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Forgiveness
Dec 31, 2011 By David Marcus | Commentary | Vayiggash
Parashat Va-yiggash continues the longest narrative in the Torah, that of Joseph and his brothers.
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Tears for the Temples
Dec 31, 2011 By David Levy | Commentary | Text Study | Hanukkah
Reading this makes me think of the breaking of the glass during a Jewish wedding ceremony. In a moment of sheer joy at the marriage, we break a glass to remember the Temple and that our joy cannot be complete in light of its destruction. Here, too, the Rabbis imagine, Joseph and Benjamin cannot fully enjoy their moment with the foreknowledge that the Temples will be destroyed.
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Why There Is Suffering
Dec 24, 2011 By Charlie Schwartz | Commentary | Text Study | Miketz | Hanukkah
Who among us has not experienced suffering? After all, loss, sadness, and struggle are as much a part of life as joy, happiness, and triumph. This is as apparent in the emotional arc of Joseph and his family in parashat Miketz as it is in life’s experience.
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Slaves Will One Day Be Free
Dec 17, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Vayeshev
In the narrative unfolding of the biblical drama, the Joseph story accounts for the arrival of Jacob’s sons and their descendants in Egypt. It also serves to introduce one of the main themes to emerge from the rest of the biblical story: the overturning of oppression with redemption.
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I Stayed with Laban
Dec 10, 2011 By Robert Harris | Commentary | Vayishlah
The opening verses of this week’s parashah recount Jacob’s decision, upon returning home after 20 years of “living abroad,” to get in touch with his brother, Esau. You may remember that they—ahem!—had not parted on the best of terms (see Gen. 25:27-34 and especially Gen. 27:1-41 for the gritty details). At the beginning of the parashah, it is not yet clear to what extent Jacob is motivated by fear, by friendliness, by craftiness—or by some combination of these and potentially other concerns.
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A Painful Embrace
Dec 10, 2011 By Andrew Shugerman | Commentary | Text Study | Vayishlah
Rarely do I find a midrash like the one above that reflects love and hate, admiration and anger, in a single passage about how Jews relate to Christians. While the two rabbis quoted here agree that a peculiar scribal feature is crucial to understanding Jacob and Esau’s reunion, they fundamentally disagree about what that detail signifies.
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Between Dante and Jacob
Dec 3, 2011 By Marc Wolf | Commentary | Vayetzei
For Parashat Va-yetzei, although the times are different, the convention is the same and, for us, the question all the more poignant: What is the role of Jacob’s romantic love for Rachel? Does romantic love set us up for an unfulfilled life?
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Torah As Water
Nov 26, 2011 By Charlie Schwartz | Commentary | Text Study | Toledot
The metaphor of Torah as water has always resonated with me. With Torah as water, the idea of learning, engaging with, and living through our sacred texts comes into focus. Just as we cannot live for long without water, so too will our lives become desiccated and empty without the study of Torah.
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Honoring Teachers
Nov 26, 2011 By David Levy | Commentary | Text Study | Vayetzei
Picking up on the surprising mention of Abraham as Jacob’s father, we learn an important lesson about the roles different people can play in our lives. Each of us who has been taught by someone is obliged to honor him/her as we would our parents. And the extension of this teaching is that each of us has the potential to play this important role in someone else’s life.
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Conflicted Relationships
Nov 25, 2011 By Arnold M. Eisen | Commentary | Toledot
At the start of this week’s parashah, and again at its conclusion, we confront the complex, conflicted relationship that binds Isaac’s twin sons to one another and to their father. The middle section of the parashah, by contrast, is concerned with the no less complex and conflicted relationship that binds Isaac and his family to their neighbors.
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To Speak Is To…
Nov 19, 2011 By Samuel Barth | Commentary | Hayyei Sarah
After the many narratives that explore deeply the life of Abraham and his family, we find in this portion an interlude in which the focus is upon Abraham’s elder servant—not named in our text, but often assumed to be Eliezer (mentioned in Gen. 15:2). Eliezer has been charged by Abraham to find a wife for Isaac—not from the local (Canaanite) population, but from Aram, the place of Abraham’s birth.
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Our Aging Bodies
Nov 18, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Hayyei Sarah
If the rabbis could imagine Abraham’s dismay at the physical signs of aging, how much more so for us, men and women, living in a culture in which we are constantly bombarded with visual images of young, vigorous bodies?
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Sustaining Our Hearts
Nov 12, 2011 By Andrew Shugerman | Commentary | Text Study | Vayera
On its face, this midrash may seem to state the obvious: that eating bread gives one energy. After all, a look at our food packaging today reveals the ingredients and nutrients contained in any given product. This text, however, teaches that not all nourishment comes in physical form. The deceptively simple statement that “bread strengthens the heart” and the prooftexts that follow it actually provide a subtle commentary to the notion that “man does not live on bread alone” (Deut. 8:3); indeed, we derive sustenance at least as much from our gratitude for the company we keep and for the blessing of hospitality.
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Going Toward the Present
Nov 11, 2011 By David Hoffman | Commentary | Vayera
Martin Buber, the great 20th-century Jewish theologian, observed a powerful literary connection between the beginning of Abraham’s life and the end. God first speaks to Abraham suddenly, seemingly without introduction, and commands: “Go forth (lekh lekha) from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (Gen. 12:1). With these few words, God introduces God’s Self to Abraham and it is with these words that their relationship is founded.
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The Redeeming of Captives
Nov 5, 2011 By Eliezer B. Diamond z”l | Commentary | Lekh Lekha
What does it mean to be someone’s brother or sister, beyond a biological fact? In Genesis, the answer seems to be: not much. Every story involving brothers is one of violence, discord, enmity, or deceit. Cain murders Abel; Ham shames his father and is doomed to serve his brothers. Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers—we all know how those relationships played out. In fact, the only brother who comes to his brother’s aid is not actually his brother: it is Abraham—then Abram—who rides to the rescue of his nephew Lot.
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Gifts to God
Nov 5, 2011 By David Levy | Commentary | Text Study | Lekh Lekha
The midrash seems to be pointing out that we can learn from Abraham: we are to give a gift to God when we receive good news.
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A Sabbath Song for Parashat Noah
Oct 29, 2011 By Judith Hauptman | Commentary | Noah
It is a lovely Jewish practice to sing songs at the Shabbat table. The little booklets that contain grace also provide the words of many zemirot, Sabbath songs. If we look at two of the more popular ones, Yah Ribbon and Mah Yedidot Menuhatekh, we find that their common theme is a plea to observe the Sabbath in the present, and a hope for a future in which God redeems the People Israel. But there is one song that differs from all the rest. It makes reference to this week’s Parashat No·ah. The name of the song is “The Dove Found a Place to Rest on the Sabbath (Yonah Maz’ah Bo Manoah).”
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Small Crimes, Big Punishment
Oct 29, 2011 By Charlie Schwartz | Commentary | Text Study | Noah
This week’s midrash has a rather shocking answer to the question of why the world deserved to be wiped out in the days of Noah.
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Reason Versus Faith
Oct 22, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Bereishit
If the ancients worried to prove God’s existence, the challenge of Darwinian evolution posed an even greater threat: counterevidence to the biblical account of Creation. In the postmodern era, we Jews-in-the-center find ourselves oddly caught in the middle of a debate portrayed in the news media as between those who insist literally on the biblical account and those who reject it altogether.
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Creation and Good Health
Oct 22, 2011 By Matthew Berkowitz | Commentary | Bereishit | Simhat Torah
With this week’s celebration of Simhat Torah and Shabbat Bereishit, we return to the very beginning of Torah as we read anew the narratives of Creation, the Garden of Eden, and the tragedy of Cain and Abel.
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