Beshalach — When He Had Let the People Go
Exodus 13:17–17:16
At the sea, after the danger of drowning has passed, after Israel has been saved and six hundred of Pharaoh’s elite charioteers has drowned in the sea, the scripture sums up the essence of the ancient faith in this fashion: “And the people feared the Lord; and they believed in the Lord, and in his servant Moses” (Exod. 14:31). There is a direct, intimate connection between what the people see and their belief in God, as though our text were quoting some sort of Israelite tag line that said, “See it, believe it; don’t see it, don’t believe it.” God has been through a great deal since then. He’s gone from babysitting and sewing underwear for his creatures in the Garden of Eden, intimate chats with his believers by the terebinths of Mamre (Gen. 18:1–15) and drowning their enemies in the sea, to the point where he has disappeared from human events and left us more mature and much more alone in our own time. I once wrote myself a note that I’ve saved:
How is it possible to understand God’s words and intentions when human beings created in his image could dress up in storm troopers’ uniforms, pin the swastika on their shirts and do the things they did? Are they part of his “likeness,” too? Right there and then God stopped being comprehensible, because those are things that can’t be understood in any human logic. His Almightiness was put to a serious test, and even his eternal goodness is in real doubt. To frame the theological dilemma of the Holocaust accurately, I need to turn to the wisdom of one of the great Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century, Hans Jonas, who was born in Germany, went to Palestine as a young Zionist and spent most of his career teaching in New York. One of his most important works for our purposes was a lecture on the significance of the idea of God after the Holocaust. Jonas frames his remarks around the classical problem of evil in the world: if there is an almighty creator who embodies absolute good, how can evil exist in the world? On this question he says: “Only a completely unintelligible God can be said to be absolutely good and absolutely powerful, yet tolerate the world as it is. Put more generally, the three attributes at stake – absolute good, absolute power and intelligibility – stand in such a logical relation to one another that the conjunction of any two of them excludes the third.… “But if God is to be intelligible in some manner and to some extent (and to this we must hold), then his goodness must be compatible with the existence of evil, and this it is only if he is not all powerful. Only then can we uphold that he is intelligible and good, and there is yet evil in the world.” (Hans Jonas, “The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice,” The Journal of Religion 67, no. 1 [January 1987]:, 9–10.)
Avrum Burg draws a number of distinctions in his analysis of parashat Bo. The core of his argument is that “Every struggle for freedom is a struggle to seize the mastery of time” and coordinate with this, and that “command of time is the essence of freedom.”
A subsidiary argument contrasts in a similarly binary way the ideas of slavery and freedom, using the mythic models of Exodus to deploy “Israel” and “Egypt” as metaphors embodying the essential attributes of each paradigm.
While these sorts of contrasts are useful in exposing some of the dynamics of human life, the way in which these are carried forward in Burg’s teaching is reminiscent of many of the modern paradigms of academic as well as of more popular modern rabbinic and Jewish communal exegesis, exposition and advocacy. Put differently, the idea that one people “is” the paradigm of “one thing” (slavery, freedom) may be rhetorically inspiring and even in certain instances in the life of a people mostly accurate, but it misses the complexity.
The complexity exists on multiple levels, but the two that I am thinking of as central are: the reality that any people (Israelite or Egyptian) is an amalgam of multiple individuals, not all of whom agree about a presumably shared identity, whether collective or personal; and the reality that in a given moment, people who share a collective identity can be behaving in very different ways.
Bo – Go In Exodus 10:1–13:16
This week the story of the Exodus reaches its climax. The last plagues come down on Pharaoh and his house. The gates of Egypt are thrown open wide and “my people go.” Thus the Middle Eastern drama of days gone by, whose echoes still spark the imaginations and shape the values of the three great monotheistic faiths. Such myths often fired the imagination of the ancient world, and a few have survived to our time. For example, the Roman gladiator Spartacus led a slave revolt against the Roman republic in 73 BCE. Leading an army of gladiators and runaway slaves, he fought off the trained legions of Rome for nearly three years in what historians call the Third Servile War, before being defeated. His story happened in the far distant past, but it continues to resonate. Numerous modern revolutionary movements drew their inspiration from Spartacus, including the most famous: the Spartacus League, led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht during the Weimar Republic in Germany. Fictional versions of his story continue to grow in number. Arthur Koestler’s first novel, The Gladiators, published in 1939, was based on the Spartacus story.
Howard Fast wrote a novel titled Spartacus in 1951 that was made into an Academy Award-winning movie in 1960, starring Kirk Douglas and directed by Stanley Kubrick. In Fast’s telling, Spartacus was a sort of ancient communist fighting the Roman establishment to liberate the slaves. Perhaps not coincidentally, the screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo, one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, and his on-screen credit in Spartacus is said to have ended the Hollywood blacklist. The Kubrick film was re-released in 1967 and again in 1991. Fast’s novel was adapted again in 2004 as a made-for-television movie. Yet another version was launched in 2010 as a Starz Network cable television series, Spartacus: Blood and Sand; the series is entering its third season at this writing, and is focused more on action and sex than politics.
Aram Khachaturian composed a ballet on Spartacus in 1954, considered one of his greatest works, and later adapted the music into a series of orchestral suites that continue to be popular as theme music on British television. The Soviet Union sponsored its own international sports competition, the Spartakiad, for decades until the collapse of Communism. Spartak is still the name of Moscow’s most successful football and hockey clubs. Finally, Spartacus is also the name of the newsletter of the Communist youth league of Israel. Perhaps that’s why Moshe, or Moses, is the most popular name in Israel.
Exodus 6:2–9:35
Not long ago my niece Shira sent me some comments on the weekly portion in which Moses was saved by Pharaoh’s daughter. She compared the historical events with the life stories of her two grandmothers, who had died at the end of a long, full life after first experiencing a childhood of terror and persecution, from which they were saved by non-Jewish neighbors. Here is what she wrote: “I choose to be an optimist, and following the life experiences of my two grandmothers, to believe in people like Olga and Mikolai, like Umm and Abu Shaker, like Pharaoh’s daughter, who made the right choice. Because of them I stand here today. Because of people like them, because of personal friendships that break down walls, life has a chance, and maybe even coexistence.”
Here is how my beloved father-in-law Lucien answered her: “Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch made a contribution to our Shira’s method of commentary…. ‘Pharaoh’s daughter called her foster son Moshe, one who draws out of the water, and not Mashui, one who is drawn from the water. Perhaps this gives us an indication of the whole tendency of the education which the princess gave her foster son…that all his life is he to have a tender heart for other people’s troubles and always be on the alert to be a moshi’a, a deliverer in times of distress. His Hebrew name always kept the consciousness of his origin awake within him. The princess surely inquired of the mother the Hebrew term for expressing this thought, otherwise she would have given him an Egyptian name. In all this we can see the noble humane character of Moses’s savior” (Samson Raphael Hirsch on Exod. 2:10).
Not long ago the entire government of France cited an initiative begun by my father-in-law. At the Pantheon, the most important memorial site in Paris, a grave was dedicated for the “unknown righteous gentile.” (You may not know, by the way, that Israel has recognized more than twenty-one thousand righteous gentiles to date, among whom the entire Danish underground is counted as one person, and the entire Danish people as a subset of this.) Both their comments, my father-in-law’s and my niece’s, open a window for us to discuss the very fine but clear line threading through the story of the Exodus, namely the story of the righteous gentiles.
Miketz — At the End of Two Years
Genesis 41:1–44:17
Because We Were Strangers
Joseph is the archetype of the Diaspora Jewish success story. He is the first ever to make it big in the royal court. He is the first to understand what it means to live outside Israel, initially under duress but later by choice. His story raises thoughts of the smallness of Jewish life in a Jewish land, and of the greatness of the Diaspora Jew as Other, forced to compete, to excel and to stand out. In a sense Joseph is the first Einstein – that is, he is essentially a Zionist, but from afar. Jewish, but mostly in relation to gentiles.
What’s more, Joseph is the first of us who was born outside Israel and made his mark outside Israel. That is, Abraham was born outside Israel and found success in Israel; Isaac was born in Israel and succeeded in Israel; and Jacob was born in Israel and found success abroad, while working for Laban in Haran. Joseph came from outside and succeeded outside. He brief stay in Israel was not of great importance to his future or his greatness. Accordingly, Joseph’s story presents us with a difficult choice of themes. Do we use Joseph to shed light on the complicated relationship between Israel and the Diaspora, or do we focus this week on the place of the outsider in society? As usual, we will allow the urgent to displace the substantive, and put off Israel-Diaspora relations for now.
One could read the entire Book of Genesis as a discussion, via personal stories and anecdotes, of the place of the outsider and the Other in human society.
Vayeshev
“Vayered Yehuda,” our story begins – literally, Yehuda descended. This is an emotional statement as well as a topographical one. Tamar’s story begins just as we conclude the story of Yehuda proposing that his brothers sell their younger brother Joseph. In both stories, Yehuda acts in an immoral way.
The story begins by telling us that Yehuda has three sons: Er, Onan and Shelah. Er takes Tamar as his wife, but Er “does badly” in the eyes of God and thus dies. So does Onan, who flouts his obligation, under biblical law, to marry his brother’s widow and give her children, thus ensuring the continuity of his brother’s lineage. Onan masturbates instead, ‘acting badly before God,’ and dies as well. We are left with the last son, Shelah, who under biblical law is to be given to Tamar as well.
Yehuda, instead of soul searching – trying to understand in what ways his boys might have offended God, blames the death of the boys on Tamar, and refuses to give her his last son.
Genesis 37:1–40:23
Jacob and His Two Firstborns, Judah and Joseph
There is something reassuringly stable and secure in the notion of “dwelling,” the verb that gives this week’s portion its name. It has an air of permanence, of rootedness, unlike more tentative concepts such as sojourning or abiding. The same is true of the Hebrew original, yeshev; in various permutations it means to sit, settle down or inhabit. Its root letters, y-sh-v, lend their meaning to such essential values as the yeshiva, the place where scholars sit together to study Torah (and where, if you will, the spirit of God dwells among them), and the yishuv, the permanent Jewish community in the Land of Israel. Jacob was surely seeking that sort of permanence and stability in his life when he decided to settle down at last after years of impermanence, instability and upset. But wishing doesn’t make it so: “Jacob sought to dwell in tranquility, but the anger of Joseph sprang upon him” (Rashi on Gen. 37:2). Rashi argues that Jacob’s hopes to settle down to a quiet farmer’s life were upset by the feuding between Joseph and his brothers, which ended up wreaking disaster in the family. Rashi adds, “The righteous sought to dwell in tranquility; but the Holy One, praised be he, said: the righteous are not satisfied with what is arranged for them in the world to come, but want to dwell in tranquility in this world?” And thus begins the final chapter in the most un-tranquil life of Jacob.
At the core of the story is the unavoidable comparison between Joseph and Jacob. Comparisons between generations are not unusual in this family. Thus, for example, Rashi begins his commentary on Parashat Toledot:
These are the generations of Isaac. Abraham begot Isaac…. The jokers of that generation used to say that Sarah was made pregnant by Abimelech (the king of Gerar, who “took Sarah” thinking she was Abraham’s sister, Gen. 20:2) since she had lived with Abraham for so many years and not gotten pregnant by him. What did the Holy One, praised be he, do? He made the features of Isaac’s face resemble Abraham’s to attest to all that Abraham begot Isaac. (Rashi on Gen. 25:19)
Genesis 32:4–36:42
Jacob and What Isn’t Accomplished by Force
As we’ve noted, more than half the weekly portions in the Book of Genesis deal with Jacob, his personal history and his difficult family. It’s no surprise, then, that his character and profile are depicted in much finer detail in the Torah than any of his parents or forebears. Abraham first entered the stage at age seventy-something. Isaac was passive and dependent until his fifties; it was not until then that he began to register as an independent actor, after which we came to know him as an innovative and prosperous farmer, though he remained a weak, ineffectual father.
By contrast, we follow Jacob from the moment he is born until he breathes his final breath. We have a front-row seat as he grows and evolves. Let’s try to isolate one thread in his story and follow it from beginning to end. By tracing this one thread, we can try to understand some of the dimensions and processes that he carried with him from his earliest days as Jacob, the younger brother, up to his death as Israel, the father of the children of Israel.
Jacob’s life story is a long, torturous process of learning the uses and limits of power. Often enough he simply didn’t understand the meaning of power. He didn’t know that he himself was imbued with great power. He didn’t know how to wield it, and many of his mistakes stemmed from his failure to understand it. He was utterly blind to the strength that comes from restraining oneself and refraining from the use of power.
Genesis 28:10–32:3
Why Is Jacob, Despite Everything, My Father?
In last week’s portion we explored the web of lies that surrounded Jacob from the moment he was born until he reached his final not-very-restful abode. This week’s portion doesn’t give Jacob much rest, either. It’s not only lies that surround him and his family, but heaps of trouble that pursue them. There are people and families that never in a lifetime experience a fraction of what he went through. But he, Jacob, seems to have been a magnet for all the real and symbolic troubles that can possibly appear in a family, to the point where the reader says to himself, if there was ever a family I would not want my family to resemble, it has to be Jacob’s family. There probably wasn’t a single piece of it that functioned properly. And so the inevitable question arises: why was he chosen to be the father of our nation? Why not Joseph, the ruler of Egypt, or Judah, the mighty warrior? For that matter, why him and not Esau? At least Esau isn’t known to have accumulated such a burden of shame and infamy.
Generally speaking, I should make it clear that just as I don’t consider the Torah a Jewish book of science (as in How to Create a World in Six Days), nor do I consider it a history book whose every fact represents actual events. By the same token, I don’t think that the patriarchs were necessarily three consecutive generations of father, son and grandson. The Chumash tells the stories of three great characters who arose during the course of several generations, each of whom embodied certain character traits and personal, national, moral or religious profiles so worthy of note that they became beacons, symbolic fathers of the entire nation. I think it’s even possible that there were no such people at all, and that these characters are archetypes. If that’s that case, then why Jacob? What does he represent?
Toledot
Genesis 25:19–28:9
Do you remember when Ross Perot, in a debate against Al Gore back in the early 1990s, got flustered by something Gore said, maybe about NAFTA or Perot’s computer company, and at a certain point he started yelling out, “Now you’re lying!” “He’s lying!” Nobody could tell who was right at that moment. But everybody knew that Perot had lost the debate. The accusation, it turned out, revealed more than did the deception itself.
Avraham Burg, of course, is no Ross Perot. Yet we ought to be exceptionally careful when we focus too intently on the falsehoods that biblical characters allow themselves. Our reaction may say more about us than them.
To understand what’s troubling in Burg’s approach, we should start by taking note of the one “liar” that he oddly neglects to mention: God. God, after all, deceives twice. He famously twists Sarah’s words when asking Abraham why she laughed at the prospect of having a baby at her age (she had actually laughed about Abraham’s age, not hers). And he later deceives Abraham into thinking that he would have to kill his own son in the Binding of Isaac. In both cases, God’s example points to a problem in Burg’s reasoning: If deception equals corruption, then God too is corrupt, and we have a lot more to worry about than Jacob’s character.
Genesis 25:19–28:9
Jacob: A Simple Man?
The fact is that our father Jacob was a liar in his youth. It’s also true that by the end of the story, he is the most upright patriarch of them all. As opposed to Abraham and Isaac, he never told anyone that his wife was his sister. He never followed voices that weren’t the voices of his heart, the way Abraham did when he banished Hagar and Ishmael, and he never climbed onto an altar in defiance of the most basic instinct of survival. To his misfortune, however, even though he managed to break free of his personal cycle of lies he was never able to escape the culture of lies and deceit into which he was born. Some people are simply unable to change, no matter how hard they try. Look at how many times Jacob changed his surroundings, moved to new places hoping to change his luck, even changed his name and his occupation, and yet he was never able to shake the reputation for dishonesty that he had gotten stuck with early on. From his childhood years right up to his last day on earth he moved from place to place, investing so much energy in wandering, uprooting himself, settling into new places. Perhaps that’s why he didn’t invest enough of his inner resources in the personal change that might have spared him some of his suffering.
From the moment he entered the world he was stuck with the demeaning name Ya’acov (coming up from behind), which became synonymous with slyness and cunning. How did the prophet Jeremiah interpret the name centuries later?
In his commentary on Chayei Sarah, Avrum Burg reflects on the life and nature of the Father of the Jewish people, Avraham. Burg points out that Avraham is not only pious and loving to God, but concerned for people of other nations. In addition to cultivating his divine relationship, he also wants to engage with others as a person of warmth, fairness, and integrity. We witness this commitment over the last several parshiyot, from his welcoming of the angels to his purchasing of Maarat HaMachpela in this week’s parsha.
Nowhere is this more visible than in Avraham’s confrontation with God regarding the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. Midrash Tanhuma, reflecting on parshat Chayei Sarah, tells a beautiful midrash. Discussing the importance of kavanah, mindfulness or intention during prayer, the rabbis declare that Abraham is the highest exemplar. They say, “…And nobody inclined their mind and heart like our Father Abraham”. The rabbis continue on to bring an amazing example of Abraham’s mindful and heartfelt prayer: they point to Abraham challenging God. When God tells Abraham that he is going to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of their wickedness, Abraham fights for the innocent, claiming that there must be some number of righteous people within the city’s gates. He asks: “Will You sweep away the innocent along with the guilty?… Far be it from you to do a thing like that!… Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?”
Genesis 23:1–25:18
The Strength to Concede
Chayei Sarah, The Life of Sarah, is an interesting portion. It’s not unusual to find that a portion of the Scripture dealing with death begins with a word connected to life. Thus “The Life of Sarah” deals with the death of the matriarch at age one hundred twenty-seven; similiarly, the portion that begins, “And Jacob lived,” tells the story of the death of the aged, tortured third patriarch. It’s tempting to think that one person’s death is in essence the beginning of somebody else’s independent life. It’s only when Abraham and Sarah pass away, for example, that Isaac and Ishmael are able to come together for the funeral. In the same manner, only when Jacob dies can a real dialogue begin between Joseph and his brothers. When the old folks die, the young are free to redesign the world according to the understandings of their generation and the next.
And so, with the death of Sarah, the domineering and rather devious matriarch, a great many things became possible that couldn’t have happened when she was alive. Hagar, according to the Aggadah, changed her name and returned to Abraham’s tent as Keturah. Ishmael was able, as we noted, to reestablish his connection with his brother and childhood friend, Isaac. But the most important change was that Rebecca was brought from Aram to Canaan to be Isaac’s wife. “And Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent, and he took Rebecca, and she became his wife; and he loved her. And Isaac was comforted for [the death of] his mother” (Gen. 24:67).
However, it is not only Sarah from whom we take our leave in this week’s portion, but Abraham as well. As such, this is the right moment to take stock of the first patriarch’s hidden legacy.
Reading Avrum’s thoughts on this week’s torah portion, I find it hard to choose what to focus on. I feel intrigued by the invitation to think about God’s ‘color,’ especially God in shades of gray. I feel a need to agree with his open embrace to the various life-bearing options of new families. But like Avrum, who hears the voices of our daily challenges echoing in the Parasha, I too mush think of Sodom in the context of our society and of the sounds coming from the streets of Jerusalem these days.
Ezekiel, the prophet, lived in a time of turmoil. He lived to see the last days of the first temple, and then to experience its destruction, and the exile to Babylon.
There, by the rivers of Babylon, God through Ezekiel sends a clear message to Jerusalem: “Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom: pride, fullness of bread, and careless ease was in her and in her daughters; neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.” (Ezekiel 16, 49)
Genesis 18:1–22:24
You Shall Hear the Cry of the Oppressed
The thought of commenting on Parashat Vayera immediately prompts the desire to write something soothing, to get away from the binding of Isaac, the destruction of Sodom and the strange story of Sarah’s strange pregnancy. The portion has other, gentler lessons to teach – for example, about the Torah’s approach to hospitality, about models of acceptance and rejection (compare Abraham’s warm welcome of the three visitors to his tent in Mamre with the brutal reception they receive in Sodom). But Israeli reality has a way of intervening and pushing off the comfortable choices to some point in the distant future. This is a holy land where blood cries out from every inch. Yes, Israeli blood and Palestinian blood flow more cheaply than ever, but also Ethiopian blood, spilled in fear and shame down the drains of our blood banks, and the blood of gays and lesbians dehumanized on the streets of Jerusalem, uniting rabbis, imams and bishops of every faith in their hate. We are left, then, with no choice but to look at the portion again and try to understand the Torah of the outcry. Who cries out, and when? Which outcries leave their mark and which dissolve into a still, small whimper?
It seems to me that every time God comes down to our level, it ends badly. When he came down to see what was going on in the Tower of Babel, the entire earth fell into a muddle. “And the Lord came down to see the city and tower, which the children of men had builded. And the Lord said: ‘Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do; and now nothing will be withholden from them, which the purpose to do. Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech’” (Gen. 11:5–7). And again in the case of Sodom, something distracts God’s attention and he decides to go down and understand what is going on among the dwellers below: “And the Lord said: ‘Verily, the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and, verily, their sin is exceedingly grievous. I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me; and if not, I will know’” (Gen. 18:20–21).
“Everything is in the hands of Heaven except for reverence of Heaven”
(Babylonian Talmud, tractate Berachot, 33b)
In his commentary of this week’s portion, Lech Lecha, Avraham Burg takes issue with the concept of faith. Weaving together late antiquity Midrash, Maimonides and his own hermeneutics, Burg charts his namesake, the original Abraham, as he who opened to God the door of faith, i.e. of an enduring reciprocal and dynamic relationship between man and the divine. It was the human side who liberated God from the shackles of skeptic solitude, according to Burg, and not vie versa. This Idea, originally explored in a beautiful rabbinic allegory, is expounded by Burg to show its full theological post-modern import.
It is worth taking the opportunity that Burg gives us in order to inquire a little further into the notion of faith, for it may teach us something about the way faith plays a role in our lives, secular and observant alike.
In philosophy of language there is an important distinction between “believing that” and “believing in”. When I believe that x, I believe that a certain proposition is true. For example, the proposition “I believe that it’s raining” means that I hold the proposition “it’s raining” to be true. Most uses of the verb to believe in our everyday language are of this sort, and usually refer to things we can’t be certain about, but still hold as true. The degree to which we are willing to act upon beliefs from the nature of “believing that” vary greatly by person and circumstance So much for “believe that.”
Genesis 12:1–17:27
Abraham, Defender of the Fledgling Faith
The culture of the Christian West, the culture of the Muslim world and the culture of the Jewish community are, in the final analysis, the cultures of Abraham. Some call them revealed religions — religions with a central hub that turns on an axis of divine revelation, and an outer rim that awaits a final revelation and redemption in the end of days. That might perhaps explain why revelation and redemption sound and unfold so similarly. We frequently hear that it was Abraham who discovered God and spread his teachings and his faith to the ancient world. It is a view shared by philosophy and legend alike.
This is how Maimonides, the rationalist philosopher, a stranger to mysticism, describes him: Because he had been weaned on them, [Abraham] began to find his thoughts wandering. While still young he began to think night and day. He began to wonder how it could be that this wheel was perpetually turning if no one was turning it or driving, since it was impossible that it should turn itself. He had no teacher or instructor.
What if Noah had been an exemplary spiritual leader and not just, as the Torah tells us, a righteous person by the standards of his own generation? Picture Noah as a true prophet of his time, a man who knows that God is about to destroy the world. Such a person would have done far more than simply build an ark for his own family. He would have labored tirelessly to warn the entire human family. He would have spoken from every rooftop, announcing that the earth would soon be destroyed if they did not immediately change their lives. He would have begged, cajoled and proclaimed, “There is still time, but do not tarry, for the end of the earth is at hand!”
Avraham Burg’s bold new Torah commentary inspires us to probe the Torah’s wisdom for our own time. Burg uses his own moral and spiritual imagination to uncover new layers of meaning in the ancient text. For him, the destruction described in this Torah text leads to reflections on the Nazi Holocaust For me, the Torah’s narrative of global annihilation has a closer analog in the reality of environmental destruction, and the very real threat to the earth born of human hubris, greed, denial and neglect. Our generation faces the real possibility of ecological disaster, caused by human misuse of the earth given to us.
Genesis 5:9–11:32
For years I was extremely critical of Noah. I didn’t like his silent character, his failure to open his mouth, to utter even a single word of protest as God stormed across the world in his murderous, watery rage. Unlike Abraham at Sodom, unlike Moses facing the sin of the Golden Calf. I had always thought that the essence of scripture was in its words; I never noticed that there is a scripture of words and a scripture of deeds, and that they are not necessarily the same thing.
I interpreted Noah’s silence as impotence, and when the commentaries and the Midrash derided him and mocked his name, I happily joined in. “These are the generations of Noah. Noah was in his generations a man righteous and wholehearted” (Gen. 6:9). Here’s what Rashi has to say: “Some among our rabbis interpret ‘righteous in his generations’ as praise, and conclude that if he had lived in an age of righteous men, he would have been even more righteous. Others interpret it as criticism, saying that by his own generation’s standards he was righteous, but if he had lived during the generation of Abraham he would not have been considered at all.” The compliment is not really a compliment, and the criticism is harsh and piercing.
Today I think of Noah altogether differently.
One of the great joys of my life is in the study of Jewish texts. Every time I read one, even if the story is familiar to me, I am grateful to be part of a religion that rewards questioning and debate and has such a rich literature that you can mine its depths again and again and still be rewarded with gems of knowledge.
I consider myself to be both a feminist and a proud liberal Jew, and read Jewish texts as such. I am not beholden to a Jewish tradition based on divine law and belief, but rather see Judaism as a golden heritage of rigorous inquiry, wisdom and discussion of the human condition which offers me profound wisdom and guidance in how I live my life. That discussion progresses and adapts, and while there has been much progress with women in Judaism in recent years, there is still far to go. Much of this can be attributed to where our story begins, in the first book of the Torah.
When you read the text carefully you will see that there are two stories of how men and women came to be. The first says that God created them equally: “God created man in his own image….male and female he created them.” (1:27 Genesis) and then follows with a woman being created from a man’s rib: “She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man.” (2:23 Genesis)
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