Sefer Bereisheet Archives | Page 22 of 23 | Academy for Jewish Religion

1 04, 2006

Bereshit

By ahsilver|2006-04-01T20:56:29-05:00April 1, 2006|

On Endings, Beginnings and Tikkun ha-Olam:
A-HA Experience at AJR

By Peg Kershenbaum

Vayar Elohim et-kol-asher asah v’hinei-tov m’od; vay’hi-erev vay’hi-voqer yom hashishi
And God saw all that He had made. And behold: it was very good!
And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. (Gen. 1:31)

We begin anew the hora
of Torah, linking the end of the holy season with the start of the
term’s sacred studies. That it will be a year of challenges and yet of
great promise I hope to demonstrate in this, the first of our
community’s renewed series of divrei torah.

Each week as we recite Kiddush, we
join the ending of the verse above to the beginning of the next verse: vay’chulu hashamayim v’ha aretz vchol-tz’ va am.¹
Yet each day we affirm that ‘God renews daily the work of creation.’
Are the works of creation actually complete or not? Rashi was puzzled
by this, Read More >

23 03, 2006

Vayehi

By ahsilver|2006-03-23T08:06:13-05:00March 23, 2006|

By Michael Kohn

Vayehi is the final parashah of Sefer Bereshit and brings to a close not only the lives of Jacob and Joseph but the narrative of the Patriarchs as well. It is a major transition point in
the Torah narrative, inasmuch as the second chapter of Sefer Shemot begins with the birth of Moses. And as Prime Minister Sharon lies seriously ill in Hadassah Hospital, regardless of the outcome of his current condition, it is obvious that a major transition point, like
that described in this parashah, is occurring today in Israel.

In Vayehi, the Torah employs interesting juxtapositions of the third Patriarch’s two names’Jacob and Israel’perhaps as a way of illustrating the transition. For example, at the very outset, the Torah tells us: ‘Jacob lived in the land of Egypt seventeen years; and the span of Jacob’s life was one hundred and forty-seven years. When the time for Israel to die drew Read More >

23 03, 2006

Vayigash

By ahsilver|2006-03-23T08:03:50-05:00March 23, 2006|

Toward Reconciliation
By Harvey Israelton

At the end of last week’s parashah, Miketz, Joseph’s brothers
had returned to Egypt to appear once again before Joseph, and they had
brought with them Joseph’s only full brother, Benjamin (Joseph and
Benjamin were Rachel’s only children). Joseph had stated that Benjamin
will remain with him as his slave and that the other brothers may
return home. This week’s parashah, Vayigash, begins with one of
the most dramatic scenes in all of Bereshit: Judah making a moving plea
for mercy for Benjamin, or more precisely, for their father Jacob, so
as to spare Jacob the loss of both his favorite children.

After his plea for mercy, Judah offers to remain as a slave in place
of Benjamin. This is a very different Judah than the man we saw at the
moment when the brothers threw Joseph into the pit so many years ago.
Although Judah was among those who argued against killing Joseph, it
was he who suggested that Read More >

23 03, 2006

Miketz

By Rabbi Michael Rothbaum|2006-03-23T08:01:14-05:00March 23, 2006|

Shabbat Chanukah

By Michael Rothbaum

In memory of Naomi Goodman, z”l, past president of the Jewish Peace Fellowship

About 2,200 years ago, as many of us know, a ragtag group of
insurgents known as the Maccabees defeated what was then one of the
strongest military forces in the known world, the Syrian Greek Empire.

A few centuries later, in deciding how to tell this story, the
rabbis did a funny thing. They changed it. The story of the Maccabees?
It’s found nowhere in Jewish scripture. All that war business? They it
took out. In the Talmud, the rabbis include a brief narrative’not about
war, but about a jar of oil.

The rabbis, one might argue, had learned the lessons of history. By
the time of the Talmud, the Maccabees are long gone. The Romans have
conquered Jerusalem. Some Jews’particularly young Jewish men and
boys’won’t stand for it. They carry out guerilla attacks against the
Romans. Sometimes, these young people die. And sometimes, like the
Maccabees, they attack Read More >

23 03, 2006

Vayeshev

By ahsilver|2006-03-23T07:48:43-05:00March 23, 2006|

Fraught with Background
By Alan Levenson

Erich Auerbach (1892’1957), a great German-Jewish scholar of
literature, once wrote that to fully appreciate any particular
character or narrative in TaNaKh (Jewish Bible) one must appreciate
that they are ‘fraught with background.’ In Genesis 37 we are given
several good reasons for the brothers’ hatred of Joseph. He is a
tattletale; he is the recipient of a visible symbol of Jacob’s
favoritism (the ketonet passim’the special coat); and he obliviously
relates those self-aggrandizing dreams’twice. Although the brothers are
already past the point of speaking civilly to him (Gen. 37:4b),
Joseph’s dreams seem to be the ‘tipping point.’ When Joseph finally
finds the brothers at Dothan, they refer to him as follows: ‘hiney ba’al ha-halamot ha lazeh ba’ (Gen 37:19). I hear much more of an edge in the Hebrew than in the pat OJPS translation, ‘Behold, this dreamer cometh.’

On first glance, then, the brothers’ hatred is adequately explained
by Genesis 37’which brings me back to Auerbach. Read More >

23 03, 2006

Vayishlah

By ahsilver|2006-03-23T07:46:56-05:00March 23, 2006|

Jacob’s Struggle with the Angel
By Rebecca Tenenbein

This d’var Torah is written in loving memory of my grandparents

Edith Tenenbein, Alexander Tenenbein, and Abe Newborn, z”l

Jacob must go back to his homeland, Canaan, but first he must settle
accounts with his brother, Esau. Twenty years have passed since Jacob
ran away with the fear that his brother might kill him. Twenty years
have changed them both greatly. The night before the meeting between
the two brothers, ‘Jacob was left alone and a man wrestled with him
until the break of dawn.’ (Genesis 32:35). When morning comes, Jacob
has a new name, Israel.

Who did Jacob actually wrestle with? Who was this man? Many rabbis
and great thinkers have spent time interpreting this passage. The
commentator Rashi suggests that it was Esau’s angel. Jacob was worried
about his upcoming meeting with Esau. Rashi adds that when Jacob
realized that he was wrestling with Esau’s angel, he saw that he could
possibly persuade Read More >

23 03, 2006

Vayetzei

By ahsilver|2006-03-23T07:44:48-05:00March 23, 2006|

The Quality of Gossamer
By Linda Shriner-Cahn

Jacob comes to an unnamed spot, running to an ill-defined future,
from a traumatic past. Everything is unsure. He has no moorings. He is
untethered, and then he puts a rock on the ground, rests his head,
dreams, and is transformed.

‘God was in this place and I, I did not know it.’ (Gen. 28:16’as translated by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner)

Jacob has a dream, a strange dream. It disconcerts him; it makes him
shudder. What does he dream? He dreams of a stairway that goes between
heaven and earth, with angels going up and down and God standing next
to him. It is almost too much, but there is more. God speaks and
promises him the future.

‘God was in this place and I, I did not know it.’

Jacob wakes from his dream and knows that he has experienced
something truly extraordinary, but he can’t hold on to it, can’t
sustain it. So he tries to make it last Read More >

23 03, 2006

Toldot

By ahsilver|2006-03-23T07:43:25-05:00March 23, 2006|

In the Blindspot-light
By Rabbi Steven J. Rubenstein

Each year I cringe when the postcard arrives in the mail reminding
me that my appointment with the optometrist is due. A couple of years
ago my eye doctor welcomed me to the club of those whose eyesight would
gradually diminish with age. I know from experience that reading the
fine print of the Talmud had become increasingly difficult with each
passing month, but I tried to ignore the fact that the letters of the
Torah were becoming a bit fuzzier around the crowns when I read from
the scroll on Shabbat.

How our ancestor Isaac would have benefited from a yearly eye check-up if it had been available to him! In this week’s portion Toldot, we are told, ‘Isaac was old and his eyes were too dim to see.’ To see what?

Right before this comment, the Torah tells us that both Isaac and
his wife Rebecca were disappointed when their son Esau Read More >

23 03, 2006

Toldot

By ahsilver|2006-03-23T07:42:04-05:00March 23, 2006|

Covenantal Language
By Dr. Jerome Chanes

In commemoration of the Yahrzeit of my dad, Manuel Simcha ben R. Ya`akov
Avraham Chanes, z”l; and in honor of Ora Horn Prouser and David Greenstein

Parashat Toldot is one of the classic ‘transition’ narratives
of our Scripture in which ‘covenantal’ language’language, used in key
settings in the Chumash, that expresses the transmittal of the Covenant from generation to generation’is central.

The core of the narrative, as outlined in Chapter 27 of Sefer B’reshit,
is the story of the transmittal of the Covenantal blessing from Isaac
to Jacob. The narrative, deceptively simple, is about clear and keen
perception’Rebecca’s’and, more to the point, lack of
perception’Isaac’s. It is immediately obvious that the blindness of our
patriarch Isaac is at bottom a metaphor for his lack of perception.

As is often the case in Biblical narrative, the philology of the
text tells us all we need to know about the message. In Chapter 27 (and
I thank Rabbi David Silber for suggesting Read More >

23 03, 2006

Chayei Sarah

By ahsilver|2006-03-23T07:39:42-05:00March 23, 2006|

The Public and the Private

By Peggy de Prophetis

While reading this week’s parashah, Chayei Sarah, I was struck by the contrast between things that should happen in public and things that should be allowed to happen only in private.

In Bava Batra 2a and b, there is a discussion about whether partners who live in a courtyard and who agree to build a wall, do so in order to prevent visual trespass. The question raised is whether or not visual trespass is damaging. And there are other places in our tradition where the issue of personal privacy is expressed. For example, in Exodus 28:33’35 it says that the high priest’s robe should
have a golden bell so that the people will know when he enters the Temple. From this our rabbis deduced that we should warn people before we enter a room lest we come upon them doing or saying something that should be private.

In Read More >