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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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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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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Moses on Trial
Jan 23, 1999 By Robert Harris | Commentary | Bo
Perhaps by now you have seen the animated feature, The Prince of Egypt. In one scene, the character of Moses is portrayed as being plagued(!) by his conscience immediately after killing the Egyptian who had been beating the Israelite (see Exodus 2:12). In fact, the movie eliminates the secretive nature of this act as the Biblical narrative presents it (look it up!), and instead depicts Moses as fleeing Egypt — not because the Egyptian authorities are seeking his life — but as a result of his moral abhorrence of his own act. The taking of a human life is judged by this animated pacifist as reason for self-exile from society. Unfortunately, the film does not take up the issue of the wholesale loss of Egyptian life in the ensuing plagues sequence and splitting of the sea. In the movie, Moses never questions God’s fierce methods in freeing the Israelites from slavery. We shall return to this issue below.
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Balancing Emotional and Rational Approaches
Jan 30, 1999 By Morton M. Leifman z”l | Commentary | Beshallah
This Shabbat celebrates music. Some communities have developed the lovely custom on Shabbat Shira of distributing special food for the birds, those providers of musical gifts to humanity. The Beshalah Torah reading contains the passionate hymn which our ancestors chanted after crossing the Sea of Reeds in safety and witnessing the destruction of their pursuing enemies. Our tradition is to stand during the reading of the hymn, for the leader to use special musical tropes during the chanting and for the congregation to join in the singing of a number of the verses. It is intended to be a dramatic performance. In some Hassidic communities the chanting was followed by a ritual dance to reenact symbolically the jumping into the waters of the sea and the emerging in safety. Thus, music and drama are used as an integral part of the emotional components of the religious experience.
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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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