All posts by izonah

B’Shalach, Exodus 13:17-17:16

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Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/beshalach

The Long Short-Cut

By Rabbi Ari Kahn

When the Israelites finally leave Egypt, rather than taking them on the shortest, most direct route to their destination, God leads them on a circuitous path. The trip eventually becomes so long that almost an entire generation passes away and the overwhelming majority of the adults who leave Egypt never make it to the Promised Land. One might be tempted to regard this entire venture as a failure. However, at the very start of the journey, the Torah tells us that God took them on this longer route because they did not have the moral fortitude to take the shorter route.

Perhaps it is human nature that makes detours infuriating; any trip that takes longer than scheduled can make us bristle. Maybe we are hardwired to want to shorten our travels, and arrive at our destination in as short a time as possible. For most of us, the only thing better than arriving on time is finding a shortcut and arriving early, especially when we are going home.

But travel is not always about geography, about movement from one place to another; travel is not only result-oriented. Sometimes the places, experiences and people we meet along the way are really the point of the trip. Sometimes the journey is not about the destination, but rather the growth experienced along the way.

The Israelites had been thrust into freedom, but the generations of slavery had limited and stifled them in so many ways, “relieving” them of the burden of independent thought and initiative. Incongruously, slaves and prisoners often create a “comfort zone” of rote functionality. Their lack of freedom can become like a womb or a cocoon, limiting yet sustaining. Without exercise, innate creativity and even the instinct for self-preservation become dull. People who become accustomed to having their basic needs taken care of by their captors or masters quickly lose the ability to take responsibility for their own lives. This is not a mass occurrence of Stockholm syndrome, in which the slaves identify with their oppressors. The dynamic is far more subtle: Slaves quickly “learn their place”, and begin to believe that this is their fate. In a certain sense, they are liberated from the burden of providing for their own needs and mastering their own fates. The security of the present – even an oppressive present – often outweighs the frightening prospect of the unknown, of the uncharted road to freedom and independence.

Had the Israelites taken the direct route to the Promised Land, they would have faced war, on the one hand, and economic independence on the other. They were neither physically, emotionally nor spiritually prepared for either, as is evidenced by their recurring bouts of nostalgia for the “good old days in Egypt.”Their long, circuitous journey through the desert, then, was an educational and spiritual process of growth. In the course of their travels, they would reexamine their dependency.Their most basic needs would become acute, pressing, in a new and alarming way, and they would learn to turn to God, and not to Pharaoh, as the ultimate Provider and Sustainer.

God knew that these newly-freed slaves were not yet capable of providing for themselves. Their spiritual and physical capabilities required nurturing. In the desert, they would develop a unique and intimate relationship with God, while at the same time evolving from a rag-tag band of emancipated slaves to a nation capable of defending itself and its right to exist and control its own destiny. For this to happen, the journey would have to be long and the pace slow but deliberate. They would be given commandments, but they would slowly assume responsibility for fulfilling those commandments over time. At the point of the Exodus, they were physically and emotionally exhausted; they had been enslaved and abused for hundreds of years. Had God not intervened, Pharaoh would not have granted them even the three-day vacation Moshe had requested on their behalf. They were in no fit state to carry all of the burdens of independence. Thus, while they would be granted the Sabbath – a revolutionary concept for the slave mentality -God knew they were not really ready for the six-day working week. They would have to learn about the true source of their sustenance without the physical labor of agrarian life in their homeland.

For that generation, then, the message of Shabbat was learned when on the seventh day they did not collect the manna/bread that fell from heaven throughout the week. Their “work”would be minimal,but the thrust of the lesson – that sustenance comes from God and not Pharaoh –would be clear and unmistakable nonetheless. The spiritual reality they experienced in the desert would achieve an even higher level on Shabbat by the simple cessation of activity, in imitation of God.

This was one of the many lessons they learned on the road, a lesson independent of their ultimate destination;the journey itself would teach them so many more invaluable lessons. The longer, less direct route would allow them to grow in so many ways, while the shorter route would have brought them to their destination long before they were ready to meet the challenges that awaited them there, long before they would truly be worthy of the inheritance that awaited them at the journey’s end. Perhaps the same holds true for our personal journeys in life: The path we take, and the lessons we learn along the way, are often no less important than the destination.

Kahn, Ari. The Long Shortcut. OU Torah. (Viewed on January 11, 2014). http://www.ou.org/torah/article/the_long_shortcut#.UtMzmNJdWqg

Contemporary Reflection on Parashat B’Shalach

By Rabbi Patricia Karlan-Newmann

There are moments that define us: unexpected or unplanned moments when the decisions we make, the actions we take, determine all that will follow. Crossroads come disguised in many forms. Many are unmarked, without a hint of what is ahead.

B’shalach describes such a crossroads. The crossing of the Sea of Reeds was not only the crossing out of Egypt and out of slavery, but also the entrance into an unknown future, made possible by a moment of extraordinary faith.

As she emerges from the water, Miriam faces an array of alternatives-an internal sea crossing of her own. Was it the time to forge ahead, adrenaline still coursing from their narrow escape? Was it the occasion to mourn the loss of the known, the familiar if oppressive Egypt? Was it the instant to comfort those catching their breath, those who had needed to run and swim faster than they believed possible? Was it safer to hang back and let others take their rightful place as leaders? Or was this the moment to lift up the hand-drum and triumphantly sing and dance, giddy with gratitude for God’s redemption?

Miriam had the foresight to bring her hand-drum. Miriam had the wisdom to gather her sisters to acknowledge and affirm the miracle, to mark the moment when their tenuous hope broke forth in joy the birth of her community as a people touched by God.

Miriam’s leadership is surprising. Kol ishah, the voice of a woman, Miriam’s strong voice, had been heard previously only as a sister and daughter. Yet, at her sea crossing, emerging from the waters, she does not wait for someone else to change the world. She does not demur that she was not bred for greatness. She does not blend into the crowd. Instead, Miriam’s voice rings out for all to hear.

Miriam is a leader: a prophet who speaks to and hinds others to God. Like a large tallit on small shoulders, she is one upon whom the mantle of authority does not fit snugly, one who might have been surprised at her own influence, but one who nevertheless conscientiously undertakes responsibility for contributing to God’s purpose-much like contemporary women leaders. In the waters of transition, Miriam sparks innovation, creativity, and hope, rooted in the past yet focused on the future-just like contemporary women leaders. Like Miriam after the waves, we ask: how do we navigate waters never traversed before? How do we create rituals that reflect the tradition yet give voice to our experience? How do we speak new words that include the familiar in a Holy tongue?

Like Miriam, today’s women face our own sea crossing. We too can choose to enter the water: with quiet certitude, brash impulsiveness, or terror at what lies ahead. Or, we may decide to hang back, looking around for someone else to go in first. Eventually, when we enter—however we enter—we, and our world, are transformed.

In our time, the sea crossing may be when we hear a cry for social justice, when we unexpectedly find our voice waxing prophetic; it may come as we read a book, converse with a friend, or witness a scene in which we are seized with understanding about our place in the world. As we enter the water, if we speak and act out of awe and gratitude, if we look around and trust our vision, we may discover that we are bathed in and buoyed by the presence of God.

Karlan-Neumann, Patricia. "Contemporary Reflection on Parashat B'Shalach." The Torah: A Women's Commentary. (Viewed on January 11, 2014). http://blogs.rj.org/wrj/2013/01/22/contemporary-reflection-on-parashat-bshalach/

Bo, Exodus 10:1-13:16

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Link to Parsha: http://www.jtsa.edu/PreBuilt/ParashahArchives/jpstext/bo.shtml

Does One Crime Justify Another? Understanding Why God Hardens Pharaoh’s Heart.

By Rabbi Suzanne Singer

God’s hardening of Pharaoh’s heart in Exodus 10:1 presents a theological problem on two levels. First, if God is the agent of Pharaoh’s behavior, what does that imply about Pharaoh’s free will? Second, if God hardens Pharaoh’s heart in order to demonstrate God’s power, we must ask: At what price the Israelites’ liberation? Indeed, the ultimate result of Pharaoh’s stubbornness is the murder of every first-born Egyptian male. Even if we consider this to be retributive justice, payback for Pharaoh’s earlier order to kill all newborn Hebrew males, we still must ponder: Does one heinous crime justify another? And how do we come to terms with killing innocent children?

Commentators, equally bothered by this thorny moral dilemma, have provided inspired interpretations. With regard to the question of free will, some interpreters note that during the first five plagues, Pharaoh hardens his own heart. Only afterward does God take over, starting with the sixth plague (9:12), suggesting that Pharaoh has foregone the chance to operate independently. Modern psychoanalyst Erich Fromm writes, “The more man’s heart hardens, the less freedom he has to change; the more he is determined by previous action … there comes a point of no return, when man’s heart has become so hardened … that he has lost the possibility of freedom.” This is an astute insight into human behavior, but it begs the question of the text’s plain meaning, which is that God causes Pharaoh’s stubbornness.

The hardening of Pharaoh’s heart might also be viewed as a paradigm for what Fran Burgess calls the “transformative power of adversity.” According to this view, Pharaoh’s stubborn resistance is the condition necessary for Moses and the Israelites to emerge from their straits (the Hebrew name for Egypt, mitzrayim, is very close to the Hebrew for “straits,” metzarim). Indeed, it often takes facing overwhelming odds to make radical change. As Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong said, “Before cancer, I just lived. Now I live strong.” Pharaoh thus serves as a tool for the Israelites’ psychological and moral development. However keen, this interpretation too satisfies only on the level of metaphor.

Perhaps the most satisfactory approach is to keep the theological problems ever-present. In The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (1995), Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg suggests that the liberation story of the Israelites, what she calls the “master narrative,” gives rise to “counter-narratives” that throw the justification of God’s triumphal power into question. Indeed, as Zornberg argues, the master narrative of God as loving and benevolent redeemer of the Israelites is challenged by the killing of the Egyptians’ first-born, including “the first-born of the captive who was in the dungeon” (12:29). This prompts a counter-narrative from the perspective of the plague’s victims that asks: What sin could the babies and the captives possibly have committed to deserve this punishment? The answer posits an evil God. This narrative appears again later, in the story of the Golden Calf, when Moses convinces God not to murder the Israelites for their transgression, arguing that otherwise, the Egyptian story will prevail: “Let not the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he delivered them” (32:12). Although the Midrash attempts to silence and “neutralize” potentially heretical answers to such queries, Zornberg maintains that “the Torah, even God’s quoted words, gives rise to interpretations that radically contradict its own master-narrative, and that cannot, moreover, be totally repudiated by its accredited expositors” (p, 143).

For Zornberg, an alternative for dealing with the dissonance between narrative and counter-narrative is “the model of endless questioning, in which the answer does not totally silence the questioner” (p. 143). In fact, implicit and explicit questions play an important role in this parashah. God mandates that the story of the Exodus be told in response to children’s queries: “And when your children ask you…you shall say…” (l2:26-27). This is the basis for the Passover seder’s custom of the Four Questions. Further, two more verses from this parashah and one from Deuteronomy instruct us to answer our children’s questions about the Exodus. The rabbis understood all these verses as referring to four kinds of children, the Haggadah’s Four Sons, each with varying aptitudes, each eliciting a different perspective on the narrative: the Wise Son (Deuteronomy 6:20-21), the Wicked Son (Exodus 12:26), the Simple Son (13:14), and the One Who Is Unable to Ask (13:8).

Through questions, we might call forth another counter-narrative: the experience of women during the exodus and its subsequent retelling. Noting that the traditional Haggadah assumes a conversation between a father and four sons, contemporary feminist Haggadot fill in for the absence of women’s voices. The Ma’yan Haggadah, for example, includes the Four Daughters. The daughter “in search of a usable past” asks, “Why did Moses say at Sinai, ‘Go not near a woman,’ addressing only men, as if preparation for revelation was not meant for us, as well?” The daughter “who wants to erase her difference” wonders about the importance of women’s issues. The daughter “who does not know that she has a place at the table” asks, “What is this?” And the daughter “who asks no questions is told: “From the moment Yocheved, Miriam, and the midwives questioned Pharaoh’s edict until today, every question we ask helps us leave Egypt a little farther behind” (Tamara Cohen, Sue Levi Elwell, and Ronnie Horn, eds., The Journey Continues: Ma’yan Passover Haggadah, 1997).

Just as the women defied Pharaoh, so we too as readers must confront and challenge troubling aspects of our sacred narratives. The persistent hardening of Pharaoh’s heart results in the Israelites’ night of redemption, but we must never forget that this same night was one of horror for the Egyptians. We must continue to ask the questions that preserve our awareness of the Other’s story. Did the Israelites hear the tzaakah (cry) of the Egyptians (12:30)? Did it remind them of their own cry–the tzaakah in 3:7 which brought God’s attention to their plight? Year after year, as we recall at our seder table the wonders God performed for us, we must remember the price the Other paid for our liberation.

Singer, Suzanne. "Does One Crime Justify Another: Understanding Why God Hardens Pharaoh's Heart." My Jewish Learning. (Viewed on January 4, 2014). http://myjewishlearning.com/texts/Bible/Weekly_Torah_Portion/URJ--Bo.shtml?p=0

The Necessity of Asking Questions

By Rabbi Jonathon Sacks

It is no accident that parshat Bo, the section that deals with the culminating plagues and the exodus, should turn three times to the subject of children and the duty of parents to educate them. As Jews we believe that to defend a country you need an army, but to defend a civilization you need education. Freedom is lost when it is taken for granted. Unless parents hand on their memories and ideals to the next generation – the story of how they won their freedom and the battles they had to fight along the way – the long journey falters and we lose our way.

What is fascinating, though, is the way the Torah emphasizes the fact that children must ask questions. Two of the three passages in our parsha speak of this:

And when your children ask you, ‘What does this ceremony mean to you?’ then tell them, ‘It is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when he struck down the Egyptians.'” (Ex. 12:26-27)

In days to come, when your son asks you, ‘What does this mean?’ say to him, ‘With a mighty hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. (Ex. 13:14)

There is another passage later in the Torah that also speaks of question asked by a child:

In the future, when your son asks you, “What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the Lord our God has commanded you?” tell him: “We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. (Deut. 6:20-21)

The other passage in today’s parsha, the only one that does not mention a question, is:

On that day tell your son, ‘I do this because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.’ (Ex. 13:8)

These four passages have become famous because of their appearance in Haggadah on Pesach. They are the four children: one wise, one wicked or rebellious, one simple and “one who does not know how to ask.” Reading them together the sages came to the conclusion that [1] children should ask questions, [2] the Pesach narrative must be constructed in response to, and begin with, questions asked by a child, [3] it is the duty of a parent to encourage his or her children to ask questions, and the child who does not yet know how to ask should be taught to ask.

There is nothing natural about this at all. To the contrary, it goes dramatically against the grain of history. Most traditional cultures see it as the task of a parent or teacher to instruct, guide or command. The task of the child is to obey. “Children should be seen, not heard,” goes the old English proverb. “Children, be obedient to your parents in all things, for this is well-pleasing to the Lord,” says a famous Christian text. Socrates, who spent his life teaching people to ask questions, was condemned by the citizens of Athens for corrupting the young. In Judaism the opposite is the case. It is a religious duty to teach our children to ask questions. That is how they grow.

Judaism is the rarest of phenomena: a faith based on asking questions, sometimes deep and difficult ones that seem to shake the very foundations of faith itself. “Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?” asked Abraham. “”Why, Lord, why have you brought trouble on this people?” asked Moses. “Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all the faithless live at ease?” asked Jeremiah. The book of Job is largely constructed out of questions, and God’s answer consists of four chapters of yet deeper questions: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? … Can you catch Leviathan with a hook? … Will it make an agreement with you and let you take it as your slave for life?”

In yeshiva the highest accolade is to ask a good question: Du fregst a gutte kashe. Rabbi Abraham Twersky, a deeply religious psychiatrist, tells of how when he was young, his teacher would relish challenges to his arguments. In his broken English, he would say, “You right! You 100 prozent right! Now I show you where you wrong.”

Isadore Rabi, winner of a Nobel Prize in physics, was once asked why he became a scientist. He replied, “My mother made me a scientist without ever knowing it. Every other child would come back from school and be asked, ‘What did you learn today?’ But my mother used to ask: ‘Izzy, did you ask a good question today?’ That made the difference. Asking good questions made me a scientist.”

Judaism is not a religion of blind obedience. Indeed, astonishingly in a religion of 613 commandments, there is no Hebrew word that means “to obey.” When Hebrew was revived as a living language in the nineteenth century, and there was need for a verb meaning “to obey,” it had to be borrowed from the Aramaic: le-tsayet. Instead of a word meaning “to obey,” the Torah uses the verb shema, untranslatable into English because it means [1] to listen, [2] to hear, [3] to understand, [4] to internalise, and [5] to respond. Written into the very structure of Hebraic consciousness is the idea that our highest duty is to seek to understand the will of God, not just to obey blindly. Tennyson’s verse, “Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or die,” is as far from a Jewish mindset as it is possible to be.

Why? Because we believe that intelligence is God’s greatest gift to humanity. Rashi understands the phrase that God made man “in His image, after His likeness,” to mean that God gave us the ability “to understand and discern.” The very first of our requests in the weekday Amidah is for “knowledge, understanding and discernment.” One of the most breathtakingly bold of the rabbis’ institutions was to coin a blessing to be said on seeing a great non-Jewish scholar. Not only did they see wisdom in cultures other than their own. They thanked God for it. How far this is from the narrow-mindedness than has so often demeaned and diminished religions, past and present.

The historian Paul Johnson once wrote that rabbinic Judaism was “an ancient and highly efficient social machine for the production of intellectuals.” Much of that had, and still has, to do with the absolute priority Jews have always placed on education, schools, the bet midrash, religious study as an act even higher than prayer, learning as a lifelong engagement, and teaching as the highest vocation of the religious life.

But much too has to do with how one studies and how we teach our children. The Torah indicates this at the most powerful and poignant juncture in Jewish history – just as the Israelites are about to leave Egypt and begin their life as a free people under the sovereignty of God. Hand on the memory of this moment to your children, says Moses. But do not do so in an authoritarian way. Encourage your children to ask, question, probe, investigate, analyze, explore. Liberty means freedom of the mind, not just of the body. Those who are confident of their faith need fear no question. It is only those who lack confidence, who have secret and suppressed doubts, who are afraid.

The one essential, though, is to know and to teach this to our children, that not every question has an answer we can immediately understand. There are ideas we will only fully comprehend through age and experience, others that take great intellectual preparation, yet others that may be beyond our collective comprehension at this stage of the human quest. As I write, we don’t yet know whether the Higgs’ boson exists. Darwin never knew what a gene was. Even the great Newton, founder of modern science, understood how little he understood, and put it beautifully: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

In teaching its children to ask and keep asking, Judaism honoured what Maimonides called the “active intellect” and saw it as the gift of God. No faith has honoured human intelligence more.

Sacks, Jonathon. "The Necessity of Asking Questions." Aish.com, Covenant and Conversation (Viewed on January 4, 2014). http://www.aish.com/tp/i/sacks/137847678.html

How Jews Wake-Up: Modeh Ani

Reference and Research,

The first instruction in the Code of Jewish Law is: “Be strong as a lion when you wake-up in the morning to serve your Creator.” Here is the blessing on waking-up, to be said before you get out of bed:

Hebrew:
.מודה אני לפניך מלך חי וקיים, שהחזרת בי נשמתי בחמלה; רבה אמונתך

Transliteration:
Modeh Ani L’fanecha
Melech Chai V’kayam
Shehechezarta Bi Nishmati B’chemla
Raba Emunatecha

Translation:
I offer thanks to You,
Eternal One,
for lovingly restoring my soul to me;
Your faithfulness is great.

* the first word of the blessing is gender-specific: modeh for a man, modah for a woman.

Va-era, Exodus 6:2-9:35

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Link to Parsha: http://www.jtsa.edu/PreBuilt/ParashahArchives/jpstext/vaera.shtml

Dvar Tzedek

By Rachel Farbiarz

Parshat Vaera continues the conversation between God and Moses following Moses’s first encounter with Pharaoh. God persists in his alternately tender and impatient wooing of the reluctant emissary, while Moses insists that he is unfit for the task. As before, Moses’s feelings of inadequacy center on his difficulty with speech, now captured, ironically, by his poetic lament: “I am uncircumcised of lips.”

The Torah does not identify the nature or origins of Moses’s difficulty. Rashi postulates that Moses had an actual speech impediment—perhaps a stutter or a severe lisp. A midrash explains that Moses’s impeded speech dated from infancy when the angel Gabriel had guided him to place a hot coal in his mouth. Perhaps Moses was deeply shy, a shepherd who preferred the company of animals over people with their insatiable demand for words.
Lending further obscurity, Moses’s impediment is wholly self-described. We learn of it only through his own protests at having been chosen as Israel’s liberator. Whereas the omniscient biblical narrator provides the descriptions of its other central characters, it is silent on Moses’s “heavy-mouthed and heavy-tongued” condition. The absence of this narrative corroboration implies that Moses’s impediment loomed larger in his own mind than as a handicap perceptible to others.
Whatever the impediment’s nature, it is clear that each utterance exacted a painful toll on Moses. God therefore sends Aaron to be his brother’s mouthpiece, and Aaron remains at Moses’s side as the two heap threats and plagues upon Pharaoh and the Egyptians. Indeed, it is Aaron who initiates the first three plagues, stretching his rod over the waters to bring forth blood and frogs and hitting the earth to summon lice.
While the brothers seem to have settled well into their complementary roles, a nagging difficulty remains. In last week’s parshah, God dismissed Moses’s protestations by saying: “Who gives man speech? … Is it not I, the Lord?” Why then, instead of forcing Moses to suffer through humiliation and anxiety, doesn’t God eliminate the impediment? Why offer Aaron as a crutch rather than solve the problem?
God’s solution of Aaron as translator contains the answer: Aaron’s role as mediator was critical to the success of Moses’s leadership. Aaron’s translation not only smoothed away his brother’s stutterings, but also bridged a vast existential difference that stood between Moses and the slaves whom he was charged with liberating.
Moses, raised as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, grew up in privilege. He had not been beaten for stumbling over his own exhaustion. His mind had not been numbed by the monotonous horror of slavery. Moses could certainly feel righteous rage for the bitterness of the Hebrews’ servitude, but their burdens had never been his. Their pain was not his desperation. He had simply never been a slave. Aaron, by contrast, was not raised in Pharaoh’s palace: He was raised as a slave, among a family and community of slaves.
Moses’s reliance upon Aaron’s translation served as a constant reminder that to advocate effectively for his nation, Moses needed to reach beyond his own personal experience. Aaron could speak directly from the experience of oppression, and his role as translator helped Moses traverse the large divide between himself and the former slaves. Each time Moses sought use of his brother’s lips, the great leader was compelled to confront the fact that while he could speak to God without barrier, advocating for Israel was a more complicated matter.
As Westerners, many of us have been raised, like Moses, among privilege. While this gives us great power to advocate for those in need around the world, it also means that we have not personally shared their experiences. The partnership between Moses and Aaron helps us understand that in a situation of such disparity we cannot work alone, but must work together with the communities whom we seek to help.
We revere Moses as rabeinu, our greatest teacher: Among his enduring lessons are the insights of his obdurate tongue. Just as Moses needed Aaron’s constant mediation to lead and liberate a nation whose hardships he had never shared, we must be aware, when we commit ourselves to global justice work, that the communities we serve have faced challenges and privations that we have not borne.
Such awareness is, of course, not meant to impose artificial barriers. Rather, it is meant to cultivate respect and humility, to require from us the open-mindedness to listen for local wisdom and the discipline to concede that we do not hold a monopoly on solutions. For Jews seeking to heal the world, this means that grassroots organizations are best positioned to tackle the injustices and challenges of their own communities. They are, in effect, our “translators”— adapting for their communities’ particular contours our common aspirations for a just world.
Farbiartz, Rachel. "Dvar Tzedek: Parshat Vaera." On1Foot.org. (Viewed on December 28, 2013). http://on1foot.org/dvar-torah/ajws-dvar-tzedek-parshat-vaera-1

Part of a Process

By Regina Stein
Moses and God have little credibility among the Israelites in Egypt. Moses’ talk of redemption leads only to more severe oppression by Pharaoh. No sooner does God assure Moses that God’s might will soon be demonstrated than we read again at the beginning of the parsha that God speaks to Moses.

Hasn’t there been enough talk already? What could God possibly say at this point that would be helpful rather than detrimental to the Israelites?

Remind them, God says to Moses, that they are in the midst of an ongoing process. Remind them that this process began long ago, with their ancestors Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who also had to learn that the covenantal promise would not be completely fulfilled in their lifetimes. Israel will only find the strength to endure and believe in the coming redemption, God seems to be saying, if they can learn to look back at the suffering and redemptive moments experienced by their ancestors.

Israel must remember that the covenant does not begin with them and will not end with their Exodus from Egypt. “I will free you…deliver you…redeem you…take you…and I will bring you to the land which I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” It’s all in the process.

“In every generation,” we recite at the Passover Seder, “we must learn to view ourselves as having personally experienced the Exodus from Egypt.” We, as our ancestors before us, tend to focus on the immediate moment with its problems and crises. But to be a Jew is to realize that we are part of a process that began long ago and will not end in our lifetimes.

There may be no immediate gratification; we may be impatient when we do not see the immediate results of our efforts. But as with Moses and the Israelites in Egypt, we can find consolation and meaning in the awareness that we are part of that ongoing covenantal process.

Stein, Regina. "Part of a Process." My Jewish Learning. (Viewed on December 28, 2013). http://www.myjewishlearning.com/texts/Bible/Weekly_Torah_Portion/vaera_clal.shtml?p=0

Christmas as a Jew

Reflection and Opinion, , ,

Christmas as Jew. There are no signs of Christmas in my Jewish home; Christmas is a holiday I do not celebrate because I am Jewish. I do not pretend Christmas is a secular holiday to embrace universal values. I honour the fact it is a deeply meaningful holy day for many of my Christian friends. Of course, there are secular Christmas celebrants. But this I find to be something I cannot embrace.

Continue reading Christmas as a Jew →

Shmot, Exodus 1:1-6:1

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Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/shemot

HATAN DAMIM – THE BRIDEGROOM OF BLOOD

By Rabbi Jeffrey M. Cohen

Exodus 4:24-26 has been justifiably described as “arguably the single most
bizarre and baffling passage in all of the Hebrew Bible.” Moses has just been
given the charge to journey to Egypt, there to commence the most audacious,
awesome and dangerous mission of demanding that the great Pharaoh release
his vast cadre of Israelite slaves.

According to the text, these were not the usual motley group of slaves,
dragged back in bonds as the booty of a victorious battle. They had been resident
in Egypt for generations, albeit ethnically alien, and consciously singled
out and enslaved because they were deemed to constitute a direct threat to the
security of the realm (Ex. 1:9-10). Without God’s assured promise of protection,
providence and ultimate victory, such a mission was a recipe for disaster,
spelling suicide for its instigator and bitter consequences for those it had
intended to benefit.

The relationship between God and the leader chosen to undertake such a
mission must have been exceptionally close, and the spiritual credentials of
the latter so impeccable as to justify the trust placed in him by God. And yet,
no sooner has he set out on the journey, disaster strikes:

And it came to pass on the way at the lodging-place, that the Lord
met him and sought to kill him. The Zipporah took a flint and cut off
the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet; and she said:’Surely a
bridegroom of blood art thou to me.’ So He let him alone. Then she
said: ‘A bridegroom of blood in regard of the circumcision’ (Ex.
4:24-26).

What it was that caused God to launch that fearsome attack on His chosen
leader is mystifying in the extreme. Moses had hardly had time – or opportunity,
given that he was escorting his wife and young children – to do anything
to offend his God so heinously during the few days that had elapsed from the
time he left Midian to the time he arrived at the inn in the desert.

If, as the text seems to suggest, Moses’ sin was neglect of the circumcision
of his son, then we also need to understand why, at that critical moment, with
Moses’ momentous mission about to be launched, it was just circumcision
that loomed so large in the scheme of Divine priorities. Was God prepared to
abort His great plan for Israel’s deliverance through the taking of the life of
the leader He had chosen to carry it out? If circumcision was, indeed, the
issue, then one might also question why Moses deserved the death penalty
and why it was being administered without any prior warning (even Pharaoh
was forewarned, time and again, before the punishment of the plagues was
administered!) and why mitigating circumstances were not taken into consideration.
After all, Moses was reared and lived until this time in total isolation
from the traditions of his Hebrew brethren, and may well have been completely
ignorant of that precept, its significance and the precise time in the
life of the infant that it had to be performed.

The precise meaning of Zipporah’s outburst, ‘A bridegroom of blood art
thou to me,’ also needs to be clarified. Why “bridegroom” and not “husband?”
Also, what additional point, if any, did she mean to convey by unnecessarily
repeating that pejorative description, ‘a bridegroom of blood in relation to the
circumcision’?

The whole episode is complicated even further by the absence of subjects
for the verbs employed. We are told that God met him and sought to kill him,
but we are not told to whom this refers. Yes, we have assumed above that it
was Moses who was the object of the attack, but it might also have been one
of the two sons that accompanied him, presumably the one who was peremptorily
circumcised by Zipporah in order to save his life. But which son was
that? Again, that fact is suppressed. The reference is merely to “her son,” so it
could have been either Gershom, the firstborn, or the second son named in
18:4 as Eliezer.

We are also told that Zipporah cast the foreskin “at his feet,” though we
know not whether this means the feet of the circumcised son or of Moses.
Indeed, there is also the possibility that her outburst was addressed to the
former, and that he is the one being referred to by the phrase bridegroom of
blood. And, as if we were not short of problems, there is that of the strange
formulation that God “sought to kill him” – as if this were some difficult and
protracted challenge in which God was engaged.

For an elucidation of this most enigmatic episode we would instinctively
turn to the wisdom, insights and tradition of our classical commentators.
Quite surprisingly, most of the above issues are ignored. Nachmanides allows
the episode to pass without a single observation, almost like an angel fearing
to tread where others might readily rush in.

Rashi, quoting the Talmud, views Moses as the victim of the Divine attack
because of his failure to circumcise his younger son, Eliezer. (Rashi clearly
follows the Midrash in its identification of the son, whereas Targum Yonatan
identifies him as Gershom, the firstborn). The Talmud excuses Moses’ delay
in performing that mitzvah on the grounds that he considered his first priority
to be responding to the Divine summons mandating him to set out immediately
into the desert, rather than to circumcise his son first. Although the act
of circumcision only took a few minutes, Moses was cognizant that he could
be jeopardizing the life of a weak, circumcised child by subjecting him to a
journey through the desert.

Rashi explains that the foreskin was cast at the feet of Moses, but that Zipporah
was addressing her son Eliezer when she made her subsequent outburst.
Rashi therefore renders Hatan damim attah li as, “You [attah] were
(almost) the cause [gorem] of Moses, my beloved’s [hatan li] blood [damim]
being shed.” The repetition of that outburst, according to Rashi, took the form
of an act of realization, when the heavenly attacker withdrew [Vayiref mimmenu],
that the attack had indeed been occasioned by the failure to circumcise
[la-mulot].

A bracketed gloss on Rashi’s last point reveals that Zipporah was confused
as to the precise offense that her husband had perpetrated against his God to
evoke this terrible retribution. It was only when, subsequent to her circumcision
of Eliezer, the heavenly attacker withdraws, that she realizes [az amrah]
that it was the failure to circumcise, and not any other sin, that had been the
cause of the attack.

The text implies that Zipporah did not know that the cause of the heavenly
attack was the lack of circumcision until after she had performed that emergency
operation. This begs the question of what it was that alerted her to just
that course of action as a means of saving her son.

A commentator offers the suggestion that Zipporah was always troubled by
Moses’ marriage with her, the daughter of an idolatrous priest, and feared
some retribution. At this moment she instinctively assumed that this might
well have been the real reason for the attack on Moses, and that he could not
presume to become Israel’s liberator if he retained her as his wife. When she
saw the attack subside immediately after her act of circumcision, she
breathed a sigh of relief and cried out, A bridegroom of blood on account of
the circumcision – and not for the other reason!

This purely speculative explanation does have the benefit of offering a reason
for Zipporah’s use of the otherwise abstruse nomenclature “bridegroom”
to describe Moses. Psychologically, she is returning to, and articulating, her
long-standing apprehension; namely, that Moses, her bridegroom, had chosen
a bride from a family of idolators, rather than from his own monotheistic
people.

The usually incisive and original Ibn Ezra is of little help in unraveling the
mystery of this episode, and in offering a solution to all the difficulties which
we have enumerated. He is unusually expansive, and merely reiterates the
talmudic presentation of Moses’ dilemma over taking a circumcised child on
a journey. He quotes R. Samuel ben Hofni, who could not bear the thought
[chalilah!] that God would attack Moses, the agent of His mission on behalf
of Israel. According to him, the attack could only have been leveled, therefore,
at Eliezer. It is most perplexing, however, that neither R. Samuel nor Ibn Ezra was troubled by the terrible injustice that would have been perpetrated, if they were right, on an innocent babe.

I believe that the key to resolving all the problems we have raised above
lies in the relation of this episode to the verses that precede and, I believe,
introduce it. It is important in this context to note that our “bloody bridegroom”
episode runs on from the previous verses, with none of the usual textual
indicators that would demarcate it as a separate episode.

In those introductory verses, Moses is commanded to tell Pharaoh: ‘Israel is
my firstborn son, and I tell you to let my son go and serve Me [v’ya’avdeni];
and if you refuse to do so, I shall kill your firstborn son. Service of God is
emphasized here as being so vital that its prevention is a capital offense.
It is against that background that the very next episode is set. Moses cannot
deliver that religious message to Pharaoh because he himself is guilty of that
identical act of prevention of religious practice through his failure to circumcise
his own firstborn son, Gershom.

The latter is being prevented from serving his God in the prescribed manner through the failure of his father to initiate him into the sacred covenant of circumcision.
It stands to reason, therefore, that Moses is on course to suffer the prescribed
consequences of that sin. That is, his own firstborn, Gershom, should
have his life forfeited. It is him that God encounters and seeks to slay.
Zipporah rescues her son’s life, literally in the nick of time. Her thrusting of
the foreskin at the feet [vatagga’ leraglav] of her husband is indicative of the
fearful haste she felt impelled to employ and her profound anger at Moses for
having endangered their son’s life. She verbalizes this anger in the problematic
cry, ‘ki hatan damim attah li [literally: For a bridegroom of blood you
are/were for me].’

I offer here two possible explanations of this most puzzling condemnation.
The first takes account of the fact that, in the cognate early Semitic languages,
one of the nuances of the basic meaning of the verbal root underlying the
word “hatan [son-in-law]” is “to circumcise.” This is was retained in classical
Arabic where “hatana” has the meaning “to circumcise” and “hitun” means
“circumcision” or “circumcision feast.” The lexicons elucidate the relatedness
of these two meanings by explaining that “circumcision [is] performed on
young men just prior to marriage.”

Hence, the particular nuance of Zipporah’s condemnatory cry hatan damim attah li: You should have been the circumciser for me! You should have done it, not me!
A second possible interpretation takes account of the usage of the word
“damim” in the sense of “guilt,” or “responsibility.” Hence, in the legislation
providing for the establishment of cities of refuge, where the manslayer can
escape the revenge of the near relative, the Torah states that [it is] so that no
innocent blood be shed in the midst of thy land [v’hayah alekha damim] – nor
shall any blood be upon you (Deut. 19:10). Damim here is clearly a synonym
for “guilt,” “responsibility” for the taking of innocent life.

And this may well be the condemnation that Zipporah was levelling against
her husband, hatan damim attah li: A guilty groom you’ve proved to me! You
have let me down by jeopardizing the life of our child! She may well have
employed the term hatan here pejoratively and idiomatically, underlying the
fact that, through his neglect of the circumcision, Moses had behaved more
like an inexperienced groom than a mature and responsible husband.

The Targum Yonatan on Exodus 4:24 says that “Gershom was not circumcised,
on account of Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, who would not permit
Moses to do so, though Eliezer was circumcised, according to the agreement
made between them.” This is an allusion to the tradition contained in the
Mekhilta, that Jethro’s condition for giving his daughter in marriage to Moses
was that the first son should be brought up in the idol-worshipping tradition
of Midian, whereas the second son could be reared according to Israelite tradition.

Now, circumcision was already practiced among the ancient Egyptians as
early as 4000 BCE, as well as in many other Middle-Eastern societies. “Wherever
the operation is performed as a traditional rite it is done either before or
at puberty, and sometimes, as among some Arabian peoples, immediately
before marriage.”

We may assume, therefore, that the delay in circumcising
his firstborn son was, as the Midrash suggests, prompted by Jethro’s insistence
that Midianite practice be observed, and that Gershom would eventually
have been circumcised at puberty or as a prelude to marriage. Thus, Zipporah’s
oblique reference to Moses as a hatan [son-in-law] who had concocted
an unseemly – and clearly dangerous – pact with his father-in-law.
Hence, once the immediate threat had passed, she breathed an audible sigh
of relief [az amrah], reflecting, a little more calmly, though also more specifically,
on the precise issue wherein her husband had let her down: hatan damim
la-mulot [a bridegroom guilty (of dereliction) in relation to circumcision.]
Ironically, it is Zipporah who stands out here as the one brimming with
righteous indignation, and Moses, the future law-giver, is cast as the religious
compromiser!

As to the difficulty of God’s attack on an innocent child, I believe that the
inclusion of the word “vayyevakesh [And He attempted (to slay him)], is
highly significant. It clearly betokens a role-play, a symbolic and harmless
acting-out of the slaying of a firstborn. It was a charade with a double purpose:
to reassure Moses that every threat he was to aim at Pharaoh would be
carried out, even to the extent of the slaying of Pharaoh’s firstborn, as referred
to in God’s most recent communication to Moses. This was calculated
to embolden Moses so that he would undertake his most hazardous mission
without any reservations or fears for his own safety. At the same time, it was
a not-so-subtle reminder to Moses that he had to put his own house in order
and circumcise his firstborn without a moment’s delay.

Cohen, Jeffrey. "Hatan Damim: The Bridegroom of Blood." Jewish Bible Quarterly. Vol. 33, No. 2, 2005. (Viewed on December 21, 2013). http://jbq.jewishbible.org/assets/Uploads/332/332_Chatan1.pdf

Chanukah Lights

Reflection and Opinion, , , ,

Chanukah 2011

Chanukah is a holiday of community in which we rededicate ourselves to each other and to the things that are truly important to us. A time in which we honour and acknowledge difficult times we have gone through, but remember that it is through acts of loving kindness that give light to those around us that we are able to transcend those times.
Continue reading Chanukah Lights →

Va-yechi, Genesis 47:28-50:26

Va-yechi, , ,
Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/vayechi

12 Tribes, 12 Paths in Life

By Rabbi Simon Jacobson

In this week’s Torah portion – which closes the book of Genesis – we read how Jacob, in his last days, blesses his children, the twelve tribes. In these blessings lie many secrets foretelling events to come. As the verse tells us: And Jacob called to his sons, and said: “Gather together, that I may tell you what will happen with you in the end of days.”

As a blueprint for life these blessings have much to teach us. Each of the twelve tribes reflects a unique path in life. As the verse tells us at the conclusion of the blessings: All these are the twelve tribes of Israel… every one according to his blessing he blessed them (Vayechi 49:28). What is the meaning of the words “every one according to his blessing?” “Blessing” in Hebrew also means to ‘draw down’ (‘hamshocho’), from the root ‘mavrich.’ Every one of the tribes has his particular journey, his specific energy which he must manifest in this world.

Indeed, our sages teach that the Re(e)d sea split into twelve paths, providing a separate path for each of the twelve tribes.

To understand these twelve paths we must study the different ways that the tribes are described in the Torah. We find three descriptions for the tribes. First, when they are named by their mothers (Vayeitzei – Genesis 29-30; 35:18), each child/tribe is given a name with a particular meaning for a specific reason. Second, when Jacob blesses them (in this week’s portion). And finally, when Moses blesses them at the end of the Torah (Deuteronomy 33:6-25).

In addition the tribes are named and specified many times in the Torah – when they enter Egypt, when they leave Egypt, during their 40 year journey through the Sinai wilderness they travel and camp as tribes, their Temple dedication offerings are repeated twelve times (though they brought the same offerings) to emphasize the twelve unique paths.

Here is one of many applications of these twelve paths, based primarily on this week’s blessings.

Reuven – The First
Shimeon – The Aggressor
Levi – The Cleric
Judah – The Leader
Dan – The Judge
Naftali – The Free Spirit
Gad – The Warrior
Asher – The Prosperous One
Issachar – The Scholar
Zevulun – The Businessperson
Joseph – The Sufferer
Menashe – Reconnection
Efraim – Transformation
Benjamin – The Ravenous Consumer

Reuven – the first-born (‘bechor’) – represents the powerful energy of everything that comes first. The first fruit, the first moments of the day, the beginning of every creation – has enormous amount of energy. “Unstable like water,’ this power can go either way: If harnessed properly, the ‘bechor’/Reuven energy can change worlds; if abused it can destroy. Like water, it can be the source of life, but if left unchanneled it erodes its environment and can flood its surroundings.

Shimeon is aggressive gevurah – the antithesis of Reuven’schesed/water. The fierce anger and cruel wrath that can result from unbridled gevurah must be eliminated lest it turns into weapons of violence that consume the person and all those he comes in contact with. [The lesson of this today is self understood].

Levi is the tribe chosen to serve in the Temple. “Levi” also means ‘attached’ or ‘joined’. Levi is the personality of dedicating your life to serving a higher calling. Of freeing yourself from your bounds to material survival and attaching yourself to Divine service (see Rambam, end of Hilchot Shemittah v’Yovel).

Judah means acknowledgement (‘hodaah,’ as in ‘modeh ani’). Judah’s name also includes the four letters of the Divine name Havaya. Judah is the leader; his descendants would be the kings of Israel, beginning with King David and concluding with Moshiach. Judah is the path of selflessness (‘bittul’) – the most vital ingredient in true leadership.

Dan is the path of law and order (‘dan’ means to judge). Objective justice is the heart of any civilization.

Naftali is the free spirit personality. Like a ‘deer running free’ – breaking out of the status quo – independence is a necessary component in growth. Yet, this free spiritedness must always take care to ‘deliver words of beauty.’

Gad is the warrior archetype. Expanding on the justice of  Dan, Gad is ready to fight for his beliefs. The warrior is necessary to both defend our cherished values and to protect our freedoms.

Asher is both prosperity and pleasure. Asher is the dimension of blessing beyond the norm – to be given more than what is necessary for survival. Asher is the personality of not just getting what you need, but also enjoying it.

Issachar is the scholar. Scholarship provides wisdom, clarity and direction. It is the foundation of any system. Issachar is the dedication to immerse in study and education.

Zevulun is the merchant, the businessperson personality. His role is to enter the marketplace and redeem the Divine sparks within the material world (the ‘secret treasure hidden in the sand’ – Deuteronomy 33:19). Zevulun complements Issachar; they forge a partnership: Zevulun supports the scholar, he funds houses of scholarship, which earns him a right to partake in the reward of Issachar’s studies.

Joseph is the element of suffering in life. Yet, he not only survives; he thrives. He achieves greatness through his challenges. He overcomes all adversary and becomes a great leader, saving his entire generation. Despite his corrupt environment, he maintains his spiritual integrity. The powerful light that emerges from darkness in Joseph divides into two dimensions – his two sons: Menashe and Efraim:

Menashe represents the ability to not succumb to the powers of the ‘mitzraim-constraints’ that want to make you forget your spiritual roots. To remain connected regardless of the challenges.

Efraim takes it even further. It is not enough to just survive in an alien environment, but to thrive – to ‘be fruitful in the land of my affliction.’ Efraim is the power to transform the difficulties into Divine power.

Benjamin is hungry, hungry for the Divine sparks in all of existence. So, like a ‘ravenous wolf’ Benjamin recognizes that his mission is to passionately seek out the Divine energy embedded in matter, devour it, consume and elevate it.

Twelve tribes. Twelve paths. All necessary to reach our destination.

Which personality are you? What part do you need to develop?

May we discover our path and live up to it. And may that help us reach the time — at the end of days – when we will gain clarity as to who belongs to what tribe (see Rambam Hilchot Melochim 12:3). Perhaps the significance of this revelation is the crystallization that will come in the time when the ‘world will be filled with Divine knowledge as the waters cover the sea.’

Jacobson, Simon. "12 Paths in Life." Meaningful Life Center. (Viewed on December 14, 2013). http://meaningfullife.com/oped/2002/12.19.02$VayechiCOLON_The_Twelve_Tribes.php

Generations Forget and Remember

– By Rabbi Lord Jonathon Sacks

The drama of younger and older brothers, which haunts the book of Bereishit from Cain and Abel onwards, reaches a strange climax in the story of Joseph’s children. Jacob/Israel is nearing the end of his life. Joseph visits him, bringing with him his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim. It is the only scene of grandfather and grandchildren in the book. Jacob asks Joseph to bring them near so that he can bless them. What follows next is described in painstaking detail:

Joseph took them both, Ephraim in his right hand toward Israel’s left, and Manasseh in his left hand towards Israel’s right, and brought them near him. But Israel reached out his right hand and put it on Ephraim’s head, though he was the younger, and crossing his arms, he put his left hand on Manasseh’s head, even though Manasseh was the firstborn. . . . . When Joseph saw his father placing his right hand on Ephraim’s head he was displeased; so he took hold of his father’s hand to move it from Ephraim’s head to Manasseh’s head. Joseph said to him, “No, my father, this one is the firstborn; put your right hand on his head.” But his father refused and said, “I know, my son, I know. He too will become a people, and he too will become great. Nevertheless, his younger brother will be greater than he, and his descendants will become a group of nations.” He blessed them that day, saying: “In your name will Israel pronounce this blessing: ‘May G-d make you like Ephraim and Manasseh.’” So he put Ephraim ahead of Manasseh. (48: 13-14, 17-20).

It is not difficult to understand the care Joseph took to ensure that Jacob would bless the firstborn first. Three times his father had set the younger before the elder, and each time it had resulted in tragedy. He, the younger, had sought to supplant his elder brother Esau. He favoured the younger sister Rachel over Leah. And he favoured the youngest of his children, Joseph and Benjamin, over the elder Reuben, Shimon and Levi. The consequences were catastrophic: estrangement from Esau, tension between the two sisters, and hostility among his sons. Joseph himself bore the scars: thrown into a well by his brothers, who initially planned to kill him and eventually sold him into Egypt as a slave. Had his father not learned? Or did he think that Ephraim – whom Joseph held in his right hand – was the elder? Did Jacob know what he was doing? Did he not realise that he was risking extending the family feuds into the next generation? Besides which, what possible reason could he have for favouring the younger of his grandchildren over the elder? He had not seen them before. He knew nothing about them. None of the factors that led to the earlier episodes were operative here. Why did Jacob favour Ephraim over Manasseh?

Jacob knew two things, and it is here that the explanation lies. He knew that the stay of his family in Egypt would not be a short one. Before leaving Canaan to see Joseph, G-d had appeared to him in a vision:

Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for I will make you into a great nation there. I will go down to Egypt with you, and I will surely bring you back again. And Joseph’s own hand will close your eyes. (46: 3-4)

This was, in other words, the start of the long exile which G-d had told Abraham would be the fate of his children (a vision the Torah describes as accompanied by “a deep and dreadful darkness” – 15: 12). The other thing Jacob knew was his grandsons’ names, Manasseh and Ephraim. The combination of these two facts was enough.

When Joseph finally emerged from prison to become prime minister of Egypt, he married and had two sons. This is how the Torah describes their birth:

Before the years of the famine came, two sons were born to Joseph by Asenath, daughter of Potiphera, priest of On. Joseph named his firstborn Manasseh, saying, “It is because G-d has made me forget all my trouble and all my father’s household.” The second son he named Ephraim, saying, “It is because G-d has made me fruitful in the land of my affliction.” (41: 50-52)

With the utmost brevity the Torah intimates an experience of exile that was to be repeated many times across the centuries. At first, Joseph felt relief. The years as a slave, then a prisoner, were over. He had risen to greatness. In Canaan, he had been the youngest of eleven brothers in a nomadic family of shepherds. Now, in Egypt, he was at the centre of the greatest civilization of the ancient world, second only to Pharaoh in rank and power. No one reminded him of his background. With his royal robes and ring and chariot, he was an Egyptian prince (as Moses was later to be). The past was a bitter memory he sought to remove from his mind. Manasseh means “forgetting.”

But as time passed, Joseph began to feel quite different emotions. Yes, he had arrived. But this people was not his; nor was its culture. To be sure, his family was, in any worldly terms, undistinguished, unsophisticated. Yet they remained his family. They were the matrix of who he was. Though they were no more than shepherds (a class the Egyptians despised), they had been spoken to by G-d – not the gods of the sun, the river and death, the Egyptian pantheon – but G-d, the creator of heaven and earth, who did not make His home in temples and pyramids and panoplies of power, but who spoke in the human heart as a voice, lifting a simple family to moral greatness. By the time his second son was born, Joseph had undergone a profound change of heart. To be sure, he had all the trappings of earthly success – “G-d has made me fruitful” – but Egypt had become “the land of my affliction.” Why? Because it was exile. There is a sociological observation about immigrant groups, known as Hansen’s Law: “The second generation seeks to remember what the first generation sought to forget.” Joseph went through this transformation very quickly. It was already complete by the time his second son was born. By calling him Ephraim, he was remembering what, when Manasseh was born, he was trying to forget: who he was, where he came from, where he belonged.

Jacob’s blessing of Ephraim over Manasseh had nothing to do with their ages and everything to do with their names. Knowing that these were the first two children of his family to be born in exile, knowing too that the exile would be prolonged and at times difficult and dark, Jacob sought to signal to all future generations that there would be a constant tension between the desire to forget (to assimilate, acculturate, anaesthetise the hope of a return) and the promptings of memory (the knowledge that this is “exile,” that we are part of another story, that ultimate home is somewhere else). The child of forgetting (Manasseh) may have blessings. But greater are the blessings of a child (Ephraim) who remembers the past and future of which he is a part.

Sacks, Jonathon. "Generations Forget and Remember." OU Torah. (Viewed on December 14, 2013). http://www.ou.org/torah/article/generations_forget_and_remember#.UrAFXNJdWSo

Va-yigash, Genesis 44:18-47:27

Va-yigash, , , , ,
Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/vayigash

Personal Narrative and the Needs of Others

By Mark Kirschbaum

This week’s  perasha  begins at a moment of climax – all seems lost. An innocent descent to Egypt to purchase food has ended up with youngest brother Benyamin in prison, and it seems that due to the actions of the brothers, the children of Rachel are at risk of total decimation (with Yosef believed dead and Benyamin in a place worse than death), which they know would compound their father’s already unrelieved grief to beyond mortal tolerance.

In an act of desperation, Yehudah steps forward and begins to plead with the hostile sovereign for his brother’s life. The text uses some unusual language – its says  Vayigash Elav Yehudah, Yehudah “encountered” him. The use of the term vayigash, from the root hagasha, (to come close, also to prepare) is somewhat unusual, both linguistically and even in terms of the action, given that they were in the same room. And to whom is the  second word in the phrase, Elav, “to him”, referring to?

In fact, why does the text need to quote Yehuda’s speech at such length? There is seemingly nothing new revealed in terms of the linear development of the plot; we are given no new facts about the brothers’ history, and no new personal revelations. Yet this speech is very extensively analyzed by the Midrashim. The Midrash choreographs entire dialogues lurking behind the words of Yehudah, referring to all sorts of hidden meanings within his every word, both conciliatory and threatening words; the prelude in the Midrash Rabbah (BR 93:3) insists that the words of Yehudah “can be interpreted from every angle.” We will find that the words of Yehuda teach us several useful lessons for the fight against societal injustice.

The Midrash (BR 93:6) tells us that the term vayigash reflects three types of preparation:

“R. Yehudah says: preparation for war…R. Nehemiah says: preparation for mediation, diplomacy…The Rabbis say: preparation for prayer…R. Elazar settled this saying: If for war, I’m ready, if for diplomatic mediation, I’m ready, if for prayer [i.e., if all is lost], I’m ready…

We see then several possibilities for the odd word vayigash, a stepping forward towards several potential activities, and thus, stepping forward towards several possible Elavs, several possible “towards him,” several possible objects of the sentence; these possible objects are of interest, as we shall see.

To whom then, does the “elav” refer? One interesting approach taken by several of the mystical commentators is that the Elav to whom this verse refers is God, in other words, that the speech given by Yehudah, is actually not an argument to the Pharoah’s minister, but actually a prayer, where Yehudah is pleading and negotiating with Gd.

This approach is found in both the Noam Elimelech and the Bat Ayin. They both read Yehuda’s speech as a prayer addressed to God, and not a prayer limited to this particular narrative, as we shall see. The Noam Elimelech’s transformation of this passage into a meditation for all time takes off from the next phrase, where Yehuda states ki komacha k’pharoh, that “you are like Pharoah.” This is generally understood as Yehuda telling Yosef, that he is equal to the Pharoah in the brother’s eyes. However, the Noam Elimelech sees this phrase as our recognizing our human weakness and  inability to focus on what truly matters – when we pray, the Noam Elimelech says,  sometimes our minds are properly focused  on You, God (kamocha), sometimes we are too distracted by  the thoughts of mundane desires that enslave us (Pharoah)…

The Bat Ayin, a disciple of the Noam Elimelech, turns this passage into one of those wondrous Hassidic plaints toward God- “How can you, God, behave like the evil Pharoah?” The Mei HaShiloach, who also offers a reading in this vein, adds that the next phrase, bi adoni, “me, my Lord” reflects Yehuda’s internal certitude that his cause is correct, thus God must redeem him.

The Sefat Emet, in earlier years, also reads the “elav” as referring to God, but in his writings of the year 5637 (1877), adds a second possible object to whom Yehuda turns with this speech – to himself. The phrase Elav means that Yehuda approaches himself in dialogue, that  this text is a soliloquy directed at himself – Yehuda is reevaluating the events for himself: “after all, Yehudah did not introduce one new fact in these words, and he had no solid claim to put forward as a defense to Yosef – even so, the clarification of the issue to himself brought about salvation.”

In current terminology, one might say that only the individual’s construction of his own narrative brings about a level of self-understanding, that only then can the individual (and us as the readers) come to any form of enlightenment. This message is related multiple times in the Torah. For example, there is a frequently cited Midrash upon the story of the servant of Abraham’s mission to find a bride for Yitzchak, his son, in which it is claimed that Eliezer, the servant of Abraham, had a daughter that he wished Isaac to marry as revealed. This is revealed, according the Midrah, by the deficient spelling of the word “perhaps” in the phrase “perhaps she (a prospective bride for Isaac found in Haran) will not wish to follow me back here” (the word for perhaps, “ve’ulay” is written without a vav). Interestingly, as the Kotzker points out, that in the initial narrative of the story, when the servant first says this phrase to Avraham in discussing his mission, the word is written complete, with the vav in place, thus not giving away this covert hope that Yitzchak marries his daughter. It is only in a later passage, when the servant repeats the story about his mission to Rivka’s family, that the word perhaps is written without the vav, only when the servant recreates the events in his own mind and thus constructs a personal narrative out the events that transpired, that he comes to realize that his intentions were, in fact, tainted by his own personal desire for failure of the mission. In an honest retrospective reconstruction of the events that transpire in one’s life, one can come to recognize one’s own hidden motivations, the obstacles one has placed in one’s own way, and thus begin a path to self-correction and reconciliation.

In this light, we can understand the Midrash (BR 93:9)  which tells us that it was only after Yehuda’s speech that Yehuda himself realized how committed he was to saving his brothers, that he was even willing to give up his life for his brothers, and in this way, revealed through his words just how profound was his sincere contriteness for his previous actions. It is this construction of his internal narrative that is recorded as a lesson for us here, the centerpiece of the narrative, the moment of insight, of progress- Yehuda’s internal story.

It is with this theme that we can take this passage and move beyond a local interpretive reading into something much greater and deeper. Let us follow the logic of the text before us. After Yehuda’s successful speech, Yosef breaks down, reveals who that he is not a Pharoah but really their brother, and then there is a very clear shift in the structure of the story from the conflict between Yehudah and Yosef, who both fade out of center stage, to a resumption of concern with Yaakov, who resumes centrality in the next perasha as he gives the blessings to his sons. Contrary to previous blessing narratives, such as that of  Avraham or Yitzhak, in which a non-specific positive blessing is given, this time the blessings from Yaakov also contain recollections of past events linked with wishes and predictions for the future. Blessings now come with a history and a story. The stories relating to the fraternal enmity and eventual consolation in Egypt are all framed by Yaakov’s narrative.

Yaakov’s narrative at this point in the story is that just as Yehuda learns by recollecting, so does Yaakov. Perhaps in this way Yaakov now receives the answer to his earlier request at the time he left his father’s house for the first time – Yaakov at the time asked, Im yihyeh Elokim imadi, “If God would only accompany me,” and now, at this point, at the end of his tale, he recognizes, that God was there with him all along, present in every moment of his story; it often  takes an attentive  recollection, review and retelling of one’s own story, an honest construction of one’s personal narrative, in order for any person to become aware of this kind of presence in their own life and to give it meaning.

The Izhbitzer in his work, Mei Shiloach, takes this theme of the retroactive uncovering of meaning through honest re-appraisal to a more universal level. The Izhbitzer has a remarkable reading of the dialogue narrated in Shemot (Exodus)  23, where God reveals himself to Moshe with the phrase, “my back you shall see but not my front.” This the Izhbitzer teaches as meaning that God can be found in history primarily in retrospect; we may not sense God’s presence in the events as the events are occurring, but in a retrospective analysis God’s presence can become palpable. The same process of retroactive understanding, writes the Izhbitzer,  is illustrated in this story of the brothers in Egypt, and in essence, in all of Jewish history, of which this episode is meant to serve as a paradigm. In this episode, from the brothers’ perspective, upon innocently traveling to Egypt to procure food, they unexpectedly find themselves in the darkest of situations, about to lose everything, with no hope for redemption, and suddenly, at the bleakest moment,  in retrospect, it is apparent that they never at any time, were in any danger at all! It was their brother standing before them all along!  According to the optimistic view of the Izhbitzer, so will it be at the end of history, when all will  come to realize that History has meaning, that God had a purpose for all of our suffering,  and in retrospective understanding, all the dark moments will become points in a line leading to universal enlightenment.

I would like to return, at this point to the idea of personal narrative as illustrated by the soliloquy of Yehuda. How “personal” is the personal narrative we are to create for ourselves to be? Too often teachings related to personal awareness are read as some kind of purely private moment, limited to therapeutic or self-help approaches. In other words, they are meant to help you figure out what is “wrong” with your own story and by correcting yourself, you will fit in better at work or in relationships, and then your life will be smoother and you will be more productive.

I would argue that too often,  “self-help” advice is merely a cover for deflecting the injustices in society upon the individual, onto some kind of failure of the individual to conform as argued Adorno in his work, The Stars Down To Earth, in which he summarized several years worth of newspaper horoscopes as teaching one how better to fit in and not cause trouble, when it is clear that there are injustices in society which are the truer cause of the individual’s alienation and suffering. Too much of the self correcting emphases of contemporary therapy is meant to subvert the alienation and injustice induced by societal inequalities into a deficiency of the hapless individual , who only needs to cope and accommodate in order to be “happier” and have more “fun.”

In this light, we might suggest a third alternative towards whom this elav was pointed, at whom Yehuda’s speech, read as critique, was directed.  Yehuda stepped forward and, to use another generation’s useful terminology, “spoke Truth to the Man.”  The Tiferet Shelomo reads Yehudah’s  speech as intending to question the dominant society’s sense of fairness in these events which clearly represented a miscarriage of justice within the dominant society. The Tiferet Shelomo says that the impact of Yehudah’s speech is a result of his speaking from a sense of arevut, out of a sense of responsibility for the Other. Only when Yehuda realized that he has taken personal responsibility for the Other’s cause upon himself, could he then speak clearly and directly. All too often, when we need to make personal requests for our own well-being, we find ourselves feeling inhibited, embarrassed, and unable to express in words what we really want. However, when we sincerely take up the Other’s cause, we find that we  can accurately pinpoint the needs and the injustices and make the proper stand on behalf of a better society.

This standing up for the victims of injustice, for the weak members of society, the Tiferet Shelomo argues, is the deeper meaning of all our prayers. “Kol Yisrael arevim zeh la’zeh”- all of humanity needs to feel responsibility for one another’s welfare. This is why all the prayers in the Hebrew prayer service are phrased in the plural voice, never “heal me,” always, “heal us.” The Talmud teaches us that when one prays for another’s well-being, the personal needs of the individual praying are answered first – perhaps, because our own needs are not clear to us until first we have stood up for the rights and needs of another…

In summary, the lesson of  the opening line of this week’s Torah reading, Vayigash elav Yehuda,  might be read as teaching that all levels of  relationship, from those with ourselves to those with others, even onto relationships with the divine,  require a construction of one’s own personal narrative, which itself is perhaps only possible when we learn to feel responsibility for the pain and suffering of our fellow human beings. This yearning to mitigate the suffering of others is our tefillah, our prayer, and I suspect, as the Izhbitzer suggests, the route and goal of our ultimate redemption.

Kirschbaum, Mark. "Weekly Torah Commentary Perashat Vayigash: Personal Narrative and the Needs of Others." Tikkun Daily. (Viewed on December 7, 2013). http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2011/12/28/weekly-torah-commentary-perashat-vayigash-personal-narrative-and-the-needs-of-others/

An End to the Charade

– By Rabbi Stephen Fuchs

The entire story of Joseph builds toward the moment when Joseph reveals himself to his brothers in Parashat Vayigash.

We wonder though, Why does Joseph treat his brothers so harshly? Why does he accuse them of being spies? Why does he demand Benjamin’s presence in Egypt, and why does he instruct his steward to put his goblet into Benjamin’s bag?

Many commentators suggest that Joseph’s motive was revenge. The brothers mistreated Joseph and sold him as a slave, and so now Joseph is paying them back.

Even W. Gunther Plaut in his masterful Torah commentary suggests revenge as one of Joseph’s motives. Plaut writes that at first and understandably, Joseph thought of revenge. He still wants revenge more than he wants love. (The Torah, A Modern Commentary, p. 284)

However, if revenge had been Joseph’s goal, he could have exacted it without disguise, without delay, and without bringing the untold anguish upon his father that Benjamin’s journey to Egypt caused. Joseph acted as he did for only one reason: He wanted to see if his brothers had changed.

Years before, Joseph had been their father’s favorite. As a result, Joseph’s brothers hated him and sold him away into slavery. With Joseph gone, Benjamin became Jacob’s favorite. By putting his cup into Benjamin’s sack, Joseph places Benjamin in a position whereby he would be detained in Egypt as a slave and Jacob would once again suffer the loss of his favorite son.

Judah knows what is at stake. In one of literature’s most stirring speeches (Genesis 44:18-34), he offers himself as a substitute for Benjamin. That is all Joseph-who has already had to leave the room twice in his meetings with his brothers to avoid breaking down and weeping in their presence-needs to hear in order to end the charade.

Our tradition calls a person who repents for his or her sins a ba’al or balat teshuvah (literally, a “master of repentance”). The Jewish tradition accords even a greater honor to a person who commits a particular transgression but later, when he or she is put in a similar position, turns away from the same kind of wrongdoing. That person is a ba’al teshuvah shelemah (a “master of complete repentance”). This is the lofty designation Judah earns for his actions in Joseph’s presence. [See Nehama Leibowitz, Studies in Sefer Bereshit, pp. 327-328 (Hebrew edition), pp. 460-461 (English edition)].

In Parashat Vayigash, Judah becomes a true hero. The story discusses his emergence as the progenitor of Israel’s most enduring tribe. We can be proud that the words “Jew” and “Judaism” are derived from his name. More important, Judah’s example of repentance can inspire us to examine our own actions and help us to turn away from transgressions we have committed in the past.

Fuchs, Stephen. "An End to the Charade." Torah Study. (Viewed on December 7, 2013). http://www.reformjudaism.org/end-charade

Mi-ketz, Genesis 41:1-44:17

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Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/miketz

Healing and Transformation

By Rabbi Suzanne Singer

The painful past casts a long shadow on parashat Miketz. A father’s insensitive treatment of his sons–and the resulting sibling rivalry–form the backdrop to this tale. Though the women are never explicitly mentioned here, Jacob’s relationship to his sons’ mothers underlies his attitude toward their children. Among his wives, Jacob loves Rachel only, paying scant attention to Leah and the sisters’ maidservants.

Likewise, Jacob dearly favors Joseph–Rachel’s firstborn–showing little evidence of affection toward his other children. Blind to the difficult family dynamic he engenders, Jacob had sent Joseph alone to check on his brothers (37:13-14), setting up a situation rife with the potential for disaster. Joseph’s ensuing disappearance does nothing to stop Jacob from now favoring yet another son, Benjamin, Rachel’s second (see 42:4).

But healing and transformation also begin here. A hint of what is to come is encapsulated in the name Joseph chooses for his first son, Manasseh, “For God has made me forget all the troubles I endured in my father’s house” (41:51). Clearly Joseph has not forgotten his troubles if they form the basis of his son’s name. Rather, it seems that the past is no longer a burden to him. He is able to thrive despite the horrors he suffered in the pit where his jealous brothers threw him (37:24). The name of Joseph’s second son, Ephraim, expresses this forward movement: “For God has made Me fruitful in the land of my affliction” (41:52). His marriage to Asenath indeed bears fruit: their children will become tribes of Israel.

A New Relationship

Joseph soon enables his older brothers to achieve a new relationship with their past as well, creating a set of circumstances that provides them with the Opportunity to respond to favoritism differently. That would represent true teshuvah (literally “return”), as the medieval Spanish rabbi and philosopher Moses Maimonides describes it: teshuvah has occurred when a person, confronted with the opportunity to commit a transgression anew, refrains from doing so–not out of fear of being caught or failure of strength (Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Teshuvah §2.1).

Teshuvah is, indeed, a primary theme of parashat Miketz. The word, too often mistranslated as “repentance,” actually means “return”–to the right path. Whereas “repentance” connotes remorse and self-flagellation, “return” suggests a kind of joyous homecoming. Our mistakes, rather than serving solely as a source of guilt, become also a springboard of opportunity.

Perhaps unwittingly, the brothers had begun the process of teshuvah before meeting Joseph again in Egypt. In 42:1, at home with their father, they are referred to as Jacob’s sons. Two verses later, on their way to Egypt, we read, “So Joseph’s brothers went down …” Restating classic midrashim, Rashi opines that “they set their hearts on conducting themselves toward him as brothers.” This is an optimistic reading, but the language does suggest a change in their relationship to Joseph-though one that is undoubtedly buried beneath layers of guilt and denial.

Joseph manipulates the situation so that the brothers’ feelings can rise to the surface. Simeon is held back as ransom. Alarmed at the prospect of returning home to their father one brother short, the brothers recall their cruelty of more than twenty years ago: “Oh, we are being punished on account of our brother! We saw his soul’s distress when he pleaded with us, but we didn’t listen …” (42:21). Perhaps because they could not hear him then, Joseph’s pleading was not mentioned in the initial narrative (Genesis 37). Now, for the first time, the brothers exhibit empathy toward Joseph. According to Marsha Pravder Mirkin, empathy is the key to teshuvah): “Empathy … is valuing another person enough to listen and hear her voice. It is a halting that then allows us to take action … that brings us closer to becoming the best we can be” (“Hearken to Her Voice: Empathy as Teshuvah,” in Gail Twersky Reimer and Judith A. Kates, eds., Beginning Anew: A Woman’s Companion to the High Holy Days, 1997, p. 70).

A New Attitude

When the brothers return to their father in Canaan, a significant transformation has occurred. The first indication is their report of their time in Egypt: the brothers demonstrate a newfound sensitivity to their father’s feelings, sparing Jacob some of the more disturbing details of their journey. Modern Israeli commentator Nehama Leibowitz points out, for example, that they omit Joseph’s original plan to keep all but one of them in Egypt (42:16) and the threat of death (42:20) (New Studies in Bereshit/Genesis, undated, pp. 471-2).

Then, in the face of their father’s fear for Benjamin’s life, Reuben offers his own sons’ lives in pledge for Benjamin’s (42:37). This is an impulsive and ill-conceived gesture-yet a marked change for the man whose idea it was to throw Joseph into the pit (37:22). Finally Judah, who had convinced his brothers to sell Joseph to the Ishmaelites (37:27), offers to take personal responsibility for the life of his youngest brother (43:9). Clearly, Judah is the brother who has matured and evolved the most.

He and his brothers have made peace with their father’s favoritism. We might imagine that, after Joseph forces them to confront their guilt, they realize that their earlier violent response to their father’s unequal love has not changed Jacob. Aware that hurting Jacob or Benjamin will not get them greater attention from their farther, they come to terms with Jacob’s failings, choosing compassion over anger in their dealings with him.

This parashah ends mid-action, leaving us to wonder: Will Joseph really enslave Benjamin? How will the brothers respond? Will Joseph reveal his identity? The answers are not clear-because neither Joseph’s motivation for putting his brothers through this ordeal, nor their commitment to ethical behavior, are fully actualized until the next parashah. Perhaps the Rabbis broke off the story here to suggest that our choices are moment-to-moment decisions, the path never certain until the time comes to act. This cliffhanger ending is also a signal of hope, because teshuvah is always open to us.

Singer, Suzanne. "Healing and Transformation." My Jewish Learning. (Viewed on November 30, 2013). http://www.myjewishlearning.com/texts/Bible/Weekly_Torah_Portion/urj-miketz.shtml

Measure for Measure

By Rabbi Yehuda M. Hausman

There are a good many details about the Joseph narratives that elude ready explanation. We absorb them readily and ignore them just as readily. What bearing do they have on Joseph or his brothers? They seem of no connection with the past or with the future. It is fair to claim all this as chance and happenstance. But to be sure, we must, like the good detective of legend, examine the evidence.

Let us begin at a familiar point. The brothers have stripped Joseph of his dignity and his “coat of many colors.” He is dumped down the shaft of a dry well. Meanwhile, as he lies alone and bloodied in the dark, a caravan of Ishmaelites arrive, “their camels carrying balm, balsam and labdanum, heading down toward Egypt” (Genesis 37:25). The merchants’ destination is quite significant, for it is to there that Joseph shall soon descend. But of what import is the merchandise? Perfumes and fragrances are neither here nor there.

Next, the brothers sell “Joseph to the Ishmaelites for 20 pieces of silver” (Genesis 37:28). The sale of a human being is a heinous crime. It is neither mitigated nor magnified with a brief statement about currency and price! Why even mention these “pieces of silver”?

Finally, to conceal their wicked sin, the brothers “took Joseph’s coat, slew a hairy goat and then dipped the coat in its blood” (Genesis 37:31). Naturally, the blood is needed to deceive Jacob, who at the sight of the tattered, blood-soaked coat assumes the worst: “Joseph is torn to pieces by a wild beast” (Genesis 37:33). Still, why mention the goat, and why especially a hairy goat?

With these facts before us, we proceed. To begin, the goat seems to have little connection with the particulars of Joseph’s life, but Jacob’s life seems to revolve around them. It was Jacob who sent 220 goats to his brother as a guilt offering to assuage the latter’s wrath (Genesis 32:15). It was Jacob who spent a good 20 years being swindled out of things, like spotted and speckled goats, by his father-in-law, Lavan. And most important, it was Jacob who deceived his father, Isaac, with goat meat and goatskins. Disguised as (hairy) Esau, wearing his goatskins and bearing a tray of goat meat, Jacob steals Esau’s blessings (Genesis 27:9-16). It is poetic justice, then, that his children in turn deceive Jacob through a slain goat.

As to Joseph, it is possible that his beloved coat was woven of goat’s hair. Luxury fabrics like cashmere and mohair are woven from goat sheerings. In the wilderness, the fabric was used in the construction of the Tabernacle (Exodus 25:4). Perhaps it is doubly ironic that the beautiful coat, which expressed Jacob’s profound love for Joseph, is used to bring about Jacob’s greatest sorrow, through its being submerged in, of all things, the blood of a hairy goat.

If this is Jacob’s due for his past crimes, what punishment awaits the brothers? It is here that we find two details that would, at first glance, seem happenstance if it were not for our earlier investigations. The setting is Egypt, Joseph is viceroy, and in the 20 years since his brothers last saw him, he has become a new man, disguised beyond recognition. Joseph interrogates his brothers, accuses them of espionage and incarcerates Simeon. He then offers them a deal to prove their innocence: “bring Benjamin, Jacob’s youngest son.”

On their way, the brothers notice something odd. Joseph has returned their pieces of silver. They “see silver in the mouth of the pack” (Genesis 42:28). Once more they must return to their father, minus a son, with a sack full of silver coins, and the heavy stench of guilt. “What is this that God has done to us?”

When they finally convince Jacob to relinquish Benjamin, so they can return to Egypt and buy food, Jacob offers some advice. Bring the man (Joseph) a gift: “a little balsam, a little honey, balm andlabdanum, pistachio nuts and almonds … and as for your brother, take him, too” (Genesis 43:11-13).

Such delicious irony: The same fragrant smells that accompanied Joseph the slave on his descent to Egypt now accompanies the brothers as they descend to Egypt. This time the brothers accompany Benjamin, anxious at every step. Will he vanish like Joseph, like Simeon? Perhaps this viceroy will keep all of them as slaves?

Such is biblical justice, measure for measure, an eye for an eye. “Until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,” as Abraham Lincoln put it. But such a world is not half as cruel as one of happenstance. A world where, to quote William Shakespeare, “Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.”

Hausman, Yehuda M. "Measure for Measure: Parashat Miketz (Genesis 41:1-44:17)." Jewish Journal Torah Portion. (Viewed on November 30, 2013). http://www.jewishjournal.com/torah_portion/article/measure_for_measure_parashat_miketz_genesis_411_4417

Va-yeishev, Genesis 37:1-40:23

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Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/vayeshev
For a Pair of Shoes

By Rabbi Ari Kahn

As Yosef approaches his bothers, he does not know that they have been plotting his downfall. For his part, he earnestly seeks his brothers. This feeling is not reciprocated and soon Yosef is thrown into a pit, where he remains until the opportunity to permanently solve the “Yosef Problem” presents itself. Thankfully, the messy business of murder is avoided, rejected in favor of a more profitable arrangement. Once the decision is formulated to sell Yosef to the Ishmaelites, a second group is introduced, the Midianites, and the sale forges ahead:

Then there passed by Midianite merchants; and they drew and lifted up Yosef out from the pit, and sold Yosef to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver; and they brought Yosef to Egypt. (Bereishit 37:28)

The reference to the Midianites is unclear; Rashi suggests that Yosef was sold more than once, while the Ibn Ezra says that both names refer to the same caravan. There are, however, commentaries who suggest that the brothers did not actually sell Yosef: While the brothers were still discussing the idea, the Midianites rode by, and hearing Yosef’s bloodcurdling screams, they “rescued” him from the pit, only to in turn sell him to the band of Ishmaelites the brothers had seen approaching. The Rashbam, who advocates this position, theorizes that the brothers, not wishing to ruin their repast, had positioned themselves at some distance from the pit into which they had thrown Yosef and from his cries for help. The Hizkuni goes even further and suggests that the brothers were unaware that the Midianites had sold Yosef to the Ishmaelites, a theory borne out by Reuven’s futile attempt to save Yosef from the pit – after he was sold: If, in fact, the brothers had been party to the sale, Reuven’s behavior would be inexplicable.

These opinions seem to contradict the brothers’ own admission of guilt: When they unknowingly stand before Yosef in Egypt, they admit that they had indeed heard Yosef’s cries, and ignored his pleas. Yosef himself would surely have mentioned any mitigating facts or circumstances when he consoled his brothers and attempted to make peace with them years later, but he does not seem to be aware of any such factors. If the Rashbam and the Hizkuni were correct, we would expect Yosef to have said something to them along the lines of, “it wasn’t you who sold me” or “you did not know that I had been sold”. Instead, he says “I am Yosef whom you sold…”

Indeed, it seems difficult to argue that the brothers were not guilty of this act of perfidy. Jewish tradition refers to the sale of Yosef as a stain on the collective conscience of the entire nation – a stain that much of Jewish practice and Jewish history is geared toward cleansing. The Rambam notes that a goat is always brought as a sin offering on holidays, and ties this offering directly with the goat’s blood with which Yosef’s coat of many colors was stained by the brothers. The goat is a symbol of the treachery which continues to haunt the collective, a blot on the integrity and unity of the entire nation. On holidays, when we gather as a family, we bring the sin offering with the blood of the goat in order to attempt to bring about healing for the sale of Yosef at his brothers’ hands.

In fact, our sages associate some of the most cataclysmic events in Jewish history with our collective guilt for the sale of Yosef: The martyrdom of Judaism’s ten greatest scholars, retold in the Yom Kippur liturgy each year, is said to be a tikkun for the sale of Yosef. It seems an inescapable conclusion that Jewish theology considers the brothers guilty of the sale, and senses the repercussions of that episode throughout our history.

When one considers the portion traditionally read as the Haftorah associated with this parsha it leads to an inescapable conclusion of guilt.

Thus says the Almighty; ‘For three transgressions of Israel I will turn away punishment, but for the fourth I will not turn away its punishment; because they sold the righteous one for silver, and the poor man for a pair of shoes. (Amos 2:6)

Yosef, as distinct from all the other Patriarchs, is known as “The righteous one”, and the words of the Prophet Amos supply information that is lacking in the verses of our parsha: Tradition teaches that the money they “earned” from the sale of Yosef was used by the brothers to purchase shoes. The Torah recounts only that twenty pieces of silver changed hands in the exchange; there is not a word to indicate what was done with the money, nor any mention of shoes. This seems altogether fitting: the use made of this “blood money” does not seem relevant to the real issues of the parsha, and to the long-term effects of the brothers’ actions. In other words, why do we have a tradition about this? Is the fact that the brothers bought shoes with this money really a salient fact worth recording? The very fact that they sold their brother seems enough of an outrage. What difference does it make what they did with their ill-gotten profit? As we shall see, the seemingly-irrelevant information that the Prophet preserves and transmits will help reveal other important facets and aspects of the sale.

Shoes appear in the Torah in several contexts. The first is when Moshe is told to remove his shoes in deference to the holy ground on which he stands:

And Moshe said, ‘I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt. And when the Almighty saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the midst of the bush, and said, ‘Moshe, Moshe.’ And he said, ‘Here am I.’ And He said, ‘Do not come any closer; take off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground. (Sh’mot 3:3-5)

In this context, removing one’s shoes indicates an awareness of holiness. On the other hand, when the Jews prepared to leave Egypt, they were told to put on their shoes:

And thus shall you eat it; with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it in haste; it is the Pesach for the Almighty. (Sh’mot 12:11)

While it might seem that the commandment to put on shoes is purely pragmatic, preparing the Jews for the long walk on which they will soon embark, the deeper significance may be learned from the third context in which shoes appear: There is one halachic section of the Torah, one Torah law, in which a shoe is a significant element. When a man refuses to marry his deceased brother’s childless wife, a unique ceremony is carried out:

If brothers live together, and one of them dies, and has no child, the wife of the dead shall not marry outside to a stranger; her husband’s brother shall go in to her, and take her to him for a wife, and perform the duty of a husband’s brother to her. And it shall be, that the firstborn which she bears shall succeed to the name of his brother who is dead, that his name be not put out of Israel. And if the man does not wish to take his brother’s wife, then let his brother’s wife go up to the gate to the elders, and say, ‘My husband’s brother refuses to raise to his brother a name in Israel, he will not perform his duty as my husband’s brother.’ Then the elders of his city shall call him, and speak to him; and if he persists, and says, ‘I do not wish to take her’; Then shall his brother’s wife come to him in the presence of the elders, and pull his shoe from off his foot, and spit in his face, and shall answer and say, ‘So shall it be done to that man who will not build up his brother’s house.’ And his name shall be called in Israel, “The house of him who has his shoe pulled off.” (Dvarim 25:5-10)

The ritual performed when a man refuses to marry his brother’s widow and carry on his late brother’s name and family line, is called haliza. One central part of this ritual is the removal of the man’s shoe.  Alternatively, if the living brother chooses to marry his brother’s widow and build the family, the term used to describe the ceremony is yibum. In fact, the first appearance of yibumin the Torah is found in the verses that immediately follow the sale of Yosef, when Yehuda’s surviving sons are responsible for the yibum of Tamar. Unfortunately, they were not interested in continuing their brother’s legacy and they frustrated the natural yibum process.

And Yehuda said to Onan, ‘Go in to your brother’s wife, and marry her, and raise up seed to your brother.’ And Onan knew that the seed would not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in to his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground, rather than give seed to his brother. And his behavior was wicked in God’s eyes and (Onan), too, was put to death. (Breishit 38:8-10)

The tragic story of Yehuda’s sons must, necessarily, be seen in light of Yehuda’s callous call to sell his brother Yosef in the preceding verses. Yosef is their flesh and blood, and yet he speaks of profit, of personal benefit, of manipulating the law by avoiding murder while capitalizing on the situation for personal gain:

And Yehuda said to his brothers: ‘What profit is it if we slay our brother, and conceal his blood? Come, and let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and let not our hand be upon him; for he is our brother and our flesh.’

Apparently, Yehuda’s children learned a lesson in fraternal relations and responsibilities from their father. They learned that their brother is not their concern; a pair of shoes is preferable to a brother. It is surely no coincidence that when the Torah teaches the law regarding a man who refuses to build his brother’s home, the rejected widow is instructed to remove a shoe from the indifferent brother’s foot. When he fails to recognize his brother’s holiness and the sanctity of the family he is charged to preserve, his shoe is removed as a reminder (as it was for Moshe) or as a symbol of his callousness (as when the brothers purchased shoes with “blood money”).

The sale of Yosef began as the brothers callously broke bread while Yosef cried out to them from the pit. That meal, the symbol of a family divided, was interrupted by a passing caravan that soon provided shoes for the brothers, eventually took the brothers themselves to Egypt. They thought they had found a convenient way to dispose of their annoying brother; they thought they were selling him as a slave. Instead, they and their descendants became slaves. And when the time arrives for their descendents to finally to leave Egypt and begin their journey back to the Land of Israel, they are commanded to sit and have a meal together – as families, whole and reunited. At that meal, they are finally ready to put shoes back on their feet and begin the long trip back to Israel. This is a healing meal, a celebration in which each recognizes the holiness of the others; finally, they become one family, united.

Kahn, Ari. "For a Pair of Shoes." M'oray Ha'Aish. (Viewed on November 23, 2013). http://www.aish.com/tp/i/moha/For-a-Pair-of-Shoes.html
Dvar Tzedek

By Sigal Samuel

Anu Mokal was four months pregnant the night policemen brutally assaulted her at a bus stop in Satara, India. They beat her so severely that she suffered a miscarriage. When she later filed a complaint against them, no investigation took place, despite the presence of witnesses. Why? Because she was a sex worker, and the policemen—who had charged her with soliciting clients at the bus stop—were just ‘doing their job.’

Anu’s story is disturbingly familiar: Today, millions of sex workers across the globe suffer abuse and discrimination from law enforcement officials as well as the general public. The fact that their work is criminalized increases their susceptibility to violence and gives them no way to seek legal redress. While many people view sex work as immoral exploitation of women or insist that all sex workers must be victims of sex slavery or trafficking, the reality is that in many cases, women choose this work because it is the best of a severely limited range of economic options allowing them to support themselves and their children. Indeed, sex work is the means by which many resourceful women manage to build homes and pay school fees.

I suspect that Tamar, in Parashat Vayeshev, would empathize with these women. Tamar is left financially vulnerable after the death of her husband when her father-in-law Judah fails to offer her security through levirate marriage to his remaining son, Shelah. Her social standing ruined, Tamar disguises herself as a prostitute to trick Judah into sleeping with her. She becomes pregnant and Judah, not realizing that he himself is the father, condemns her to death. But then Tamar presents Judah’s seal, cord and staff, saying, “I am pregnant by the man who owns these items.” Aghast, Judah recognizes his belongings and is forced to take responsibility for his actions. “Tzadkah mimeni,” he admits. “She is more in the right than I.”

In this story, Tamar leverages the only two things left at her disposal—her wits and her sexuality—to regain her social standing. When she takes Judah to task in this way, her story plays out according to what scholars of biblical and rabbinic literature call “the trickster motif.” “Tricksters” are “characters of low status who improve their situation through use of their wit and cunning” and who “can lay claim to their reproductive power only through tricksterism, camouflage and seduction.” I believe, as scholar Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert has argued, that this motif is so endemic to biblical and rabbinic narrative traditions because the patriarchal world of the Bible often made it so. Tamar’s was a world in which women, with few material resources and little power, needed to leverage their wits and sexuality in order to gain the upper hand. Thousands of years later, this is—in many ways—still the world we live in. Indeed, like the “tricksters” of the Bible, modern-day women who use their wits and sexuality to take care of themselves often do so in response to a society that undercuts their power.

Today, sex workers face flawed legislation that is more concerned with criminalizing their work than protecting their rights, their health and their safety. Ugandan law, for example, targets the sex worker rather than the client. While the sex worker may be punished with up to seven years in prison, the client goes free. Worse, the criminal status of sex workers encourages their societies to stigmatize them, leading to the erosion of their basic rights and freedoms and to their exclusion from basic services like medical care, screening for sexually transmitted diseases and protection by the police from violence. Discrimination also prevents sex workers’ efforts to seek other economic opportunities that might enable them to find a new line of work: for example, in 2010, Uganda’s Minister of Ethics and Integrity blocked a sex workers’ conference, even though its aim was simply “to build the skills of sex workers—in leadership, economic empowerment, personal development and entrepreneurship.”

Fortunately, many grassroots organizations are fighting to defend sex workers’ rights. For example, AJWS grantee WONETHA-Uganda, itself spearheaded by sex workers, documents and exposes cases of discrimination and stigmatization in the community. The organization also helps women access health care services, from which they are often barred, as they are perceived as vectors of disease.

By supporting organizations like these, we can stand in solidarity with women today who, like Tamar, use their sexuality and their wits to improve their situations. We can also bring about the second meaning of Judah’s “tzadkah mimeni.” While these words are typically translated as “she is more in the right than I,” they can also translate as “she is right; this [her situation] is from me [the result of my wrongdoing].” To amplify the voices of sex workers who speak, struggle and lobby on their own behalf is to promote an understanding that, if millions of women are forced to engage in sex work to survive, the fault does not lie with them but with a systemic injustice that will only begin to be rectified when we implicate ourselves, issuing our own collective “tzadkah mimeni.”

Samuel, Sigal. "Parashah Vayeshev 5774." Dvar Tzedek. American Jewish World Service. (Viewed on November 22, 2013). http://ajws.org/what_we_do/education/publications/dvar_tzedek/5774/vayeshev.html

Va-yislach, Genesis 32:4-36:43

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Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/vayishlach

Confronting Your Fears

By Rabbi Ari Kahn

Yaakov’s return to Israel would not be simple; the factors that caused him to flee all those years ago had not changed. His mother Rivka, who said she would send for him when his brother’s murderous anger subsided, had not contacted him. To the best of his knowledge, his brother Esav was lying in wait, plotting deadly revenge. Nonetheless, Yaakov was coming back. What awaited him on the other side of the Jordan River was unknown, unclear; the only certainty was the fear in his heart. The dread and anticipation of catastrophe would have paralyzed a lesser man; sometimes, fear is worse than the catastrophe itself. Yet Yaakov marched on, deliberately but cautiously.

In fact, his fears were not unfounded. He had no illusions about the nature of his adversary: He had begun wrestling with his brother in utero, leaving their mother Rivka distressed and bewildered enough to seek Divine guidance. This was no ordinary morning sickness, nor was their struggle the normal movement experienced in a twin pregnancy: God informed her that she was carrying two distinct nations that would be at odds for millennia.

Apart from the personal history between himself and Esav, Yaakov had another reason for concern: As the sun set, Yaakov was alone, and he was accosted by an unknown assailant. This was certainly not a good omen. In fact, rabbinic tradition identifies this nocturnal opponent as the spiritual power of his brother Esav.

In short, the confrontation he was about to face had been twice foreshadowed, first by the struggle in Rivka’s womb, and again in the dark of the night before the actual encounter. To make matters worse, as the sun rises, Esav approaches with four hundred ruffians. Yaakov’s chances of survival seem dismal.

And then, something strange happens: The ruffians turn out to be no more than a benign prop, part of the scenery; as Esav is overcome with emotion and fraternal goodwill. The two brothers forge an understanding. Twenty years of fear, dread and anger melt away in a brotherly bear hug; friendly chatter takes the place of violence.

As readers, this turn of events is more than unexpected; it seems the plot has taken an unimaginable turn. We have been witnessing the drama unfold for several chapters, watching the characters develop, feeling their animosity build. We have been waiting for the unavoidable collision, for the other shoe to drop. The loaded gun, as it were, was introduced in the first act of this family’s story, and we fully expect that it will be fired in this climactic scene. Is it possible that Yaakov wrestles with Esav as a fetus, and again with his angel, yet when they finally meet on level ground, as two grown men who are prepared for violent confrontation, they settle their differences peacefully? What went wrong – or should we ask, what went right?

We may posit that the strange confrontation in the night changed the course of Yaakov’s confrontation with Esav the following morning: By defeating Esav’s spiritual representative, Yaakov had deflated his flesh-and-blood adversary.

Perhaps there is a more powerful lesson to be learned from the surprise outcome of this story: Even when all the signs point in one direction, history is not predetermined. Spiritual imprints may have been made by our personal or family history; precedents may exist in our relationships. Nonetheless, each of us is capable of changing the course of history, of rewriting the script. Our personal and collective fate is not predetermined; outcomes are neither prearranged nor immutable. Cycles can be broken – cycles of violence, cycles of abuse, cycles of enmity. We can determine our future.

Despite premonitions, precedents, signs and omens, Yaakov uses his prayers and the skills he has acquired from a lifetime of living by his wits to extricate himself from what seemed an impossible situation. The message for all of us is that we must not let our past determine our future. We must not allow dreams or signs dictate how things will work out. We must take control, and truly believe that God has entrusted us with freedom of choice. We may not always succeed, but we must not allow past failures to determine our future. Sometimes, despite all the evidence to the contrary, things do work out. Just ask Yaakov.

Kahn, Ari. "Confronting Your Fears." OU Torah. Orthodox Union. (Viewed on November 16, 2013). http://www.ou.org/torah/article/confronting_your_fears#.UoinWdLp2So

Dvar Tzedek

By Mollie Andron

Parashat Vayishlach contains the harrowing story of the rape of Dina and its equally violent aftermath. Dina “goes out” to see the daughters of the town of Shchem. Instantly Shchem, the son of Chamor, sees her, takes her and defiles her. He then falls in love with her and asks for her hand in marriage. Dina’s father, Yaakov, is unable to offer a response, remaining silent and waiting for his sons to return home from the field. As a form of retaliation, two of Yaakov’s sons, Shimon and Levi, slay all of the men of Shchem and take the women and children as captives.

After this incident, the Torah never speaks of Dina again. All we are left with is her name and her tragically violent story. By trying to reconstruct the character of Dina and fill in the missing gaps in her narrative, we can not only try to make sense of her story but also apply its lessons to the contemporary issue of violence against women and girls.

While the Torah tells us very little about Dina prior to the story in this week’s parashah, a troublingmidrash offers some insight into her character. Earlier in Parashat Vayishlach Yaakov prepares himself and his family for his reunion with his brother Esav. He takes his two wives, his two maidservants and his eleven children, and crosses the fork of the Jabbock River. But where is Dina? She seems to be missing from the narrative. According to the midrash, Yaakov, fearful of his brother Esav, locks her in a chest so that Esav won’t see her and want to marry her.1 Dina was thus literally constrained by her sexuality and gender, boxed in and invisible.

Shortly after this episode, Dina “goes out” to see the women of Shchem. This movement of hers from being invisible to “going out” suggests that Dina was likely frustrated by the limits placed on her and may have been trying to separate herself from her family and become more visible and more liberated. The verb “vatetze—and she went out,” which describes Dina’s movement, is the same verb that is used for her father, Yaakov, when he escapes the wrath of his brother and, at the start of his journey, encounters God in a dream.2 Perhaps similar to her father, Dina was trying to escape her invisibility and was searching for liberating and inspiring encounters. Sadly, however, unlike her father, her experience of “going out” resulted in violence and trauma, driving her into complete and total silence.

Unfortunately, in today’s world, many women and girls, who, like Dina, are already constrained and oppressed because of their gender, become victims of similar gender-based violence. One in three women world-wide will be abused, beaten or raped during her lifetime, most often at the hands of a boyfriend or husband. And for many of these women, the violence against them goes unpunished.

What can we learn from the story of Dina? Unlike her brothers, whose names are explained and connected to particular traits, Dina is simply named, with no interpretation. Despite the lack of explicit explanation, Dina’s name is simple to interpret, as it derives from the Hebrew word “din—judgment.” In Dina’s case, her brothers execute judgment on her behalf by killing the men of Shchem, addressing violence by causing more violence. But this judgment plunges Dina into further silence and invisibility.

In response to the problematic judgment exercised in Dina’s case and the incomplete judgment exercised in contemporary instances of violence against women and girls, we have a moral and political obligation to reclaim Dina and bring about full justice by stepping up and acting with judgment. We need to not only raise our voices against sexual violence but support women and girls around the world who are—with courageous legislators and decision-makers—working to enshrine their rights in law so that violence is not only punished but prevented. Only once we eliminate violence and restore Dina’s din will we have truly internalized the lessons of her story.

Andron, Mollie. "Parashat Vayislach." Dvar Tzedek. American Jewish World Service. (Viewed on Novemver 16, 2013). http://ajws.org/what_we_do/education/publications/dvar_tzedek/5774/vayishlach.html

Va-yetzei, Genesis 28:10-32:3

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Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/vayetzei

Why is Jacob, Despite Everything, My Father?

By Avraham Burg

In last week’s portion we explored the web of lies that surrounded Jacob from the moment he was born until he reached his final not-very-restful abode. This week’s portion doesn’t give Jacob much rest, either. It’s not only lies that surround him and his family, but heaps of trouble that pursue them. There are people and families that never in a lifetime experience a fraction of what he went through. But he, Jacob, seems to have been a magnet for all the real and symbolic troubles that can possibly appear in a family, to the point where the reader says to himself, if there was ever a family I would not want my family to resemble, it has to be Jacob’s family. There probably wasn’t a single piece of it that functioned properly. And so the inevitable question arises: why was he chosen to be the father of our nation? Why not Joseph, the ruler of Egypt, or Judah, the mighty warrior? For that matter, why him and not Esau? At least Esau isn’t known to have accumulated such a burden of shame and infamy.

Generally speaking, I should make it clear that just as I don’t consider the Torah a Jewish book of science (as in How to Create a World in Six Days), nor do I consider it a history book whose every fact represents actual events. By the same token, I don’t think that the patriarchs were necessarily three consecutive generations of father, son and grandson. The Chumash tells the stories of three great characters who arose during the course of several generations, each of whom embodied certain character traits and personal, national, moral or religious profiles so worthy of note that they became beacons, symbolic fathers of the entire nation. I think it’s even possible that there were no such people at all, and that these characters are archetypes. If that’s that case, then why Jacob? What does he represent?

Abraham is the model of the true believer whose faith burns pure right up until his final breath (and even until the final breaths of his loved ones, who pay the price for his passion). Isaac represents an extreme form of the helplessness that strikes us at various times and places. So often in his personal history he was the passive victim of circumstances not of his doing. Like him, we often long for complete, absolute protection from the vicissitudes of life, only to find ourselves surprised each time that life is so much more creative and imaginative than all our careful plans. And Jacob? Jacob symbolizes our national proclivity for disaster. There are some people who simply attract calamity. They’re accident prone, constantly tripping over something, never quite managing to come home in one piece from wherever they were going. Jacob was like that and so are we, his children and children’s children. The stories are in the past, but their message is eternal because the evil in the universe and in humankind has no expiration date.

We often find ourselves enchanted by stories of runaway children, youngsters forced to leave home to escape family violence. The first of the breed was Jacob, son of Rebecca and Isaac, of the line of Abraham. His older brother, the big, tough hunter, didn’t like him or his oh-so-civilized ways, and hated his childish pranks. Things finally reached the point that Jacob was forced to flee for his life from his hot-tempered brother’s very specific and concrete threat: “Let the days of mourning for my father be at hand; then I will slay my brother Jacob” (Gen. 27:41). This was a family where every private thought became public knowledge, so someone came along and told Esau’s secret to his mother: “And the words of Esau her elder son were told to Rebecca” (Gen 27:42).

And so Jacob sets out on his own, a runaway youth joining the ranks of the fugitives. He goes looking for a family to take him in, in place of his own family, which broke up under circumstances that were partly his own fault. As if it weren’t enough that he has to grow up without a father or mother, the same trauma continues to resonate throughout the rest of his adult life. For twenty-one long years he is cut off from his beloved mother. He loses his childhood sweetheart Rachel while she is still young, before they have had a chance to consummate their love or enjoy the freedom they have purchased from her father, thanks to his beliefs and limitations. No loving, supportive mother, no beloved wife, no tenderness.

The family is unquestionably the arena where Jacob’s life is pounded out. His wives are switched one after the other: Leah, then Rachel, then the concubines that are deposited between his loins for fruitfulness and multiplication. He lives in constant dread of his father-in-law Laban, fearing that he will steal his daughters and concubines. There’s no real trust between him and his wives. Even his beloved Rachel – for whom he labored seven years and then another seven, through summer and winter, in blazing heat and freezing cold – steals her father’s idols and hides the truth from Jacob, tries to deny it and finally brings disaster on them both when she turns out to be the address for the death-curse that escaped Jacob’s lips in his promise to Laban: “‘With whomsoever thou findest thy gods, he shall not live…’ For Jacob knew not that Rachel had stolen them” (Gen 31:32).

That was Jacob’s relationship with his wives. Things were no better with his children – from Reuben, his firstborn, to Benjamin, his last-born, child of Rachel, his only true love. Besides stealing the blessings and rights of the firstborn from his brother Esau, he essentially usurped his brother’s natural role. Perhaps there were customs of this sort in those days, as some ancient archives attest, but the biblical narrator derives no pleasure from these customs. The result is that both of his natural firstborn sons are displaced before his very eyes in the most eternally humiliating fashion. Reuben, his firstborn, exposes the family to the ugliness of incest when he takes his father’s concubine Bilhah between the sheets. Reuben violates his father’s honor in an act more violent and cruel than Jacob’s own act of cheating Isaac and Esau. The result is that Leah’s eldest loses his birthright. Likewise Joseph, Rachel’s firstborn, is taken from the farm into long years of exile, and Jacob is forced to make do with Judah as his heir and bearer of his line into eternity (for out of the tribe of Judah, Yehudah, come the Yehudim, the Jews), even though we have no idea how Jacob felt about him.

Sex, forbidden, impure and brutally violent, never ceases to dictate events in Jacob’s household. Consider the rape of Dinah in Shechem (Gen. 34:1–31), and its bloody consequences. Consider Judah’s involvement with Tamar, his daughter-in-law, lover and whore, who was “with child by harlotry” (Gen. 38:24). Not to mention the business deal Rachel concluded with Leah, trading sex with their husband in exchange for a bunch of mandrake flowers.

And on top of everything else, let’s not forget the trade in children that was conducted in Jacob’s household. The brothers sold seventeen-year-old Joseph to the Midianites, to the Ishmaelites, to Egypt. Afterward they abandoned Simeon in an Egyptian prison. Then they all banded together against their aged father to trade young Benjamin in exchange for the opportunity to feed their family during the famine that was ravaging the land. Through all these misfortunes that plagued Jacob from his earliest childhood right through his final days in Egyptian exile, his body too was damaged beyond repair, leaving him an invalid. Jacob was a healthy man, a strapping shepherd, familiar with the seasons of the year, the fields and the desert, and knowledgeable in the ways of nature. But after a fierce nighttime struggle with a man whose name remains unknown, he is left with a crippled leg. His hip dislocated, he limps on his perpetually aching leg from that day on (Gen. 32:25–30). And he limps in more ways than one: he doesn’t love his first wife, he has grief from his beloved second wife and misery from his concubine and he is forced to witness a bloodbath over the wounded honor of his clan and the rape of his daughter. No wonder he fears the natives, worrying that they might kill him and his household and not be satisfied with merely vilifying his good name, which isn’t so good to begin with.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is our father Jacob. A man with a history like this should have given rise to the Tatars, Mongols, Cossacks or some other warlike tribe. And yet, remarkably, this is the man whose troubled life gave birth to the most positive philosophy of life, one of whose finest rules, according to Rabbi Akiba, is: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Lev. 19:18). The very practical-minded Hillel the Elder rendered the same idea this way: “What is hateful to you, do not unto others” (Mishnah Avot 4:5). It’s amazing, isn’t it? Jacob is the ultimate proof of our claim that the entire Torah is, among other things, the improvement manual for our forefathers’ character flaws. It’s an improvement process that obligates each and every one of us, all day, every day. As the saying goes: happy is the man who is always improving.

Burg, Avraham. "Why is Jacob, Despite Everything, My Father?" The Jewish Daily Forward. (Viewed on November 9, 2013). http://blogs.forward.com/avraham-burg/146999/vayetze-jacob-left/

Blaming the System

By Rabbi Avraham Fischer

Jacob had been involved in an act of deception, and now he becomes the victim of deception. After seven years of working for his uncle Laban, he wishes to marry Rachel, Laban’s younger daughter: “And it was in the morning, that behold it was Leah. And [Jacob] said to Laban “What is this you have done to me?  Did I not work with you for Rachel? And why did you deceive me?” (Genesis 29:25).

Laban, the champion deceiver, tricked Jacob by switching Rachel with Leah. Laban explains himself; after all, he is a recognized leader in the community. When he presents his excuses, he makes a not-so-veiled reference to Jacob’s own act of deception, in which he took the place of his older brother Esau in receiving their father Isaac’s blessing: “It is not done so in our place, to put the younger before the older.  Complete this one’s [Leah’s] week [of celebration] . . .”(Genesis 29:26-27)

The next word in Hebrew is critical to our understanding of Laban’s character:  “v’nitnah.” Theoretically, there are two ways of translating this word.  Ibn Ezra (12th century Spanish commentator) interprets it passively: “she will be given” after the week of celebration for Leah, it will be acceptable for Rachel to marry Jacob.

Most commentaries, however, (including Rashi, Ramban (Nachmanides), and Onkelos (2nd century translator of the Bible into Aramaic) translate this word as active and plural: “We will give” Rachel to you as wife.  But the plural form is hard to understand. Surely, Rachel is Laban’s daughter only!

The Ramban explains: “Laban’s words were spoken with cunning. He said to Jacob ‘It is not done so in our place, for the people of the place will not let me do so, for it would be a shameful act in their eyes. But you fulfill the week of this one and we-–I and all the people of the place–will also give you this one, for we will all consent to the matter, and we will honor you and make a feast as we have done with the first one.”

Laban is saying “I am not to blame for what happened. But what can I do? I am, as you are, at the mercy of social convention.” Laban shifts the responsibility away from himself to others.

Anyone who wishes to have his own way at the expense of others and “get away with it” takes refuge in the “system,” claiming to be but a small cog in the machinery. He “passes the buck.” He argues “I was only following orders.” In this way he can perhaps assuage his own conscience, and he might even satisfy the public.

By blaming the system–and each of us does this from time to time–a person splits himself in two: there is the personal “I,” who always does what is pleasant and right, and there is the “I” that is part of an abstract corpus (the Public, the State, the Community, the Organization, etc.). He compartmentalizes himself but demonstrates a shocking disregard for moral responsibility. Once begun, it is a hard habit to break, and the results can be terrifying: moral schizophrenia.

Judaism insists that each person be one fully integrated “I,” that he take full responsibility for his actions, and act according to what the Torah says is right.

The Talmud teaches (Kiddushin 42b, ff.) that “there is no agency for sinful acts.” This means that if I am appointed by another to commit a sin, I cannot excuse my actions by claiming “He made me do it.” I am responsible for my actions, not anyone else, not the society, not even another part of myself. At times, this might require standing in opposition to and resisting the nameless, faceless “Them.”

This is the central theme of the approaching holiday of Chanukah. During the Second Temple period the world was greatly influenced by Greek culture and its outlook on life. The Jewish people also saw value in Greek civilization and philosophy. However, there came a point when fitting in with the Greek lifestyle would have meant abandoning Torah values.

The Greeks admired physical perfection, and thus condemned the observance of Brit Milah(circumcision) as mutilation. Shabbat and Kashrut became social barriers, and were compromised, then abandoned.  Worshipping the Greek gods became a step towards social acceptance. The primacy of man in Greek philosophy supplanted the primacy of God. Many Jews rationalized their adherence to Greek values by referring to the “spirit of the times.”  The entire world was falling in line. To be modern was to be Greek.

Against this background, it was extremely difficult for some Jews to insist on drawing the line between fitting in and selling out.  In effect, they were saying that they would not join the modern trend of dividing their identities between their Jewish selves and their citizen-of-the-world (that is, Greek) selves. They proclaimed, in the words of Mattityahu  (Mattathias), “Whoever is for Hashem, to me!” There is only one “me,” the one who is defined by loyalty to Hashem.  Even when I participate in the secular world, I do so as a Jew.

The Torah teaches otherwise. The first Patriarch, Abraham, is called Ivri, “the one on the other side.” Abraham courageously, and at great personal risk, did not fall in line with the masses. He opposed the idolatry of his environment, with all its immorality and cruelty.

The whole world was on one side of the ideological divide and Abraham was on the other. The world’s side, the side of multiple gods, was a world of divided selves. Abraham stood on the side of a world-view that insisted that, just as Hashem is One, man must strive for oneness. As Jews–both as individuals and as a nation–we are bidden to follow his example.

Only a moral lightweight like Laban can split himself into his public-self and his private-self, claiming that he is justified.  Ultimately, Laban, the Great Deceiver, succeeds only in deceiving himself. In time, Jacob sees Laban for what he is.

Jacob on the other hand, exemplifies Emet, the complete truth. He ventures into the world at large, even spending 20 years under Laban’s influence, but retains his unified self. The message he sends his brother Esav, with the message between the lines seen by Rashi, is “With Laban have I dwelled, and the 613 Mitzvot (commandments) have I kept.”  And when he finally arrives in Israel, he arrives Shalem–whole, undivided, one.

We are enjoined to reject the example of Laban, and to aspire to the examples of Abraham and Jacob. Each of us must acknowledge that we have one “I.” Our challenge as Jews is to align that “I” with the eternal values of the Torah.

Fischer, Avraham. "Blaming Society." My Jewish Learning. (Viewed on November 9, 2013). http://www.myjewishlearning.com/texts/Bible/Weekly_Torah_Portion/vayetze_ou5761.shtml?p=0

Tol’dot, Genesis 25:19-28:9

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Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/toldot

Toldot: Hunting Down One Good Prayer

By Chaya Lester

In this week’s parsha we read that Isaac prayed for his barren wife Rebecca. It is notable that the term used here is “lanochach eshto”, which can be read literally as he prayed “standing before”, or “opposite” his wife. Midrash Rabbah picks up on this curious phrase and paints a picture of Isaac and Rebecca standing together, facing each other in shared prayer. It’s a poignant image of a couple working together in a striking face-to-face pose; an admirable Biblical model for partnership.

So one might ask, if this is such a partnership, why is it that it is Isaac’s prayer alone that is recorded & answered by God. Rashi explains that his prayers were heard because he was the son of a saint, whereas Rebecca is the daughter of an evil man. The poem I’m about to share attempts to take that answer one step further.

But first, let’s look briefly at a little of what we know about Isaac’s psychological makeup. Later in the parsha we read that Isaac’s eyes grew dim in his old age. The Midrash explicitly links Isaac’s blindness to his experience of being bound upon the altar beneath his father’s sacrificial blade. It records that angels witnessing the binding wept tears that dropped into Isaac’s eyes. Those very tears were taken as the cause of his blindness later in life.

Aviva Zornberg likens Isaac’s blindness to a type of psychological vertigo. She notes a remarkable phenomena where people who suffer traumatic experiences earlier in life can often, in later years, suffer from serious vision impairment. It is as if their compromised vision in old age is an expression of years of repressed emotion. Their blindness manifests a psychosomatic drive to un-see all the horrors that they had witness so long ago.

According to these findings, blindness can be an indicator of unprocessed trauma. As the text itself says, “Isaac’s eyes became dimmed from seeing.” His eyes were dimmed from the impact of all that he had seen. And so we return to the scene of Rivka and Isaac’s prayer for children with this in mind.

Yes, God hears Isaac’s prayers because he was the son of a saint; a man so saintly that he was willing to sacrifice his beloved son! We must ask ourselves what psychological impact did that near-sacrifice have on Isaac? And, most pointedly, what sort of an impact did it have on Isaac’s stance towards begetting and parenting his own children.

In keeping with their model of an honest face-to-face relationship, Rebecca in this poem urges her husband to do the laborious work of processing his past. She, in her own desire for children, begs him to confront whatever resistances he may have to generating his future generations.

It is striking that the opening & title of the parsha, “Toldot Yitzchak”, means the Generations of Isaac. Such a title could thus be seen as a testimony to his successfully stepping up to the task of continuity and child-rearing in the face of his own complex childhood.

STANDING OPPOSITE ISAAC
You were broken
like
porcelain.
Dashed against a desert.
Shattered neath a father’s
          dagger.
And a flinty mirror streaked
          with tears
          dripped
          not blood
          but blindness
          into your grey hairs.
Your pieces plastered
back together
hold me tender
a fragile tendon
– tiptoed to the next generation.
You, the quiet casualty
of your father’s spiritual
ambitions.
Perhaps you fear
that G-d demand
you do the same
if you were to father
your own ambitions.
– Would you?
Or would you rather
          pray?
Pray for me.
Here –
where you were
born up
on that unforgiving rock,
beneath an angel’s eye
and ram’s horn
fortuitously caught.
Would you pray a future
to fill this vacant womb?
Would you pray for continuity?
Would you
– continue?
And tell me, husband dear,
can you eye your own
resistance
and defy your very fears?
Forgo the blindness
that has plagued you
and face your own
descendants
with a faith
that here
is holy
and life
is weighty
and no more waiting
for safety
but rather brave the gaze
of a world that is
crazy
beautiful
and full of grace.
And shun the blade
that bids you to
accuse your father
or mourn your mother
or resent your God
or blame anyone other
than yourself
for your own debilitating
fears?
For the hand that
you are dealt
is but yours to
commandeer.
So let’s move on
to making our own
glaring
parenting
mistakes.
To risking inflicting
some untold & unending
trauma onto our children.
And with a
well-intentioned will,
sacred and sincere,
let us lift our prayers
to God’s awaiting ears.
With the knowledge
that beyond old traumas
and emotions on the mend
there is meaning
to the riddle
of Moriah
though our tongues
are twisted
and our eyes are dimmed.
Come, husband
to this field
with me
and hunt down
one good prayer.
For the fixing of your childhood
is through fathering your children.
          if you dare.
Lester, Chaya. "Hunting Down One Good Prayer." Spoken Word Torah. (Viewed November 2, 2013). http://blogs.jpost.com/content/toldot-hunting-down-one-good-prayer-0

Sharing The Blessing

Isaac’s decision to bless both of his sons gives us hope for achieving a peaceful solution to the conflict between Jews and Palestinians.

By Rabbi Daniel Bronstein

Even by biblical standards, few statements are as stark as God’s words to Rebekah after the matriarch had conceived twins. “Two nations are in your womb,” God explains, “And two peoples shall be separated…And the elder shall serve the younger.”

Indeed, few Biblical struggles, few familial conflicts–in a book filled with stories of intra-family struggles–are as tragic as the confrontation between Jacob and Esau.

It seems that from that moment, the twin brothers clashed and competed over the family birthright and legacy. The twin grandsons of Abraham and Sarah were, from their birth onwards, locked in a constant struggle over inheriting the prophetic mantle of Abraham and Sarah, inheriting the leadership over the family, and of course, inheriting the riches of the land which God had first promised to Abraham.

As the Torah portion Toledot unfolds, we witness Jacob, the younger brother, gaining through guile what had first been granted to Esau by virtue of being born first. Together, Jacob and Rebekah successfully conspire to transfer the blessing Isaac had intended for Esau over to the younger brother. More than being mere words, Isaac’s blessing was critical because it served as the instrument for bestowing the family legacy, leadership, and ownership of the land.

Yet, in the end, we read that Isaac also rejects playing a zero sum game and grants an alternative blessing to Esau. Although the two blessings are not identical, Isaac, nonetheless, chooses to depart from the tradition of granting a single blessing to his eldest son and instead blesses both of his children.

Some of the sages are puzzled over the multiple blessings, while others attribute Isaac’s actions to a father’s compassion for a grieving child. But whatever the reasons, Isaac’s deed offers us an important lesson in the contemporary struggle for peace. Far from being a perfect analogy, there are still many elements in this story all too reminiscent of the conflict between Jews and Palestinians.

This present-day conflict is also the story of two nations at war with one another from the moment of conception. And as the tragic violence continues between the contemporary nations, we are also reminded that Jacob and Esau also fought over being blessed with the Land. Finally, we are reminded that along with Jacob and Esau, Jews and Arabs are also descendents of Abraham. Like Jacob and Esau, today’s conflict seems unsolvable, and we lament over being locked into what appears to be an eternal struggle.

However, Isaac’s blessings for Jacob and Esau leave us with a measure of hope, even now when many despair of ever achieving peace in the holy land. Isaac blesses both sons with inheritances of fruitful land. Facing different circumstances and possessing different traits, both twins nevertheless receive their father’s blessing–and with it a measure of hope for future descendants of Abraham.

One Jewish tradition teaches that possession of sufficient food and drink is of itself a profound blessing. Still, “if there is no peace,” argued our sages, “there is nothing at all, for “peace equals all else.” Today, we must also reject facile zero sum games, and find ways to share the blessings.

While we may possess sufficient sustenance, we still live without peace. Today, against expectations and against the odds, we also must struggle to share the blessings of our ancestors and to share in the blessings of the land. Now more, than ever, let us remember Isaac’s deeds, and remember that ultimately, “peace equals all else.”

Bronstein, Daniel. "Sharing the Blessing." My Jewish Learning. (Viewed November 1, 2013). http://www.myjewishlearning.com/texts/Bible/Weekly_Torah_Portion/toldot_socialaction5761.shtml?p=0

Peoplehood Activities: Connecting to the Tribe

Reflection and Opinion, , , , ,

As I began to think about the question of what activities connect the Jewish People, it seemed quite straightforward to me. Then I made the mistake of doing a little more research into the concept of “Peoplehood.” Suddenly, things weren’t quite so simple.
Continue reading Peoplehood Activities: Connecting to the Tribe →

Chayei Sarah, Genesis 23:1-25:18

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Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/chayeisara

You Can’t Go Home Again. Sort Of.

By Rabbi Niles Elliot Goldstein

The Torah portion for this week raises a critically important existential question, a query that writers, psychologists and seekers have asked for many, many years:  Can we ever really go home again?

Chayei Sarah, or The Life of Sarah, encompasses death and birth, ends and beginnings, and continuity. It offers a story about the polarity of mortal existence. It also highlights the cyclical, and sometimes paradoxical, nature of the human journey.

The portion gets its name from the opening two verses of the narrative, which recount the life and describe the death of the first matriarch of the Jewish people. Immediately after Sarah dies, the aged Abraham purchases the cave of Machpelah from its Hittite owner, Ephron. From that point forward, the cave and the land around it will serve as the burial site, not only for Abraham’s wife but for Abraham himself, as well as his progeny.

The cave also serves as a symbol. After the patriarch’s horrific trial on Mount Moriah (the binding and near sacrifice of his son Isaac), and following the loss of his beloved wife and lifelong partner, Abraham is in dire need of something tangible — something concrete — that he can possess and “control.” Tested by God and bowed by the irresistible power of mortality, the gravesite becomes Abraham’s foothold in the land of Canaan, but it also represents an anchor of security in the midst of forces that are beyond his ability to fathom or resist.

The first chapter in the life of the Jewish people has come to a close. The “mother” who gave birth to the people of Israel has died. But a new chapter has begun.

As T.S. Eliot writes in his poem, “Little Gidding”:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

In Chayei Sarah, Abraham stands at a threshold, a shadow place between ends and beginnings, death and new life. When we, like the patriarch, stand at a threshold, we often feel as if we are neither here nor there: we teeter in liminal space, unsure of our footing and uncertain about our next steps. A threshold can usher in change, but it can also trigger feelings of panic. Yet Abraham does not panic. Instead, he acts quickly and with resolve.

After his purchase of the gravesite and Sarah’s burial in it, the narrative tells us that Abraham is now “old, advanced in years” (Gen. 24:1), and the juxtaposition of this information with Sarah’s interment implies that the patriarch’s life is nearing its end as well, and that Abraham will soon join his wife in the cave of Machpelah. In the next verse, Abraham orders his senior servant to travel to the land of the patriarch’s birth in order to find a wife for his son Isaac — and to swear an oath that he will not choose a woman from among the Canaanites. When the servant asks whether Isaac should meet him there in the event the prospective bride is unwilling to follow him, Abraham replies, “On no account must you take my son back there!” (Gen. 24:6)

Abraham is adamant about this point. He reaffirms and reinforces it two verses later, when we hear his very last words: “Do not take my son back there!” (Gen. 24:8) Yet while the patriarch is (notably) resolute and passionate about his son never setting foot in his homeland, Abraham seems just as determined in his desire to find Isaac a wife from his homeland.

The story presents us with a paradox. On one hand, Abraham’s words and directive convey the idea that we cannot, and should not, try to go home again. Many years earlier, Abraham heeded God’s call, left his father’s house, and began a covenantal relationship between God and his future progeny. There is no going back — not for Abraham, nor for his son and all those to follow.

The past must remain in the past. On the other hand, if we view the woman who will eventually become Isaac’s wife (Rebekah) as a metaphor for “home,” then the narrative — and the teaching behind it — gets more complicated. While we can’t go home again, we can retrieve and reclaim aspects of our heritage. Where we have come from informs and shapes who we will be. Tribal continuity is something we should strive for with all of our heart and soul.

Abraham dies and is buried with Sarah in the cave of Machpelah. The servant finds Rebekah and brings her back to Canaan to marry Isaac. And the cycle of life continues.

T.S. Eliot goes on in his poem:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning.

Living at the threshold, as Abraham does in this week’s Torah portion — living at all, really — means that our perceptions of time and self will always be in a state of flux: ends will give birth to new beginnings, and beginnings will eventually transform into ends. Like the patriarch’s clan, we have little choice but to embark, and embark again and again, on the ever-cyclical journey.

Yet our souls crave rest. And completion. When our exploration comes to a close, our focus will shift from perception to recognition. We will see, and we will be wise enough to finally understand, that the end we longed for was actually just another beginning.

Elliot Goldstein, Niles. "You Can't Go Home Again. Sort Of." Odyssey Networks. (Viewed on October 25, 2013). http://www.odysseynetworks.org/news/2013/10/21/you-can%E2%80%99t-go-home-again-sort-of-hayyei-sarah-genesis-231-2518

D’var Tzedek

By Adina Gerver

When read with modern sensibilities, Genesis 24 is a traditional tale about a man who travels to a far-off land to find a woman to marry his master’s son. Imagine that you are that woman, going about your daily chores when a strange man approaches you. He gazes at you for a bit, and finding you to be a beautiful virgin, inquires as to your family lineage. Then he meets with your father and brother, who, seeing the many gifts that the servant has bestowed upon you and them, say without hesitation, “Take her and go, and let her be a wife to your master’s son.”

This is the scene that unfolds in Genesis 24—a traditional story, but with a surprising twist: Rebecca’s father, Bethuel, and brother, Laban, recant, and say “Let us call the girl and ask for her reply.” This verse is extraneous to the story and does not change the narrative at all, since Rebecca immediately agrees to go. What is it doing here? The Rabbis might have simply dismissed this as a stalling tactic since this verse appears in the context of the servant’s desire to take Rebecca with him immediately and her family’s desire that he tarry. Instead, Rashi makes a bold move and writes that from this specific phrase about a specific woman, we learn a general principle: a woman cannot be married against her will in Jewish law. Thus, Rebecca is carried to a far off land to marry Isaac, but with an express consent that impacts all Jewish women: “I will go.”

This story, which seems at first to solely treat women as silent property to be exchanged at will, is made slightly less disturbing by the important inclusion of Rebecca’s consent. Her voice matters at this moment, and Rashi amplifies it to make sure it is heard in future generations. He takes this tiny gap in the patriarchy-clad story and opens it up further, making women’s voices relevant to halachah as a whole.

This incident leaves a small, open space for Rebecca to be an active player in the decisions about her own life, one the Rabbis expanded to create greater change—and we can follow their lead. We must find the places where gender roles are cracking, where women’s voices are beginning to be heard, and wedge into those openings to create the chance for a stronger voice with wider resonance. We can find small elements of hope in patriarchal societies and expand upon them to make sustainable, systemic change.

Across the globe, when women in traditional societies are given the chance to be heard—on matters of their own health, the financial well-being of their families, or, more broadly, the democratic process—women, men and children flourish. When women are not allowed to be active decision makers in their own lives and in the lives of their families, they founder.

Grassroots organizations around the world are working to widen the space for women created by Rebecca. The Afghan Women’s Resource Center (AWRC) finds small gaps in patriarchy and, in those gaps, offers courses in literacy, health, women’s rights and micro enterprise. USOFOORAL ESUPAN in Senegal found a gap, and in it runs a sustainable gardening project that will provide income for 60 women and youth. The Center for Domestic Violence Prevention (CEDOVIP) in Uganda finds space for change at the grassroots level, and in that space, is mobilizing communities to change attitudes and behaviors that perpetuate domestic violence.

These organizations give women—if not Rebecca, then Farhat, Ramatulai, and Nabulungi—voices, and provide opportunities through which they can begin to defeat problems that might otherwise be overwhelming. Rather than turning away from an entire society in resignation, they find the places where women can speak and they work to expand those spaces from the inside, much as Rashi did with Genesis 24:57. And so must we each listen for openings and wedge into those cracks the fight for women’s empowerment.

Gerver, Adina. "Dvar Tzedek, Parshat Chayei Sarah." American Jewish World Service. (Viewed on October 25, 2013). http://ajws.org/what_we_do/education/publications/dvar_tzedek/5774/chayei_sarah.html

The Holocaust

Reflection and Opinion, , , , ,
The Values and Responsibilities That Arise From Holocaust Study

I learned about the Holocaust in school. I then had much of what I learned reinforced in a very visual way when I traveled through Europe. In university, as a student of political theory, many of the theoretical concepts I studied grew out of the aftermath of the Holocaust. I have watched many documentaries related to the Holocaust and, most recently, have watched much of the Eichmann trial that took place in Jerusalem. I found the trial particularly fascinating in its references to international legal instruments that were implemented in response to the horrors of the Holocaust and destruction of World War II: the Charter of the United Nations, the Geneva Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, for example.
Continue reading The Holocaust →

Kiddushin and The Sacred

Reflection and Opinion, , , , ,

What makes a relationship “sacred?” In what ways can you enhance the holiness of your relationship?

Understanding the Jewish conception of marriage, Kiddushin, was an important aspect of my Jewish journey and required me to answer some significant questions. How is my relationship made sacred? How do I make it holy? Even beginning to address such questions was difficult: for some reason, I felt as if I was required to be in a “sacred” place with my spouse it order to begin the process of considering such things, which brought me around in a circle, of course, trying to determine what “sacred” actually looks like.
Continue reading Kiddushin and The Sacred →

Va-yera, Genesis 18:1-22:24

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Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/vayera

The Non-Sacrifice of Isaac

By Mark Kirschbaum

 “I believe that Avraham is not the ultimate expression of faith as viewed in the Jewish sources; we will see later that Moses replaces Avraham exactly on this point- Moses is great because of his self-effacing concern for the people as a whole even at the risk of his own personal relationship with God- this being the truer archetype of the Jewish spiritual dialectic continually challenging the relationship between personal needs and communal responsibility.”

I don’t think I need to retell the story of the akedah, the “sacrifice of Isaac” by his father Abraham, following the word of God, I find it emotionally difficult to retell the tale in a literal manner. I do think the entire episode demands a dramatic reevaluation.

I suppose, if I wanted to put my problem with this passage in an inflammatory manner, I could ask, what kind of God is it that puts any person through this kind of “test”, and what kind of man is Abraham if he chooses to follow such a command? Eli Wiesel tells the story of a woman at the gates of Auschwitz (a story borrowed and corrupted in Sophie’s Choice) who is asked to choose which of her two children will be sent to the crematorium, her immediate response is a howling, shrieking insanity; her tormentors shot her on the spot.

No human being can or should ever be put through what may be the cruelest form of torture, the loss of a child, certainly not by a compassionate God.

Furthermore, if Abraham’s action is the apogee of the religious experience, as is commonly accepted particularly after the classic book of Kierkegaard on the subject, then why do we shudder nowadays when children are sent by their parents to die for a political cause? Are others truer to the words of our text than we are? Let us ask frankly, what kind of lesson are we supposed to derive from this perasha?

Let us return to Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling”, probably the most resonant philosophical/theological reading of this passage in Western literature. According to Kierkegaard, an honest reading of this text presents us with an Abraham who is either a murderer, or a man fully dedicated to the word of God even when God’s word is a total rupture with the demands of the ethical. This act of Abraham’s is the epitome of the ‘religious’, which is invariably at odds and transcendent to the merely ‘ethical’; contained within this act is also a powerful statement of individual singularity as opposed to surrendering what is unique in us to the demands of the collective.

Kierkegaard’s approach to the akedah text in Fear and Trembling had major repercussions in the world of Jewish thought; for example, one noted Orthodox thinker wrote a book called “Fear and Trembling and Fire” which was an attempt to read Kierkegaard into the Hassidic thinkers in a kind of theological apologetics, partly due to R. Soloveitchik’s apparent fondness for Kierkegaard’s approach.

I suppose the Kierkegaardian reading is more attractive reading than what many of us might have encountered in Lithuanian yeshivot- the lessons the Beis Halevi derives from this text, for example, are

1. That the akedah occurred so that Avraham would not become tempted to love Yishmael more, and

2. That all of us who sometimes bend Halacha to support our children are not at the level of Avraham (i.e., that we should be ready to harm our families if the choice has to be made!).

In my college years, under the influence of R. Soloveitchik, I too became a “Kierkegaardian”; I taught that position as a youth leader many times. Here I’ll present why we should move from this Kierkegaardian reading of this problematic text.

Two contemporary thinkers have recently taken on Kierkegaard specifically in terms of his approach to the Akedah (aside from the obvious Christological referent behind Kierkegaard’s reading of the text). In two essays, collected in “Proper Names”, Levinas is sympathetic to Kierkegaard’s rehabilitation of subjectivity (that is, the emphasis on the individual’s personal decision process) , particularly in relation to the idealist thinking he was confronting (which subsumed the individual into larger universal processes), but at the same time reminds us of the dangers of “overcoming” the realm of the ethical in favor of purely individual yearnings- he explicitly links this approach to the rise of Nazism (Levinas, Proper Names, pp. 76).

According to Levinas, once our sole responsibility is “torment for self”, without concern for the Other, once our belief

…is no longer justified in the outer world, it is at once communication and solitude, and hence violence and passion. (Proper Names pp. 72).

Much like in his critique of Heidegger, Levinas is concerned that idolization of the abstract and purely individual over the interpersonal (the concern for other people) will lead believers to justify the eradication of those other people who seem to stand in the way of their individual desires.

Derrida, in his recent “The Gift of Death”, disagrees with Kierkegaard’s reading from the opposite direction, denying the transcendence of the ethical by denying the uniqueness of this supposed victory over the ethical of Kierkegaard’s conception, as summarized in Derrida’s refrain, “tout autre est tout autre“, all others are entirely Other, so that at all times, every decision one makes for one’s self is a sort of akedah. To Derrida, Kierkegaard’s critique of the “ethical” where the ethical is a kind of general consensus that is surrendered to by the individual, is false, because at every moment, in every particular ethical response, I am exercising my singularity, privileging my own personal, particular choices:

….I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without sacrificing the other other, the other others. Tout autre est tout autre, every one else is completely or wholly other. The simple concepts of alterity and of singularity constitute the concept of duty as much as that of responsibility. As a result the concepts of responsibility, of decision, or of duty, are condemned a priori to paradox, scandal, and aporia. As soon as I enter into a relation with the other, with the gaze, look, request, love, command, or call of the other, I know that I can respond only by sacrificing ethics, that is, by sacrificing whatever obliges me to also respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all the others. What binds me to singularities, to this one or that one, male or female, rather than that one or this one, remains fully unjustifiable (this is Abraham’s hyper-ethical sacrifice) (The Gift of Death pp 68-71)

Thus, any act of duty on behalf of those close to me is in some sense a sacrifice on Moriah of all those others who could also benefit from my actions; then, this

“absolute duty (to those who he chooses as beneficiaries of his necessary correct action) absolves him of every debt and releases him from every duty. Absolute ab-solution” (pp73).

It is a reasonable assumption that the Hassidic masters did not read Kierkegaard (not least due to the dearth of reliable Danish-Yiddish translators), but closer in spirit to the woman with the unthinkable choice in Wiesel’s book, they could not accept that God had at any point asked Avraham to kill his son.

I will present several thinkers who explicitly deny that God or Abraham ever thought actually murdering Isaac was the intent, and how they thus read this text. I am emboldened in finding these alternate readings by the fact that even back in the medieval period, Ramban describes the entire Akeda episode as a punishment to Avraham; furthermore, I believe that Avraham is not the ultimate expression of faith as viewed in the Jewish sources; we will see later that Moses replaces Avraham exactly on this point- Moses is great because of his self-effacing concern for the people as a whole even at the risk of his own personal relationship with God- this being the truer archetype of the Jewish spiritual dialectic continually challenging the relationship between personal needs and communal responsibility.

The Beer Mayim Hayim offers the most “ethical” reading, interesting both in light of Levinas’ and Derrida’s critique of Kierkegaard’s religious versus ethical. He attempts to explain how it was possible for Abraham to believe that God was asking this sacrifice from him, by viewing it not as a blind response to a command, but from an ethical perspective. Abraham, he explains, had seen the corruption of the world around him, especially that of Sodom, and thought that perhaps the sacrifice of Yitzhak would, as with the asara harugei malhut, the ten martyrs of Roman times who paid with their lives as a result of trying to teach their entire generation, serve in lieu of the destruction again of all of humanity. One life to save many lives.

The Noam Elimelech is more radical, stating flat out that neither Abraham nor Isaac had any serious belief that God actually wanted a sacrifice to be carried out, basing this assumption on a textual clue:

…Abraham whose trait was mercy went with the certainty that both would return safely, as he says to his accompanying youths, we will pray and return to you (in the plural)…

Their test was that they went up with full intention ki’eelu, “as though” they were actually going to carry it out. For what God wants is a response to his call, the actual action being less important. The intention was transformed adequately into action by the splitting of the wood in creation of the altar, and that was sufficient response.

Derrida in “The Gift of Death” at one point offers a properly midrashic position that suggests an encounter with traditional sources- he points out on pp 58 that the Hebrew word korban, the usual biblical term for sacrifice is not used in this perasha, and explains, that a sacrifice, a korban, “supposes the putting to death of the unique in terms of its being unique, irreplaceable, and most precious”. In our essay on Perashat Vayikra we discuss at length, the way in which a korban is “wasted”, by which we restore the uniqueness of the “sacred” by removing it from the economy of personal use (nicely paralleling Battaile). Derrida could have been quoting directly from the Bais Yaakov who points out that no human being must ever be that far transformed; humans can’t be utterly wasted like a korban– the human has a continuous “use” in serving God (Lainer edition pp 162 and 164). Thus, Abraham refused to accept the idea that all the work he had done to promote the value of God in the world would be put at risk by killing his son, and figured throughout the three day journey that indeed there was some other meaning to this command to bind his son.

Similarly, the Kedushat Levi points out that Avraham, who in the Midrash is frequently described as one who fulfilled all 613 mitzvot intuitively, without a command (because of his autonomous intuition as to what actions would bring him closer to God) needed in this particular case to be commanded, because Abraham could not intuit any sense of meaning or value in this action; justification for his sense that there was no sense to the original command is that in the end he was commanded not to sacrifice Yitzhak, proving the senselessness of the first three days. The Kedushat Levi adds, and in this is followed by R. Kook, the sense of the whole exercise is in fact the senselessness of using human life as a means of sacrifice, the point of the text is the non-sacrificing of Yitzhak, thus for the initial (senseless) command Avraham is called by name once, whereas in the call to Avraham not to strike at Yitzhak at all, he is called by name twice, “Abraham Abraham”, as a sign of love- it is the senselessness of the initial command that is the true message of the Akeda narrative.

The Tiferet Shelomo goes furthest in his reading of the Akedah, with a reading which he reprises several times in the work (for a powerful example, see Perashat Re’eh, pp 249). To him the word “nisayon” does not mean a test, there was no test here, and neither God nor Abraham read it this way.

He states that the root of the word nisayon are the initial Hebrew letters “NS“, an acronym for “Somech Noflim“, meaning ‘support for those who are falling’, in this case, for those failing or flagging in spiritual resolve. The purpose of this exercise was not to test Abraham, but rather as a ritual, a way for Abraham, mystical archetype of Love, to symbolically/textually bind Yitzhak, mystical archetype of Severity and Judgement, thus creating an eternal symbol of spiritual yearning overcoming personal self judgements of inadequacy and failing. This strengthening of the weak needed to be done right at the beginning of Jewish history, where all the future descendants of the Abrahamic message are represented by Isaac, son of Abraham. Thus the akedah becomes a spiritual ritual enactment, a mystical exercise, meant as a symbol of will overcoming self doubt.

These texts should be adequate demonstration that the Hassidic commentators were uncomfortable with a reading of the Akeda in which God could be seen as demanding the murder of Isaac, and in which Avraham could be seen as virtuous by acceding to a demand to actually murder his son.

Do we have a reading in which Avraham protests this trial? The Aish Kodesh argues, poignantly, that it is not Abraham who vigorously protests this episode, but rather his wife, Sarah!

According to the Aish Kodesh, the very next text begins by stating the number of years Sarah lived, then repeats, these were the years of Sarah, and continues the narrative by recounting the episode surrounding the obtaining of a proper burial site for her by Abraham.

Rashi derives two lessons from this odd verse- first, that the strange way in which the numbers are presented is meant to teach us that all her years were good ones, and secondly, the proximity of this narrative to the previous text of theAkeda, is to link the akeda episode as cause of her death.

According to the Midrash, based on this sequence of narratives, Sarah’s soul literally “flew off” (parcha nishmata) when she was told of the Akeda. The Aish Kodesh, writing in the Warsaw Ghetto, understands this Midrash in teaching us that Sarah, upon hearing of the akedah, gave up her soul as a protest statement towards God. She said, there is only so much a human being can be pushed, only so much in which they can be tested. The human soul cannot withstand every level of suffering. This type of trial, one in which ones children are taken, she protested towards God, is not acceptable; foreseeing the unfortunate woman of Elie Wiesel’s book, she cried out that even if one could withstand this type of challenge, they would be broken and be only a shattered remnant of the person they were, (quoting a line from BT Bava Kama 65. “what’s the difference between being partially killed or being totally killed?”)

From Rashi’s explanation of the repetition in the text “these were the years of Sarah” that all her years were equal and pure, the Aish Kodesh understands that God agreed with Sarah, accepted her protest, and didn’t hold the years she sacrificed against her as rebellious or erroneous…

Nowadays, more than ever, it is our responsibility follow Sarah in this regard, and to demand from God, from ourselves, and from all of humanity the end of days in which parents must mourn children sacrificed in violence for ideology, and a return to a political situation where the Akedah is but a textual exercise and spiritual archetype, not a daily reality for parents and children around the world.

Kirschbaum, Mark. "Torah Commentary: Perashat Vayera, The Non-Sacrifice of Isaac." Tikkun Daily Blog. (Viewed on October 12, 2013). https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2012/11/01/torah-commentary-perashat-vayera-the-non-sacrifice-of-isaac/

Lech Lecha, Genesis 12:1-17:27

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Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/lechlecha

A Patriarchy Is, After All, a Patriarchy

By Rabbi Elizabeth Dunsker

Parashat Lech L’cha contains the first of three wife-sister episodes in the Book of Genesis. These moments are disturbing. As the original patriarch and matriarch of the Jewish people, we want to see a strong and loving relationship between Abraham and Sarah. We want them to love and respect each other. We want them to serve as role models for us. Unfortunately, these incidents show us an uncomfortable side of their relationship that few of us would like to emulate.

As they travel toward the Negev there is a famine, so Abram and Sarai (their original names) turn toward Egypt. Fearing for their safety there, Abram says to Sarai, “I know what a beautiful woman you are! So when the Egyptians see you, and say: ‘This is his wife,’ they may kill me; but you they shall keep alive. Please say that you are my sister, that on your account it may go well for me, and that my life may be spared because of you” (Genesis 12:11–13). Sarai agrees, and when they enter Egypt it is just as Abram predicted. Sarai’s beauty is noticed, and she is taken to the Pharaoh’s palace. Abram then acquires “sheep, cattle, and asses, male and female slaves, she-asses and camels” because of her (Genesis 12:15).

This story is disturbing on so many levels. Why would Abram be so willing to offer Sarai to the Egyptians? Why would Sarai agree to such an arrangement? How could Abram (whom we expect to have high moral standards) accept riches for the taking of Sarai? Also, we understand the ancient system of marriage to be about protecting women sexually: through marriage a woman is to be protected from the advances of others. However, in this case her husband predicts what will happen and protects himself by hiding the true nature of their relationship, leaving Sarai as vulnerable as a woman traveling alone.

The biblical scholar Tikva Frymer-Kensky notes:

These narratives relate the story as most biblical stories are related, matter-of-factly, without moral judgment. But the choice of words indicates clearly what is going on. “When he drew close . . . when Abram arrived in Egypt” [Genesis 12:11–14]. The story uses the masculine singular of the verbs even though Abram was traveling with Sarai and probably with an entire entourage. This is a story about Abram, focused on Abram and told as if through Abram’s eyes. Abram is going, Sarai and the household move “with him” until “the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house” [Genesis 12:15]. The very rare passive “was taken” [vatukach] emphasizes that she no longer has independent volition. She is also stripped of her individuality, no longer recognized as a person, for both Abram and Pharaoh treat her as “a woman”—an unspecified generic object of desire. Sarai has been commodified, and nobody in these stories uses her name. No longer Sarai, she is “she” or “wife” or “this one” or “woman,” an object being transferred from Abram’s household to Pharaoh’s, there to be a slave-concubine. But God has other plans. (Reading the Women of the Bible, Tikvah Frymer-Kensky [New York: Schocken Books, 2002], pp. 94–95. Chapter and verse references and transliteration here is mine.)

Frymer-Kensky notes for us the way the language here can help us to better understand this story. It is not Sarai’s story, it is Abram’s. Sarai is the object not the subject, and as the object her experience is irrelevant. Her sacrifice for her husband goes unnoticed as a sacrifice. As Frymer-Kensky also notes, “A patriarchy is, after all, a patriarchy” (ibid. p. 98). Sarai is not a wife in the same way that we, with our modern minds and relationships, understand “wife”; Sarai is property and is treated reasonably as such.

But of course, we cannot leave things there comfortably. If we are to find meaning and substance in our stories, then we cannot merely end the conversation by saying: “That’s how it was then; who are we to judge”? We must judge, we must struggle, we must wrestle meaning especially from these disturbing instances, or else we risk allowing the uncomfortable scenes to disappear: these too are a part of our story and I believe they must be explored.

There is some redemption here. While Abram and Pharaoh negotiate the value of “the woman,” and see her only as one more possession, God does not. The story continues, “But the Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his household with mighty plagues on account of Sarai, the wife of Abram” (Genesis 12:17). For God, Sarai is the subject. For God, Sarai’s experience is important. For God, Sarai is far more than a mere possession to be bought and sold. For God, she is not “the woman,” she is Sarai; a unique and special human being and the subject of her story. God afflicts Pharaoh for her. Her suffering is meaningful to God, if not to her husband.

“A patriarchy is, after all, a patriarchy,” but that need not be the end of the story. When a person has been mistreated, underestimated, ignored, and so on, it may lead him or her to feel unworthy and forgotten. Sarai’s humanity and individual personhood was recognized and remembered by God. I believe this is true for all of us. God recognizes the value and worth of each of us. For God, we are each unique and important. For God, we each have a name. For God, we are each the subject rather than the object. If only we as humans could also recognize the unique value of every other human and keep far from the objectification of others that continues to plague our species, we might create relationships that future generations will look to emulate. What a world we would create then!

Dunsker, Elizabeth. "A Patriarchy Is, After All, a Patriarchy." Dvar Torah. Reformjudaism.org. (Viewed on October 8, 2013). http://www.reformjudaism.org/patriarchy-after-all-patriarchy

Was Abraham the First Feminist?

By Chanah Weisberg

Living in the 21st century, we have cause to celebrate the great advances that have been made in the past 100 years in granting women rights and freedoms—freedoms that are unprecedented in all of recorded history.

And yet, despite the real advances in women’s rights, when I view the image of womanhood as it is portrayed in today’s media, I can’t help but cringe. What message is being sent about femininity in a society where a woman’s physical attributes are emphasized as being of prime (or sole) importance?

To me, feminism means that, along with certain freedoms, a woman is treated as more than a physical being. It means that she is seen as a We have cause to celebrate the great advances that have been made in the past 100 years multidimensional individual who has spiritual, intellectual and emotional strengths (and needs) which are recognized, developed and expressed.

As the Lubavitcher Rebbe said, “All human beings, men and women, were created for the same purpose—to fuse body and soul in order to make themselves and their world a better and holier place. The difference lies only in the different tools each has been given to fulfill their common goal.”

According to this definition of feminism—as a wholesome perspective on the totality of a person—we could perhaps see Abraham as the first feminist, fighting to educate the world about the rights of women.

Let’s look at Abraham and Sarah’s story.

A famine in the land of Canaan causes Abraham and Sarah to go down to Egypt. Sarah is seen by Pharaoh’s officers and, because of her beauty, she is forcibly taken into Pharaoh palace. Only God’s miraculous intervention saves her. She and Abraham prepare to leave the country laden with wealth (bestowed by Pharaoh), having successfully accomplished their physical and spiritual mission in the land.

Let’s take a closer look at the wording of the text:

As Abraham and Sarah are ready to leave Egypt, the verse tells us, “Abram went up from Egypt.” It makes sense for the verse to describe this journey as an ascent upwards, because they would need to travel northward to reach their destination in the land of Canaan.

However, a metaphorical reading of the verse indicates that Abraham also rose to new heights after his experience in Egypt. His sojourn in Egypt enriched him materially, but also personally. He returned to Canaan as a bolder, stronger leader, even more ready to enlighten the world with his message. His experience in Egypt showed him how diametrically opposed his vision was to the rest of civilized society, and how much work he had ahead of him.

At this time, Egypt was becoming the most highly developed center of the ancient world. The Egyptians were master astronomers and mathematicians, and even today we are awed by their engineering feats in constructing the pyramids. However, basic principles of morality were foreign to this civilization, as we will see from the text.

When Abraham originally set out for Canaan, the verse refers to Sarah by her name: “Abram took Sarai, his wife . . . and they went forth to go to the land of Canaan.” Egypt was becoming the most highly developed center of the ancient world. Likewise, when God  refers to Sarah, it is by her name: “Your wife, Sarai.” And when they are approaching Egypt, the verse reads, “And it came to pass when he came near to enter Egypt that he said to Sarai, his wife.”

But then, two verses later, the text reads, “When Abram came to Egypt, the Egyptians saw the woman”—an anonymous woman. Similarly, as Sarah is forcibly taken into the king’s palace, we are told, “The princes of Pharaoh also saw her, and praised her to Pharaoh, and the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house.”

Likewise, when Abraham and Sarah prepare to leave Egypt, Sarah’s name is not mentioned: “Abram went up from Egypt, he and his wife.”

As soon as Abraham and Sarah enter Egypt, Sarah becomes a nameless “woman.” The only time Sarah’s name is mentioned in Egypt is when God intervenes to protect her every time Pharaoh approaches her. We are told that Pharaoh and his house are smitten with plagues al devar Sarai eishet Avram—“because of the matter of Sarai, the wife of Abram.”

To understand this, let’s look at Sarah’s names—actually, at Sarah’s two names. Her original name was Yiskah, which is from the root sochah, meaning “gazes.”

The name Yiskah alluded to Sarah’s gift of divine inspiration, which allowed her to gaze into the future. It also alluded to her beauty, which was so powerful that it drew gazes. Rashi explains: “Yiskah is Sarah, since she gazes with divine spirit, and everyone gazes at her beauty.” (Alternatively, Yiskah is from the rootnesichut, “princedom,” referring to her authority, and paralleling her other name, Sarah.)

Sarai, on the other hand, was (according to the Malbim) the name given to her by her husband, Abraham, and means “my princess and superior.” Abraham called her Sarai in deference to her superior spiritual characteristics, attributes that in many ways surpassed even his own.

But Sarah is seen this way only as long as they were in Canaan. From the moment they cross the border into the morally depraved Egypt, Sarah is no longer recognized for her leadership qualities, her talents or her keen prophetic capabilities. She is merely “the woman.”

In the Egyptian civilization at the time, women were seen from one perspective only: whether they were physically attractive. That’s why the verses say that the Egyptians were punished al devar Sarai, “because of the matter of Sarai”—because of the way they degraded her by seeing her not as Sarai, but as some kind of anonymous woman whose only significance was her physical form.

That was the difference between the community of Abraham and the Egyptian community. Abraham regarded his wife as Sarai, “my ruler,” seeing the true beauty of her nature. His only reference to her outer beauty came as they were about to enter Egypt, when it posed a threat to their lives.

Abraham did not treat Sarah like just an anonymous pretty face—the way that a purely physical perspective of women led the Egyptians to treat Sarah. On the contrary, with her prophetic abilities and in her intimate communication with God, she was Abraham’s guide and teacher. She was his ruler and superior. And it was only together, Abraham saw, that they could achieve their mission of reaching out and educating the world with their united spiritual ideals.

Even in modern times, when we have reached unprecedented advances in the treatment of women, the story of Abraham and Sarah challenges our value system. What do you see when you look at a woman? And, how do you view another human being? Do you see only their outward physical attributes, or do you look deeper to see the whole individual, including the beauty—and enormous depth—of their Godly soul? body? Do you see beyond externalities to a soul?

Weisberg, Chanah. "Was Abraham the First Feminist?" Life's Passages. Chabad.org. (Viewed on October 9, 2013). http://www.chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/2328590/jewish/Was-Abraham-the-First-Feminist.htm

Noach, Genesis 6:9-11:32

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Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/noach

Leave The Ark

By Dani Passow

Following the tragic and near-utter destruction of humankind during the deluge, Noach, the patriarch of the lone family to survive the flood, offers a sacrifice to God. The Torah records that God finds the smell of the sacrifice pleasing, but follows with a perplexing line: “God smelled the pleasing aroma, and God said in His heart: ‘I will not continue to curse the earth because of man, since the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; nor will I again smite every living being, as I have done.’” Why would God respond to Noach’s sacrifice by stating that man’s heart is evil? Wouldn’t this statement about the innate nature of humankind have been more appropriate as a response to the corruption that precipitated the flood?

To better understand God’s reaction to the sacrifice, we need to explore Noach’s prior behavior. When God first tells Noach to build the ark, the design instructions include the command, “You shall make a window (tzohar) for the ark.” The existence of the tzohar begs Noach to bear witness to the suffering taking place outside of the ark. But Noach doesn’t seem to hear this message. Instead of being aware of the events unfolding outside of the ark, he goes out of his way to remain oblivious. We read that as the storm settles, “Noach removed the covering of the ark;” however, at no point was Noach instructed to place a cover over the ark. It seems that rather than stare the suffering of others in the face, Noach hides from it and uses the ark as a cocoon to shelter himself from the horrors being suffered by the rest of humanity.

Noach’s act of closing himself off from the world is understandable. After the waters have subsided, Noach is so afraid of seeing the devastation that lies beyond the threshold of his wooden bubble that he needs to be commanded by God to leave the ark. Perhaps from the small view he sees when uncovering the ark, Noach is traumatized into paralysis, physically unable to leave his protected world and encounter the destruction outside. Having anticipated this anguish, Noach may have felt the need to remain isolated during the flood, and thus covered the tzohar in order to have the strength to carry out his God-given mission of securing the continued existence of life on earth.

But such action is only a compromise; ideally Noach would have let the tzohar remain uncovered and witnessed the true extent of the suffering. Had he done so, he likely would have been so devastated by what he saw that bringing a sacrifice in gratitude for his own salvation would have seemed inappropriate. Indeed, God’s statement to Noach upon receiving the sacrifice indicates that Noach has distanced himself too greatly from the rest of humanity. How, in the face of so much death and destruction, God implies, do you, Noach, have the gall to bring a sacrifice? The moment of global mourning, Gods seems to be saying, should trump a personal religious expression of thanksgiving.

In our everyday lives, what Noach-like compromises do we make? In what ways do we walk around in our own personal arks choosing to protect the emotional and material well-being of ourselves and our families at the expense of engaging with the suffering and needs of others? What efforts can we make to ensure that nurturing our own spirituality doesn’t overshadow our obligation to be aware of the dire need in the world—the dark reality that 1.4 billion people live on less than $1.25 a day and that 925 million people are undernourished? Living in a globalized world where technology affords us the ability to see the real-time distress of so many around us, have we internalized God’s message of the tzohar and used these tools to pay attention to the plight of those facing challenges around the globe? When, like Noach, we worry that we will be traumatized by trying to address the suffering of others and therefore seek to fortify ourselves for the work ahead of us, do we go too far and retreat too deeply into the mode of self-care, or are we able to strike the proper balance?

We learn from Noach that we are challenged by God to expect to be traumatized in our efforts to heal the world. Truly paying attention to suffering is risky. It may sap our emotional energy, require us to make radical lifestyle changes, and even raise deeply troubling theological questions about justice. It is therefore normal to wish to shelter ourselves from time to time so as not to be overwhelmed; but God is constantly calling, “Leave the Ark!

Passow, Dani. "Noach." Dvar Tzedek. American Jewish World Service. (Viewed on October 6, 2013). http://ajws.org/what_we_do/education/publications/dvar_tzedek/5774/noach.html

The Tower of Babel

By Erin Brouse

Following the account of the flood and God’s destruction of the world, the narrative of the Tower of Babel is found in this week’s parsha.  In the story, everyone is said to have spoken the same language.  As people migrated from the east, they settled in the land of Shinar.  The people there sought to make bricks and build a city and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for themselves, so that they not be scattered over the world.  God came down to look at the city and tower, and remarked that as one people with one language, nothing that they sought would be out of their reach.  He punished them by confounding their speech so that they could not understand each other and scattered them over the face of the earth.

The development of “otherness,” of consciousness, of difference, is a central theme in this parsha, following the theme developed in parsha B’reishit.  In the garden, we first learn that God created human beings in his image, “man and woman he created them,” an androgynous whole.   God then decides that Adam needs a partner so he is not alone, and Eve is created from his flesh.  Through relationship with another, partnership, Adam becomes whole: he becomes conscious of himself.  Similarly, consciousness of the world, of good and evil, comes after Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge.  They become aware of the world around them.  Their relationship with each other and with God is forever changed as a result.  In Noach, with the story of the Tower of Babel, linguistic difference, the confounding of language, represents the birth of nations.  We move beyond self-consciousness, beyond the awareness of otherness in our intimate relationships, to the consciousness and identification that accompanies a language group.   We become “other” in the largest sense.

What is most interesting about this punishment from God is that it is linguistic homogeneity that is here rejected.  God punishes the people of Babel for their efforts to remain a homogeneous group, for their imperialistic desire to prevent difference.  Difference was God’s ultimate aim, and the hubris that motivated the construction of the Tower and the ambition to “make a name for themselves” was contrary to God’s plan.   Diversity, “otherness,” was required to provide humankind with the conditions it needed to prosper and thrive.   Just as the otherness Eve provided Adam to fulfill our intimate needs as individuals, otherness on a larger scale allows us to feel the bonds of community. The development of community relies on the existence of other communities to which we distinguish ourselves.  We become part of this group, and not that group.

Just as our communities are made-up of individuals, different from each other but united by common language, so too the communities of the world are linked by a common humanity.  Their existence is what allows the other to thrive.   Without them, we cannot feel the important human connection that community brings, and we are deprived of the opportunity to think beyond ourselves and our parochial interests.  We need otherness to realise ourselves.

B’reishit, Genesis 1:1-6:8

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Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/bereshit

Relationships, Responsibility, Renewal

By Tamara Cohn Eskenazi

Who are we? Parashat B’reshit pictures our origin as frail, naked earth creatures who are nevertheless bearers of the divine. The two different stories of creation (Genesis 1:1-2:3 and 2:4-3:21) share the view that we were created for relationships – with God in whose image we are or whose breath animates us; with the earth from which we were formed; with the animal world for which we have a responsibility; and finally, with each other as males and females who are co-created in Genesis 1, and who are separated in Genesis 2 only to feel a longing for reunion. Parashat B’reshit envisions the rewards and responsibilities of these relations as delightful and dynamically creative, necessary parts of a defined and defining harmony.

Genesis, however, depicts human desire to go beyond boundaries. The quest for more knowledge endangers all four relationships (God, earth, the animal world and one another) and drives the first couple out of innocent, sheltered existence. The garden=”s” gates shut behind them. But the world at large opens wide and the world is still God’s good creation, even if no longer as cozy as a protected bubble: the still joyous creative acts of childbearing and work are now also mixed with sorrow and hardship. More importantly, relationship with each other and with God now require effort – effort which they undertake. Moving closer to each other and to God, they therefore name their first born in celebration of renewal and regeneration.

Journeying beyond the garden, the first humans transmit to us the memory of how we are meant to be: joyous, equal partners in work and play, in wholesome relationship with God, earth, nature and our human counterparts. Since these gifts of life no longer come on a silver platter, Parashat B’reshit invites us to renew them. As the cycle of Torah reading begins again, so too our lives resume a journey of regeneration, restoring our delicate yet resilient connection with God, nature and one another.

Cohn Eskenazi, Tamara. "Relationships, Responsibility, and Renewal." D'Var Torah. ReformJudaism.org. (Viewed on October 7, 2013). http://www.reformjudaism.org/relationships-responsibility-and-renewal.

Creation According to Eve: Beyond Genesis 3

By Ilana Pardes

No feminist critic of the Bible has neglected to discuss the story or stories of the creation of woman; and yet, despite significant differences in theoretical approach and focus, their readings generally have been confined to Genesis 1–3. One may well ask why, since the matter of creation and femininity is also addressed beyond Genesis 3. Genesis 1–3 may in fact be construed as part of a larger unit of primeval history which ends only at Genesis 11, where the history of the patriarchs and matriarchs commences. This textual unit consists of a series of narratives and genealogies dealing with creation and crime and punishment—or both.

The tendency to focus on Genesis 1–3 (common not only among feminists) derives in part from the continuing impact of the Christian perception of the Fall as the unequivocal conclusion of Creation. There is, however, no concept of an Original Fall in Genesis. Primeval characters fall time and again in a variety of ways. The first fall is not singled out. Fratricide, sleeping with the Sons of God, incest, and the building of the Tower of Babel are transgressions as exemplary as the eating of the forbidden fruit. Similarly, creation is an ongoing process. The world is wholly destroyed and recreated in the story of the Flood; and on a less cosmic level, this is true of most stories in this unit.

Many feminist critics have sharply critiqued Christian interpretations of the creation stories, but they have done so without calling into question the status of the Fall as a conclusive boundary. Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1895), Kate Millett (1969), Mary Daly (1973), Phyllis Trible (1978) and Mieke Bal (1987) provocatively turn the story of man’s Fall through woman (as in Paul’s reading) into the story of woman’s Fall through man, ignoring the fact that Eve does not vanish after Genesis 3, nor does she hesitate to rise and fall again in Genesis 4.

One of the distinguishing marks of Jewish feminist criticism, here and elsewhere, is the challenge it poses—wittingly and unwittingly—to Christian exegetical presuppositions. Thus, for example, Carol Meyers (1983) sets out to correct the tendency to read the story of the Garden of Eden as one whose central topic is sin and disobedience and calls for a reconsideration of Genesis 2–3 as a “wisdom tale” whose purpose is to address the complexities of human life for both women and men.

In my own reading of Genesis (1992), I go beyond the normative Christian demarcation in an attempt to show that the analysis of Genesis 4 is essential to an understanding of the treatment of femininity in Genesis 1–3. I begin with the opening verses of Genesis 4, where we learn that Adam and Eve, after the banishment, make use of the “knowledge” they acquired back west in the Garden. As a result two sons are born and Genesis 2–3 is linked to the story of Cain and Abel. What is of special interest in this genealogical note is the point in Genesis 4:1 where Eve, who previously was an object of naming, becomes a subject of naming. At the birth of her first son, the primordial mother delivers a fascinating naming speech: kaniti ish et YHWH—rendered by Cassuto as “I have created a man [equally/together] with the Lord”—setting the ground for maternal naming-speeches in the Bible. Naming is not only Adam’s prerogative, as Mary Daly (1973:8) claims, nor is it necessarily a paternal medium. In fact, Eve is no exception; more often than not it is the mother or surrogate mother who names the child.

Eve’s naming speech, however, is rather obscure. Although most commentators would agree that this speech expresses the primordial mother’s joy at the birth of Cain, their translations and interpretations differ significantly. This is far from surprising: every word in this speech poses a problem. The verb kana is polysemic, a feature which has allowed the by-now-discredited translation “to acquire” instead of the less theologically palatable “to create.” The use of the term ish (man) for a newborn boy is odd. But the final part et YHWH (literally, with the Lord) has been by far the most perplexing element. God is always present in procreation—opening wombs, giving seed. What is more, He is often the implied addressee in naming speeches, as is evident in the naming-speeches of Rachel and Leah in Genesis 29–30. But in Genesis 4:1, He is treated scandalously, as a partner rather than as the pivot around whom everything turns.

Umberto Cassuto, one of the few to acknowledge the radicality of the verse, suggests that “the first woman in her joy at giving birth to her first son, boasts of her generative power, which approximates in her estimation to the divine creative power. The Lord formed the first man (2:7), and I have formed the second man … I stand together (i.e. equally) with him in the rank of creators” (1961: 201). Eve’s position in the rank of creators allows her to become God’s partner in the work of creation; it allows her to “feel the personal nearness of the Divine presence to herself” (202). Cassuto supports his argument by showing that the verb knh in the sense of “create” is used both in reference to God’s creation of the world—as in the well-known expression koneh shamayim va-arez, the maker of heaven and earth (Genesis 14:22)—and, even more relevantly, in the context of divine parental procreation (Psalms 139:13, Proverbs 8:22). It is precisely by using a verb which in all other cases defines divine (pro)creation that Eve sets the birth of her son on the same footing with the birth of the race. Calling attention to polytheistic elements in the Hebrew Bible, Cassuto goes on to suggest that the same root kny or knw appears in the title of Ashera, the Ugaritic mother goddess: knyt ilm, “the creator/bearer of the gods.”

Eve’s naming-speech may be perceived as a trace from an earlier mythological phase in which mother goddesses were very much involved in the process of creation, even if in a secondary position, under the auspices of the supreme male deity. A speech of this sort is undoubtedly a bold provocation in a monotheistic context. If a mother goddess—be it Ashera, Aruru, or Mami—had delivered a similar speech, it could have been construed as “factual” or even as a token of modesty, but when the primordial biblical mother, who is a mere human being, claims to have generative powers which are not unlike God’s she is as far as possible from modesty.

Eve’s hubristic tendencies do not begin here. Already in Genesis 3, the first woman violates the divine decree, opting to become like God. Her naming-speech on the occasion of Cain’s birth is in a sense a continuation of her first rebellion. If in Genesis 3 she ventures to taste the fruit which opens one’s eyes, in Genesis 4 the primordial mother explores the ways in which the “knowledge” she usurped in the Garden of Eden may be realized. Her hubris is transferred to the realm of creativity. By defining herself as a creatress, she now calls into question the preliminary biblical tenet with respect to (pro)creation—God’s position as the one and only creator.

While the Bible is not a feminist manifesto but has a clearly patriarchal thrust, patriarchy is continuously challenged by antithetical trends. That such a challenge in turn does not escape critique may be seen not only in the punishment of Eve in Genesis 3 but also in the change in tone evident in Eve’s second naming-speech: “Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and named him Seth, meaning, “God has provided me with another offspring in place of Abel” (4:25). If Eve was the subject of the earlier speech, now God is the subject, the one who provides an offspring. He is restored to his conventional role as the protagonist of procreation. Is Eve more modest and careful at this point as a result of her first encounter with death? Does she take God’s punitive abilities more seriously now that death is no longer an abstract concept?

Eve’s acknowledgement of God’s power, however, does not entail an acceptance of Adam’s rule. The primordial mother still treats procreation as if it were an outcome of a transaction between God and herself alone. Such transactions are a common topic in maternal naming-speeches and serve, in a sense, as a female counterpart to the long conversations men have with God concerning seed and stars.

The ongoing interplay between a dominant patriarchal discourse and various opposing undercurrents is analogous to the tension between the divine plan and the disorderly character of actual historical events. God may be the ultimate authority, yet He is continuously disobeyed. Similarly, man has been officially allotted the position of master over woman, but this does not necessarily imply that she accepts his authority. The official hierarchy God-man-woman is never a stable one in biblical narrative. The capacity to transgress boundaries is one of the essential traits of the biblical character, whether male or female.

In the realm of creation, the “official” hierarchy goes as follows: God is the Creator, Adam is the Son of God, and Eve is a Daughter of Adam (to evoke another primeval story). But the story of creation does not end with the desires of God and Adam. The problem for both male authorities is that Eve rebels against her role as a subordinate of a subordinate in a field in which the female body has a prominent role. Through the naming of her sons, the primordial mother insists upon her own generative powers and attempts to dissociate motherhood from subordination.

Pardes, Ilana. "Creation According to Eve: Beyond Genesis 3." Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 1 March 2009. Jewish Women's Archive. (Viewed on October 8, 2013) <http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/creation-according-to-eve-beyond-genesis-3>.

Key Jewish Sacred Texts

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Tanakh: the acronym referring to the Torah, the Nevi’im and the Kethuvim.

Torah: the first five books of the Bible. Also referred to as the Pentateuch or The Five Books of Moses – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Each book is broken into 10-12 weekly parshiyot (54 in total).

Nevi’im: the second part of the Bible, comprised of the eight books of Prophets and the Twelve Minor Prophets (so-called because they are shorter texts): Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, The Twelve (Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi).

Kethuvim: the “writings,” divided into three main parts:
1. Psalms, Proverbs, Job
2. Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther (also referred to as Hamesh Megillot, the five scrolls)
3. Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles (historical texts)

The Septuagint (LXX): the name commonly given to the Koine Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures, translated in stages between the 3rd to 1st century BCE in Alexandria, Egypt. In the Septuagint, the Torah and Nevi’im are established as canonical, but the Kethuvim appear not to have been definitively canonized yet.

Mishnah: literally defined as oral instruction, the Mishnah is a compilation of the written records of oral discussions of various laws completed in 200 CE. Believed to be compiled in its final form by Rabbi Judah al-Nasi, “Rabbi.” Divided into six orders, each with numerous subsections called tractates: Zera’im (seeds), rules about agriculture; Mo’ed (appointed times), rules about Sabbaths and festivals; Nashim (women), primarily marriage laws; Nezikin (damages), rules about money and legal disputes; Kodoshim (holy things), Temple procedures; Teharot (purities), ritual impurities and purification.

Tosefta:  literally “addition.”  Further rabbinic comments on most of the topics covered in the Mishnah.

Talmud: exists in two forms – the Jerusalem Talmud (abbreviated y.) and the Babylonian Talmud (abbreviated b.). Compiled during the 3rd to 6th centuries, the Talmud consists of extracts from the Mishnah, accompanied by commentary called Gemara (learning). Represents the body of Jewish civil and ceremonial law.

Midrash Rabbah (Great Midrash): collection of rabbinic comments on biblical text, completed in 1545. Contains 10 midrashim: the five books of the Torah and the Five Scrolls (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther). Individual sections are referred to by their biblical title (i.e. Genesis/Bereshit Rabbah, etc).

Halakhah and Aggadah: descriptive types of rabbinic comment. Halakhah is legal comment, referring to “the way” of the Torah, concerned with explicating, applying and making sense of the legal materials in the Bible. Aggadah is non-legal comment, a more amorphous category, including theology, legend, sayings, prayer and praise.

Sefer ha-Zohar: The Book of Splenour, the central text of Kabbalah, the mystical branch of Judaism.

Responsa: thousands of volumes of answers to specific questions on Jewish law. If the Talmud is a law book, then the responsa are case law.

Family Shabbat: Checklist and Timeline

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Oh, how I envy those who have celebrated Shabbat as part of their lives since childhood. For them, the routine and ritual of the event seems to come naturally: they were there to help set the Shabbat table, listen to their parents and grandparents recite the blessings, sing songs that are now etched in their memories, and read Torah at Saturday services with friends and neighbours. I envy the innate comfort they have with the holiday, the effortlessness with which they participate, the sense of security and connectedness that its practice brings. As a Jew trying to come back to my Jewishness, I have had to learn the Shabbat rituals and obligations, sifting through religious texts, rabbinic instruction, historical overviews, how-to-guides, and directives from well-meaning columnists, bloggers, and friends. As a Reform Jew, I have then had to critically examine these obligations and their meaning within the context of my personal circumstances. As the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) stated in the Centenary Perspective of 2004, “within each area of Jewish observance Reform Jews are called upon to confront the claims of Jewish tradition, however differently perceived, and to exercise their individual autonomy, choosing and creating on the basis of commitment and knowledge.” In what follows, I have outlined the Shabbat I have created with my family, informed by the mitzvot of remembering Shabbat and keeping it holy.
Continue reading Family Shabbat: Checklist and Timeline →

Weekly Torah Readings

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The Torah is divided into 54 sections called parshiyot and one parshah (singular) is read each week throughout the year (two occasionally). Reading the weekly Torah portion is a hallmark of the learned Jew as new insights emerge each time one engages in the pursuit of Torah. The cyclical nature of the parshiyot reflects Judaism’s connection to time and season. In the synagogue service, the weekly parshah is followed by a passage from the prophets, which is referred to as a haftarah (haftarot, plural). Contrary to common misconception, “haftarah” does not mean “half-Torah.” The word comes from the Hebrew root Fei-Teit-Reish and means “concluding portion”. Usually, the haftarah portion is no longer than one chapter, and has some relation to the Torah portion of the week.

The Torah and haftarah readings are performed with great ceremony: the Torah is paraded around the room before it is brought to rest on the bimah (podium). The reading is divided up into portions, and various members of the congregation have the honor of reciting a blessing over a portion of the reading. This honor is referred to as an aliyah (aliyot, plural; literally, ascension).

To access the most comprehensive, non-denominational weekly Torah and Haftarah portion go to Hebrew Calendar: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/. Below is a table of the weekly parshiyot in the order in which they are read: 

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When God Blinks

Shabbat requires bravery and daring.
It challenges the very notion of consistency, of constancy. It is an affront to normalcy. It threatens reality, sanity, of waking in the morning to see the sun arise each day.
It flouts planning. Steps. Control of the world, ourselves. Of believing there is a self that is ours.
Shabbat is unknown. A turning left. The untrod path. The creative life in-utero
It precludes tomorrow’s monotony. Questions our next breath.
Shabbat reveals a world beyond. Of dreams. Where other forces rule. Where elephants climb through needles’ eyes.
It is the pause between, the no-man’s land, the dark of light, the in of out, the light of dark, the in-between.
Shabbat is vibration. The proof in rest of endless movement; the comma in perpetual
motion,
motion,
motion.
Shabbat takes planning, preparation for submission, a yielding to the unknown, the irrepressible. A readiness, as best we can, for that which is beyond, wild, in the hands of the Other.
It is an expedition, with tools of civilization discarded, of gadgets and comfort left behind. It leads, with faith, forward, leaving behind reality’s rhythm, groping without light in a world not of our making, illusion laid bare for a day, as we journey into nothingness, the world left on its own to breathe, to rest, to linger in the void.
What will be? What will be?
Shabbat is Kabbalah’s proof. G-d’s hidden habit revealed of recreating every moment the world anew. The affirmation of nothingness and some other force behind.
The place where artists live. From where inspiration sprouts. To where dreams head.
From this void all things emerge. The blind fare best. And those who love to leap fly with closed eyes and held breath, anticipating their destination with uncertainty and thrill.
What will be?
Who will I be?
Will there be me?
This pulse is always there, everywhere. But on Shabbat it is ours. We enter cautiously its space, its time — welcoming the Other in our lives. Affirming what we know deep in ourselves but lack the courage to replace with it the normality of our lives, the illusion of our continuity.
And at its end, we emerge, blinking, startled, curious, bewildered by the world anew. What’s happened while we stayed away?
Strayed away?
Did something die?
Is there still me?
Without us, did it all go on?
Who mastered the world while we dreamt?
Or are we dreaming now?
Who mastered the world?
G-d.
With miracles, and masters still.
Just for a moment, for these few hours in eternity, He let us in. We entered His reality. He allowed us to glimpse existence as it is when He blinks. He let us touch the place from which we too are born anew each moment, with infinite opportunity to become, to transform, to discover…
…with courage and daring.
The bravery of Shabbat.
The creative life sprung forth.
From nothing.
– Jay Litvin

Remember Shabbat and Keep it Holy: First Steps

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My three children and I had a tradition of celebrating the end of our week at work and school with Friday night “Party Night” for several years before I began my Jewish journey. This usually meant that the normal rules of the week were set aside: no-one had to do homework, take a bath or shower, or rush to get through dinner. Instead, we would go to the store and buy candy, order pizza, sit in our pyjamas and watch a movie or something on television. There was no stress or formality to the evening, and I would often let the children stay up later than usual and sometimes we would have a sleepover in my bed. We would try to eat at the table some nights, and go around the table to say three things we were happy about that week, one thing we wanted to change, and one thing we liked about the others. It was a very special time for us when we felt very close to each other.

Continue reading Remember Shabbat and Keep it Holy: First Steps →

Shabbat is different from all other days of the week. It has no routine activities, no work commitments, no interference on the part of the authorities, no evil temptations. For one day a week, man is totally free.
The commandment to sanctify Shabbat was the first call to humanity at large for real equality. And the first summons for freeing man from the bondage of man, for freeing man from himself, from the routine of work. This was the first significant taste of freedom and equality. And this taste has never faded since.

– Shimon Peres

The Taryag Mitzvot: 613 Commandments

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In Judaism, there is a tradition that the Torah contains 613 mitzvot (Hebrew for “commandments,” from mitzvah – מצוה — “precept”, plural: mitzvot; from צוה, tzavah- “command”). According to tradition, of these 613 commandments, 248 are mitzvot aseh (“positive commandments” commands to perform certain actions) and 365 are mitzvot lo taaseh (“negative commandments” commands to abstain from certain actions). Three-hundred and sixty-five corresponded to the number of days in a year and 248 was believed by ancient Hebrews to be the number of bones and significant organs in the human body. Three of the negative commandments can involve yehareg ve’al ya’avor, meaning ‘One should let himself be killed rather than violate this negative commandment’, and they are murder, idol worship, and forbidden relations.

The Talmudic source is not without dissent concerning the number of mitzvot, however. Some held that this count was not an authentic tradition, or that it was not logically possible to come up with a systematic count. This is possibly why no early work of Jewish law or Biblical commentary depended on this system, and no early systems of Jewish principles of faith made acceptance of this Aggadah (non-legal Talmudic statement) normative. The classical Biblical commentator and grammarian Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra denied that this was an authentic rabbinic tradition. Ibn Ezra writes “Some sages enumerate 613 mitzvot in many diverse ways […] but in truth there is no end to the number of mitzvot […] and if we were to count only the root principles […] the number of mitzvot would not reach 613” (Yesod Mora, Chapter 2).

Whether dictated by tradition or Torah, Maimonides (RaMBaM), in his Sefer HaMitzvot, arranged the 613 Mitzvot in groups; the Positive Mitzvot into ten groups and the Negative Mitzvot into ten groups.
Continue reading The Taryag Mitzvot: 613 Commandments →

Glossary of Key Halachic Terms

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The term Halacha refers to the collective body of Jewish religious law, including biblical law and later talmudic and rabbinic law, as well as customs and traditions. Halacha guides not only religious practices and beliefs, but numerous aspects of day-to-day life.  Although Halacha is often translated as “Jewish Law”, a more literal translation might be “the path” or “the way of walking.” The word derives from the root that means to go or to walk.

When discussing Halacha and the practices and rituals that characterise a Jewish life, numerous terms are used that are often unfamiliar to the uninitiated.  I have listed some of them below.  Many, as you will see, are related to the rules of taharat hamishpacha, an area of Jewish law that relates to women, marriage and sexuality.  For more information concerning these subjects, here is an excellent resource available online: Nishmat Yoatzot Halacha.

Balanit – Mikveh attendant

Balua – Lit. “swallowed up” – refers to items found in normally inaccessible parts of the body that do not require cleaning before mikveh (e.g., ear canal)

Bediavad – Refers to a less than optimal manner of fulfilling a halachic requirement, acceptable after the fact or in difficult situations (opposite of l’chat’chila)

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