This essay was originally published in Issue 3 of New Polity Magazine under the title Insomnia and Idolatry.
I.
People sleep. It seems like something natural science should have settled some time ago, but the fact remains mysterious. We are told that sleeping is a kind of “recharging,” which is about as helpful as calling thinking a kind of computing or digesting a kind of plumbing. We create devices that “recharge” in a manner analogous to how we sleep, not the other way around. It does little good to answer the question of why we do something by pointing to the machines and toys built in the image of us doing it. The fact that, during sleep, we replenish our glycogen levels and heal our bodies is true, and marvelous, but it hardly answers the question of why we lie down and dream to do it — that is, why sleep, and not something else, is the form that delivers these goods.
II.
In the Holy Scriptures, the first sleep is not a natural sleep. Adam does not lie down and dream because his body urges him towards unconsciousness as his belly urges him towards the fruit of the trees. Rather, “the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man” (Genesis 2:21). This cuts to the truth of all the subsequent dozing and napping of the sons of Adam — we do not choose to sleep. Sleep chooses us. No one can “go to sleep” by a deliberate action any more than one can become joyful by grimacing. Joy waits to descend until the human person is united with something she loves. Sleep waits to descend until the human person has given some sign of faith, some liturgical movement of belief that sleep will, in fact, descend. Merleau-Ponty describes it well:
I lie down in bed, on my left side, with my knees drawn up; I close my eyes and breathe slowly, putting my plans out of my mind. But the power of my will or consciousness stops there. As the faithful, in the Dionysian mysteries, invoke the god by miming scenes from his life, I call up the visitation of sleep by imitating the breathing and posture of the sleeper. The god is actually there when the faithful can no longer distinguish themselves from the part they are playing, when their body and their consciousness cease to bring in, as an obstacle, their particular opacity, and when they are totally fused in the myth. There is a moment when sleep ‘comes,’ settling on this imitation of itself which I have been offering to it, and I succeed in becoming what I was trying to be: an unseeing and almost unthinking mass, riveted to a point in space and in the world henceforth only through the anonymous alertness of the senses. [1]
In both joy and sleep the human person is a petitioner; she cannot seize them from the ether; she can only make herself a good candidate for their presence. Insomnia is negative evidence that people are beggars on sleep's doorstep rather than rational individuals who choose to sleep because they are free. To stare at the ceiling in the red glow of an alarm clock; to feel sleep hovering above the bed without making her nest in it; this is the awful revelation of the gratuity of existence. Sleep — like joy, forgiveness and life itself — only ever comes as a gift.
III.
If I do not fall asleep, I'll fall over dead, and yet I cannot choose to sleep beyond begging for sleep to fall over me. This is the paradigm of infancy: The infant must eat but can only scream for milk. Babies are either held or they wither, and genetic engineering has yet to produce a newborn that can hold himself. We are born full of needs that we cannot fulfill beyond begging. Life begins as a loud, piercing, wordless petitionary prayer, mercifully answered by a family.
It is the unique foolishness of adulthood to imagine that what little mastery we attain over our world shushes this wail rather than giving it linguistic specificity. Our capacity for communicating, walking in straight lines and rarely spilling coffee down our shirts makes an idol of the adult, who, rudely squeezed between childhood memories and a looming old-age, briefly considers himself an individual, the master of his ship and the owner of his car.
Sleepiness cures us of this grownup idolatry. Tired adults are like babies: whimpering, scratching at their eyes, unable to make decisions and bumping into the furniture. Sleep is an experience of infancy, carried into adulthood. Despite my independence, my position, and my unique political identity, I am newborn; laying in my bed hoping to receive what I cannot will; given over to a world beyond my choosing; moaning for relief.
IV.
The lovely moment of being asleep, drooling and crushed into the pillow, will always embarrass liberalism, because liberalism is a way of living in the world as if one were not a child — and so as if we never slept.
Liberalism reduces freedom to consent. Within its weird logic, we are free insofar as we give our consent to whatever situation we enter; we are oppressed insofar as we are placed in situations without our consent. This notion of freedom obviously does not apply to children, who can be roughly described as animals placed in situations without their consent for six to eighteen years. Children are held, clothed, fed, named, baptized, inculturated and indoctrinated, all without consent — but only a psychopath could think that they were, for this reason, oppressed. [2]
But to be asleep is likewise to be unable to give or receive “consent” as a coherent psychological act. Within the liberal concept of “gender identity,” one is male, female, both or neither on the basis of one’s psychological identification, as in: “I identify as male.” But one who is asleep does not identify as “male,” in the sense of actively identifying or passively consenting to be identified as such — he dreams and rolls over. Obviously, it would be psychotic to say that a woman ceases to be a woman when she falls asleep — but this is the consequence of rooting one’s gender identity in an adult, active, volitional consciousness, which chooses and consents with bloodshot eyes. We do not know if a sleeping woman would consent to be called a woman — we would have to wake her. We do not know if her past identification as “woman” still stands — we would have to stir her to ask. Thus, within liberal societies, the majesty of sleep, its dreams, visions and twitches, become a “pause button” pressed down on the real life of the human person; the bed a USB port in which she is recharged; the sleeper frozen like a TV dinner to be microwaved back into real existence come morning. The philosophy of gender identity only works in an insomniac society in which sleep is declared meaningless. And this reduction of the sleepy freedom of being male or female to a caffeinated consent to being-identified-as male or female is just one garish clang of liberalism’s constant alarm bell: On some level, liberalism simply is the reduction of a free society to a society of consent, as made explicit in its theory that human government exists, apart from tradition, as a “social contract”; an agreement, tacit or explicit, that it is in the best interest of each individual to live in a governed community. Since the sleeping sign no contracts; since the snoring man is not motivated by love or by fear to submit to the will of the Leviathan; liberal societies must stringently avoid coming to terms with the phenomenon of sleep, just as they avoid coming to terms with children, lest they be forced to reconsider, and imagine human society and government as a reality of our nature; as a true condition of the consentless sleeper as much as the waking consenter; as existing prior to the machinations of the human will and so naturally open to God, who precedes us all.
Of course, outside of those tangled up in liberalism's castigation of all things sleepy, small, and weak, no one worries about these questions. Sleep is as easily understood as small children; one must make an educated effort to become stupid on both topics. People are familial beings, and only receive any sort of individual identity insofar as they belong to a community which lovingly holds and bestows that identity even as the individual slips in and out of consciousness, in and out of health and ability — in and out, even, of biological life. I hold my brother in my consciousness as “brother” even when he, duveted and dead to the world, could not possibly consent to my identifications of him as family, as male, as so-named and so-valued; I call the child “sweet little one” and “girl” and so participate in constituting her as both, despite (and because of!) her inability to know, speak, or consent to being sweet, little, female, or anything else; I call the Alzheimer’s patient by the name he does not identify himself as; I remember the dead who cannot possibly consent to my mode of remembrance. Far from any kind of violence or oppression, this constitution by the loving gaze of the other is proper to the nature of familial beings, born into the arms of others. Only pretending otherwise — that we are not familial, but individual — reorganizes the real world and sniffs suspiciously at all things adhering and ascribed to the individual that do not burst spontaneously from his lonely, alert interior.
V.
What, then, is sleep? To be asleep is to enjoy being in the mode of a creature which receives its being from another; it is to be helpless; given over; one who does not have oneself deliberately at hand.
If we really were “like God,” sleep would be the weird abasement that liberalism is so afraid of. God does not sleep. God does not enter into a mode in which all is reduced to the reception of being from without, for the simple reason that he does not receive being from without. He is the fullness of being, the source of all being — He needs no other to provide it:
Before Yohanan the high priest, there was a custom that when the Levites would rise in the Temple in the morning, they would recite the verse, ‘Rouse Yourself; why do you sleep, O Lord.’ These Levites were called the ‘wakers.’ The practice was abolished because it gave the impression that God is sleeping, and Psalms 12:14 says, ‘See the guardian of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.’ [3]
Sleep feels good because it is good not to be God. It is good to simply be, not as a volitional agent, a thinking thing, an “I” that knows that he is this I and not another; not, in short, because of any action or state attributable to human volition and reason, but as given, as just lying there, utterly and obviously dependent on the continued gift of life from our lovely, inscrutable Giver.
Because sleep is an act of worship, it comes like a feast day, liturgically, trilling back and forth about a twenty-four hour calendar. By matins, the body is orientated towards marveling that one has existence for oneself and may dispose it towards good or evil, the grocery or the gas station. Waking life is stuffed with capacity, volition, doing and seizing, ad majorem dei gloriam. After vespers, the sun slouches behind the hills, and the body begins its descent into a darker, murkier gratitude, contemplating the goodness of existence not as disposed this way or that, but as sheerly given by God. Monks and nuns who rouse themselves to pray in the middle of the night do not reject sleep, but realize its inner meaning, a meaning revealed to David who sings “in the night also my heart instructs me” (Psalm 17:7).
Sleep, as described in the Bible, is the perfect antithesis of sleep as described by the anti-Bible, liberalism. Rather than an insubstantial nothing that awaits the real, waking life of consent, it is a classroom in which to better learn the law of God, a pleasure in which to escape the foolishness of human princes (beginning with oneself!) who would imagine human existence coming forth from human hands, and an animal openness to the “still, small voice of God” which waits for us to become like unto little children to whisper prophecies and visions of his Kingdom. [4] An ancient story of Creation contains this fundamental insight, that night and day are made for man, a binary of sun and moon perfectly fit to elicit gratitude from a binary being, who has being both as truly his and as coming entirely from God:
When the earth heard this expression thereupon it trembled and quaked, crying before its Creator: Sovereign of all worlds! I have not the power to feed the multitude of mankind. They agreed to divide the task between themselves: the night was for the Holy One, blessed be He, and the day (was apportioned) to the earth. What did the Holy One, blessed be He, do? He created the sleep of life, so that man lies down and sleeps while He sustains him and heals him and gives him life and repose, as it is said, ‘I should have slept: then had I been at rest’ (Job 3:18) ... but the first man’s food, ‘in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.’ (Genesis 3:17) [5]
The labor of the day and the receiving of the night feed man in his twofold aspect of both having and receiving his act of existence.
VI.
There are two ways for political rule to imitate the wakefulness of the Holy One. The first is in distribution, the second is in subjection. Because a ruler must sleep, he must either give away his rule to another, who “keeps watch in the night,” or he must develop a society in which his rule is still felt and obeyed, even while he slumbers. The distributive imitation of divine alertness is the path of Moses: His father-in-law upbraids him for attempting to judge the Israelite people without help. Instead, he encourages Moses to follow the inclination of his weariness, to rest, in and through electing other God-fearing men to “judge the people at all times” (Exodus 18:22). The gap left by the need to sleep is filled by the gift of authority beyond the person of Moses, into the body of believers. He does not expand his judicial power by making these new judges into extensions of his own judgment: “every great matter they shall bring to you, but any small matter they shall decide themselves” (18:22). Great matters are the province of Moses’ authority and small matters belong to the judges, but there is no indication that those small matters decided by the judges are “really” the decisions of Moses; that the authority of those god-fearing men is not real authority, but derivative; that Moses has not, in fact, given judicial authority but rented it out.
Thomas Hobbes denied that authority was truly distributed in the Mosaic kingdom, arguing, instead, that Moses remained the sovereign source of judgment. In his account, God gives the judges “a mind conformable and subordinate to that of Moses, that they might prophesy, that is to say, speak to the people in God’s name, in such manner as to set forward (as ministers of Moses and by his authority) such doctrine as was agreeable to Moses and his doctrine.” [6]
This stretches the text. Moses limits his hierarchically “higher” role to that of aid and assistance through difficulty and ascribes sovereignty to God, not himself, when distributing judicial authority: “you shall not be afraid of the face of man, for the judgment is God’s; and the case that is too hard for you, you shall bring to me, and I will hear it” (Deuteronomy 1:17). Likewise, God distributes authority to the seventy elders of Israel, not by subcontracting Moses’ authority, but with the language of taking from Moses and giving to the elders: “and I will take some of the spirit which is upon you and put it upon them” (Numbers 11:17). Indeed, it seems that a special effort is made to impress the self-giving nature of Moses’ rule, which is not orientated towards maintaining himself, but towards distribution, an orientation only frustrated by the sinfulness of the Israelite people:
Now two men remained in the camp, one named Eldad and the other named Medad, and the spirit rested upon them...and so they prophesied in the camp. And a young man ran and told Moses, ‘Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp.’ And Joshua the son of Nun, the minister of Moses, one of his chosen men, said, ‘My lord Moses, forbid them.’ But Moses said to him, ‘Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the lord's people were prophets, that the Lord would put his spirit upon them!’ (Numbers 11:26-30)
The 18th century Talmudist, Or Ha Chaim, interprets Joshua’s jealousy as an attempt to coalesce authority in the person of Moses, to concretize his position as the only intermediary before God:
[W]e must explain the verse as follows: ‘Is your jealousy based on the fact that these men were unwilling to receive their share of prophetic insights from me rather than from G’d directly? I wish all the Jewish people had been endowed directly by G’d with prophetic insights instead of having to receive it from me as their intermediary.’ [...] In this manner Moses demonstrated his utter humility and total lack of a desire for personal honour. [7]
Moses rejects his own idolization; he describes his own intermediary office and position as remedial; he points forward to a Messianic period in which all people will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit in holiness.
Hobbes must reject this traditional interpretation because Hobbes, in his Leviathan, is re-reading the Scriptures as texts promoting the notion of sovereignty that structures our nation-states today. [8] The idea is simply that, as a necessity of human nature, authority cannot be distributed. Someone always holds what Max Weber calls a “monopoly on legitimate violence” — the capacity to enforce their will as the ordering principle of the entire society, achieved through fear, that is, through the submission of the wills of all others to that of the sovereign, a submission seen as being in the self-interest of those who submit. While not entering into the discussion of whether this is the way the human family should be ordered, it would be difficult to deny that this principle is, in fact, how our modern nation-states are ordered. We call that thing that has the power to enforce its will over a society the “state.” Within our states, all political decisions are either positively willed by or passively allowed by the state, and all other political authorities either derive their authority from the state directly (as local governments or police forces); indirectly (as in businesses allowed to operate within state parameters); or as rivals to the state (such as the family and the Church).
Sleep poses a problem for this description of sovereignty. Like the person who achieves his gender by actively identifying as a “woman,” the question must be asked: is the sleeping sovereign still sovereign? Liberalism is obscure in regards to those times and spaces in which it is evident that its own logic is not in force: the father disciplining his son does not derive this capacity to police and punish a free individual from the state. He exercises an authority that is genuinely his own. The liberal doctrine of sovereignty necessitates a liberal doctrine of sleeplessness, a doctrine that allows the state to “see” the father and the son despite their apparent operation outside of its rule. Andrew Willard Jones describes this need in his essay, The End of Sovereignty, and argues that liberalism answers it by re-describing reality as a configuration of abstract, legal personae that the state can always govern:
Because real difference between the parties has been translated into a matter of quantity, the sovereign can see them clearly in all their complexity, and their interactions within the registry are necessarily violence-free, being as they are manifestations of a single will. Because real difference between persons is understood as the source of conflict (and so also economic friction), liberalism seeks to map onto all human interaction this sovereign matrix of abstract personae, properties, rights, and contracts, thus eliminating real, personal difference in the self-referential registry. To “register” all relationships as contractual agreements between personae with fungible rights is to eliminate qualitative relationships in favor of quantitative transactions: collapsing the wills of persons into the single will of the now corporate sovereign, and so the primordial warfare is replaced with structured haggling and lawsuits that occur within the sovereign’s idiom. The subjects’ translation of their relations into this language is that submission of their wills to the sovereign power’s that peace requires. [9]
VII.
In the Jewish tradition, the sleep of Adam was not merely a convenient sedative, but evidence of his creaturely status and a protection of all the creatures of earth from the sin of idolatry:
“Said R’ Hosha`ya: In the moment that the Holy One created Adam Harishon, the first Human, the ministering angels erred and sought to say ‘Holy/Qadosh’ before him (to worship him) . . . What did the Holy One do? ‘He cast upon him deep sleep’ [Gn 2:21] and all knew that he was Adam.” [10]
If Adam sleeps, Adam is not God. Conversely, if a god sleeps, then he is not the true God. When Elijah holds trial between Ba’al and the God of Israel, as to which is God indeed, he taunts the priests of Ba’al in precisely this manner: “Shout louder!” he said. “Surely he is a god! Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or traveling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened” (1 Kings 18:27). Conversely, feigned sleeplessness is the prerequisite illusion of any man who would appear to be “like God.”
This direct imitation of the sleeplessness of God is in the Bible, but not in the servant of God, Moses. The nations of the earth, surrounding the Jewish people, practiced political insomnia by idolizing their sovereign kings. This is, in part, simply what idolatry means; the practice whereby a human power is falsely given divine attributes. This predominantly takes the form of denying and obscuring the absence of rulers, the release of their power, and the sleep of the king, creating an illusion of divine omnipresence that veils real human weakness; pretending that the sovereign eye never closes. In describing the origin of idols, the Book of Wisdom says that “when men could not honor monarchs in their presence, they...made a visible image of the king whom they honored, so that by their zeal they might flatter the absent one as though present” (Wisdom 14:17). The monument pretends to extend the presence of political rule beyond the limits of actual, human weariness, and the rage of the prophets against the idols is never apart from their condemnation of the idolatrous kings who set them up. The Jewish people, in their condemnation of idols, are a thorn in the side of god-kings like Nebuchadnezzar, for whom the raising of statues and subsequent submission to them simply is the method of forging a national unity around the notion of the absolute sovereignty of the king, a ritual of belief in the sleeplessness of human rule: “These men, O king, pay no heed to you; they do not serve your gods or worship the golden image which you have set up” (Daniel 3:12).
Likewise, idolatrous societies are ordered to deny the limitation of human rule. The Israelites ask for a human king, contrary to the plan of God, because they were awestruck by the military power of the kings of the nations: “And when you saw that Na’hash the king of the Am’monites came against you, you said to me, ‘No, but a king should reign over us,’ when the Lord your God was king” (1 Samuel 12:12). The Israelites rejected the real, sleepless, kingship of God for the feigned sleeplessness of man, and so God, offended by their repetitive worship of powerful human beings, revealed to them the method by which the kings of the nations appear godlike:
These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers...He will take the tenth of your flock, and you shall be his slaves. (8:11-18)
In short, the human king appears as a possible replacement of the divine king only insofar as he constructs a society in which all property, labor, and persons become extensions of his will, maintained by force. The king is always awake through his commanders; he is able to deal with an entire swath of people without Mosaic weariness because he has reduced them to numbered units and ordered them as a military force; indeed, even the labor of baking and perfuming is, ultimately, an action ordered by the king. The king appears sleepless insofar as his people become slaves.
The Jewish people can be roughly described as a group chosen, by the grace of God, to spread an empire of sleep over a world insisting that man can be always awake. A unifying thread, running through the Old Law, is the desire for rest, both in terms of physical sleep, and in the Jewish prohibition on the production of any accumulation that accrues without end; any power which adds to itself without limit. The Law is full of mandated and enforced “bedtimes” for all machinations of human power: Sabbath-mandated rest from labor; a prohibition of charging interest on loans; the Jubilee year, which puts all debts to rest; the Sabbatical year, which lets the soil recover from the work of human hands. In this godly economy, one is banned from being so alert, so precise, as to imagine that the world is one of efficient human power, and not of infants receiving from a gracious Father. In harvesting, the Jews were commanded to leave crops in the field and to not go back to find the grapes left on the vine, that the poor may eat gratuitously, and that the harvester might exercise the ineptitude that characterizes life itself. The king, especially, was the target of these mandated ineptitudes, resting points in his political rule: “he must not multiply horses for himself...he shall not multiply wives for himself...nor shall he greatly multiply for himself silver and gold...that his heart may not be lifted up above his brethren” (Deuteronomy 17:16-20). He was banned from considering the people as numbered units in a census, banned from building monuments to himself, in short, banned from constructing the sort of society in which he would appear as something less of a child, and something less sleepy, than his brothers.
Throughout the Bible, men pretending to be gods are killed while they sleep: The firstborn of the god-king Pharaoh is slain while he slept: he “rose up in the night” to wail the judgment of God over the “all the gods of Egypt” (Exodus 12:12). Judith beheads Holofernes, right hand of the god-king Nebuchadnezzar while he is “stretched out on his bed” (Judith 13:2). Ja’el hammers a tent-peg through the head of Sisera, who oppressed the Israelites with “chariots of iron,” while he was “lying fast asleep from weariness” (Judges 4:21). Sleep reveals the creatureliness of all would-be divinity, and so the Jewish revelation of the weakness and mortality of all would-be gods is, in the same breath, a calling of the world to rest.
VIII.
As a consequence of their guiding notion of sovereignty, liberal states imitate divine wakefulness; they develop a society in which rule is still felt and obeyed, even while the sovereign slumbers. Hobbes redefines Moses as a political sovereign, and so re-describes any apparent distribution of his judicial authority as an extension of his judicial authority — Moses stays awake and unwearied in and through his seventy elders — and in doing so makes him out to be a god-king rather than a servant of God. Likewise, liberal states define political authority as proceeding from a sovereign power, rather than being always already distributed in and through the particular offices of care that human beings, by virtue of their inequalities, have over each other. The falsity of the sovereign account of politics is apparent in every family, which practices genuine rule, underived from the state. This is why the family, like children and sleep, remain an aporia for the liberal mind; something to be destroyed now or repressed until some later date in which reality can be made to fit its theory, and parents re-articulated as licensed state actors. To take joy in sleep (both physical and analogically extended into a society’s gratitude for limit, rest, and the cessation of accumulation) is a small act of rebellion against states pretending to possess divine attributes. Like any experience of contentment, it breaks with the dominant, restless paradigm of liberal capitalism, with its adoration of unrestrained desire and growth, asserting, in its stead, a social order in which happiness, and not merely its restless pursuit, is genuinely possible. Christians should, and already do, shake themselves free of the pretense that sleep is the negative opposite of wakefulness, and enjoy it as an act of worship of the God who keeps us in safety as we slip in and out of control and capacity. We should make the taunt of Solomon our own: “In vain is your earlier rising, your going later to rest, you who toil for the bread you eat; when he pours gifts on his beloved while they slumber” (Psalm 127:2).
[1] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge Classics) (pp. 189–190).
[2] Indeed, when one lets liberalism proceed along its normal course, it is suicidal: one ends up viewing life itself as the greatest form of oppression, thrust upon people, constraining them into bodies, never bothering to ask whether one wanted to live enfolded into a family.
[3] Joshua Kulp, English Explanation of Mishnah Sotah 9:10:3, a
[4] Dreams are riddles, messages, and playthings delivered by the conscience, by angels, and by the Holy One himself. Liberal science, in accordance with the powers that fund it, can only frown at and wonder at this odd contradiction of the “pause button” thesis, this “thinking” that does not come from me, this envisioning that I do not consent to envision, this self-identification that the self does not will to make. Against the weight of past and present human experience, they assert a few vagaries that call the brain a computer and so reduce dreaming to a useful organization of this computer-brain’s data. Jacob dreaming of the divine ladder between earth and heaven is a better description of dreams, generally speaking. Because to sleep is to feel the goodness of existence as it is given, whether we would like it or not, dreams, and even nightmares, make the most sense as cries to and responses from the Giver.
[5] Gerald Friedlander, Chapters of Rabbi Eliezer the Great, (Bloch Publishing Company 1916) pp. 86–87.
[6] Hobbes, Leviathan, (George Routledge and Sons, 1886) pp. 215.
[7] Eliyahu Munk, Or HaChaim on Numbers 11:29.
[8] Indeed, Hobbes makes an interpretation opposite to the one of Or Ha Chaim, arguing that it is not the spirit of God that is placed on the new judges, but the mind of Moses, and that Moses’ condemnation of jealousy was merely the correction of a mistake, not a disavowal of some intrinsically sovereign status: “For they were but Ministers; and when two of them Prophecyed in the Camp, it was thought a new and unlawfull thing; and as it is in the 27. and 28. verses of the same Chapter, they were accused of it, and Joshua advised Moses to forbid them, as not knowing that it was by Moses his Spirit that they Prophecyed.”
[9] Andrew Willard Jones, “The End of Sovereignty,” Communio, Volume 45.3–4, pp. 408–456.
[10] Bereishit Rabah 8:10, Merged from Rabbi Dr. David Mevorach Seidenberg, from "Kabbalah and Ecology" Sefaria Community Translation, www.sefaria.org/Bereishit_Rabbah.