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?

Scrollers Preview - Parashat Lech L'cha

The Etz Hayyim commentary distinguishes between God’s first two attempts, through Adam/Eve and then Noah and his family, to create humankind so that they will choose to do good, and this new attempt, through Abram and Sarai (later known as Abraham and Sarah.) According to the commentary, in this Parasha, God “now changes the approach. Instead of asking one individual or one family to be good in isolation, God seeks to create a community, a people, descendants of a God-fearing couple, in the hope that the members of that community would sustain and reinforce each other. In that way, ordinary people would be capable of displaying extraordinary behavior.”

This is a powerful assertion, that a community is what is needed for good values to endure in the world. As we study together, I want us to ask ourselves if this communal aspect is what distinguishes the covenant with Abraham from God’s relationships with Adam and Noah and the other false starts in the beginning of the Torah. How is asking Abram to “go forth” from his native land and his father’s house to the land that God will show him qualitatively different from God’s choosing of Noah or God’s creation of Adam?

We are presented with a series of covenantal moments in this parasha –from the creepy scene of the covenant between the pieces to the name changes of Abram to Abraham and Sarai to Sarah, to the commandment to circumcise all males. How do these encounters between God and humans lay the groundwork for a community that will, as the commentary says, “sustain and reinforce each other” that “ordinary people would be capable of displaying extraordinary behavior”?

We will also read about Sarah giving her Egyptian servant Hagar to Abraham to have a child through her, and about Hagar’s subsequent banishment. As well, we will read about Abraham’s passing Sarah off as his sister in Egypt, and about Abraham’s participation in a war between two groups of kings. If this parasha is about a particular covenantal community, what is the text saying about other communities with whom we interact?

Scrollers Preview - Parashat Noah

Scrollers Preview

Parashat Noah

Rabbi Rachel Goldenberg

In the Women’s Torah Commentary, feminist scholar Tikvah Frymer-Kensky writes that the biblical flood is not primarily a punishment but “a means of getting rid of the thoroughly polluted world and starting again with a well-washed one.” Throughout our parasha, we find the Hebrew root “macha,” which means “to erase.” God wants to start over again with a clean slate.

But the thing is, God doesn’t really start over with a clean slate. Yes, the polluted world is “thoroughly washed,” and all that has life-breath on the earth is killed off. But God preserves the source of the pollution by piling Noah and his family and representatives of all creatures  into the Ark. God admits that the “the devisings of the human mind are evil from his youth,” yet God doesn’t completely rid the earth of us. God could have decided to completely erase and truly start over, but God doesn’t do this.

Instead, God preserves humanity in the same form that God originally created us. The new element that God introduces is a new covenant – a pact with humanity that God will never again destroy the world with a flood, and that humans will be held accountable for their propensity for violence and their spilling of innocent blood. Does being created in God’s image mean that humans will necessarily have that propensity for violence? Has God become more self-aware about God’s propensity for violence?

I look forward to swimming in the deep waters of this text with you tomorrow!

Shabbat Shalom

Scrollers Preview - V'zot Ha-B'rachah

Shabbat Shalom everyone! Just a head’s up that if the weather is dry tomorrow morning, we will hold our Scrollers session in our beautiful Sukkah, in honor of the holiday. Also, I will begin our session with a quick conversation about this group hosting an Oneg Shabbat. The Membership committee is inviting various synagogue groups to take responsibility for hosting one Friday night Oneg during the year.

On the Shabbat during the intermediate days of Sukkot, we traditionally are supposed to read a passage from Exodus. Over the years I alternated between studying that passage and the final Parasha of the Torah, V’zot Ha-Brachah. This year I thought we would do V’Zot Ha-brachah. This final passage of the Torah does not have a Shabbat assigned to it. On Simchat Torah, we traditionally read it and then go back to Breishit, the beginning of the Torah. However, we don’t always have a chance to study it. We will also take a look at the Haftarah for Simchat Torah, which is the first part of the Book of Joshua.

With these readings, we complete the story and the life of Moses, with his final blessing of the tribes, his death and his burial.  And then, with the haftarah, we gain a sense of continuity, as the Israelites accepts Joshua as their new leader, and they prepare to finally cross the Jordan river into the Land of Israel.

After last week’s poem of Moses, which is full of warnings of the People’s future straying and punishment, we get some more poetry here. But this time, the poetry is full of hope and blessing for success and fertility and security in the land. We also have a chance to mourn Moses’ death, and to read about his burial.

As we read, I want us to think about our relationship to Moses, personally and communally. How would we want to remember him after his burial. How do we see him? At the end of his life, he blesses the tribes as a patriarch from Genesis would bless his own children. Do we see Moses as a parental figure? Or, is he something wholly other than that – a singular prophet – the only one who ever knew God face to face?

Scroller Preview - Parashat Ha'azinu

Scrollers Preview
Parashat Ha’azinu
Rabbi Rachel Goldenberg

The Messenger Came in the Night
Rachel (translated by Robert Friend)

The messenger came in the night
and sat on my bed,
his body all protruding bones,
the eye-holes deep in his head;

and I knew time’s hands were dangling
(as though the words were unspoken),
that the bridge between future and past
had broken.

A bony fist now threatened,
and I heard aghast
sardonic laughter that said:
“This poem will be your last.”

This parasha represents the beginning of the end of Moses’ poetry. One more Torah portion after this, and we hear his voice no more.

Thanks to Suzanne Levine, I recently read an article from a poetry journal that spoke of the poem as witness. From what I could understand of this very scholarly article, the poem is as close as you can get to putting the present into words before the present slips away into the past. Poetry has the power to bear witness to and to evoke the immediacy of experience and of feelings.

In her poem above, the early Zionist poet Rahel alludes to her poetic voice, her very life, as the bridge between future and past. And she anticipates how with her death that bridge will be broken. Perhaps she fails, however, to recognize that her poetry will continue to bridge those places for her devoted readers. When we read her poem, we are transported to the present of that composition. We become the bridge.

Moses opens his poem, Ha’azinu, with the words,

“Give ear, O heavens, let me speak;
Let the earth hear the words I utter!”

Even now that Moses is gone, his poem bears witness, and calls all of Creation to witness, the message of the last moments of his life. In the final moments of his life, Moses reminds the people of how God been there for them, steady as a rock, and how God has sheltered them like a mother bird. He prophesies that the Israelites will stray and will reject God, that they will forget. God will threaten to hide God’s face from them, but God will ultimately save them again.

As we study this poem together I want to ask - what is Moses actually feeling and experiencing in this moment of his life? How does he see his life and his death? What does he want to bear witness to, with this poem, which will be his last?