Monday, December 30, 2013

Bo

Exodus 10:1−13:16

Ready For Renewal


Like the Israelites who left Egypt and faced the terrifying choices of freedom, modern Jews face the challenge of responsibly establishing new guidelines and directions for the Jewish community.
By Rabbi Bradley Artson; provided by the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, which ordains Conservative rabbis at the American Jewish University.
Ours is an age of unparalleled uncertainty.

While we ransack the past and its accumulated wisdom for guidance today, we also know that the degree of change in every aspect of our lives is without precedent. Groping in the dark, treading uncertainly down a path not previously taken, modern humanity doesn't know its destination and isn't even sure it is enjoying the trip. And we have good cause for our doubts.

Consider the degree of changes that this century alone has witnessed. At the turn of the century, a mere ninety years ago--a single lifetime really--wars were fought using foot soldiers, ships and bullets. Tanks, planes, missiles, nuclear bombs, space satellites, submarines, all of these techniques of killing are new to our time.

Advances in Science

We think nothing of picking up a phone and calling anywhere in the world, we schedule a flight halfway around the globe and get there within hours. We are preceded by the forms we had our office fax, which arrive there with the speed of the spoken word! If we like something we read, we copy it--no big deal. Few type anymore, at least not into typewriters. When I was a freshman in college, only the wealthy students had electric typewriters. Now everybody has their own personal computer.

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Monday, December 23, 2013

Parashat Va-era

Exodus 6:2–9:35


This week’s commentary was written by Chancellor Arnold Eisen, JTS.

This week’s parashah abounds in venerable theological problems, beginning with its name and opening verses. How could it be that God “appeared” to the ancestors but that some aspect of God—or some truth articulated in God’s name—was not “made known” to them and will be revealed only now, to Moses? The answer that seems most persuasive to me bears a lesson that, like so many others in the Torah, is not so much theological as ethical; it teaches far less about the nature of God than it does about human responsibility. This God, we learn in this parashah, cares greatly about justice in the world and will—at least on this occasion—enter into history to bring it about. God will do battle on the world’s greatest stage with the world’s most powerful ruler—all this to let the whole world know that God is concerned with human beings and human history. The Torah commands us to be no less concerned. We cannot count on divine intervention to improve things. The world will be redeemed only if we act to help make it so.

This question facing us, then, is what we shall do to further God’s pursuit of justice? How are we to know what action to take in response to the Torah’s demand? Prophecy is a scary business. In our day, too many men and women urge murder and much else in God’s name. We dare not follow them. The rabbis declared two thousand years ago that the age of prophecy has passed. It is up to us to interpret and apply the divine commands revealed in scripture as best we can, using all the faculties at our command—reason and experience first of all. “We pay no heed to any heavenly voices.” What voices then shall we heed? How shall we know what to do? Where shall we find the wisdom to do it well? Heschel put the problem this way: “Infinite responsibility without infinite wisdom and infinite power; is our ultimate embarrassment” (God in Search of Man, 285).

One thing is clear, from this parashah and those that follow: we must take action in pursuit of righteousness and cannot use human frailty as a paralyzing excuse for doing nothing. The text works hard to make sure that we identify with its protagonists, never more so than in the story of Moses who, after trying hard to escape the task, leads the Israelites’ struggle to be free of the Pharaoh’s genocidal tyranny. We cheer him on when he slays that Egyptian slave-driver—but then pause to worry, if we are like the sages, that people less attuned than Moses to God’s wishes will take matters into their own hands in a way that promotes injustice rather than fighting it. The Torah shows us case after case of less than perfect Israelites who care more for their own well-being than for the world’s well-being. Even Moses acts rashly on occasion and issues commands that may be at variance with God’s wishes. How then are we latter-day children of Israel meant to puzzle out the rights and wrongs, avoid self-deception and self-righteousness, and still act resolutely to apply prophetic principles in unprecedented situations?

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Monday, December 16, 2013

Sh'mot

Exodus 1:1−6:1

 

Symbolic Names


The name Gershom, and the word for Hebrew, Ivri, carry a message about what it means to be Jewish.


By Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, Provided by the Jewish Theological Seminary, a Conservative rabbinical seminary and university of Jewish studies.

Moses names his first born son Gershom, still a common Hebrew name.

The child is born to him and his wife Zipporah in the land of Midian, towhich he fled after he murdered an Egyptian taskmaster. We do not hear of Gershom again in the epic, yet his name bears on the destiny of his father and his people. The name consists of two Hebrew words, "ger sham,"meaning "a stranger there." By bestowing it on his son, Moses stresses the complexity of his own fate: "I have been a stranger in a foreign land" (Exodus 2:22).
Not Living With Your Own

On the surface, the name conveys the discomforting fact that Moses the Egyptian found himself living among a people not his own. From a prince in Pharaoh's court, Moses plummeted to the lowly rank of a shepherd in the household of a Midian priest, reason enough to be disoriented. Yet his explanation of the name is not in the present tense but in reference to his past. Even in Egypt, in the royal palace, he felt not wholly at home. His Hebrew wet nurse, his mother, must have imbued him with an inchoate and subliminal sense of Hebrew identity. What else could have prompted him to investigate for himself the lot of Egypt's downtrodden Israelites or to side with them instantaneously? His compassion erupted from a shared wellspring of memories. So his son's name pointed to the deeper unease of being a Hebrew in Egypt.

It also adumbrated the fate of Jews in exile. Gershom Soncino was the most productive and famous member of an illustrious family of early Italian Jewish printers. In 1483-84, his uncle, Joshua Solomon Soncino had printed for the first time ever in Soncino in the Duchy of Milan, two tractates of the Babylonian Talmud. In the last decade of the 15th century and the first few of the 16th century, Gershom published a torrent of Hebrew books, including at least another 25 tractates of the Talmud, in eight different Italian cities as well as in Solonika and Constantinople. An era drenched in turmoil kept him on the move. Often in the colophon to his books, he would underscore the meaning of his name, ger sham, a mere sojourner in whatever principality gave him entry. His permanent residence was in the world of Torah, which he strove to make more accessible through the invention of printing.

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Monday, December 9, 2013

Va-y'chi

Genesis 47:28–50:26

Why Bondage?


An exploration of why the Children of Israel were destined to be slaves to Pharaoh


By Rabbi Ismar Schorsch; Provided by the Jewish Theological Seminary, a Conservative rabbinical seminary and university of Jewish studies.


The book of Genesis ends as it starts, with its lead characters in a state of exile.

The existential human condition is to be out of place, far from home. Jacob's clan no longer resides in the land promised to his father and grandfather. Yet the narrator makes it unmistakably clear that their final destination was not Egypt, but Canaan, the land that would eventually bear Jacob's other name, Israel, the one who "strove with beings divine and human and prevailed" (Genesis 32:29).

Prior to relocating to Egypt, to be reunited with his long-lost son Joseph, Jacob is reassured by God that "I Myself will go down with you to Egypt and I Myself will also bring you back" (Genesis 46:4). As the end of his life approaches, Jacob beseeches Joseph to inter him in the family burial place in Hebron (47:29-30), and in a subsequent conversation makes pointed reference to Canaan as his nation's "everlasting possession" (48:4). Joseph, indeed, accorded his father a protracted state funeral on the way to burying him in "the field of Makhpelah" (50:13). As for Joseph, he did not ask the same of his brothers, only that when God restores them to Canaan, they should take his embalmed bones with them for burial.
Reaffirming Canaan
In short, the Torah goes out of its way at this juncture to reaffirm Canaan as the sacred destiny of Jacob's progeny. Despite the detour into Egypt, the storyline never loses sight of its end. As Joseph avers to his brothers, they are in Egypt by design, not accident. What appears to happen at random up close, from a distance gains purpose and meaning. God employed Joseph to rescue his family, if not Egypt itself, from a terrible famine. Henceforth, the fate of both will be intertwined, though Israel's sojourn is never destined to become permanent.

The question I wish to ask is what was the need for the sojourn in the first place? If the narrative leaves nothing to chance, what did it intend to accomplish by subjecting the nation to emerge from Abraham's loins to centuries of suffering? God guides Abraham to Canaan only to tell him when he gets there that the land is not yet his, that his descendants will have to endure affliction and bondage in a land not their own for some 400 years (Genesis 15:13). The wrinkle suggests a change of heart. The story is so familiar to us that we have stopped feeling the inelegance of the plot. Or perhaps, God's will is not to be questioned.

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Monday, December 2, 2013

Vayigash

Genesis 44:18−47:27

By Rabbi Charles Savenor, Provided by the Jewish Theological Seminary, a Conservative rabbinical seminary and university of Jewish studies.

Joseph's Moment of Truth


Revealing his true identity, the viceroy cannot control his emotions.


The moment of truth has arrived.

With Benjamin framed for stealing and sentenced to enslavement, Joseph waits to see how Jacob's other sons will respond. Joseph believes that his well-orchestrated ruse will finally expose his brothers' true colors.
Judah's Appeal

This week's parsahah opens with Judah appealing to his brother Joseph, the Egyptian viceroy, to free Benjamin and to enslave Judah in his place. Judah's eloquent petition recounts his brothers' interaction with this Egyptian official as well as the familial circumstances of Jacob's household. Benjamin, the youngest son in the family, occupies a valued place in their father's eyes, Judah says, because he is the last living remnant of Jacob's deceased wife, Rachel. In conclusion, Judah asserts that if he were to return home to Canaan without Benjamin, he could not bear to see his father's immediate and long-term pain and suffering.

Judah's words arouse Joseph's soul, as the Torah tells us that "V'lo yachol Yosef lehitapek. . ."--"and Joseph could no longer control himself before all his attendants, and he cried out, 'Have everyone withdraw from me!' So there was no one else about when Joseph made himself known to his brothers" (Etz Hayim, Genesis 45:1).

Witnessing Joseph's intense reaction to Judah's appeal, we wonder what exactly pushes Joseph to his emotional limit? What does Judah say or do that compels Joseph to reveal himself at this moment?

Our most trusted biblical commentator, Rashi, surmises that since Joseph's emotional outburst is juxtaposed with evacuating his Egyptian servants, Judah's self-incrimination embarrasses Joseph. The viceroy of Egypt fears that when these alleged spies are introduced as his brothers, the family's reputation, and his by association, will already be tarnished in Egypt and in Pharaoh's court.

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