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Wearing the Crowns of Heaven
Feb 27, 1999 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Tetzavveh | Purim
Many a busy street corner of Manhattan has served on occasion as the stump of a preacher who speaks in the name of God. With the countdown to the millennium, the scene will only occur with greater frequency. Yet most passersby don’t tarry for a moment. The mere claim to revelation carries no weight.
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The Experience of Revelation
Feb 13, 1999 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Mishpatim | Shabbat Shekalim
With exuberance and certainty, the young Heinrich Graetz, not yet 30 but soon to become the greatest Jewish historian of the nineteenth century, made a distinction between Judaism and paganism that would in time become commonplace: “To the pagan, the divine appears within nature as something observable to the eye. He becomes conscious of it as something seen. In contrast, to the Jew who knows that the divine exists beyond, outside of, and prior to nature, God reveals Himself through a demonstration of His will, through the medium of the ear. The human subject becomes conscious of the divine through hearing and obeying. Paganism sees its god, Judaism hears Him; that is, it hears the commandments of His will.”
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Do You Believe in God?
Feb 6, 1999 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Yitro
Martin Buber tells the story of an unexpected visit by an elderly English clergyman in the spring of 1914. A simple Christian of deep faith, he had done much good for the nascent Zionist movement in the days of Theodor Herzl and Buber knew him well. What brought him to Buber that particular day was his foreboding of an imminent outbreak of war worldwide, based not on any public or secret sources of information, but on his own careful recalculation of the age-old prophecies of Daniel. When the presentation ended, Buber took his guest back to the railroad station. Before they parted, the clergyman grasped Buber’s arm and said to him with utmost gravity: “Dear friend, we are living in a great time. Tell me: Do you believe in God?”
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Midrash in the Prince of Egypt
Jan 9, 1999 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Shemot
Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Prince of Egypt is a midrash on the exodus story, a specimen of reader participation in the recounting of ancient Israel’s foundation epic. While respecting the articulate contours of the biblical narrative, Mr. Katzenberg fills in the gaps with a distinctly contemporary sensibility. To my mind, the most imaginative and effective of these additions to the text is the relationship between Moses and the pharaoh of the exodus. They are portrayed as half-brothers and childhood friends. The film takes advantage of the Torah’s complete silence on Moses’s long years in the pharaoh’s palace to introduce a dramatic twist and humane subtext to the well-known cosmic contest between the God of the patriarchs and the gods of Egypt. It would have us imagine that in the royal domain Moses not only assimilated the mores of the Egyptian aristocracy, but also became the closest friend of Ramses, who was destined to be the next ruler of Egypt. The first quarter of the film is in fact devoted to the escapades of this carefree and destructive twosome, with Moses clearly the dominant figure.
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The Archetype of the Firstborn
Jan 2, 1999 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Vayehi
As the book of Genesis daws to a close, it circles back to the beginning. The displacement of the firstborn, the theme which has dominated the narrative throughout, is reiterated one last time. And this final reiteration is as arbitrary as the first. At the dawn of human history, it was the sacrifice of Abel, the younger son of Adam and Eve, that found favor in God’s eyes and not that of Cain, even though Cain was the first to turn to God in a spirit of thanksgiving (Genesis 4:3-4). Divine rejection quickly led to human aggression. The episode foreshadows the pervasive preference for the younger brother which becomes the connective tissue of all the patriarchal stories.
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Judah and Jewish Education
Dec 28, 1998 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Vayiggash
It is the subplots which make the Joseph saga a work of great literature. Had the Torah focused solely on relocating Jacob from Canaan to Egypt it would have left us with a piece of wooden theology and boring prose. But the author is too much the artist to have Joseph reveal his identity when his brothers first arrive. Yet what is accomplished by the delay? Joseph’s dreams, which cost him their love, have surely been fulfilled.
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“By Spirit Alone”
Dec 19, 1998 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Miketz | Hanukkah
Judaism shuns the celebration of military victory. The conquest of Canaan by Joshua was never transmuted into a holy day. Passover commemorates our redemption from Egypt; Shavuot, the giving of the Torah at Sinai; Tisha B’Av, the destruction of the Temples; but the demolition of Jericho by Joshua or the final achievement of sovereignty with the erection of the national shrine at Shiloh (Joshua 18:1) find no place in the religious calendar of Judaism.
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The Power of Dreams
Dec 12, 1998 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Vayeshev
For the ancients, dreams often conveyed a divine communication about the future. For us moderns, raised in the shadow of Freud, dreams are an expression of our unconscious desires made manifest through dissimilation. Freud took as the motto for his pathbreaking Interpretation of Dreams, published at the end of 1899, a line from Virgil’s Aeneid: “If I cannot bend the higher powers, I will move the infernal regions,” which summarized his thesis. Desires censored by the defenses of our “higher mental authorities” would resort to the realm of our “mental underworld (the unconscious)” to achieve their ends (Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for our Time, p. 105). Nowhere does the secularization of the modern mind find more striking articulation than in the view that dreams are no longer regarded as an emanation from above but rather as an eruption from below.
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The Comfort of a Forgotten Poem
Dec 5, 1998 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Vayishlah
Jacob’s life with his beloved Rachel is cut painfully short by her death in childbirth. After a long absence and before he has a chance to build a permanent home in the land promised by God, he loses the treasure acquired abroad. It was a relationship marked by love and adversity. Seeing Rachel for the first time at the well in Haran filled Jacob with the strength to remove unaided its heavy stone covering (Genesis 29:10-11). The intensity of his affection is conveyed by the fact that Jacob worked for Laban, his father-in-law, for fourteen years to win the right to marry her. And his resolve is undiminished by the fraud committed by Laban, which saddles Jacob with Leah, Rachel’s older sister, as his first, unsought-for wife. Rachel is the more comely of the two, and the Torah tells us unabashedly that Jacob “loved Rachel more than Leah (Genesis 29:30).”
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A Hardened Heart
Nov 7, 1998 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Va'era
“To harden the heart” is a figure of speech that goes back to the book of Exodus.
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The Politics of Genesis
Nov 7, 1998 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Vayera
It was during my sabbatical in Israel in 1974-75 that I first began to sense the political thrust of the book of Genesis. The messianic order of Gush Emunim, the radical young nationalists destined to take over the National Religious Party, had not been dimmed by the near debacle of the Yom Kippur War. The melancholy and self-doubt that pervaded Israeli society did not dilute their resolve to settle the West Bank. The effort to mobilize the sacred texts of Judaism to reinforce the ideal of a Greater Israel was well underway. Where we live undeniedly impacts on the way we see things. Only in America, with its worship of the self, would we ever come to regard the biblical saga of our ancestors as the mirror of our own dysfunctional families.
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Torah: A Canon Without Closure
Oct 31, 1998 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Lekh Lekha
Our parasha opens like a thunderclap on a clear day. Since No·ah, the voice of God had not been heard by human ear. For ten generations the Torah records not a single instance of communication. Then, without forewarning, God explodes into Abraham’s life: “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you (Genesis 12:1).” The course of history was about to be rerouted.
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The Laws of Noah
Oct 24, 1998 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Noah
As the story of No·ah opens, the Torah returns to the word “elohim” for “God:” “When God saw how corrupt the earth was… God said to No·ah… (Genesis 6:12-13).” And with few exceptions (Genesis 7:1,5, 16; 8:21), this remains the term for God throughout. It is the same noun used by the Torah in chapter one to depict the creation of the cosmos. Unlike the four letter personal name of God – YHVH – (rendered as “the Lord” in the Jewish Publication Society’s translation of the Bible), elohim is a plural form and a generic term for deity that can also serve to refer to pagan gods.
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Between Moses and Genesis
Oct 17, 1998 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Bereishit
For the rabbis, the gap between the death of Moses at the end of the Torah and the creation of Adam and Eve at the beginning is bridged by divine compassion. The Torah closes as it opens, with an act of kindness, in order to establish the doing of good deeds (gemilut hasadim) as the supreme value of Judaism. Our exemplar is none other than God, who in each instance is moved by human plight.
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Nourishing the Soul
Sep 30, 1998 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Yom Kippur
To fast for a day is not what makes Yom Kippur difficult for us. Fasting gets easier with age. The real challenge of Yom Kippur is to do without the distractions to which we are addicted. Ours is a society that abhors silence. We jog with earphones, run with music, fly with movies and even entertain company with the television droning in the background.
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Taking a Spiritual Inventory
Sep 21, 1998 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Rosh Hashanah | Yom Kippur
The twentieth-century American artist Georgia O’Keeffe, known for her enlarged and stylized flower studies, once said: “Nobody sees a flower really – it is so small – we haven’t time, and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.” Whatever else our High Holy Days might be, they are surely about helping us sharpen our vision. If I had to reduce the drama and choreography, the prayer and music of this protracted season to a single, encompassing goal it would be to enable us to catch another glimpse of what has grown dim or to discover an insight beyond our ken. And because seeing afresh cannot be hurried, we slow down and withdraw, gradually diminishing the bombardment of distractions.
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Life From the Ashes
Aug 1, 1998 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Devarim | Tishah Be'av
How did Judaism manage to survive the destruction of its central sanctuary? According to the book of Deuteronomy, which we always begin to read on the Shabbat before Tish’ah Be’av, it was to be the only link between heaven and earth. All sacrifices were to be offered there and no place else. The exclusive cult restricted to a single Temple seemed to reinforce the fragile belief in a single, omnipotent God. And even if Solomon’s Temple never fully eradicated the plethora of local altars and sanctuaries, it did claim to be the repository of God’s holy name and the place where God was most readily accessible to human supplication. Yet, unwittingly, the monotheism of Solomon’s court increased the vulnerability of Israelite religion. The destruction of his Temple in 586 BCE could have ruptured the ties between God and Israel. By then the exiled tribes of the Northern Kingdom, crushed by Assyria in 721 BCE, were well on their way to oblivion.
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Remembering the Holocaust on Tisha B’Av
Jul 25, 1998 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Masei | Mattot | Tishah Be'av
My father liked to record in the books he bought the date of purchase. Each book became a marker in the unfolding of his life. Though long gone, my father and I meet often on the pages of the many books from his library that are interspersed in mine. Every year at this time, I take off the shelf his slender Hebrew edition of the Order of Lamentations for Tisha b’Av to ready myself for the fast day. I never fail to be arrested by the date stamped on its first page beneath my father’s name: January 12, 1933. Hitler came to power as Germany’s Chancellor exactly 18 days later on January 30. The pall of Tisha b’Av descended in mid–winter that year and would not lift till the spring of 1945.
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Being Jewish at Yale
Jun 27, 1998 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Korah
The Talmud condemns the rebellion by Korah and company against Moses as the prime example of “a controversy not for Heaven’s sake.” Tarnished by impure motives, his challenge brings no lasting benefit. And the Torah confirms that reading. Korah is a Levite bent on leveling the religious hierarchy set up by God to govern the Tabernacle. He rejects the special status accorded his clan to service the cult “You have gone too far,” he declaims to Moses. “For all the community are holy… Why then do you raise yourself above the Lord’s congregation (Numbers 163)?” Behind the facade of democratic rhetoric lurks a grab for power.
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What Hands Teach Us about Religion
Jun 13, 1998 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Beha'alotekha
My father liked to study hands, not to predict the future but to judge character. An amateur graphologist, he had concluded that our hands are an even more revealing extension of our personality than our handwriting. The interest was a great ice–breaker. He would often ask guests visiting our home for the first time to show him their hands, palms down and held together in a triangle. After a brief gaze, he would offer a few comments about their personality type, talents and values. He was rarely way off. Though I failed to acquire his expertise, I remained ever sensitive to the expressiveness of hands.
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