Rosh Chodesh Tammuz: Play

Last month, I found myself in the Rochester airport with an hour to fill. I had been spending a gorgeous weekend teaching Torah, and am compulsively early to the airport, so there I was, needing something to do. Rochester, I learned that weekend, is home to the Museum of Play – and, delightfully, they have a tiny section in the airport that the museum runs! With matching games, trivia, a HUGE Etch-a-Sketch, and more, it was a joyful way to spend the time after I had checked that my gate was actually there (you have to check before you do anything else in the airport, no matter how early you are, that’s just the rules).

I thought of these moments of play spent in the small-city airport this week while learning daf yomi. At the start of Avodah Zara (my favorite masechet!), we get a sidebar about God’s schedule. We are told that God’s twelve-hour day is split into quarters. For the first three hours, God learns Torah. For the second quarter, She judges the entire world, realizes that strict justice would require the world to be destroyed, and shifts over to sit in the throne of mercy. In the third quarter, God sustains all creatures, from the smallest to the largest.

And in the final quarter of the day, “ יוֹשֵׁב וּמְשַׂחֵק עִם לִוְיָתָן,” God “sits and plays with the Leviathan.” (AZ 3b.)

Of all possible anthropomorphized images of God, God playing is among the most surprising to my Rambam-addled brain. Divine rage and Divine joy feel like experiences that I can more easily associate with a transcendent God. But play, with all the goofiness and vulnerability really fun play invites – it’s hard to imagine God playing!

here i am playing with the giant etch-a-sketch

It is a little easier to think about human play; a midrash that’s been on my mind lately imagines Torah learning as play. I first encountered it as taught by Rabbanit Rachelle Sprecher Fraenkel at Hadran’s Women’s Siyyum HaShas in January of 2020. The rabbis pun on a verse from Kohelet:

דָּבָר אַחֵר, דִּבְרֵי חֲכָמִים כַּדָּרְבֹנוֹת, אָמַר רַבִּי בֶּרֶכְיָה הַכֹּהֵן כַּדּוּר שֶׁל בָּנוֹת, כַּהֲדָא סְפַיְרָה שֶׁל תִּינוֹקוֹת שֶׁהֵן מְלַקְטוֹת וְזוֹרְקוֹת לְכָאן וּלְכָאן, כָּךְ הֵם דִּבְרֵי חֲכָמִים, זֶה אוֹמֵר טַעְמוֹ וְזֶה אוֹמֵר טַעְמוֹ…

“The words of the wise are like goads [kadarvonot]” (Ecclesiastes 12:11) – Rabbi Berekhya HaKohen said: A girl’s ball [kadur shel banot], like the sphere that small children catch and throw from here to there. The statements of the Sages are the same; this states his reason and that one states his reason.

(Bamidbar Rabbah 14:4)

The rabbis take “kadurbanot,” “like goads,” and reread it as “kadur banot,” “a ball belonging to girls.” The give-and-take of Torah learning is compared to little girls tossing a toy back and forth – this midrash imagines Chazal as smiling children, girls laughing as they play.

Our sugya in Avodah Zara, too, connects play with Torah and with children, but differently so. The sugya continues on to tell us that

אֲמַר לֵיהּ רַב אַחָא לְרַב נַחְמָן בַּר יִצְחָק: מִיּוֹם שֶׁחָרַב בֵּית הַמִּקְדָּשׁ אֵין שְׂחוֹק לְהַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא

…

בִּרְבִיעִיּוֹת מַאי עָבֵיד? יוֹשֵׁב וּמְלַמֵּד תִּינוֹקוֹת שֶׁל בֵּית רַבָּן תּוֹרָה

Rav Aḥa said to Rav Naḥman bar Yitzḥak: From the day the Temple was destroyed, there is no play for the Holy Blessed One.

… what does God now do during the fourth three-hour period of the day? Sits and teaches Torah to schoolchildren.

In other words, after the massive tragedy of the destruction of the Temple, God ceases to play. But this leaves a hole in the Divine schedule, which God fills by being an elementary-school Torah educator. In this sugya, play seems to be the opposite of Torah learning; when God can no longer muster the joy to play, God teaches.

But this is not just Torah teaching – it’s teaching children. So I wonder if it is not as sharp a shift as we might think. God can no longer find the joy in just play; so God seeks out the most playful of Torah learners.

Torah and play, per Bamidbar Rabbah, can be the same. Torah learning at its best is playful – it invites creativity, vulnerability, and experimentation. Torah is serious, it is here for us to turn to in difficult moments, it is sacred and intense. And none of that is at odds with Torah as a ball we toss back and forth, giggling.

A foundational idea in queer theory is that queerness is antinormative – that to embrace queerness is to reject standard structures, paths of thought, and lifestyle choices, and even the notion of norms at all. This is a generative challenge for thinking about what it can mean to build queer Torah, halacha specifically. After all, halacha IS a normative, ordering structure!

A new generations of queer theorists have been questioning the centrality of antinormativity in queer theory. Anti-antinormative (I’m sorry!) theorists argue that there are other ways of conceptualizing the relationship between queerness and normativity. In the introduction to a collection of articles about just this, Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth Wilson write:

It is this rich field of dependencies, differentiations, clashes, and engenderings that queer antinormative arguments misunderstand. And this misunderstanding has distinct consequences: it asphyxiates the relationality that is at the heart of normativity. Antinormativity is antinormative, then, in a way that it presumably does not intend: it turns systemic play (differentiations, comparisons, valuations, attenuations, skirmishes) into unforgiving rules and regulations and so converts the complexity of moving athwart into the much more anodyne notion of moving against.

(“Introduction: Antinormativity’s Queer Conventions,” Antinormativity in Queer Theory)

“Systemic play!” This is theory-speak for Torah as kadur shel banot, a girls’ ball. The joy of play is in relationship – the ball is thrown between people, banot PLURAL.

Perhaps this is why Chazal imagine God switching from playing with the Leviathan to teaching Torah to children. God is in mourning, navigating a different kind of world and a shifting relationship to the Jewish people. God cannot play with the Leviathan, who presumably does not speak back to God and is more pet than peer. But God can bring the need for play to a relationship that can hold it even amidst struggle: that of Torah learning.

As we enter Tammuz in a world that seems like a never-ending string of churbans, it can feel impossible to play. But we need the skills of play – to imagine and to connect. In the heat of summer, I am giving myself space to splash in the pool, to doodle in colors that speak to me, and to let that energy affect how I learn and teach Torah. The goal is to build a world together where everyone has the freedom to play.