Mosaic is a unique Jewish Community - in that we offer at least three weekly and festival services from the Liberal, Masorti and Reform traditions. After our services we get together for joint kiddushim, and offer study sessions before or after some of our services.
In my class on superheroes this past week, I talked about how many superheroes come from backgrounds of trauma — losing a parent or loved one. Villains turn their past into justification for lawlessness, but heroes see the injustice done to them and say — no one else should have to suffer what I went through.
It seems that Joseph is going to the “dark side” — punishing his brothers for what they did to him, until Judah starts to speak. Judah, the one responsible for selling Joseph as a slave years earlier, now intercedes on behalf of Benjamin. His speech reveals sincere feelings of regret for the past events, as well as tenderness for his young brother whose life is bound up with his father’s. Judah’s mediation is not only conceived here as an act of mercy toward Benjamin, but also as one that is capable of amending the injustice suffered by Joseph in the past.
Only after hearing Judah’s sincere words does Joseph abandon his delusions of grandeur and stop playing with his brothers’ lives; Judah’s words are like a magic spell that brings Joseph back to reality. In that reality Joseph is capable of seeing who he really is, and only then he manages to turn his revenge into compassion. Only then he feels the urgent need to reveal himself to his brothers, as if he was recalling his true identity: “It’s me, my brothers! Don’t you recognize me? I am Joseph. I was oppressed and expelled from my own land. I know the heart of the stranger and therefore I cannot tolerate oppression anymore. Please be welcomed in my new land.”
Clothes seem to be significant in the Joseph story. It seems that whenever things are going downhill, clothes are taken away from Joseph. When things start to improve, Joseph is given clothes. Joseph’s brothers take his coat of many colors and dip it into blood to make their father think Joseph was dead. Mrs. Potifar tears off his clothes and claims that Joseph tried to attack her. In our parasha, things start to turn around for him. Instead of clothes being taken from him, Joseph is given new clothes. Pharaoh presents Joseph with new royal attire, a wife, and a new name. I can add that interspersed with the Joseph narrative we also get the story of Judah and Tamar — she disguises herself in order to seduce him.
So the question is — what is the Torah trying to teach. I would argue that the repeating theme of garments make the point: things are not necessarily as they seem. Appearances deceive. In fact, the Hebrew word for garment, b-g-d, is also the Hebrew word for “betrayal,” as in the confession formula, Ashamnu, bagadnu, “We have been guilty, we have betrayed.”
In fact, we judge people all the time based on how they dress or appoint themselves. These details can be telling, but they never tell the whole truth. As Rabbi Meir says in Pirke Avot: Do not look at the vessel, but what is in it; there is a new vessel filled with old wine and an old vessel that does not even contain new wine.
The dreams of the butler (sar ha-mashkim) and baker (sar ha-ofim) seem quite similar. Each of their dreams contain food (grapes, bread) and the number three (three branches, three baskets). If they are so much alike, what prompted Joseph to explain that the butler, would be restored to his post, while the baker would be hanged ?
The commentator Benno Yaakov says that the text itself indicates that despite the similarities, there was a fundamental difference between the butler’s and baker’s dreams. The butler describes himself as being active-“I took the grapes, pressed them into Pharaoh’s cup, and placed the cup into Pharaoh’s hand.” Here, there is a preponderance of words of action.
The baker on the other hand, was completely passive. Three baskets were on my head, he said, and the birds were eating from the baked goods. Here, there are no verbs descriptive of what the baker did in his dream.
Dreams reveal much about character. Observing this phenomenon, Joseph concluded that the baker is a man who is sitting back and doing nothing — in stark language, he was already dead. The butler’s dreams showed he was a doer, a person of action — worthy of returning to Pharaoh’s palace.
I personally do believe in the power of dreams — but not because they are predictive of the future. I think they can give us insight into ourselves — to accept or to change who we are. If the baker had understood his unique dreams of passivity early enough, he could have taken action.
Shabbat comes in 3.43pm; goes out 4 .50pm __________________________________________________________________________ “Looking up, Jacob saw Esau coming, accompanied by four hundred men. He divided the children among Leah, Rachel and the two maids, putting the maids and their children first, Leah and her children next, and Rachel and Joseph last. He himself went on ahead and bowed low to the ground seven times until he was near his brother. Esau ran to greet him. He embraced him, falling on his neck, he kissed him, and they wept.” (Genesis 33:1-4)
Jacob is still dividing instead of uniting, although the meeting with Esau is putting him on a better path for the future. My colleague Rabbi Edward Feinstein writes poignantly about what led up to this division of the family: “Two brothers. One blessing. Who told Father Isaac that he had but one blessing to bestow upon his sons? Who told him that blessings must be hierarchical, setting one brother over the other, declaring one the victor and the other a loser ?
Two brothers. One blessing. This is the dark side of monotheism. Monotheism can bear two very different interpretations. The belief in one God can yield two different worlds. A monotheism of exclusion imagines one God who belongs to me and not you. One truth that is ours and not theirs. One world gifted to us, and not to them. This brand of monotheism offers blessing to one brother, and subjugation, exile and death to all others.
Genesis vehemently protests this. God is not so small, so narrow, so parochial as your fear and hatred. Genesis offers a radically different religious vision, a monotheism of inclusion – a God of all. God is creator of all. Not just our tribe and our kind, but all. And more radically , all are created in the image of God. Everyone bears the divine within.”
Shabbat comes in 3.50 pm : goes out 4.55 pm ___________________________________________________________________
There is a midrash that fills in the story of what happened when Jacob discovered that Lavon had tricked him, and given him Leah to marry instead of Rachel. It states that Jacob said to Leah: “You are a liar, the daughter of a liar – last night, I called you Rachel and you answered me; now I call you Leah and you also answer me ! ” She said back to him: “Are you a man with no followers ? Your father called you Esav and you answered him, and then he called you Jacob and you also answered him!”
This midrash points out similarities in Leah’s and Jacob’s deception: 1) one sibling pretends to be the other; 2) the deception is instigated by a parent; 3) the deception ends up for the good, in spite of the initial anguish experienced by the deceived party; 4) the victim was fooled because he could not see (Isaac because of blindness, Jacob because of the dark of night); 5) the deception appeared to be the only way of accomplishing an important goal.
Both situations involve difficult moral decisions, where the right choice was not clear. In fact, the more we examine these two episodes, and others faced by our role models, the personalities in the Torah, the more we see that most of the choices they faced were quite complex, fraught with difficulty, and left lingering problems. What is the message of the Torah — does the end justify the means ? At least in these cases, it seems the answer is yes.
This week’s portion tells of Isaac’s special love for Eisav and Rebecca’s special love for Jacob. One wonders how Isaac could have been so naive to prefer his son Eisav more than Jacob. After all, Eisav was merely a hunter while Jacob was a thoughtful young man.Perhaps he thought that Eisav would defend the Jewish people against all attacks while Jacob would be the spiritual heir. Eisav would be the leader for the “body” while Jacob would be for the “soul”.
Rebecca did not see things that way. She insisted that there could only be one heir. The body and the soul should not be separated. The soul needs the body to exist in this world, and the body needs the soul to give meaning and direction to its existence.
Rav Ahron Soloveitchik, points out, that Rebecca pushes Jacob to have courage by insisting that he challenge Eisav by taking the blessing from him and putting his life on the line. We know that Jacob eventually learns this lesson for later in his life he successfully wrestles with a mysterious man, and is given an additional name-Yisrael, which means one who is able to fight and be strong.Shabbat Shalom
Parsha Chayei Sarah literally means “the life of Sarah,” yet, despite this title, the parsha deals with her death at age 127, and Avraham’s purchase of a burial plot for her. The description of Sarah’s death follows directly after the Binding of Isaac, or, as we say in Hebrew, Akeidat Yitzchak.
Rashi explains the connection of the near-sacrifice of Isaac with Sara’s death by saying, “as a result of the tidings of the Akeidat, that her son had been fated for slaughter and had been all-but-slaughtered, Sarah’s soul flew away and she died.” Modern commentator, Dr. Aviva Zornberg, states succinctly in the book Genesis: The Beginning of Desire, “Sarah is the true victim of the Akeidat; her death is its unexplicated, inexplicable cost.”
Families are a psychological unit. What happens to one member affects the others. It is easy to understand that parents feel the pain of their children, and other relationships are tight as well. So for example, if one sibling gets seriously hurt, it is helpful to “check-in” with other siblings to see how they are doing. Abraham thought he was just interacting with God and Isaac — but he was also affecting Sarah as well.
Shabbat comes in at 4.23pm: goes out at 5.24pm ________________________________________________________________________
What was so terrible about Sdom that it had to be utterly destroyed?
The Midrash Pirkei DeRebbi Eliezer states: “They issued a proclamation in Sdom saying: Everyone who strengthens the hand of the poor and needy with a loaf of bread shall be burnt by fire.
Plotit, a daughter of Lot was married to one of the great men of Sdom. She saw a very poor man in the street and she felt bad for him. What did she do? Every day when she went out to draw water she put in her pitcher all kinds of provisions from her house and she sustained the poor man.
The men of Sdom said: How does this poor man live? When they ascertained the facts they brought Plotit forth to be burnt by fire. She cried out: Sovereign of all worlds! Maintain my right and my cause at the hands of the men of Sdom!
And her cry ascended before the throne of glory. In that hour G-d said: I will go down and see whether they have in fact done what she is crying about. If it turns out to be true then I will overthrow the city.”
Nechama Leibowitz points out: “Their wickedness was the law of the land and whoever violated the law and performed a good deed prompted by his own instincts of pity was condemned to be burnt at the stake. There was no remedy for such a society but total destruction.”
It reminds me that laws of our land must be to protect those without resources — not to protect the wealth of those of means.
Islam points to Ishmael as its spiritual ancestor, just as Judaism points to Yitzhak and Ya’akov, as the heirs of God’s covenant with Avraham. The Koran and the Torah share a story about the binding and near sacrifice of one of Avraham’s sons; in the Islamic story, that son is Ishmael, and in the Judeo-Christian story, it is Yitzhak.
Yet even in the Torah, both sons share a near-death experience, and both are delivered by Divine intervention. A ram replaces Yitzhak on the altar, and Ishmael, exiled from Avraham’s household with his mother Hagar, nearly dies of thirst before God’s angel once again appears to Hagar, showing her a lifesaving spring of water.
Both are in “God’s favour”. God is with Ishmael as he grows up, but we don’t have any account of what God might have said to Ishmael during those years when “God was with the boy” (Gen. 21:20). Who knows how God might have described or thought of their relationship ? We only know that God makes the same promise in substance to both Avraham and Ishmael – to make of them a goy gadol, “a great nation”. In ancient Hebrew, “great” means numerous. My modern mind also wonders if our nations will achieve “greatness,” as in excellence.
Was Noah an environmentalist? Probably not on purpose. But he was the first to see the world as a closed, integrated system. Noah and his eight-person crew maintained a sort of BioDome inside the ark, struggling to preserve a functional level of ecological balance in the most challenging of situations. Within such a system, every action has a significant impact. If he fed the elephants too much food, then the zebras might not have enough. If he didn’t clean the waste of the animals quickly enough, then disease might break out.
It’s useful to see ourselves in the same situation. Every action, no matter how small, affects the universe. For example, using public transportation in congested areas reduces pollution, while cutting down on frustrating traffic. That leads to better health for the population — and less stress.
The name Noah means “rest”. Overall, Noah’s relationship with the world was harmonious and productive, not adversarial or injurious to the planet or to his own well-being. That’s a lesson to remember.
