Scrollers Preview: Parashat Vayeitze

The parasha opens this week with Jacob on the road at night, fleeing from his brother, headed towards his uncle Lavan. He lays down to sleep and has a vision of angels going up and down a staircase. When he awakes, what stays with him is an awareness that God is with him. During the dream, God announces to him: “Remember, I am with you.” And after the dream Jacob vows that “If God remains with me. . . then the Lord shall be my God.”

After twenty years of serving his uncle Lavan in order to marry his two daughters, Rachel and Leah, twenty years in which Jacob was mistreated and deceived by his uncle, Jacob is still aware that God is with him. As Jacob secretly plans with his wives to leave Lavan’s camp, Jacob mentions God’s presence in his life twice. And so, the phrase “God is with him” appears four times in this parasha.

The word “to steal” also appears four times in this parasha. As they are leaving Lavan’s house, Rachel steals his household idols, and Jacob’s stealthy departure is described as “stealing Lavan’s heart.”

God is with Jacob, a sign of connection and wholeness and safety. And yet, there is deep conflict, deception, and stealing, which all create a sense of disconnection, fragmentation and danger. So – what is Jacobs’ experience of these twenty years? What does it mean to him that God is and has been with him this whole time? Do we sometimes have to separate from another person, or another people – in order to truly experience safety and connection in our lives as a whole? Is it possible to feel that God is with us in the midst of conflict, deception and darkness?

Scrollers Preview - Parashat Toldot

Now that Isaac has married Rebekah, his story truly begins, according to the opening lines of our Parasha, “This is the story of Isaac.” As we read Isaac’s story, there is a sense of déjà vu.

Rebekah is barren, like Sarah. Like in Abraham and Sarah’s story, there is a famine in the land, and Isaac passes his wife off as his sister, fearing that the inhabitants of the area will kill him because Rebekah is so beautiful.

And then, Isaac redigs wells that his father Abraham had dug a generation before – wells which the Philistines had stopped up. Isaac gives those wells the same names his father had given them.

Isaac has two sons, like his parents. And one son, Jacob, is sent away to the “homeland” to find a wife for himself, paralleling Abraham’s servant’s journey to the same place to find a wife for Isaac in the previous generation.

After Abraham almost sacrifices Isaac on the mountain, the Torah doesn’t show them together again until Isaac and Ishmael come together to bury their father. We may imagine that Isaac and Abraham never saw each other again alive. And yet, Isaac’s life is tracing the lines of his father’s life. He is redigging the wells that his father had previously dug, literally and figuratively.

As we study together, let us look for the parallels and look for the places where Abraham and Isaac’s lives differ. Why these variations on the same themes from the prior generation? Is this the Torah’s way of showing us God’s hand in events? And why these themes – barrenness, sibling conflict, exile? What is the message behind them about how the covenant is passed down from one generation to the next?

Parashat Chayei Sarah - preview by lay leader Linda Sherman

Parashat Chayei Sarah

Genesis 23:1 – 25:18

November 10, 2012

I AM WOMAN; HEAR ME ROAR…..REALLY….IT’S BEEN THAT KIND OF WEEK.  As a proud feminist, I was honored and delighted to be asked to lead this particular torah study on Sarah, matriarch of Jewish women.

This was the same torah portion that I did for my bat mitzvah, 40 years ago on November 11, 1972.  So, this parashat has a particular significance for me, on many levels.  It is fascinating to think about how the world of Jewish women looked to a young girl just turning thirteen vs. how it looks today to a (slightly) older woman with 40 years more experience.

As a young girl, I didn’t yet realize that women weren’t always treated equally, or that there were things some folks felt we couldn’t do or accomplish because we were women.  I was very naïve about such things, and never questioned my parents and teachers who said I could be whatever I wanted to be, do whatever I wanted to do.  I was wonderfully naïve about such things growing up.  My focus on my torah portion wasn’t even on Sarah, but on Rebecca, who I thought was quite brave to leave her home and family to travel across the desert to meet a strange man and be his wife.  What courage, I thought.  What faith she must have had to say “I will go.”  My older, more cynical eyes, now say, why ever not?  What did she have to lose?  She had an overbearing brother and an abusive father – and both happy to sell her off to the highest bidder.  Of course she wanted to leave, how relieved she must have been to say, “I will go.”

This brings me to my question today; not of feminism per se, but of perspective.  What a difference a few years, or a few decades, or a few millennium make.  I wanted to talk about the matriarchs and their power; how women in the torah seem so strong and how they seem to “get it” so much easier than the men.  But, the more I read, the less sense it made.

·         Is this a story of transition, from one generation (Abraham/Sarah) to another (Isaac/Rebecca)?

·         Is Sarah’s death linked to (the Akedah) Isaac’s close escape from death at Abraham’s hand on orders from God?  Does Sarah die instead of Isaac, because God forms a covenant with him and for his seed after him?  Or is she overcome with grief upon hearing (or dreaming) about what happened?

·         Why were Abraham and Sarah in different places when she died?  Had she left him? 

·         Why so much detail about where and how to bury Sarah?  Why this particular piece of land?  The chapter ends with Abraham’s death and burial in the same place.  What if Abraham had died first?  Would the story have turned out any differently?

·         Is this just an elaborate plot device to set up a family plot for future generations?  Or maybe this is all about property rights.

There is no shortage of commentary on this parashat.  Much of it depends on the perspective you bring to it when you read the section.  What do you want to believe?  What do you want it to mean?  So, being a true skeptic, another gift of 40 years of experience, I went back to the original text.  What did it actually say, without interpretation or embellishment?  Below is a surprisingly short summary of every mention of Sarai/Sarah in the book of Genesis. 

·         Chapter 11 – we are introduced to Abram’s wife Sarai and told she was barren.

·         Chapter 12 – Abram took Sarai to Canaan, where he passed her off as his sister and she was taken into Pharaoh’s house.  Then the Lord plagued Pharaoh, and they were released.

·         Chapter 16 – Sarai gave Hagar to Abram to conceive a child, then dealt harshly with Hagar who ran away, and then was told by the angel of the Lord to go back to Sarai.

·         Chapter 17 – Sarai’s name is changed to Sarah, and the Lord blesses her and promises she will bear a son at age 90 and be a mother of nations and establishes a covenant with her.

·         Chapter 18 – the Lord sends 3 angels to tell Abraham and Sarah they will have a son; Sarah laughs and is admonished by God.

·         Chapter 20 – Abraham and Sarah journey south, and again he passes Sarah off as his sister to Abimelech, with similar results as with the Pharaoh.

·         Chapter 21 – Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, named Isaac.  Sarah tells Abraham to cast out Ishmael so he will not inherit with her son.

·         Chapter 23 – And the life of Sarah was a hundred and seven and twenty years, and she died in Hebron.  Abraham came to weep for her, and then he buried her in the cave of the field of Machpelah in Canaan, where he was later buried as well.

One of the things I enjoy most about Holy Scrollers is the abundance of perspectives that we bring to any discussion.  There are folks who are old and young; male and female; products of book-learning or the school of hard knocks; liberals and conservatives; artists and scholars. 

So, what is your perspective?  What does this Parashat, or even all of the above, tell us about Sarah’s life, about women in the Torah?  And, when combined with the rest of this parashat about Rebecca (and Isaac), does this tell us any more about how Judaism is relevant to women, or how we “go forward in our faith”?  Or, is it just an elaborate instruction manual?

Scrollers Preview - Parashat Vayera

 Friends – I hope that you are all well, safe and warm. Please come for hot coffee and bagels tomorrow!  It will be good to see you…

In this parasha, we have a series of critical episodes: the visitation of Abraham and Sarah by divine messengers who relay the news that Sarah will give birth to a son; Abraham and God’s dialogue regarding the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; the story of Lot, living in Sodom, taking in the 2 angels/messengers, and then escaping with his wife and daughters; another sister/wife episode, this time with King Avimelech; the birth of Isaac; the casting out of Hagar and Ishmael; and the Akedah – the binding of Isaac.

These episodes really feel like they are a connected whole, especially because of the use of some key words that repeat throughout. One is the root “ra-ah”, “to see.” Another is “tzachak,”, “to laugh”, another is “tzedek,” or “righteousness/justice”, and lastly, “tza-ak,” “to cry out.” Interesting how these last three words begin and end with the same sound.

As we study, I want to keep track of when the Torah text uses these verbs and see how they lay the groundwork in the first few episodes that lead to the climactic almost sacrifice of Isaac at the end. How might these verbs combine to tell a story of faith, and how may they help us understand what faith really is in the world of the Torah? How is faith a combination of seeing, laughing, crying and pursuing justice?