An article I wrote for Religion News Service about what New York’s draconian Covid-19 rules affecting Orthodox communities evidence about the rules’ crafters can be read here.
Category Archives: Jewish Thought
When Innocence Really Isn’t
Remarkably, in response to Avimelech’s protest over being punished for taking Sarah, Hashem confirms the king’s insistence that he had acted innocently, believing that Avraham and Sarah, as they had claimed, were brother and sister.
“I, too, knew,” Hashem tells Avimelech in a dream, “that it was in the innocence of your heart that you did this” (Beraishis, 20:6).
So why didn’t Hashem merely prevent Avimelech from touching Sarah? Why were the king and his family and entourage punished?
Perhaps the answer lies in what Avraham told Avimelech in explanation for having misled him: “Because I said ‘There is no fear of G-d in this place’ ” (ibid, 11).
A leader has the ability, and responsibility, to influence the mores of his society. If the society evidences lack of “fear of G-d,” its leadership is implicated.
No, Thank You
When, as they approach Egypt, Avram asks Sarai to pretend she is his sister, he explains “so that it will be good for me and I will remain alive because of you.” (Beraishis, 12:13)
Rashi’s comment on the words “it will be good for me” – “so that they [the Egyptians] will give me gifts” – puzzled me, as they surely have many, for years. Avram, who later in the parshah (14:23) spurned even a shoelace from the king of Sdom, is concerned with gifts?
An intriguing possible understanding of Rashi’s words occurred to me. Shlomo HaMelech, in Mishlei (15:27) teaches us that “the one who hates gifts will live.”
It may be that the greatest expression of that attitude isn’t only “in theory,” in hating the idea of gifts, but in actual practice – namely, that it’s the attitude toward an actual proffered gift that helps ensure life.
And so, perhaps Avram wanted gifts to be offered to him, so that he could “hate” the fact that he received them… with the result being that, as he continues, “I will remain alive…” – echoing Shlomo HaMelech’s words.
Postscript: Interestingly, the concept of shunning gifts as bolstering life is reflected in a snippet from a 1960s folk song:
“Some people never get, some never give;
“Some people never die and some never live.”
Yesh chachmah bagoyim.
Plumbing the Meaning of the Torah’s First Word
The Torah’s first verse is purposely unclear. As the Ramban, Nachmanides, points out, the deepest truths of how the universe was created are unfathomable and inscrutable, hidden, ultimately, in the realm of mysticism, not physical science.
It is intriguing, though, that the Torah’s first word, “Bereishis,” implies, as the Seforno explicitly states, that time itself is a creation – a notion that comports with traditional cosmological physics (if not with scientists who, terrified at the notion of a “beginning,” postulate a “multiverse” of universes, conveniently beyond observation).
Likewise intriguing is that, according to the Talmud, the Torah’s first word can be split into two words, “bara” and “shis.” While the Gemara sees in “shis” a hint to an Aramaic word meaning “conduit,” hinting to an underground channel into which liquid poured on the mizbe’ach would descend (a channel created at the beginning of time – Sukkah, 49a), the word can also, most simply, mean “six.”
As in the six types of quarks, currently believed to be the fundamental particles of which all matter is, ultimately, comprised.
“He created six”?
The Devarim-Beraishis Bridge Idea
The Chasam Sofer notes that the Torah’s last word, “Yisrael” and its first one, “Braishis,” share the letters aleph, shin, resh and yud… spelling ashrei.
Ashrei can be translated as “praiseworthy” or “fortunate.” That latter meaning may be the key to the “bridge idea” connecting the end of the Torah and its beginning, which we seek to connect on Simchas Torah when we complete the yearly Torah-cycle and begin it anew.
Because central to the very idea of the Torah and the people to whom it was given is the need to recognize how truly fortunate we are – to have been granted existence and the opportunity to play a role in the Divine plan, to daily receive Hashem’s gifts of life and sustenance, to be part of Klal Yisrael. That recognition should inform every Jew’s world-view.
And the joy that it yields should be front and center in our minds during z’man simchaseinu and Simchas Torah.
What Jewish Tradition Can Offer the Abortion Debate
The Forward ran an opinion piece I wrote about abortion. It can be read here.
A Tishrei Surprise
You’ve no doubt heard the term “October Surprise.” But have you heard of a “Tishrei Surprise”? Yes, it’s a thing. As you can read here.
The Threesome Chain
The Gemara (Shabbos 88a) quotes “a certain Galilean” as having said “Blessed is the Merciful One, Who gave a three-fold Torah [in the broad sense, Torah, Neviim and Ksuvim] to a three-fold nation [Cohanim, Levi’im and Yisraelim] by means of a third-born [Moshe] on the third day [of separation of men and women] in the third month [Sivan].”
The stress on threes concerning the giving of the Torah, it occurs to me, reflects the essence of mesorah itself, its transmittal. Just as the most elemental physical chain needs three links, so, too, the conceptual one. Each of us is a middle link; we must have received the mesorah and then transmitted it. And our recipients then become middle links themselves.
In parshas Haazinu, we read, similarly: “Ask your father and he will tell you, your grandfather and he will say to you” Devarim 32:7). The threesome chain again.
And, intriguingly, the word employed for the father’s telling is “viyagedcha”, from the root lihagid — which Rashi elsewhere (Shemos 19:3) says implies harshness; and for the grandfather’s telling, the word is viyomru – whose root, omer, Rashi (ibid) characterizes as a “soft” communication.
The Torah may mean to teach here that a father must be an authority figure, and his transmittal of the mesorah more demanding, while a grandfather’s guidance is to be, well, grandfatherly, imparted with a more gentle touch.
(c) 2020 Rabbi Avi Shafran
Trembling With Joy
Rosh Hashanah evokes, or should evoke, what seem to be discordant emotions: fear and joy. To read how I think they should be synthesized, click here.
And may you and yours have a ksiva vachasimah tovah!
[photo by Esky Cook]
The Clock is Missing
Rosh Hashanah is the only holiday on the Jewish calendar occuring at the new moon, beginning on a night when the moon isn’t visible at all. That fact is hinted at in the posuk “Tik’u bachodesh shofar bakeseh liyom chageinu” (“Sound the shofar on the New Moon, at the appointed time for the day of our festival”) — Tehillim 81:4. The word bakeseh, “at the appointed time,” can be read to mean “covered.”
The moon is, famously, a symbol of Klal Yisrael. It receives its light from the sun, as we receive our enlightenment from Hashem; it wanes but waxes again, as we do throughout history; and it is the basis of our calendar.
Various ideas lie in the oddity of Rosh Hashanah being moonless. One that occurred to me has to do with that latter connection, that the moon is our marker of time, our clock, so to speak. When we repent of a sin, Chazal teach, the sin can be erased from our past — even, if our teshuvah is complete and sincere, turned into a merit!
And so, we are particularly able on Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the ten days of teshuvah, to undermine time, to go back into the past and change it.
What better symbol of that power than to remove our “clock” from the sky?
Ksiva vachasima tovah!