Scrollers Preview - Parashat Yitro 2015

This week’s parasha begins with the story of Moses’ father-in-law Yitro’s visit to the Israelite Sinai encampment. Yitro sees Moses standing all day long giving rulings in the interpersonal affairs of the Israelites, and he gives Moses the sage advice to delegate! Afterwards, we have the set-up for and then the giving of the Ten Commandments.

This year I’d like to focus on the Ten Commandments or better said in Hebrew, “aseret ha-dibrot,” the ten utterances. Among these statements are some revolutionary concepts as well as laws that are common to most societies. The more common laws include the prohibitions against murder, adultery and theft. Among the revolutionary concepts, we have the prohibition of making graven images of God, and we have the idea of a 24-hour period of cessation from work every week, on Shabbat.

What makes these utterances unique as well is that they are not given in the form of case law – if you do this, you will be punished. Theft and adultery and violating Shabbat are not merely seen as illegal and disruptive to society. But to break these commandments would mean that one is violating universal principles, determined by God. The statements are absolute.

Rather than proposing some questions for us to wrestle with up front, I look forward to slowly working our way through these ten statements, hearing your questions, and drawing on the Etz Hayyim commentary as we try to address them.

Scrollers Preview - Parashat Bshallach

In this week’s parasha the word “yad,” Hebrew for “hand,” “arm,” or “power,” is a key term. In chapter 14 alone, the word appears at seven times, and it occurs frequently in other sections of the parasha as well.  Moses stretches his arm (yad) with the staff in it out over the sea, and God causes the wind to blow and split the water so that the Israelites may cross over on dry land. God’s power (yad)is seen by the Israelites as it is wielded against the Egyptians. The Song of the Sea concludes with a vision of God’s hands (yadecha – “Your hands,”) building the Temple on the mountain in the Land of Canaan. And as the Israelites complain for lack of food and water, they express the wish that they could have died at the hand (yad) of God back in Egypt rather than starve to death in the wilderness.

In this climactic parasha of our people’s liberation from slavery and the miraculous crossing of the sea, we are invited to notice the hand of God in our story. God reaches in to split the sea, to defeat the Egyptians, and to shower down manna. The parasha even ends with a war with Amalek in which Moses must raise his arms (yadav, “his arms,”) in order for the Israelites to prevail.

We might conclude from this ever-present “hand” of God, that God is with the people in a new and more immediate way than before. In contrast to the 400 years of  distance and darkness and slavery, we now have God in our midst, further embodied by the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. Yet, even though this hand is reaching in to our story, the Israelites are still unsure. Yes, they celebrate on the other shore of the Sea. But the crossing is bookended by complaints and fear -  Where is the water and the food going to come from? The Egyptians are pursuing us – did you bring us to the desert to die?

Can we identify with this experience? Is the Divine presence in  our lives? Can we detect that “yad”? And even when we do for a moment, is our awareness dominated by worry, fear, a sense of distance? What do we need to do in order to see that hand – that pillar? And how do we keep it in our consciousness, even when we are hungry?

Scrollers Preview - Vayechi

When a matriarch or patriarch in a family dies, there are often a big questions looming over the surviving family members – how will this family continue? Will the siblings and the cousins continue to live in relationship with one another? Who will gather the family for holiday meals, now that Mom is no longer alive? We end the book of Genesis with a similar sense of anxiety. What will the future of this family look like?

Jacob offers his answers when he gathers the brothers together for his death bed “blessing,” announcing that he will tell them, “what is to befall you in the days to come.” While many of his blessings really sound like curses, and several of them focus on past missteps of brothers like Reuben and Simeon, Jacob does eventually turn toward the future. Judah and Joseph seem to fare the best, as Jacob blesses them with royalty and fertility.

These blessings bring some hope, but they are referring to a future that is hard to see. The blessings refer to tribes living in their own land, yet the brothers and their families are now settled in Egypt with no clear sense of when or how they will make their way back to their homeland.

Whereas in last week’s parasha, there was a sense of safety and security in the family’s being able to settle in Egypt during the famine, in this week’s parasha, Egypt starts to feel like a trap. After Jacob’s death, Joseph has to get permission to bury his father in Canaan, and an enormous entourage of Egyptian officials accompanies him. The kids and flocks stay back in Egypt. Pharaoh makes it clear where he wants Joseph and his family to be.

As Joseph is dying, a sinister shadow starts to move over the story. Joseph tells his brothers that “God will surely take notice of you and bring you up from this land.” (50:24) And he makes them swear to bring his bones up with them. Does this mean that God has stopped noticing them for now?

By the end of the book, it is clear that we are not leaving Egypt any time soon. We are left with an image of waiting, as Joseph’s body is “embalmed and placed in a coffin in Egypt.” (50:26)  We will find out next week that it is quiet a long wait before those bones are finally carried up out of Egypt.

Scrollers Preview - Parashat Bo 2015

This week, the drama of the plagues continues, with the plagues of locusts and darkness, culminating with the plague of the killing of the first born of the Egyptians. All three of these plagues contain the element of darkness – the locusts are so thick that the land is darkened; the plague of darkness itself is so thick you can touch it; and the killing of the first born takes place in the dark, at midnight.

By the time the locusts come along, Pharaoh’s courtiers are already convinced it is time to give in to Moses’ demands. “Are you not yet aware that Egypt is lost?” they ask. And even in the midst of all of the plagues, “Moses himself was much esteemed in the land of Egypt,” and the Egyptians are disposed favorably towards the Israelites, giving them gifts of silver and gold as they depart.

But  no matter how dark and desperate it gets, Pharaoh’s heart remains impenetrable. His ego, his belief that he is right, his fear all build a thickness around his heart. For him, the darkness lies inside of him – he is unwilling to see what is really happening. He is unable to take in the reality of the fact that there is a force much more powerful than himself  at play here.

Pharaoh wakes up to the cries of death throughout his land. And at least for a moment, he is afraid enough to let the Israelites go. But we know that his heart still hasn’t softened. And it won’t, leading to the scene next week, when the Israelites, having crossed over on dry land, will see “Egypt” dead on the shores of the Sea.

As we study the parasha this week, I invite us to ask ourselves about that Pharaoh that dwells inside each of us. How does that hardness of heart manifest in our own lives? How do we get in our own way? And how do we learn from the Pharaoh in this parasha? What can we do to soften our own hearts and open to the reality of our own lives and this world, its challenges, its beauty, our own power and powerlessness?

Scrollers Preview - Parashat Vaera

In his introduction to his translation of the Book of Exodus, Robert Alter describes the shift from Genesis to Exodus as the transition from a zoom lens to a wide-angle lens on a camera:

Instead of the sharply etched individuals who constituted a family in all its explosive dynamics in Genesis, we now have teeming multitudes of Israelites. . . . In keeping with this new wide-angle lens through which the characters and the events are seen, the narrative moves from the domestic, moral, and psychological realism of the Patriarchal Tales to a more stylized, sometimes deliberately schematic, mode of storytelling. . . .

According to Alter, as the camera widens its view, the main players, God and Moses, become more distant. Whereas in Genesis, God walked around and talked to the patriarchs, here God becomes unseeable, with fiery barriers to access. Whereas we knew Jacob and Joseph’s inner lives quite intimately, we only see certain facets of Moses – his qualities as a leader.

The parasha this week opens with God telling Moses that the patriarchs had not known God by the name YHVH; they knew only the name “El Shaddai.” As we often see in Torah, this is not really so. The name YHVH has appeared before, and the patriarchs did know it. But we are still left with the question here of how God relates to the humans in this book – the book of Exodus. We are left with the question of whether and why God becomes more distant in this book.

What is the difference between “El Shaddai,” a name that connotes fertility, and this name “YHVH,” which the rabbis have interpreted as representing God’s merciful qualities? God also only uses the word “Elohim,” connoting God’s quality of judgment, with Moses once in our parasha, and from this point forward only speaks to Moses as “YHVH.”

A Chasidic commentary that we will study together brings us an answer to these questions in a way that helps us to reflect on our lives. (You’ll have to come to Scrollers to see what I mean.)

We may still have time after this discussion of God’s names to read the rest of the parasha, which tells the story of the first five plagues and Pharaoh’s hardened heart.

Scrollers Preview - Parashat Vayiggash 2014

Although the Joseph story seems to be about Joseph and his brothers, this week, it is revealed to us that the story is really about Jacob, the father. The father’s favoritism, his passivity, his struggles, have shaped the drama of the brothers’ relationships from the beginning, and this only continues in Vayiggash.

Jacob is always there. Throughout Joseph’s testing of his brothers, Joseph asks after the wellbeing of their father. This week, in the same breath in which Joseph reveals his identity to his brothers, he asks, “Is my father still alive?” As Judah powerfully steps forward and pleads on behalf of Benjamin, his primary concern is always Jacob’s welfare  - that Jacob would not survive the loss of Benjamin, because “his father loves him.” As Robert Alter comments, it is “remarkable that Judah accepts the painful fact of paternal favoritism.” Judah even refers to Rachel as if she is Jacob’s only wife.

It all seems to be about Jacob. When Jacob lays eyes on Joseph again for the first time in 22 years, Joseph weeps and weeps. And Jacob? He doesn’t shed a tear. Rather, he comments that now he can die peacefully. And when he comes down to Egypt, he bemoans his short, difficult life to Pharaoh.

Has Jacob become a narcissist? What has happened to the awe-filled Jacob after the dream of the staircase – the humble God-wrestler the night before he encountered Esau? What is his relationship with God now? Does it mean anything to Jacob that as he descended to Egypt, God came to him in a night vision and assured him that “I Myself will go down with you to Egypt, and I Myself will also bring you back”? When he wakes up from this final God-encounter, Jacob doesn’t seem transformed – he just gets back in the wagon and continues on his way…

Scrollers Preview - Parashat Miketz 2014

Shabbat Shalom and Happy Chanukah!

Two years have elapsed since last week’s parasha, and during this time, as the cupbearer forgot what Joseph had done for him, and Joseph languished in jail. Pharaoh’s difficulty in interpreting his dreams of  skinny cows devouring fat cows and thin ears of corn swallowing fat ears of corn remind the cupbearer of Joseph’s ability to tell a dream’s meaning. Joseph is washed, shaved, and brought up from prison. His interpretation and then advice to Pharaoh regarding to how to plan for and manage 7 years of famine raise him up to second in command over all of Egypt. Meanwhile, the famine reaches Canaan, and Joseph’s brothers must come down to Egypt for provisions. Thus begins a series of dramatic encounters between Joseph and his brothers, with Joseph hiding his identity from them and testing them to see if they have changed since they sold him down to Egypt.

It has been 20 years since his brothers sold Joseph as a slave, the same number of years that Jacob and Esau were estranged from each other in the previous generation. Here again we have an opportunity for reconciliation between brothers who almost killed each other. In the earlier story, Jacob wrestles with a man, is injured, and approaches his brother Esau the next morning by bowing seven times, assuming  a posture of humility. In this story, Joseph hides his identity and assumes a position of great power and authority over his brothers, putting them through an ordeal in which they believe they are going to lose their brother Benjamin to slavery.

The drama unfolds slowly and deliberately as Joseph manipulates his brothers, eventually bringing Judah (in next week’s parasha ) to prove himself as having done teshuvah. Judah recognizes how it would kill their father to come back to Canaan without Benjamin.

As we compare these two stories of fraternal reconciliation, what differences and similarities do we see? Is there a “wrestling” in this week’s parasha? Does it make Judah’s turnaround more or less authentic given that he doesn’t actually know he is speaking with Joseph? What is the role of Joseph’s hidden identity in bringing about this shift in Judah’s behavior? Do we think Judah would have been able to express his guilt and remorse directly to Joseph? Have the other brothers changed at all, or only Judah?