parsha

Glass Houses

Rashi quotes the above phrase from Bava Metzia 59b in reference to Exodus 22:20 —

So I said to my husband: is this a bit like “People who live in glass houses should not throw stones”? And my husband responded, but even if you weren’t a stranger in Egypt, you shouldn’t abuse a stranger.

But I don’t think it’s a good idea for people who live in brick houses to throw stones, do you?

History of a Bat-Mitzvah

So I remember bits and pieces of it. There was a dog, and a son, and a father. The drawing on the map probably was not part of the speech, but might have been if I had written the speech. So I would have an excuse to draw charts and pictures. The red line represents the route B’nei Yisrael (the Israelites, Children of Israel) most probably did take, so they would have a long time between slavery and being a nation in a land. The blue line is the more direct route, the one they didn’t take, which seems to go close to what is now Gaza or what was then the nation of the Philistines, a war-like people. In any case, they did meet Amalek at the end of the parsha, so they got involved in a battle, anyway.

So what was the story about the dog, the son, the father? I had to look it up. It’s from a Rashi towards the end of the parsha. It seems the father and son were going on a journey, and the son wanted to be held. So the father picked him up. Then the son wanted this. The father gave it to him. The son wanted that. Again, the father generously gave to his son. Along came another man, and the son asked, Do you know where my father is? The father got angry and put the son down. Along came a dog (Amalek) and bit him.

Now, if I could choose a topic now for my bat-mitzvah, I would have chosen Shirat HaYam, the song of the sea. Maybe next year I will study the beautiful poetry in this week’s parsha. Last year I wrote about Devorah. One thing I will have to say: even if I didn’t write the words to my bat-mitzvah speech, it was this speech that was my introduction to writing and giving divrei Torah, words of Torah. I enjoy it! So, thanks Dad (I actually used to call him Daddy, but now we call him Saba, grandfather) for helping me along this path.

    

The photo on the left shows me conducting some kind of game at my bat-mitzvah. The photo on the right is from my brother’s bar-mitzvah one year earlier; I am sitting in the same location that I stood one year later to give my bat-mitzvah speech.

Symbol of the Moon in Judaism

I learned this week that the Chinese calendar is like the Jewish calendar, as it follows the moon, but it has a correction, a leap year of some sort so the holidays stay in the right seasons. So some bloggers this week were wishing me Happy Chinese New Year while others were wishing me a good month (it was the beginning of the Hebrew month of Shevat). It occurred on the same day because of the moon.

In this week’s parsha, the moon first becomes a symbol of hope and renewal for the Jewish people. There are many Jewish laws (halachot) regarding the sighting of a new moon. In the days of old, witnesses who saw the new moon would set fires on a string of hilltops to let neighboring and far communities know of the new month. Now we follow a calendar.

In his book Ancient Secrets: Using the Stories of the Bible to Improve Our Everyday Lives Rabbi Levi Meier talks about the moon:

Note that God’s symbols, as presented in the Bible, are generally elements of nature: a tree, a rainbow, a rock. The Bible imbues these natural elements with meaning, and each symbol is intended to give us strength to face the challenges that arise.

So when the pharaoh’s rage is unleashed as he is threatened with the last of the ten plagues—the death of all firstborn Egyptian males—the Israelites are told to look to the new moon.

It does seem strange, that amidst these plagues, the concept of Rosh Chodesh, the new month, is introduced.

Rabbi Meier continues:

The new moon silently speaks to them of renewal, of a new beginning. The moon returns each night to light the darkness, changing its shape, waxing and waning, only to rise afresh after a cycle of twenty-eight days. It speaks to them of the cyclical nature of life.

Just as the Israelites are getting ready to leave Egypt, they are given not only a symbol of hope but also a reminder that life is like the moon. It, too, moves in cycles. In the worst of times, it is important to remember that there will always be renewal.

The cycles of waxing and waning, of trust and mistrust, of intimacy and distance, of joy and despair, are all normal. A great deal of unhappiness in this world comes from our refusing to acknowledge this simple fact. When things are going well, we want to hold on to those feelings of happiness and bliss. But happiness gives way to sadness, as it surely must. And we suffer needlessly, agonizing over the realization that happiness, once achieved, cannot last forever. In the midst of our disappointment, we forget the moon will rise again, bringing joy once more.

The great figures of the Bible understood that we need “down” cycles in order to have “up” cycles. Thus, even in the worst of times, they were never immobilized by despair. They used the dark moments to change, to grow, and to move forward.

What do you think of when you see the moon?

Parsha Questions

On Friday, I asked:

• Why mention Elisheva’s brother? (and who is Elisheva…)
• Why the Nile? Why was the first plague on the Nile?

1) Elisheva, who married Aaron the brother of Moses, was the brother of Nachshon Ben Aminadav. Why mention her brother? Because when you get married, you should check out your future wife’s brother (according to Rashi). So my husband said to my sons, he checked out my brother before marrying me, that’s how he knew he would have sons who love computer games. To which my middle son said, “And chess, too!”

2) Nile:
Raizy came up with a good answer:

Why was the first plague on the Nile? It was mida k’neged mida (direct retribution). The Egyptians threw newborn Jewish boys into the Nile, so now the Nile is being used to punish them in return.

Her second answer is similar to the one Rashi gives in 7:17 — the Egyptians worshiped the Nile, as the Egyptians were dependent on the rise of the Nile to water the land, as rain did not fall in Egypt. So God struck their deity.

Raizy adds: “So turning the holy water of the Nile into blood demonstrated that the God of Israel is more powerful than the gods and sacred places of Egypt. It was meant to instill fear and awe.”

Another answer is found in the Rashi of 8:17 with an aggadic story: God came against the Egyptians following the tactics of the wars of kings, in the order of measures a kingdom takes to when it lays siege to a city. At first it ruins the city’s springs of water (bloody Nile, as shown in the watercolor above). Afterwards the besieging forces sound and blow shofars at the inhabitants of the besieged city to scare them and confuse them. By the same token, the frogs croak and make noise, etc., as it says in Midrash Rabbi Tanchuma. The shofar blasts are followed by hails of arrows, comparable to lice. Then foreign mercenaries are sent in, like the mixture of wild beasts. The pestilence corresponds to a mass seizure of captives. This is followed by an attempt to burn the enemy out — the boils. The hail is like a bombardment of catapult stones. Next comes an attack by a large army (locusts). If the enemy does not surrender, they are held in prison (darkness). If the enemy is still not vanquished, its leaders are executed — the killing of the firstborn.

• • •

Here’s one more quicky that I learned from my son: how can you remember how many plagues are in Parshat Vaera and how many are in Bo? (hint: if you know gematria, that helps. Gematria is adding Hebrew letters as if they are numbers. So aleph is one, beit is two, and so on).

A reminder: just as we empty drops of wine on Passover because we are not allowed to rejoice over the death of the Egyptians in the sea, we are not allowed to enjoy the suffering of our enemies, even if they have created pain for us.

Parshat Vaera

I was away with my family since Monday, but I did have time to read over the parsha questions I receive in email each week. Maybe you can guess some answers for these two:

• Why the Nile? Why was the first plague on the Nile?
• Why mention Elisheva’s brother? (and who is Elisheva…)

If you know any of the answers, feel free to comment. If you don’t, take a guess! I’ll post Rashi’s answers early next week.

Last year’s post: the froggy song

Click on the frog to hear the children’s song that goes with this parsha.

Transition to Exodus

Robert Alter writes in his Translation with Commentary: The Five Books of Moses:

As the long historical narrative of the Five Books of Moses moves from the patriarchs to the Hebrew nation in Egypt, it switches gears. The narrative conventions deployed, from type-scenes and thematic keywords to the treatment of dialogue, remain the same, but the angle from which events are seen and the handling of the characters are notably different. Genesis ended with death, and the distinctly Egyptian mummification, of Joseph. Exodus begins with a listing of the sons of Jacob who came down to Egypt, thus establishing a formal link with the concluding chapters of Genesis in which a more detailed list of the emigrants from Canaan is provided…Instead of the sharply etched individuals who constituted a family in all its explosive dynamics in Genesis, we now have teeming multitudes of Israelites whose spectacular prolificness introduces to the story the perspective of the whole wide world of creation announced at the beginning of Genesis: “And the sons of Israel were fruitful and swarmed and multiplied and grew very vast, and the land [הָאָרֶץ same word as in Genesis] was filled with them” (Exodus 1:7).

Nahum Sarna in Exploring Exodus explains the title:

It is called in English “Exodus,” a title derived originally from the Septuagint, the Greek translation made for the Jewish community of ancient Alexandria in Egypt. It is abbreviated from a fuller title “The Exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt,” which in turn reflects a Hebrew title current among the communities of the Land of Israel. The most widely used Hebrew name is Sefer Sh’mot (“The Book: Names”), taken from the opening Hebrew words of the book, “These are the names of the sons of Israel.”

Here’s how Sarna connects Exodus to its predecessor Genesis:

The narratives in Genesis focus upon individuals and the fortunes of a single family; they center upon the divine promises of peoplehood and national territory that are vouchsafed to them. In the Book of Exodus, the process of fulfilling those promises is set in motion…God’s commissioning of Moses at the scene of the Burning Bush directs him: “Go and assemble the elders of Israel and say to them: the Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, has appeared to me and said “I have taken note of you [Heb. paqod paqad’ti] and of what is being done to you in Egypt…'” This is a studied echo of Joseph’s dying words “God will surely take notice of you [Heb. paqod yiphqod] and bring you up from this land to the land which He promised on oath to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.”

In the previous parshiot, the ones of Breishit, we got to know the characters well. In Shmot, we still can learn from the people presented in the parsha, such as the daughter of Pharoah, but I feel more distance. Perhaps we can see the upcoming parshiot as a bridge from character portrayal to nation-building and the giving of the Torah in the middle of the Book of Shmot.

Do you find transitions hard? How do you see the change from the Book of Breishit (Genesis) to the Book of Shmot (Exodus)?

Last year: Best Parsha in the Universe (includes link to a song)

A Sweet Angel Song

A re-post from last year

A beautiful song is in this week’s parsha of Vayechi. The scene is Yaacov on his deathbed, blessing his grandsons Ephraim and Menashe. Part of the blessing has become a pretty song that parents often sing to children at bedtime.

Translation in English:
“May the angel who redeemed me from all harm bless the youths, and may they be called by my name and the name of my fathers, Abraham and Isaac, and may they grow into a multitude in the midst of the land.”

Transliteration:
Hamalach hagoel oti,
Hamalach hagoel oti mikol ra
yivarech et hana’arim v’yikaray bahem sh’mi.
V’shem avotai, V’shem avotai Avraham v’Yitzchak,
v’yidgu larov, v’yidgu larov b’kerev ha’aretz.

Click on the little girl to see the same little girl with Play and Pause buttons. Click on Play to hear my daughter (and me) singing the song. Or click here for song. (I couldn’t get the Flash to embed directly in this post; one still needs a plugin for this.)

Rashi states that “the youths” refer to Ephraim and Menashe. But I like to think of the youths as any kids that are in the room at the time the song is being sung.

Hope you will find this relaxing and a calming way to get through the rest of the week!

A Woman Named Serah

First, a link to what I wrote last year about Parshat Vayigash (yippee! first time I can do that, link to an old parsha post):
Why Didn’t Yosef Send a Letter to Yaakov

From this parsha onward, there are not a lot of women in the Torah. We have Moshe’s female relatives (mom Yocheved, sister Miriam, wife Tzipora). And there is a woman who is mentioned only three times in the Torah: Serah Bat Asher. Actually, in this week’s parsha her name is affiliated with her brothers, not her father:

Commentators suggest that perhaps she is the adopted daughter of Asher, and her mother is his wife but she is from a different father.

When I was younger and I heard a midrash, they would sound silly or fake to me. The text would make sense, but then why the fantastic midrash? Midrashim came about because of questions in the text, and now as an adult I have more appreciation for them. Indeed, all we know in detail about Serah is because of midrashim, and because a big question regarding Serah in the text is: why mention her at all? She must be there for a reason.

In Torah of the Mothers (see previous posts about Devorah and Daughters of Tzelafchad), Rachel Adelman writes a whole essay about Serah Bat Asher. In this post I will just quote one midrash, the one where we learn how she brings “life” back into Jacob as she tells him his son Yosef is alive:

[The brothers said:] If we tell him right away, “Joseph is alive!” perhaps he will have a stroke [lit., his soul will fly away]. What did they do? They said to Serah, daughter of Asher, “Tell our father Jacob that Joseph is alive and he is Egypt.” What did she do? She waited till he was standing in prayer and then said in a tone of wonder, “Joseph is in Egypt/ There have been born on his knees/ Menasseh and Ephraim” [three rhyming lines: Yosef beMizrayim/Yuldu lo al birkayim/ Menasheh ve’Ephrayim]. His heart failed, while he was standing in prayer. When he finished his prayer, he saw the wagons: immediately the spirit of Jacob came back to life.

(This quote is from Midrash HaGadol 45:26, translated by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg in Genesis: The Beginning of Desire).

This paragraph does not say anything about a harp, although my daughter, who is sitting next to me as I write this post, clearly told me she learned that Serah plays a harp as she gently gives the good news to Jacob. With midrashim there is frequently more than one version. However it was that she broke the news to Jacob, with a musical harp or poetry or both, we can learn from her about how to relate shocking news to an older person, with gentleness and caring.

Ilana-Davita wrote about the careful use of speech in the parsha

Who Sold Joseph?

Who sold Joseph? Here’s the pasuk in Vayeshev (Genesis 37:28)-

The straightforward answer, as Rashi sees it, is that the brothers took Joseph out of the pit and sold him to the Ishmaelites and the Ishmaelites to the Midianites and the Midianites to the Egyptians.

I learned from my son, however, (it’s so wonderful when you can learn from your kids) that Rashbam (who is the grandson of Rashi; can you imagine challenging your own scholarly grandfather?) sees this differently. He suggests that the “they” who do the selling are the Midianites: “The brothers sat down to a meal at some distance from the pit, out of qualms of conscience and waited for the Ishmaelites they had seen. But before the latter arrived, others, Midianite traders passed, saw Joseph in the pit and drew him out and sold him to the Ishmaelites, presumably without the knowledge of the brothers.”

This helps explains Genesis 39:1, where Potiphar buys Joseph from the Ishmaelites. Other commentators complain that Rashi does not adequately explain this pasuk (how do the Midianites fit in? Who sold him to Egypt, Midianites or Ishmaelites?). But if the Midianites take Joseph without the brothers knowing and sells him to the Ishmaelites, then this pasuk makes sense.

Much more on this topic in Nehama Leibowitz’s New Studies in Breishit.

A much simpler question is why does the text in beginning of Miketz say “brothers of Joseph”? Rashi’s explanation is that they went down to Egypt to look for him, that he was very much on their minds (daughter of Mrs. S. said it was out of love for their brother). But if one follows Rashbam’s explanation, that the Midianites sold him and the brothers thought him dead, why does it say “brothers of Joseph”? (I don’t know).

•   •   •

While we are discussing Joseph, I just want to remark on what Rabbi Levi Meier, z”l, calls “Joseph’s astonishing ability to forgive his brothers.” In his book Ancient Secrets: Using the Stories of the Bible to Improve Our Everyday Lives, Rabbi Meier talks about Fate vs. Destiny: you can have reasons to hold a grudge, you can have a terrible start in life, and you can either sulk and not move forward or you can use it as a way to learn and grow:

Joseph’s forgiving is hard to achieve, especially when you have been terribly wronged by another person. In the case of Joseph, his life could have been ruined by the actions of his brothers. However, it was not, because he did not allow that to happen… Nursing your hurt feelings, your anger, and your bitterness will not bring you to happiness. It will only make you a slave to your fate, and you may never come to know that you could have freed yourself—that you could have been the master of your destiny.

•   •   •

More interesting posts on this parsha:
Ilana-Davita: Forget All My Father’s House
Aron Grinshtein: Why Couldn’t the Wise Men of Egypt Figure Out the Dreams?

And on last week’s parsha on Tamar:
Shorty: she writes about Tamar and wonders why Rivka and Tamar had to be sneaky. Any ideas for her?

Hellenization and Joseph

On Sunday I asked: Why do we read the story of Joseph around the same time as Hanukkah?

One may give a variety of answers, but a common answer is how Joseph dealt with Egyptian culture. In order to understand this better, we need to look at both the Hanukkah story and the Joseph in Egypt story.

What was the battle of Hanukkah about? There was a lot of pressure in Israel in the days of the Maccabees to conform and become like the Hellenists, to adopt Greek culture and shed Jewish traditions. Those that resisted, like Hannah and her martyred seven sons, became the precursors to today’s Jews.

Joseph, too, needed to live in a foreign culture. His was the world of ancient Egypt. He resisted the morals of that society; for example, he managed to get away from Potiphar’s wife. He never forgot his roots and was eager to reconnect with his family. At the same time, he worked on behalf of Egypt and was able to provide food at a time of famine.

Joseph can be viewed as a model of how one can integrate into a society, even in a leadership role, but not lose one’s heritage and traditions. In contrast, the Hellenized Jews of the days of the Maccabbees discarded far too much of their culture and are lost to history.

Berel Wein connects Miketz with Chanukah.

Mrs. S. gave the following: One answer is based on Ovadiah 1:18 (which is part of the haftarah for Parshat Vayishlach):
“And the house of Yaakov will be fire and the house of Yosef a flame, and the house of Esav for straw, and they shall ignite them and consume them; and there will be no remnant to the house of Esav, for Hashem has spoken.” She then clarified that comparing Yosef to a flame reminds us of Chanukah. And “giborim b’yad chalashim v’rabim b’yad me’atim” (“the strong in the hands of the weak, and the many in the hands of the few”) — Rashi is suggesting in the first pasuk of Vayeshev – based on the pasuk in Ovadiah – that one Yosef is more than sufficient to overcome all of Esav’s “chiefs”.

•   •   •

I had two more questions on Sunday:
1) Who sold Joseph? Was it the brothers or was it…? Here’s the pasuk in Vayeshev (Genesis 37:28)-
וַיַּעַבְרוּ אֲנָשִׁים מִדְיָנִים סֹחֲרִים, וַיִּמְשְׁכוּ וַיַּעֲלוּ אֶת-יוֹסֵף מִן-הַבּוֹר, וַיִּמְכְּרוּ אֶת-יוֹסֵף לַיִּשְׁמְעֵאלִים, בְּעֶשְׂרִים כָּסֶף; וַיָּבִיאוּ אֶת-יוֹסֵף, מִצְרָיְמָה.
And there passed by Midianites, merchantmen; and they drew and lifted up Joseph out of the pit, and sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites for twenty shekels of silver. And they brought Joseph into Egypt.

The text is not clear. To whom does “they” refer?

2) Why does it say the “brothers of Joseph” instead of “sons of Jacob”?
Genesis 42:3 – וַיֵּרְדוּ אֲחֵי-יוֹסֵף

Any ideas? I’ll answer in a separate post. Stay tuned.