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Lech Lecha

10/26/2014

2 Comments

 
SUMMARY: 
  • Abram, Sarai, and Lot go to Canaan. (12:1-9)
  • Famine takes them to Egypt, where Abram identifies Sarai as his sister in order to save his life. (12:10-20)
  • Abram and Lot separate. Lot is taken captive, and Abram rescues him. (13:1-14:24)
  • Abram has a son, Ishmael, with his Egyptian maidservant, Hagar. (16:1-16)
  • God establishes a covenant with Abram. The sign of this covenant is circumcision on the eighth day following a male baby's birth. (17:1-27)
D'var Torah by Carroll Greenfield

When I was perhaps eight or possibly nine years old I was told by my parents that I was about to begin attending Hebrew School. I was not happy that there was now going to be more work to do and less time to play. This was not good news and I looked upon the whole thing with no particular pleasure and a good deal of skepticism as my parents, although they themselves grew up in religious homes, no longer maintained a kosher home or observed Shabbat.

I attended Hebrew school as a duty but was not a good student. I learned to read and write Hebrew and I could even write Hebrew script. When called upon to read a passage of my choice I would choose
Hillel not because I understood the words but because it was easy for me to recite. I did all this without much enthusiasm as what I learned was not practiced at home or anywhere else in my immediate world.

At twelve I began to study to become a Bar Mitzvah, which would occur just after my thirteenth birthday. I studied my parashah along with the trope (the musical notation that is written above and sometimes below the words).

The big day arrived and I managed to get through my parashah,
Lekh Lekha, without damaging the Torah or embarrassing myself. It was all just part of my duty and I had very little understanding of the story I had just completed. Rabbi Chait, the head Rabbi at our Shul, presented me with a gift of a Tanakh and inscribed it with a reference to what I had just read, “Be Thou A Blessing”.

Thank goodness I was done. No more twice a week Hebrew School and one or two more days a week for Bar Mitzvah study. Free at last, free at last.

In my late teens my brother and his wife came to California and I just knew that I had to follow, which I did when I was twenty.

After I married my wonderful wife Hedy, and we had a couple of great kids we started thinking about joining a Temple and in the process of deciding which would be the right choice I picked up my Tanakh and reread
Lekh Lekah.  I began to muse over the first few verses. The Lord said to Abram, Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I wondered, could I, a pretty ordinary person, have received a similar message?  No, I experienced neither visions nor voices and yet here I was in a far off land. I wondered how many immigrants to this country had made a similar connection.

It is surprising how we can latch on to a few words and actually have them change our thinking and our lives. That little phrase “Be though a blessing” seemed to be a kind of obligation, my own commandment, and stayed with me thereafter and whenever I was tempted to push the moral or ethical limits, that little phrase was just like an Angel on my shoulder that whispered “Be though a blessing”. I think Rabbi Chait would have laughed had he known what an effect that little note would have on my future behavior.     

We are about to retell the saga of Genesis and I will re-experience hearing again the words of the Lord instructing Abram to
Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. Whenever I read or hear that passage it has a special meaning for me.

Lot, his nephew, accompanies Abram on his travels with all their holdings of cattle, gold and the people they had acquired. They settle in Canaan but as there was insufficient vegetation to support both of their herds they agree to separate and go in different directions. Lot eventually settled in the city of Sodom, and as we are told,
the inhabitants of Sodom were very wicked sinners against the Lord.

One of the thoughts I had about this portion was that it demonstrated the differences between Abram and Lot. Abram seems to obey all of the instructions of the Lord without question while Lot chooses to remain in the
wicked city of Sodom.  We learn in chapter fourteen how loyal Abram was when word reaches him that Sodom has fallen and Lot, his nephew, has been taken prisoner along with all his goods. Abram, in his old age, pursues those who have taken Lot and defeats them. All of the goods and people that were captured were rescued and returned. It plainly implies that if we obey the Lord and follow his commandments we will be rewarded.

Rewards come in different shapes and sizes. Rewards are not always the promise of land or wealth or the assurance that our descendants will own this or that land. Sometimes rewards come in abstract forms. I choose to believe that living a good moral and ethical life; a life that tries to follow what Genesis and Judaism teach will set us on a safe path. Even if we are less than perfect in our practice we can still benefit spiritually by our positive actions.

If
Lekh Lekha can be so enlightening, I have to wonder what we could garner from the rest of the Tanakh, and how much more our lives could be enriched.

2 Comments

Noach

10/19/2014

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SUMMARY: 
  • God decides to cause a flood that will destroy the world, sparing only Noah's family and the animals that Noah gathers together on the ark. (6:9-8:22)
  • Life starts over again after the Flood. The Noahide Commandments are listed, and God uses a rainbow to make a symbol of the first covenant. (9:1-17)
  • People start to build a city and the Tower of Babel. God scatters the people and gives them different languages to speak. (11:1-9)
  • The ten generations from Noah to Abram are listed. (11:10-29:2)


D'var Torah by Ronnie Nathan
The story of Noah and his ark, the 2nd parsha in Bereishis, is among the best known stories in the Bible.  Virtually everyone learned it as a very young child and has known it as long as they can remember.  It is a universal tale about G-d destroying His Creation and starting anew and a version of it appears in numerous cultures across many lands.  Nevertheless, it is a story replete with difficulties and challenges, not the least of which is its believability.  In this d’var I want to focus on one of these challenges, a challenge that you may never have even considered.

In the very 1st verse of the parsha Noah is introduced to us as a “righteous man, perfect in his generation.”  Yet the rabbis tell us that this caveat is really a red flag indicating that Noah wasn’t so perfect after all.  Sure enough, one of the 1st things he does upon leaving the ark & building an altar to Hashem is plant a vineyard and get drunk, so drunk in fact that he exposes his nakedness to his son Ham and grandson Canaan.  One may legitimately speculate if this was the most perfect man of his generation just how corrupt his generation must have been.  No wonder G-d decided to drown every living thing on earth and start all over again.

Unfortunately things didn’t go much better the 2nd time around.  Not only are Ham, Canaan and all their descendents condemned to an eternal slavish condition as a result of their evil inclinations, but all of humanity is punished for man’s sinful character in attempting to build the Tower of Babel.  Noah was still alive when this occurred.  It was only 1 generation removed from the flood.  Apparently, even after a divinely implemented universal genocide and granted a 2nd chance, man didn’t change very much.  But G-d did!  He promised to never destroy His Creation again.  He promised “all the days of the earth, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”  In other words, the 2nd Creation would survive as He created it forever.

So it would seem that man didn’t learn much from the 1st extermination, but surprisingly  G-d did.  That is a very strange concept, G-d learning and changing, and that is the challenging part of the story I want to explore.  After all, the essential nature of G-d is that He is omniscient, omnipotent and perfect.  If He is omniscient and already knows everything, what is there left to learn?  If He is perfect, how can He change?  Can He become more perfect than perfect?  But if He can’t learn and change, isn’t that a limitation on His omnipotence?  This is more than semantics or a word game.  This cuts to the very nature of G-d.  And this problem doesn’t manifest itself uniquely in Noach.  Both Abraham and Moses famously bargain with G-d later in Torah and convince Him to change His mind.

If you are hoping for me to solve this conundrum, I’m sorry.  You will be disappointed.  This is 1 of those puzzles, like why lobster is not kosher, that only G-d understands.  It is beyond human understanding.  But perhaps we can glimpse into the wisdom of G-d’s Plan by focusing on the end of the story.  The Noah story ends with the birth of the 1st Jew.  Instead of destroying the world and its corrupt generation a 2nd time, G-d’s response to evil in the world is the creation of the Jewish people.  So instead of a 3rd Creation, G-d chose us and gave us a holy mission, Tikun Olam, repair His Creation.  And it isn’t a job that will ever end, because His covenant with Noah, that this 2nd Creation will never end, is eternal.  That is why we have survived as a people long after all our Biblical conquerers have disappeared.  We aren’t any better than any of them, but we are chosen to serve G-d’s divine mission.  Instead of destroying the world yet again, Hashem created us, the Jewish people.

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B'reisheet

10/16/2014

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Summary

www.reformjudaism.org/learning/torah-study/breishit

  • God creates the world and everything in it in six days and rests on the seventh. (1:1-2:3)
  • Adam and Eve are placed in the Garden of Eden, where they eat the forbidden fruit and are subsequently exiled. (2:15-3:24)
  • Adam and Eve have two sons, Cain and Abel. Cain kills his brother, Abel. (4:1-24)
  • Adam and Eve have another child named Seth. The Torah lists the ten generations from Adam to Noah. (4:25-5:32)
  • God regrets having created human beings and decides to destroy everything on earth, but Noah finds favor with God. (6:5-6:8)

D'var Torah by Joseph Rensin

When I began to write this D’var Torah I sought to point out that questions in the Torah, the order asked, who asked them, and the question itself were key to understanding the intent of what was to come. The questions are sort of predictor and guide for an explorative journey to the answers we all seek. So I was surprised to find the first question, in the Torah, asked by the serpent. Who is reported to be the shrewdest of all the wild beasts which is certainly supported by the question the serpent asked of Eve “Did God really say you shall not eat of any tree of the garden”? Any answer other than No or I do not know effectively trapped and beguiled Eve into eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad (evil).

While some will argue eating of this tree provided the knowledge of everything, it clearly did not, as Adam and Eve appeared to be concerned with their nakedness and that God would discover what was already known to God.

Unlike Eve we know that God told Adam he could eat of any tree except for the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad. So Adam could not eat of this one tree in the center of the Garden of Eden next to the Tree of Life. What was so dangerous about this tree that God would deny access to Adam, who was created in God’s own image? Did God intend to never let Adam eat of this tree? Is the whole Garden of Eden story a setup by god to force Adam and Eve out of the garden?

For me the answer of it being a trap never sat well. Why would God need to trap anyone to make a point? I suspect that God, in time, intended to feed Adam and Eve of the tree in small portions, so they could fully understand the import of the knowledge they received.

What is good and bad? Like temperature, hot and cold, it is a scale of perception established by the individual. With respect to morality it is a judgment of perception. 

God made several judgments based on perception when creating the Universe. God saw and it was good, in the end before God rested, God saw and it was very good. This judgment does not hold true for God sees creation, after time has passed, and finds mankind to be evil and needing to be destroyed.

If God’s judgments are fallible how much more so are mankind’s. How did God’s mind come to change and when did it change? Interestingly the change of mind happens while God is resting, during the Sabbath, when there is time to observe the bigger picture, contemplate cause and effect, and determine the changes to make (repair) the original creation. In short time to attain the wisdom required to make moral choices of the knowledge we have acquired.

When the Garden of Eden was created there was no Tree of Wisdom alongside the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad. Maybe it was just a sapling and God was waiting for it to grow before feeding mankind with knowledge. For surely knowledge without wisdom can lead to death.

We are instructed to observe the Sabbath, keep it holy, and study the Torah. This is our path to gain the wisdom we need to repair the world. Mankind needs to observe the Sabbath and see that it is very, very good.

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    TBA Words of Torah

    A d'var Torah is an essay based on the parashah.

    Divrei Torah (plural of d'var Torah) are sometimes offered instead of a sermon during a worship service, to set a tone and a context at the opening of a synagogue board or committee meeting, or to place personal reflection within a Jewish context.

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