We're independent, just like you.
We’ve started a fun, new Twitter account @JewishLaw. Every day (hopefully!) we will post a line of text or an insights from the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, an abbreviated compilation by Rabbi Solomon Ganzfried (translated by Hyman Goldin). Please follow us and get involved in the dialogue about Jewish law, spirituality and text!
Do you want to support @JewishLaw? Please give a donation of $5.99 to support one month of our tweeting!
All you do is follow the instructions at the top of the document. If you are “instructions impaired”, the idea is to pick a line from the Torah (or an entire parshah/section) and write a very short, no more than four sentences, commentary on that section along with your name below the text you are commenting on. After you are done writing that, put a short bio at the end of the document (make sure to scroll ALL the way down) so we can show you off! When you exit Google Docs, the document will save itself — no worries.
The deadline to submit is Monday, November 14th at 2PM EST. No exceptions.
Every person in the Hebrew Bible is fundamentally screwed up. Abraham had sex with his wife’s slave, then banished her and his son Ishmael…then, he tried to sacrifice his other son Issac. Jacob and his mother Rebecca lie to Issac and steal Esau’s birthright. Moses was a stuttering menial laborer who killed a man in Egypt. Noah was a drunk…and so was Lot. Lot also had incestuous sex with his daughters, which makes Noah look like an angel.
I’m shocked when I hear people talk about the “trash on TV”. Jerry Springer and Maury aren’t showing us anything that is any more perverse than our holy text. Except for maybe this video (Not Safe For Work)…
The Biblical narrative, read literally and without much examination, is not a very good moral guide. No one can take a person from our spiritual history and say, “wow, if only my children could be more like that guy!” Unless of course you want your kid to be the kind of person who burns his enemies bodies like Joshua or uses sex to trick someone into marrying her like Tamar or Ruth.
Everything we read in the Torah is subjective: the Torah can be used to support or oppose slavery, to promote interfaith alliance or religious warfare, to subject women and children to torture or to uplift those who are downtrodden.
But the one thing the Torah teaches that no one can deny: anyone can be holy.
While I can criticize the characters of the Hebrew Bible for their terrible behavior, I have to remember that God chose these people. God not only chose them, but God made them! God also made the guests of Jerry and Maury. Their problems are no worse than the problems we read about in the weekly Torah portion.
So if I can see the attempted felon Abraham, the liar Issac and the slave holding Jacob as holy, then I have to see Pancake, the Maury Povich guest, as holy too.
Sometimes reading the Torah is like reading a book written by a blood thirsty thirteen year old with attention deficit disorder. This week’s portion jumps, not so elegantly, from women taking vows, to killing the Midianites and stealing their stuff, then all of a sudden we’re diving up a bunch of land. The end, next chapter please.
And you wonder why more people don’t take the Torah seriously? It’s like cut-and-paste poetry. Once the story gets really good, G-d interrupts everything with a census or some obscure set of rules that makes no sense. Or it starts off really boring, and you give up half way, only to find out the really good stuff is toward the end.
The Torah doesn’t have a good beginning, middle and end. And it’s really not meant to, either. I think there’s three basic reasons for that.
First, the Torah is a reflection of life. And life doesn’t have a real beginning, middle and end. Sure, individual lives start and finish, but the legacy of humanity lasts forever (or at least until SkyNet and the Terminators finish us off). At any rate, Torah reflects life, and life is filled with low points, high points, boring, pointless interruptions, scandals, intrigue, and everything else…and sometimes the order of those things doesn’t make any sense.
Second, the Torah is a reflection of Creation. There’s a midrash that says that G-d looked into the Torah before creating the world. I like that. The Torah is flawed at times, and frankly, so is the world. Now, I’m not calling HaShem a crummy writer or a bad creator, but the world isn’t perfect, and if you read the Torah enough, you’ll find out that the Torah isn’t perfect all the time either.
Finally, the Torah is the reflection of the human soul…sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse. This week, we’re dealing with the souls of women and warriors, liars and hinderers, revenge-seekers and oppressors. Next week, the soul may change, and go in a new direction. But the Torah does us a huge favor and lets us see all sides of the soul. Hopefully, the soul doesn’t end either.
So what’s the bottom line? Don’t let the strange ups-and-downs of the Torah, the weird jumping back and forth from women-and-their-dads-to-blood-and-guts keep you from learning. Life, Creation, and the human spirit has its ups-and-downs, and its weird moments, too.
It’s cool to imagine the Torah as water. But as a modern reader, I have a really hard time making this poem relevant to my life.
Those who thirst may go to water, but they aren’t going to the tiny drops of streams and rivers. They’re going to the faucet. And if they don’t have a faucet, they are going to a murky puddle poisoned by a chemical waste dump. And of course, this all assumes they can afford it. The writer makes the not-so-timeless assumption that water is free to all. And although water is not kept in silver or gold, it is kept in plastic bottles, a process which is not simple at all.
So what are we supposed to do with this text? I’d love to know your thoughts.
Photo credit to NYTimes.com
by Michael Sabani
Should you ignore something just because you don’t believe it? Can you still learn from it?
It was during a recent discussion with some friends about the Torah that I realized something that opened the Torah up for me almost completely.
We were discussing the different interpretations that one can have about things that happen in the Torah. I don’t want to get into specifics, but there was a questions as to what happened in a particular part of the story. Most everyone believed that one “counterculture” interpretation was true. In fact, they felt so strongly that it seemed they were almost offended to hear that a traditional or Midrashic interpretation could even be entertained. I was honestly kind of shocked. Not that they would entertain a view that doesn’t necessarily portray the patriarchs or matriarchs as saints because, let’s be honest, they weren’t! The issue I had was that they almost wouldn’t even listen, and when I did share, I felt like I was viewed almost as an anachronistic, ignorant, orthodox party pooper! And I most certainly am not!
What I learned is this:
We are a tradition full of ideas. You know that old saying, “three Jews, five opinions”. The thing is, when we hold on to one interpretation over another, when we almost outright refuse to listen to something from our own tradition that differs with what we want to believe, we are only cheating ourselves. In order to be informed, in order to be fully aware of what the Torah is trying to tell us, there has to be a balance. Just because you don’t like an idea, DOES NOT mean that you should run from it! Instead, embrace it! Look it right in the face and figure out exactly what you don’t like/believe about it. If, after you’ve listened you still don’t agree, GREAT! At least you learned something. And as people of the book we are called to always learn.
There is a saying from the sages that the Torah has 600,000 letters, and each represents one Jewish neshama, one Jewish soul. This means that there are as many ways to read the Torah as there are Jews who read it!
The sages also say that every letter of the Torah, down to the smallest yod ( ‘ ) is there to teach us a lesson. It would seem to me that in order to get the most out of the Torah, especially today, we should pay attention to even the smallest letters, especially when we disagree with it. Only through that friction can we release the Light, and only through that struggle can we brighten the world.
