I believe that the message encoded in the 6th day of creation is that we humans are entrusted with power. We are meant to use it for good. Like Solomon, we are meant to use our power to serve the poor and those who have no helper. To redeem the creatures of the earth from oppression and violence, not to cause it. To hold every living soul precious in our sight. The creation story attests to the inherent goodness of a natural world animated with living souls. We are not empowered to destroy it; we are called to be faithful stewards of it.
We know that we’re not going to do it perfectly. We think back to the story of the flood and even ancient people knew that we are prone to misuse of power and even violence. Our power is so potent, so complicated, so marbled and hard to handle. We humans have Godlike dominion, and yet…. we’re only human. We don’t even creep up on perfection; we miss the mark in every area despite all our most noble efforts. So my hope, my blessing for all of us today is twofold. First, like God in the flood story seeing that we are who we are, may we be accepting of one another and ourselves. And second, may we not be too accepting. May we not accept willful ignorance. May we not accept preference or convenience as justifications for participating in systems of cruelty. And may we not accept a pace of change that’s too… glacial… lest we – literally – invoke the floodwaters once again.