What-Ness Trumps Who-Ness Poem by gershon hepner

WHAT-NESS TRUMPS WHO-NESS

"If I am not for me, who is? " asked Hillel, adding,
"If I am for myself, what am I? " Crowds are madding,
containing people who won't be for you, so you
must stand up for yourself, not knowing only who
you are but, reading Hillel very closely, what,
since merely being for yourself is clearly not
enough. You have to understand more than your who-ness:
it is your what-ness that provides us with our Jewness,
to find one's what-ness greatest duty of all men
and women, gentiles just like Jews. If not now, when?

Inspired by a wonderful ten-minute sermon given by Rabbi Daniel Grama on Shabbat Tazria-Metsora,5772, in which he discussed Hillel's three famous questions: "If I am not for myself, then who will be formed? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when (Abot 1: 14) ? " Rabbi Grama pointed out that in the second question, Hillel does not ask, "If I am for myself, who am I? "Although "who? " is the crux of the first question, what is the crux of the second: "If I am for myself, what am I? "

Amazingly, in the NYT Opinions section on the next day after Rabbi Grama's sermon Michael Marder, in a discussion of Israeli studies on peas, applies the distinction between who-ness and whatness to peas:

Imagine a being capable of processing, remembering and sharing information — a being with potentialities proper to it and inhabiting a world of its own. Given this brief description, most of us will think of a human person, some will associate it with an animal, and virtually no one's imagination will conjure up a plant. Since Nov.2, however, one possible answer to the riddle is Pisumsativum, a species colloquially known as the common pea. On that day, a team of scientists from the Blaustein Institute for Desert Research at Ben-Gurion University in Israel published the results of its peer-reviewed research, revealing that a pea plant subjected to drought conditions communicated its stress to other such plants, with which it shared its soil. In other words, through the roots, it relayed to its neighbors the biochemical message about the onset of drought, prompting them to react as though they, too, were in a similar predicament.
Curiously, having received the signal, plants not directly affected by this particular environmental stress factor were better able to withstand adverse conditions when they actually occurred. This means that the recipients of biochemical communication could draw on their "memories" — information stored at the cellular level — to activate appropriate defenses and adaptive responses when the need arose…

In 1973, the publication of "The Secret Life of Plants, " by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, which portrayed vegetal life as exquisitely sensitive, responsive and in some respects comparable to human life, was generally regarded as pseudoscience. The authors were not scientists, and clearly the results reported in that book, many of them outlandish, could not be reproduced. But today, new, hard scientific data appears to be buttressing the book's fundamental idea that plants are more complex organisms than previously thought.
Evidently, empathy might not be the most appropriate ground for an ethics of vegetal life. But the novel indications concerning the responsiveness of plants, their interactions with the environment and with one another, are sufficient to undermine all simple, axiomatic solutions to eating in good conscience. When it comes to a plant, it turns out to be not only a what but also a who — an agent in its milieu, with its own intrinsic value or version of the good. Inquiring into justifications for consuming vegetal beings thus reconceived, we reach one of the final frontiers of dietary ethics.
Rabbi Grama's comment was:
Wow. I was waiting for the connection, and then I saw it. Pretty amazing, especially the way he portrayed the 'who' as giving. Thank you.

All the best,

Daniel Grama

4/29/12 #10,031