Rabbi Seth Daniel Riemer
Divrei Torah 5785
Saturday, December 21 (with Rabbi Seth’s “tisch talk” during kiddush)
Parashat Vayeshev 5785 /וישב
Genesis 37:1-40:23
Our narrative focus (a real melodrama!) shifts to two of Yaakov’s sons: Yosef and Yehudah. Yosef, the father’s gifted, coddled favorite, antagonizes his brothers by lording it over them. Several of them retaliate, conspiring to murder him, and only the intervention of the oldest brother, Reuven, keeps them from carrying out their aim. More or less siding with Reuven, but with a sly twist, Yehudah helps soften the siblings’ ire by providing a financial incentive: Instead of committing fratricide, he proposes, they can sell Yosef into slavery. Having agreed to this expedient, the brothers callously pause for lunch while Yosef remains in the desert pit where, after having stripped him of an ornamental tunic that was their father’s special gift to Yosef, the brothers threw him. Along come traveling merchants, who discover Yosef in the pit, lift him out of it, and sell him to another group, which is on its way to Egypt. The brothers panic when they Shabbat discover that he has vanished. They concoct an alibi: killing a goat, dipping its blood in Yosef’s tunic, and presenting it to Yaakov, who concludes that a wild animal devoured his beloved son. Yosef is sold to Potifar, a bureaucrat in the Pharaoh’s court. Meanwhile, Yehudah carries on his own affairs apart from his father and brothers. He marries a Canaanite woman, who bears him three sons and then dies. God kills the two older ones, the first for an unspecified reason. When the second, obligated (in accordance with local custom that later becomes enshrined in Torah law) to marry his older brother’s widow, refuses to consummate but instead wastes his seed, God kills him as well. Only the youngest of the three brothers survives. Yehudah has concluded that marriage to this woman, Tamar, is a death sentence. To prevent a repeat of his two older sons’ deaths, he uses, as his excuse for not letting Tamar marry his third son, the fact that the child is still too young to marry. But eventually, after that boy has grown up and Yehudah still refuses to allow the marriage, Tamar grows suspicious. Disguising herself as a prostitute, she lures Yehudah into her bed and becomes pregnant. When he discovers this fact, he demands that Tamar (who is after all technically betrothed to his remaining child) be put to death for adultery. She calls him on his hypocrisy by producing evidence that he is the person who got her pregnant; whereupon Yehudah apologizes and relents. Much in the manner of Rivkah with Esav and Yaakov, Tamar gives birth to twins, one of whom is destined to be the ancestor of King David. Back to Yosef. He is Potifar’s house-slave and very successful at his job and – with Potifar’s blessing – takes over management of the entire household, but he runs into difficulties again when his master’s wife tries to seduce him. He refuses, so she frames him for attempted rape, and he is thrown in prison, where, once again, his impressive administrative talents come to light, this time attracting the attention of his jailkeeper, who assigns Yosef to look after imprisoned Egyptian dignitaries, including the Pharaoh’s chief butler and baker. Sensing that the two men are despondent, Yosef asks them to unburden themselves of what is bothering them. Each man tells Yosef about a baffling dream, which he interprets as prophetic: The butler, Yosef explains, will be forgiven and restored to his honored position, and the baker will be executed. Yosef asks that the butler, upon regaining the Pharaoh’s good will, intercede for Yosef, who insists that he was kidnapped and is innocent of all wrongdoing. Yosef’s predictions come true, but the butler forgets to help him.
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.■