Rabbi Seth Daniel Riemer
Shabbat Morning Torah Study
Saturday, November 30
Parashat Toldot 5785 /תולדת
Genesis 25:19-28:9
Parashat Toldot chronicles the early life of our patriarch Yaakov. Rivalry with his twin brother Esav begins in their mother Rivkah’s womb, where Yaakov pulls at Esav’s heel in an unsuccessful effort to climb over him and be born first! During the brothers’ youth, Yaakov slyly manipulates Esav into selling his birthright to Yaakov in exchange for a bowl of lentil stew. There follow some events in the life of Yitzhak and Rivkah, echoing ones in the life of his parents. Thus, like his father before him, Yitzhak pretends that his wife is his sister while they’re sojourning in the kingdom of Avimeleh, who again discovers and expresses indignation over the deception. The parallels with Avraham’s life continue: Yitzhak likewise prospers, digs wells, squabbles over them with the locals, obtains divine blessings and reassurances, and makes a non-aggression pact with Avimeleh. Esav incurs his parents’ displeasure by marrying a Hittite women. Yaakov, who is Rivkah’s favorite, reluctantly schemes with her to steal a blessing that Yitzhak has reserved for his favorite, Esav. Yitzhak has asked Esav to hunt game and with it prepare a meal for the father to eat before giving the blessing. Hearing of her husband’s intentions, taking into account that in his old age he has turned blind, and hoping to pass Yaakov off as Esav, Rivkah dresses Yaakov in his brother’s clothes and directs Yaakov to bring Yitzhak a meal to simulate the one he’s expecting from Esav – so that the father will bless her favorite instead of his. The ruse works. Upon realizing that he has been cheated of his blessing, Esav plots to kill Yaakov. Rivkah urges him to flee for his life and directs him to her family in Haran, where she says he can stay until Esav’s anger has cooled. There’s another reason that Rivkah, with Yitzhak’s consent, wishes Yaakov to leave Canaan: They don’t want him to be tempted to follow his brother’s bad example of choosing a wife from the local heathen population. Recognizing that he has offended his parents, Esav tries to assuage their hurt feelings by marrying one of his uncle Yishmael’s daughters.
Shabbat Eve Service (followed by meal!)
Friday, December 6
Parashat Vayetzey 5785 /ויצא
Genesis 28:10-32:3
Our family saga continues with Yaakov’s flight from Canaan and years-long exile in Haran. On his way there, he stops for the night and dreams of a ramp, stretching from earth to heaven, on which angels go up and down. God, standing next to him, offers reassurance of His protection and promises to assign that land to Yaakov and his countless descendants – in whose name “all the families of earth” will be blessed. Awaking from this amazing dream, Yaakov, awestruck by God’s presence, swears fealty to Him. The young man makes his way to Haran, where he meets – and immediately falls in love with – his cousin Rahel. He asks his uncle, Rahel’s father Lavan, for her hand in marriage, but, after agreeing, Lavan, a sly swindler, tricks Yaakov into marrying Rahel’s older sister, Leah, disguised as Rahel, whom in a roundabout way Yaakov will marry as well. He works many years for the unprincipled Lavan. Over that time Leah, Rahel’s maidservant Bilhah, and Leah’s maidservant Zilpah bear Yaakov ten sons and one daughter. Rahel, long unable to conceive, eventually bears a son, Yosef, whose birth Yaakov reads as a signal to leave Haran and return to Canaan. First, though, he gets even with Lavan for having withheld years of wages. Employing basic principles of animal husbandry combined with magic, Yaakov enriches himself at Lavan’s expense – acquiring herds of strong sheep and goats while the father-in-law’s livestock grow feeble and sparse. Realizing that he has been outfoxed, Lavan prepares to confront his son-in-law. But Yaakov has already taken his family, flock and other possessions and fled. Before their departure, Rahel steals her father’s idols. Lavan chases after and catches up with Yaakov. The two men face off, each angrily, bitterly insisting that the other has wronged him. Lavan concedes that he lacks power to harm Yaakov, whom Lavan recognizes is under God’s protection. He further accuses Yaakov of having stolen those missing idols. Yaakov indignantly swears that anyone whom Lavan can prove guilty of that theft shall not live. In fact, as we learn in a subsequent parashah, Rahel will die in childbirth. She successfully conceals the stolen idols from her father, who, realizing he has the weaker hand, returns to his home after patching things up with Yaakov. Yaakov and family make their way on to Canaan.
Parashat Hayey Sarah
5785 /חיי שרה
Genesis 23:1-25:18
The deaths of Sarah and Yishmael serve as bookends for our Torah portion. Upon Sarah’s death, Avraham purchases a cave to serve as the family burial plot. He seems worried that the sellers, local Hittites, will double-cross him, so he summons his diplomatic powers to negotiate carefully with them over price and proof of sale. After laying his wife to rest, he turns to the matter of marrying off his son Yitzhak, dispatching a trusty servant and charging him to select for Yitzhak a bride from family in the homeland (rather than from the locals, whom Avraham disdains) and to bring her back with him to Canaan. Upon arriving in Aram-Naharayim and encountering Rivkah, a great-niece of Avraham’s, the servant is charmed by her gracious conduct and concludes that God has selected her for marriage with his master’s son. Some tense negotiations with Rivkah’s rather sleazy family members ensue, and then she accompanies the servant to Canaan and marries Yitzhak. Avraham remarries and begets more children, from whom tribes descend. He bequeaths most of his possessions – notably the land of Canaan – to Yitzhak, provides for his other sons, dies, and is buried, by his sons Yitzhak and Yishmael, in the cave where he buried Sarah. (To this day that place is held sacred by Jews and Muslims.) God blesses Yitzhak. Yishmael begets twelve sons, becomes – as God promised – progenitor of a mighty nation, and then dies.
Parashat Vayera:
Parashat Vayera 5785 / וַיֵּרָא
Genesis 18:1- 22:24
Nov. 16, 2024
Avraham and Sarah receive a visit from three “men” – one of whom is apparently God Himself – and serve them a meal. The men reiterate God’s promise that the couple will become parents of a son next year. Sarah, who is past child-bearing years, is skeptical. The men then depart; Avraham escorts them part of their way toward Sedom, the city where Avraham’s nephew Lot lives. By hints, God confides in Avraham His intention to destroy that wicked place. The two men accompanying God go on to Sedom. Left alone with God, Avraham, protesting with shrewd insistence, persuades Him to spare the city if in it ten righteous men can be found. But only one arguably righteous man, Avraham’s nephew Lot, resides there. Reaching Sedom, the two men (now identified as “angels”/“messengers”) are met by Lot, who – concerned for their safety in this criminal environment – persuades them to take refuge under his roof. Men of the town surround Lot’s house menacingly and demand that he hand over his guests to be gang-raped. Lot’s polite refusals – including an offer to substitute his two daughters for that horrible purpose – only infuriate the Sedomites, who threaten to rape him as well. The angels pull him into the house, bar the door, and cast a spell on the Sedomites to render them temporarily harmless. Informing Lot that God is about to destroy Sedom, the angels warn him to take his family and leave immediately. When he tells this to his sons-in-law, they think he’s joking. He himself is hesitant, so God’s men grab Lot, his wife and daughters, pull them out of the city, and urge him to “flee” the vicinity. Looking back on the devastation, his wife is turned into a pillar of salt. Lot and his daughters escape into a cave. From a distance, Avraham witnesses smoke rising from the ruins. Assuming they’re the last people alive on earth and wishing to preserve human life, Lot’s daughters get him drunk and have him impregnate them. Their sons will become ancestors of the Ammonite and Moabite nations. Avraham and Sarah travel south, where Avraham, pulling the same stunt he fooled the Pharaoh with (in last week’s parashah), tricks a local king, Avimeleh, into believing that Sarah is Avraham’s sister and allows the king to take Sarah into his harem. God, in a dream, warns Avimeleh to keep his hands off Sarah. The king angrily retorts, accusing Him (as earlier Avraham had done!) of intending to “kill an innocent people.” Avimeleh likewise rebukes Avraham, who feebly rationalizes his subterfuge by claiming that Sarah is, in fact, his sister on his father’s side. Returning Sarah to Avraham, Avimeleh further indemnifies himself by compensating Avraham with gifts of livestock and slaves. Avraham prays for the king and his household, whom God struck with infertility on account of Sarah; God heeds Avraham’s prayer, and the women of Avimeleh’s family give birth.
Two consecutive stories – also read on days 1 and 2 of Rosh Hashanah – trace dramatic events involving Avraham, Sarah, Hagar, Yishmael and Yitzhak. Sarah, who was infertile well into old age, assigned her slave girl, Hagar, to play concubine to husband Avraham and produce a baby boy whom Sarah would then adopt as her own son. Hagar became pregnant but incurred Sarah’s resentment by trying to edge out Sarah as alpha female in the household. When (in Genesis 21) Sarah inexplicably gets pregnant and bears a son, she throws out Hagar and her son, Yishmael. Powerless and homeless, mother and child wander aimlessly in the desert and nearly die of hunger and thirst. God assigns an angel to come to their rescue – by miraculously providing a well of water – and promises Hagar that Yishmael will grow up to be a fierce and powerful chieftain. The tale is meant as a reminder of divine compassion and grace even toward the impoverished and dispossessed. The fact that our story’s central figure, Hagar, whom God has protected and sustained, is both a woman and a non-Hebrew underscores the holiday’s universality: Rosh Hashanah celebrates the birth of the world, a home to all people no matter what their economic status or social rank. The story (Genesis 22) that follows, famously known as Akedat Yitzhak (the Binding of Isaac) is a harsh parable about what acting on one’s true priorities means. Having delivered on His promise to provide Avraham with a longed-for heir, God then instructs Avraham to tie up that child, Isaac, on a mountain altar and slaughter him as a sacrifice. Avraham is prepared to obey without hesitation. Upon witnessing such unflinching obedience, God orders Avraham to halt the proceedings, and Avraham sacrifices – as a substitute for the son – a ram that has been conveniently placed at the altar site. Why do we read this chapter on Rosh Hashanah? Perhaps its message complements that of the preceding chapter. From Yitzhak descends Ya’akov: Israel. Were that family line cut off, there would be no Jewish people! The ordeal father and son go through reminds them, and us, that we as a people may not take for granted our existence and God’s favor. Instead, we must come to terms with the fact that – just as in the case of Yishmael no person or people is expendable – the future of no nation, however privileged and proud it might consider itself, is guaranteed.
Parashat Lech Lecha:
Parashat Leh-Leha 5785 /לך–לך
Genesis 12:1-17:27
Nov. 9, 2024
This Torah portion traces the progress of our Hebrew ancestors’ journeys from their beginnings in Chaldea and Haran to the land of Canaan. Heeding a divine command to leave his “native land,” Avram – accompanied by his wife Sarai, nephew Lot, a household of servants, and burgeoning livestock - travels about Canaan and also ventures briefly into Egypt, the family's wealth increasing through God’s favor at every turn. During the sojourn in Egypt, fearing that other men might murder him and seize his astonishingly beautiful wife, Avram has her pose as his sister and sells her to the Pharaoh. God comes to the couple’s rescue by casting plagues on the Egyptian king and his household. Realizing he has been bamboozled and fleeced, Pharaoh releases Sarai from his harem and sends the couple packing. They return to Canaan and encounter new difficulties there. Huge herds of cattle Avram and Lot have acquired lead to competition over grazing rights, so they agree to part ways, the uncle graciously ceding to his nephew the region’s more fertile eastern terrain (in the vicinity of Sedom – near what is now the Dead Sea). However, God tells Avram that the entire land belongs to him and his descendants – who will flourish exponentially. When Lot gets caught in a vicious, longstanding struggle between rival warlords and (along with the defeated king ruling over the place where he lives) is held captive, Avram mobilizes his own forces and local allies, defeats the erstwhile victors, and releases Lot along with other prisoners. Notably, Avram refuses to profit from the spoils of war and receives praise from Malkitzedek, a priest and fellow worshipper of “God Most High.” Avram worries because he has no biological heir, but he receives divine reassurance that in the fullness of time he’ll be blessed with a son. God formally establishes a covenant with Avram after informing him that his descendants will be enslaved and liberated (as the Torah’s narrative later describes). Sarai’s anxieties echo Avram’s: She frets over her infertility and arranges for Avram to impregnate her Egyptian slave-girl Hagar so that Sarai herself can adopt the male child Hagar will bear. This arrangement goes awry: Upon becoming pregnant, Hagar tries to edge out and replace Sarai. Infuriated, Sarai punishes Hagar, who runs away. An angel instructs her to go back and submit to the abuse but promises that all will work out for the best: Hagar’s son, Yishmael, will become a powerful chieftain and progenitor of a great nation. Avram and Sarai are now very old, and the chance of their ever being able to produce a child together seems to have slipped away. Nevertheless, once again God dismisses Avram’s skepticism about the future and reaffirms the covenant between them: by changing the couple’s names to Avraham and Sarah (the name changes signify fecundity and royalty); by making male circumcision mandatory; and by promising that, a year hence, Sarah and Abraham shall be the proud parents of a newborn son. Avraham then circumcises himself, his son Yishmael, and all males of the household.
Parashat Noach:
Parashat No’ah 5785 / נח
Genesis 6:9-11:32
November 2, 2024
As a devastating deluge looms, Noah, following God’s command to save a remnant of terrestrial life, builds an ark and brings into it his family along with pairs of male and female animals, thus ensuring their procreation. The storm lasts forty days; a resulting flood, which covers the entire land mass, takes months to subside. All life on earth except what is in the ark perishes. When the waters start to recede and land becomes visible, Noah sends out a raven and then a dove to assess, from their behavior, whether the terrain is sufficiently dry to sustain habitat. After returning with an olive branch, the dove departs and does not return – these are signs that the earth can support life once again. Noah releases all the animals from the ark and makes sacrifices to God, who, forgiving our propensity toward evil, vows never to annihilate humankind again, and, blessing Noah and his sons, sets a rainbow in the sky as a promissory emblem: a reminder of His covenant with all living things. God further stipulates a code of moral conduct (the so-called seven “Noahide Laws”), including the basis of Judaism’s system of kashrut and a strict prohibition of murder. Noah plants a vineyard, drinks wine and, in a drunken stupor, strips naked. One of his sons sees the exposed father, who, upon waking and finding out, curses that son, Ham, and all his descendants, condemning them to eternal servitude (this episode is, unfortunately, the basis of a racist trope since Ham is the ancestor of dark-skinned Africans; Canaanites – who descend from this cursed family line – were early inhabitants of, and gave their name to, what later became the land of Israel). Genealogies of Noah’s three sons – the other two being Shem and Yefet – follow. Shem is the ancestor of Ever (from whom the “Hebrew” nation derives) and, eventually, as the parashah goes on to mention in its summary of Noah’s family line, Avram (who, with his wife Sarah, mentioned here without genealogical reference, is ancestor of the Jews). At a brief interval of this genealogy, the Torah inserts a powerful cautionary tale: the Tower of Babel. It relates the ironic consequences of collective hubris and offers a rather cynical explanation for the fact of cultural diversity. The story (possibly a historical reference to the ruins of ziggurats seen by Jewish exiles in ancient Babylonia) relates how all the people speak one language and gather in one place to show off by building a tower that will reach Heaven. Seeing these people trying to outrival Him, God foils their plan by confounding their speech and preventing them from communicating with one another so that they can’t follow through to complete the tower, and they separate and scatter across the world. This building project intended to strengthen humanity’s sense of common purpose has inadvertently sabotaged it!
Parashat Bereshit:
Parashat Bereshit 5785 / בראשית
Genesis 1:1-6:8
October 26, 2024
Parashat Bereshit begins on a hopeful note, but pessimism soon takes over as God’s ambitious plan for the world He has created falls apart. The divine blueprint for Creation is admirable, but a snake tricks the woman God has created to taste fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad (a symbol with multiple connotations); she persuades the man God has created to take a bite, and God punishes all three, expelling the no longer innocent man and woman from their garden paradise and casting them into a life of drudgery and struggle. One of their sons kills his brother, so the man and woman decide to start over by having more children. Violence, corruption and lawlessness increase as people multiply. Admitting failure, God decides to wipe out the human race along with all land-dwelling life forms. Only one righteous man, Noah, remains to mitigate God’s biocidal intentions.
Truma:
Time Travel in the Biblical Text
by Michael M. Cohen
Feb. 25, 2023
The 25th chapter of the Book of Exodus opens this week’s parasha, Truma. Or does it?
According to many Torah commentators throughout the ages, chapter 31 actually happened before chapter 25. What is going on here? Are we being told reading the Torah is like traveling in Dr. Who’s TARDIS, whose inside is larger than its outside dimensions and which travels backward and forward in time?
Commenting on the golden calf episode in chapter 31, Rashi explains: “There is no ‘earlier’ or ‘later’ (no chronological order) in the events related in the Torah: in fact, the incident of the golden calf happened a considerable time before the command regarding the work of the Tabernacle was given (chapter 25 and the following chapters)” (Rashi, Silbermann edition, Ex. 31:18).
That is a bold statement by Rashi, claiming the Torah was not written, dictated by God to Moses, in chronological order. On what does he base this radical approach to the text?
In the Talmud, there is discussion about two verses. The Book of Numbers, chapter 1, reads, “The Lord spoke to Moses in the tent of meeting in the Desert of Sinai on the first day of the second month of the second year after the Israelites came out of Egypt” (Num 1:1), and in the Book of Numbers, chapter 9, it states, “The Lord spoke to Moses in the Desert of Sinai in the first month of the second year after they came out of Egypt” (Num 9:1). Clearly, these sentences are not written in sequential order, which led Rav Menashya bar Tahlifa, quoting Rav, to conclude, “That is to say, there is no earlier and later in the Torah” (Pesahim 6b).
While this was recognized as an accepted hermeneutical tool in understanding the Torah, it was by no means accepted by all rabbinic authorities. It was one of the major differences between the schools of Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael and how they understood the infrastructure of the Torah.
IN HIS magnum opus, Heavenly Torah: As Refracted Through the Generations, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel explores these two approaches. Akiva believed the Torah was written chronologically, and Ishmael followed the teaching of bar Tahlifa that there is not always a strict chronology to the words of the Torah.
Heschel quotes Rabbi Judah the Patriarch who thought, as did Ishmael, “There are many passages linked to each other in the text but in actuality they are as far apart as east from west” (Heavenly Torah, p. 241; Sifre Balak 131).
Heschel also cites Rabbi Aha who offers a very interesting explanation of why God would have written the Torah out of order:
“Rabbi Aha made this interesting observation: The fact that there is no chronological order in the Torah testifies that the sacred texts were uttered by the Holy and Blessed One. Otherwise, people would say, ‘They are merely fiction, written by someone who used his imagination, in the manner of a person who relates what happened in his lifetime’ (Genesis Rabbah 85:2). He concludes, therefore, that because they lack any chronological order, they must be the product of the Holy Spirit. Moses wrote them down in the order in which they were communicated to him through prophecy” (Heavenly Torah, p. 242).
Akiva, on the other hand, as Heschel says, “stated bluntly, ‘Every passage that adjoins another has to be learned in conjunction with it’” (ibid. p. 241; Sifre Balak 131). Akiva, according to Heschel, appears to base his thinking on this verse from Psalms, “The Torah of the Lord is perfect” (Ps. 19: 8).
We also find a synthesis of these two divergent positions. Heschel quotes Nahmanides: “The Torah follows a chronological order, except where it provides a specific explanation for placing a text earlier or later, depending on the demands of the subject or for other reasons” (Heavenly Torah, p. 243; Nahmanides, Num. 16:1).
With the two passages in the Book of Numbers out of order, it is clear how Rav Menashya bar Tahlifa came to his conclusion that those two sections, and some other passages within the Torah, were written in unchronological order. So, what drew Rashi to say that Exodus chapter 25 and chapter 31 are out of order?
Rabbi Micah Peltz offers a beautiful and keen insight: “For Rabbi Ishmael, then, the order of the Torah is as follows: Sin of the golden calf; commandment to build, and the building of, the mishkan. Therefore, the sin of the golden calf actually happens before any talk of a mishkan. Suddenly the mishkan, which represented the Divine ideal for Rabbi Akiva, becomes a Divine concession for Rabbi Ishmael. Rabbi Ishmael believes that God never intended [for] Israel to build a mishkan – but then Israel sinned. Only then does God give the command to build the mishkan. God is abstract, and therefore wanted people to relate to God in an abstract way. But the people needed something concrete, something tangible, in order to relate to God, so God gives in.
“Through this example, we see that Rabbi Akiva views the world through the lens of heaven – where Divine desires come first. Rabbi Ishmael, however, views the world through an earthly lens – where human needs can affect God.”
https://www.jewishvoicesnj.org/articles/seeing-the-world-in-only-one-way-offers-a-skewed-view/
Ross Benjamin, in the preface to his new and comprehensive translation of Kafka’s diaries, offers another way to grasp the written biblical text that in places appears random in its structure:
“Unlike the Brod edition, which imposed an artificial chronology on the entries, the critical edition retains the sequence as it appears in the notebooks. Kafka went back and forth between several of them at the same time, without dating every piece of writing” (Franz Kafka, Diaries, trans. Ross Benjamin, p. ix).
“There is no chronological order in the Torah” also sends us into the reality of Einstein’s special theory of relativity that time is not absolute; there is an elasticity to time: the faster one moves, the slower time is experienced, and the slower one moves, the faster time is encountered. With Einstein’s theory chronology remains constant, unlike in the Torah where we are told the text does not always follow a direct time chronology. However, with Einstein’s special theory of relativity and its fluctuation of the speed of time along with the un-chronological sequencing of the Torah our perceived sense of time can be disjointed by both.
Perhaps that is the point. Life at times flows like a sweet melody, and at other times there is dissonance; things seem out of order. We harmonize those disparate moments by reading the text of the Torah through the lens of the Talmud which presents the perspectives of Ishmael and Akiva as both having validity.■