Parshat Lech-Lecha: Vulnerability to Strength

By TALIE LEWIS


This week’s parsha begins with Avram being told to leave his father’s house. With the story of the tower of Babel fresh in my mind, I began reading Lech-Lecha thinking Avram’s journey would be a heroic continuation of the theme of scattering that came from the end of last week’s parsha. However, contextualizing Avram’s journey in this way did not work out as I had planned. 

One recurring scene that can be found throughout Lech-Lecha is that of God reassuring Avram that his journey will ultimately be rewarded with offspring and land. My initial reaction to the frequency of God's reassurance was the following: Avram has just disconnected himself from the aspects of his life that rooted him in the past. By leaving his home, he has made himself extremely vulnerable and to counter this vulnerability, God provided him with multiple visions of the future rootedness He had in store for him, both in the form of land and children for generations and generations.

Maybe this is why we see God promising Avram that he will be rewarded so often, simply because Avram was unstable and thus needed to be reassured with the promise of future stability. 

Toward the end of the parsha, something perplexing happens, adding another layer to this idea. 

In chapter 15, verse 12, the text says:

 ויהי השמש לבוא ותרדמה נפלה על אברם והנה אימה חשכה גדלה נפלת עליו 

And it came to pass, that, when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and, lo, a dread, even a great darkness, fell upon him.

What was this great darkness? The text seems to leave that answer ambiguous. However, the following verse may offer some insight.

13 And He said unto Abram: 'Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years;

ויאמר לאברם ידע תדע כי גר יהיה זרעךָ בארץ לא להם ועבדוּם, וענוּ אתם ארבע מאות שנה

After being reassured numerous times that a nation of people as numerous as the stars of the sky will come from him, and they will be given the land of Canaan, Avram is told they will first be strangers in a land not their own, and furthermore, they are going to be oppressed there for a very long time.

I imagine that would be a very difficult piece of news to receive and certainly capable of sending someone to a dark place. Maybe, in addition to offering Avram some sense of stability, God needed to firmly plant the vision of a flourishing and rooted nation in Avram's head before breaking this harsh news to him. After all, he was already starting out in a pretty vulnerable place. And without strengthening Avram first, this news could have broken him.

Before going through Lech-Lecha this week, I remembered this parsha simply as testament to Avraham’s strength and faith in God. However, after my most recent read through, the Avraham I see here is not the Avraham I usually envision. Lech-Lecha's Avraham (Avram) was fragile. He was caught in the thick of an extremely intimidating and challenging test and thus, needed a significant amount of support from God. 

This assessment is not meant to challenge Avram’s strength or faith in God. Rather, it complicates the simple picture that many of us grew up with. In grade school, I remember hearing about Avraham and the tests God gave him. I remember hearing that he left his home, almost sacrificed his son because of his profound faith in God and as a result, passed with flying colors. But I do not remember focusing on his journey in between. I do not remember thinking about the emotional and spiritual toll these tests must have taken on him. As a result, I think I missed a vital lesson present in Avraham’s story... 

We constantly find ourselves in new positions, sometimes comfortable and empowering, and other times, uncomfortable and vulnerable. After making the life changing decision to leave his father's house, Avram was in an extremely vulnerable place. Arriving at that place and being helped out of it was necessary for his journey, and in my eyes, made the faith Avraham was ultimately able to develop all the more admirable.

Like Avraham, may all of us have the awareness and the support to turn our most burdensome vulnerabilities into a our greatest strengths.

Shabbat Shalom :)

Parshat Noach: Hesse on the Parsha

By ADINA GOODMAN

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world.

-Demian, Herman Hesse

At the beginning of the Parsha, God explains his motivations for destroying the world: “I have decided to put an end to all flesh, for the earth is filled with lawlessness because of them: I am about to destroy them with the earth” (Genesis 6:13).

It is interesting to note the specific language God uses in this pronouncement. He declares that the world is filled with “chamas,” or lawlessness. This language implies that the world contains a certain law, a certain standard, and that man has done something to mess with this world order. Since a system is as strong as its weakest unit, we must dispose of the piece that’s setting everything off the right track. There seems to be a very specific inculpation of man here – the world was fine until he came around and put everything off-balance and below God's standard.

Even once the flood is over and Noah offers a sacrifice, God maintains his view on man, saying “Never again will I doom the earth because of man, since the devisings of man’s mind are evil from his youth” (8:21).

It seems superfluously strange, then, that only verses later, God blesses Noah and his sons to “Be fertile and increase, and fill the earth. The fear and dread of [man] shall be upon all the beasts of the earth and upon all the birds of the sky” (9:1-3). Here, God uses parallel but opposite language as compared to His speech when declaring His destruction of the world. Whereas earlier He wants to “put an end to all flesh” because the “earth is filled with lawlessness because of [man],” He is now blessing Noah to “fill the earth.”

From a wholly peshat reading of the story, it seems as if God wants to bring the world back to its optimal state and start over. But then He sees that man is still around and still acting lamentably. Instead of destroying the world again in a never-ending cycle, however, God blesses man, telling him to multiply – to produce more humanity and fill the world with it. Not only that, but God proclaims that other creatures will fear man, only adding to man's immense power and influence over the world.

Another quote from Hesse may shed a light on God’s seemingly transformed approach to man as imperfect: “Whether you and I and a few other will renew the world someday remains to be seen. But within ourselves we must renew it each day, otherwise we just aren’t serious. Don’t forget that!”

As humans, we cannot recreate the world.  Even if we had Godly powers, we can see from the Noah story that the world would become imperfect again quite quickly. However, we can renew ourselves each day, as Hesse’s character suggests. This idea is the same as the one driving Gandhi’s entreaty to “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Perhaps this self-renewal idea can be extended even to God and His decision not to re-destroy man, but to encourage his reproduction. Jewish mystics describe a godliness inherent in all people. From that understanding of man, we may interpret God’s blessing to Noah as His promotion of the idea that improving the world begins with oneself. God’s recreation of the world left it imperfect, but by endowing man with the power to reflect and improve, He is in a way “being [or allowing] the change” He wishes to see in the world. God nurtures the development of man, trusting in this fleshy extension of Himself to renew himself and leave the world better.

That God did not re-destroy the world but instead blessed man to reproduce and multiply might be the ultimate pep-talk or empowering idea. God is, in effect, commanding us to destroy "chamas" and recreate our own world.

Parshat Bereshit: Trusting Humankind

By MOUCHKA DARMON

I find it extremely interesting that the parasha that is by definition connected to creation, renewal and, therefore, positivity, alludes to the “Tohu VaVohu” (1:2) at its very beginning and concludes with the passuk that announces Hashem’s desire to send the Mabul, saying “Ki nichamti ki asitim” (6:7), “I wish I hadn’t made them”. From this long parasha, we generally remember two things: the creation of the world and the sin of the Ets Hada’at. Still, in my memories, Bereishit has always been my favourite parasha and I have always thought of it as a “happy” one. My question here would be how could we actually connect the different main topics of the parasha and what message can this parasha bring us? If we take the parasha as a whole rather than a successful amalgamation, what comes out of it?

Let’s start with the beginning. When I first studied Bible, my teachers translated Tohu VaVohu as “all mixed”. Ok, I was 5, they needed to be simple. Still, striving for simplicity made them wrong. You simply have to take a look at Rashi (1:2) to get a totally different definition of those two words. Rashi gives the word “Tohu” a sense of astonishment and stupefaction even adding the old French translation as dizziness like vertigo almost. Rashi explains that it has this meaning because men are always astonished and almost shocked when placed in front of the emptiness, of the void. It is true, indeed, that nothing scares us more than this; the emptiness, the naked space, the gap, the void. We even think of emptiness as a concrete expression of sadness. We fear it in our lives, and use it as a catalyst to fill our existence with as many things and people as we possibly can. So “Tohu” would be the void and is only enhanced by “Vohu” which Rashi says is the emptiness in the sense of loneliness. Imagine a world with nothing in it. Or if it’s two hard, imagine a naked planet. Think the Little Prince of St-Exupery. Even he needed a rose and a sheep.

The world therefore got created not from an “all mixed” weird modelling clay but rather from the “nada”. This is the reason why we say the prime characteristic of Hashem is that He has the capacity to make “Yesh MeAyin”, something from the nothing, while we, human beings, as incredibly clever and skilled as we are, can only create something from something else, and need a basis for that. However, it is us who Hashem put in charge of bringing this world to its fulfillment. It is us who He chose to be His people and do His Torah. It is us again, who He calls His children. It is said that when Hashem wanted to give us the Torah, the angels cried out to Him and asked Him why He would give it to us, human beings, so prone to sin, and not to them who would do everything perfectly and He answered that the whole reason was our free will, meaning precisely our inclination for the sin. We people the world in order to choose Torah OuMitsvot over our temptations.

This very powerful idea is nevertheless tainted by some irony due to the fact that Adam Harishon and Chava sinned within the first day of creation. The Lubavitcher Rebbe explains that according to the Midrash, Adam was created on Friday during the afternoon, and the commandment to not eat from the Ets Hadaat, literally the Tree of Knowledge, was only relevant until the beginning of Shabbat. That means that the forbiddance to eat from the tree was only relevant for 3 hours.

That leads to an obvious question, which is: how could Adam Harishon, who was a Tsadik, lived in the Gan Eden, and had directly been created from Hashem Himself, who literally blew into Adam his neshama, how can this man not be able to sin for 3 hours? The Lubavitcher Rebbe answers this question by saying that it is precisely the fact that the mitsva was so easy that made it so difficult. We tend to underestimate everything that seems too easy. We take them for granted. We wouldn’t make a special effort for them because we feel like they don’t need it. Within the kiyum mitsvot, we have two additional concepts to mitsvot which are the barriers we have to define in order to not do forbidden things, and the hidourim, which are a little bit more of a Chasidic principle that is meant to embellish the mitsva. For instance, most Chasidim do not eat kitniyot during Pessach, even though it’s not Chametz. A barrier that we define to not break a mitsvat lo ta’aseh is mouktse, for example. But Shabbos, not eating chametz are complex and vast mitsvot. We think that we need extra care for them because of their difficulty. That’s a mistake, the mistake that lead Adam Harishon to eat from the Tree. We need to respect every mitsva the same way, and to not make a difference between what we think is easy or tough, what we believe is relevant or not. The lesson of the sin of the Ets Hadaat is that we need to follow the mode of operation the Torah consists in. If we had always had, we would still be in Gan Eden. Torah is to be understood as a way of life, as containing all of the necessary steps and rules to win the game over. It is not our job to define what we want to take over what.

This mistake of under-estimating a mitsva is what leads Adam and Chava to get out from the Gan Eden. It also made Adam and Chava aware of their human condition, of their nakedness, as the passuk says “vayedu ki aroumim hem” (3:7), they knew they were naked. So here we have the idea of the fear of nakedness again and the need to clothe it. The next chapter talks of the birth of Cayin and Abel and relates the murder of Abel by his brother. We were in the Gan Eden a chapter ago, then we eat from a forbidden fruit, and here we go we have a murder. If there is one thing we can take from this succession of events is the concept of domino effect. The Torah states the idea of averah goreret averah just in the same way that mitsva goreret mitsva, a sin leads to a sin and a mitsva leads to another mitsva. The parasha ends with announcing the Mabul and it could seem like everything failed, the creation concluding to destruction.

The world was created from the empty and we have been placed in it to be continually building on it. However it is only up to us to go back to the void, or to create something bigger. The key here is to know and believe that we have been placed in this world and given such a choice to make because of the incredible value of the choices we make everyday. The sin of the tree is moreover here to teach us that there is no “little” thing in the service of Hashem or in the decisions we make everyday. We often think “Who am I to change the world? It is not my small action that is going to make a difference.” Well, Bereishit teaches us that a small question such as biting in a fruit can change history, even though we don’t necessarily have the privilege to know the consequence of each one of our actions. It is indeed a beautiful message that the story of the creation of the world is so full of men actions. It would have only be logical to dedicate the entire parasha to Hashem and Hashem only who is finally responsible for the creation of the world. However, the parasha is full of men, and not simply perfect Tsadikim but real, weak, vulnerable, able to fail men that finally look a lot like us. That is because we, as we are, with our weaknesses and failures, we participate in the constant building of the world, and we are responsible for filling in the nakedness, for continuing to create. We are responsible for deciding in which direction this world is heading toward, and each one of our actions, small or big, intentional or not, is a stone that is added to the huge building representing what this world fulfills. Therefore, it is a message of empowerment that the parashat Bereishit carries, and a rather powerful one. Finally, the parasha really starts with the words “Bereishit barah Elokim”, at the beginning, Hashem created, and finishes with “veNoach matsa chen beeiney Hashem”, and Noach found grace in the eyes of Hashem. Hashem created the world to put it in the hands of men, and puts His trust everyday into men. It is up to us to justify and deserve it. The good news is that as the year begins after the Holidays, we all have what it takes for that.

Parshat V'Zot HaBracha: After The End, Continuing On Our Journey

BY: Hannah Elovitz

As we enter the new year, we have finally arrived at V'Zot Habracha, the last parsha of the Torah. Moshe gives Bnei Yisrael his parting blessings before he dies at the age of 120. Near the end of the parsha, it is written that Bnei Yisrael cry over Moshe’s death:

וַיִּבְכּוּ בְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל אֶת-מֹשֶׁה בְּעַרְבֹת מוֹאָב, שְׁלֹשִׁים יוֹם; וַיִּתְּמוּ, יְמֵי בְכִי אֵבֶל מֹשֶׁה.וִיהוֹשֻׁעַ בִּן-נוּן, מָלֵא רוּחַ חָכְמָה--כִּי-סָמַךְ מֹשֶׁה אֶת-יָדָיו, עָלָיו; וַיִּשְׁמְעוּ אֵלָיו בְּנֵי-יִשְׂרָאֵל וַיַּעֲשׂוּ, כַּאֲשֶׁר צִוָּה יְהוָה אֶת-מֹשֶׁה 

(דְּבָרִים לד: ט-י )

“And the children of Israel wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days; so the days of weeping in the mourning for Moses were ended. 9 And Joshua the son of Nun was full of the spirit of wisdom; for Moses had laid his hands upon him; and the children of Israel hearkened unto him, and did as the LORD commanded Moses.” (Deuteronomy 34:8-9)ⁱ

Note that the period of mourning described here is over just as quickly as it started. Why would the Torah do this? Why would the mourning period for Moshe Rabbeinu end in less than one pasuk? The Torah usually has such high praise for Moshe, and notes a few verses later that there was never a prophet quite like him who had such a strong relationship with God. So couldn’t the Torah at least have waited until the next pasuk to say Bnei Yisrael`s mourning period ended? Doesn’t Moshe deserve more?

On this pasuk, R' Abraham ibn Ezra (Spain,1092 – 1167) comments:  

“ויתמו - וכאשר תמו ימי בכי אבל משה שמה, שמעו בני ישראל אל יהושע”--“Once the days of mourning ended, then Bnei Yisrael listened to Yehoshua”ⁱⁱ I think Ibn Ezra is saying that Bnei Yisrael needed that time of mourning, but they also needed to move past it in order to listen to Yehoshua. Bnei Yisrael were only truly able to heed Yehoshua’s commands and guidance once they completed their mourning for Moshe and were ready to move on to the next stage of their journey.

Obadiah ben Jacob Sforno (Italy,1475-1550) also comments on pasuk 8, saying: “כי בימי הבכי אין חכמה ואין עצה ”--“Because during the days of mourning, there is no wisdom or advice.”ⁱⁱⁱ Yehoshua was only filled with the divine spirit afterward, because he couldn’t have received it during the days of mourning. This could either have been because he himself couldn’t have handled it yet, or because the nation couldn’t. This could also simply be exemplary of the nature of mourning, that we’re not supposed to take in anything new during that time, but rather solely focus on the deceased.

Whatever the case may be, it seems clear that these commentators think the short time of mourning was exactly how it was meant to be. I think the Torah is coming to teach us a very important lesson here. Life isn’t always easy; loved ones die, someone loses a job, you fail a test (obviously not as drastic as someone dying…well, maybe for Hermione Granger it is), but I think the Torah is telling us here that we can’t stay down for too long. There is a time for mourning, but it doesn’t last forever. We can’t let the hardships in life stop us from getting up again and continuing on our journeys. Even when it came to Moshe Rabbeinu`s death, Bnei Yisrael mourned for him, but by the next pasuk Yehoshua had taken the reigns and started guiding Bnei Yisrael onto their next mission.

We must always remember that as one chapter ends, another one begins.Though it is true that V'Zot HaBracha is the final parsha in the Torah, the story is far from over. Just like Yehoshua and Bnei Yisrael, we meet this new year as well as every new beginning, as even stronger people than we were before, taking the lessons we’ve learned from our past experiences to guide us.

Chag Sameach and Shabbat Shalom!

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iTranslation taken from mechon-mamre.org

ii Translation my own

iii Translation my own