To betray is to hand over, and tradition is the same word. A betrayal needs a prior trust, so it has a party and a date. What a tradition hands on is not the injury but the account of it.
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A stranger can injure her. A stranger cannot betray her.
Betrayal is not a measure of how badly she was hurt. It names a particular position between the parties: somebody held a trust, a dependence, a place beside her, and used the holding to pass her out of it. The injury can be identical in both cases. What makes a betrayal is not the damage but the standing of the one who did it, which is why a betrayal always has a party and a date, and why it can be stated as a claim.
[See LOYALTY · PRIOR RESIDENT]
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THE FIRST ONE WAS PERFORMED BY STANDING STILL
The template is in the garden, and what makes it a handover rather than a failure is the asymmetry of the instrument.
The command went to him entire, before she existed. Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. A universal permission, one exception named, and the consequence stated. In the Hebrew the permission and the penalty are both doubled, eating you shall eat and dying you shall die, so neither half is the weaker statement.
She holds it by report, and the report can be checked, because she repeats it in front of the serpent. Three things have changed in transmission, and each one is the signature of a relayed instrument. She identifies the tree by where it stands, the tree which is in the midst of the garden, and not by the name the command gave it. She adds a term that was never in it, neither shall ye touch it. And she softens the consequence from thou shalt surely die to lest ye die.
Now the question. Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? Its premise is true. There is a tree she may not eat of, so the sentence is accurate on one reading and false on the other, and the whole of the trap is in which reading was meant. She cannot settle it, because settling it requires the original and she was not there when it was given.
He was there for both. He had the name, the exception and the doubled consequence, and he had just heard her state all three imprecisely to the party attacking them. One sentence from him ends it, and the sentence is not an argument or a warning: it is the text, which only he held.
Nothing was transferred. A protection was not interposed, and the declining to interpose is the handing, because a trust is held by standing between and is discharged by stepping aside. A handover can be completed without anybody moving, and this one was.
Which is also why the same stillness means nothing in a stranger. A stranger who watches is a bystander and owes no account of it. He was not a stranger, and the silence reads as an act only because of the position it was kept from.
Then the second one, at the trial, where the consequence of a beguiling he permitted is charged to the one beguiled. The one examined on a document she never received is answerable for misreading it, and the one who held the original is answerable for nothing, which is the order of accounts the whole relay afterwards carries.
[See THE SILENT WITNESS · ADAM · RELOCATION]
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AND TRADITION IS THE SAME WORD
The Latin is tradere, to hand over. Betray and traitor descend from it. So does tradition, through traditio, a handing over, a thing delivered from one hand into the next.
The words were not drawn together by a pun. They name one motion at two durations. A betrayal is the motion performed once, between two parties who knew each other. A tradition is the motion performed down a line, by parties who never met. The act that needs a trust in order to be committed needs only a receiving hand in order to be continued.
[See HISTORY AND TRADITION · THE TWO LAWS]
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AND WHAT GETS HANDED IS THE ACCOUNT
Watch what actually travels, because it is not the injury.
The injury happens once and to one creature. What descends is the version of it: who was at fault, what kind of thing she is, what the episode proves. The account is portable where the injury is not, and it arrives already formatted, because the formatting is what made it admissible to begin with.
So what is handed down is the report of whoever reached the deciding authority first, and that report is what the next generation receives as the event itself. A betrayal transmits as a fact about the betrayed, which is the only form in which it can be carried by people who have no stake in it.
[See DISQUALIFIED TESTIMONY · THE FORGED WARRANT OF THE WORD]
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A RELAY HAS LINKS
This is what the word itself discloses, and it is structural rather than encouraging.
A handing over takes two hands. One releases, one receives, and the receiving hand becomes a releasing hand or the motion stops there. Mother to daughter, pulpit to pew, office to office, each link performing what it received and passing it along, until the account has been held so many times that nobody recalls it was ever handed to anyone. A tradition does not persist. It is performed again at every link, and a motion that is not performed is not slowed down, it is absent.
Which is why nothing in it is ancient in the way it presents itself. Whatever ran yesterday ran because hands were in it yesterday.
[See GRATITUDE · AVAILABLE IMAGINATION]
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THE LAST HANDOVER MAKES THE OTHERS UNNECESSARY
The relay has a terminus, and reaching it retires the mechanism that got there.
While the thing handed on is an account it remains an account: traceable to a speaker, contestable in principle, answerable. Handed often enough, it stops being heard as an account at all and is received as a description of what she is. At that point no trust is required to enforce it, and anyone can: strangers, forms, instruments, people who have never met her.
The relay runs until what it carries no longer needs carrying, and at that point it stops needing a trusted hand as well. Anybody can perform it, which is why it is everywhere rather than in the places where trust was held, and whoever performs it has betrayed nobody, never having been party to a trust.
[See COVERTURE · DID GOD CURSE WOMAN]
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THE OBJECTION THAT HAS TO BE MET
The objection is that a tradition of this size cannot be stopped by any one person, and that saying otherwise is consolation.
It cannot be stopped, and it does not need to be. A handing over requires a hand that receives and passes on, which means the motion is not interrupted centrally. It is interrupted wherever it is not performed. Nothing about halting it requires reaching the parties who began it, who are dead, or the institutions that carried it, which are not listening.
And halting is not an achievement in the ordinary sense. It builds nothing, wins nothing, and needs no upkeep, because it is not a thing done but a thing left undone. It cannot be revoked, since nobody granted it, and it cannot be defunded. It also produces no record, which is its one cost: afterwards there is no evidence of what did not happen.
[See CESSATION · THE ROUGH VOICE]
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The account is still in circulation, and it will be handed to the next one who arrives.
What the word says, plainly enough that it has had to be forgotten, is that the motion was never automatic. It has required a hand every time. Every link that held it was a link that could have been the last, and each of them was told, as she is told, that the thing had been settled long before she got there.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
