Chayei Sarah

This week, the subtheme seems to be the way we speak with forked tongue! Sometimes to good effect and sometimes not. Avraham wants to buy a cave to bury Sarah. He approaches Efron the Hitite, who says that he will give it for nothing. "Besides," he says, "what is a field worth four hundred shekels between friends?" So Avraham weighs out the money and pays him. Efron was not being honest when he said he would give it for free, otherwise he would not have mentioned the exact valuation of the property. Here is a negative example of doublespeak.

Then Eliezer is sent to find a wife for Yitzchak. Avraham tells him specifically to go back to his homeland and birthplace to look for a wife, but he says nothing about going back to the family. After he has found Rivkah, he says to her family that "my master made me swear that I would not take a wife from the local tribes amongst whom I live, but to go back to my father’s house and to my family to take a wife for my son."

Did Eliezer accurately report what Avraham had said? On the face of it he did not. He clearly made out that Avraham had mentioned his family to make it seem all the more appropriate and amazing that the kind qualities he was looking for could be found in Avraham’s family. Yet Eliezer went to the well where anyone might have been, not just family. So he was slightly distorting the truth in order to persuade her family that Rivkah was the Divinely ordained wife for Isaac.

On the other hand, maybe Eliezer was reading deeper into Avraham’s intentions than the text lets on. Perhaps the art is to read between the lines and to try to understand what is being said to you on more than a superficial level. The Torah provides guidance. It is not just a book of laws and customs, but also one that helps us understand human nature better.

Vayeira

God appears to Avraham as he sits at the opening to his tent. He looks up and he sees three men. He runs to meet them and says, "My Lord, please do not go away from your servant. Let me get some water and wash your feet and rest under the tree."

The simple meaning of this is that God appears to Avraham in the shape of three men who he sees and invites in. When he says, "My Lord, please do not go away," he is addressing the leader. And later it transpires they are messengers from another world. From this we might learn that angels are really humans acting in such a way as to actualize some Divine plan. We can all be agents of God in some way or another. Avraham clearly saw them as humans, because he offers them creature comforts.

But the Midrash puts a very different spin on this narrative. The Midrash sees the following sequence. God appears to Avraham and they are communicating spiritually, when Avraham looks up and sees three men. He turns to God and says, "My Lord, please do not go away." And then he turns to the three men and says, "Let me get some water," etc.

The idea here is that, however important God is, there are certain types of human crises or obligations that are so important that one can actually tell God to wait. Important as God is, as spirituality is, in the end it must enhance our relationship with other humans. This world we are in is predominantly a human one. This must determine our priorities. Of course, if we do not have a spiritual base to our lives to begin with, we might be inclined to a more selfish outlook. But in the end, being a good person is what God really wants of us.

Lech Lecha

This week we read about Avram, emerging as the first monotheist, the founder of our tradition. He is the first character in the Torah whose relationship with God seems to make him a better, more caring person. It is this that distinguishes him from, say, Noach.

There is a well-known tradition, not in the Torah itself, that Avram’s father, Terach, was an idol maker, and that one day Avram smashed the idols and put the hammer into the hand of the largest idol. When Terach returned, Avram said that the idol with the hammer must have done it, and Terach realized how ineffectual his job was!

Maimonides says that they were not that stupid. After all, both in Ur and Egypt massive engineering projects and sophisticated calculations were common, even before this period. The error was in the symbolism, not the reality. Even making a symbol for God can be misleading, just as endowing humans with supernatural power, the Superman Syndrome, can be dangerously illusory. So was Terach a goodie or a baddie?

If you look at the text, it seems that he, rather than Avram, started the migration out of Ur and moved up the great rivers towards Charan, which was where he dies. This is all mentioned before God appears to Avram and tells him to go to the new land he will show him. Indeed, at the end of the previous chapter it actually says that Terach left in order to go towards Canaan, and that he took his son and nephew Lot with him.

Yes, you can say that the Torah does not go in chronological order. But you can also say that although Terach might not have been as great as Avram, he did have some merit. He did start the process. And Avram does want to back to his roots for a wife for Isaac. Maybe Terach was not so bad after all and even inadequate fathers can still have a positive impact on their kids.

Noach

Noach's Flood. God decides He has made a mistake and mankind needs to be recast in a different mold. Isn't it strange that things went so completely wrong so quickly with humanity? Didn't God know in advance?

The fact is that right from the start, when Adam was told not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, humans disobeyed God. Of course we were given the freedom to do so, yet this does not mean that we have to make the wrong decision every time. What happened in the Garden of Eden was not usually taken by Jewish commentators to indicate "original sin", that humanity is essentially bad. Yet we do seem to keep on getting things wrong. The narrative of the Torah is trying to teach us how to do a better job.

But it is also teaching us some other principles. One is that God is patient. That He tried to see if we could manage without a detailed constitution, but slowly it became clear we humans need something more than a few simple "dos and "don'ts". Ultimately this will lead to the need for a full program for human behavior, as reflected in the Sinai revelation.

What has always intrigued me is that, for all the mistakes, God really only reacts against violence. He intervened directly with Kayin and established the principle that violence is unacceptable. Even if Kayin might have thought it nothing terrible to hit his brother, and even if he might not have realized what he had done (as he said in excusing himself later on), he and his descendants knew full well that violence was the ultimate sin. So when God decides to destroy the world, it is not because of idol worship. It is not because people aren't eating kosher or keeping Shabbat. It is because of violence (Bereishit 6:13). Or perhaps in our modern mind we might think of the end of the Neanderthals and the beginning of another human race.

But then if God saves mankind through Noach, and he was a good man, why is he not the founder of the Jewish tradition? The fact is that, good as Noach was, he seems to have had little impact on anyone else. He did not persuade one person outside of his family to join him on his "cruise". Now you might argue that God hadn't asked Noach to try to influence anyone else. But Avraham didn’t need God to tell him to argue for the lives of the men of Sodom. Clearly Noach, before and after the flood, is wrapped up in himself.

This is the issue. To help deal with aggression and violence, we must go out to try to stop, to try to educate, to try to do something before it is too late. That is one of the morals of the Noach story!

But the impact of the flood and the ark does not end there. Noach built his ark with the dimensions given in seemingly precise detail. It had three levels, and was three hundred amas long (an ama is about a foot and a half, but there are plenty of arguments about the precise measurement in our terms), fifty amas wide, and thirty amas high. Proportionally speaking, the long flat boat actually is replicated in the dimensions of the Tabernacle that would be built in the desert. So the narrative intentionally links one era to another, later one, the general human condition to the later, specifically Jewish one.

The flood is described in precise time spans. Seven days warning to get inside; Noach was six hundred years old when the flood began; the rain started in the second month on the seventeenth day; the rain lasted for forty days and forty nights; the water remained at its height for one hundred and fifty days. The ark rested on Ararat in the seventh month on the seventeenth day again. The water sloshed around until, on the first day of the tenth month, the mountaintops appeared. Then another forty days and Noach opens the ark window.

Out goes the raven and does not return. Out goes the dove and comes back. Then another seven days and the dove goes out and comes back with an olive branch. Another seven days and out goes the dove and does not come back. So in the hundred and first year of Noach’s life, on the first day of the first month, Noach takes off the covers of the ark. And in the twenty-seventh day of the second month, the earth is dry. The flood is over. One year and ten days.

It seems no coincidence that the forty days and nights echoes Moshe up on the mountain receiving the Torah and then the forty years of wandering to correct the mentality of those who were not ready to accept it. One important thread of opinion amongst the Biblical commentaries sees the Tabernacle as a direct response to the Golden Calf. Like Noach's boat, it too represents the benevolent presence of God.

So here too our scientific and religious minds get to work. Are these numbers meant to be literal, and as scientific as we like to think? Or do they contain other messages? Do we have to assume that when Noach thinks of the "whole world" it was in the same way as we think of the world today? Or should we be looking for the real, the hidden messages that numbers give us, the association of numbers with spirituality, not just science?