D'var Torah in a Minute

In this week's parashah, we get our first introduction to the patriarch of the Jewish nation, Abram (who will eventually be known as Abraham). God comm ands him to "Go away from your land, from your birthplace, and from your father's house, to the land that I will show you". But unlike Noah, who God chose because of his righteousness, there's no indication of how Abram came to deserve God's favor. There are a couple of well-known midrashim about Abram's childhood (the Torah's narrative first meets him when he is 75). The first envisions a young Abram searching for divinity in the polytheistic society of his homeland of Haran. Rather than worshipping all the various gods of his peers, Abram resolves to find the supreme deity and direct his worship there. Abram sees the sun, and he determines that it must be the greatest of the gods. Then, night falls and the sun appears to be defeated by the moon. So Abram decides to worship the moon. But at dawn, the s...

Noah was a righteous man, faultless in his generation. Noah walked with God. (Genesis 6:9) These are the first descriptors we get of Noah, in the parashah which bears his name. But what does it mean to be "blameless in his generation"? According to some commentators, Noah was not especially righteous, but, in comparison to his peers, who were so wicked as to merit being wiped off the earth, even an average degree of righteousness was remarkable. Others read the verse as meaning that Noah was righteous, not just relative to the generation of the Flood, but in absolute terms. Had he lived in a later generation, alongside Abraham or Moses, he would have been counted among the most righteous too. But is being righteous relative to one's peers enough? Certainly it is enough to be the least righteous of a remarkably righteous generation (like the joke goes, "what do you call the person who graduates last in their medical school class? A doctor."), but does the reverse...

This Shabbat, we will begin the annual cycle of Torah reading once more with Parashat Bereshit. While the big, flashy part of the narrative happens right at the start, with the creation of the world happening in the first chapter, there are four whole chapters and the start of an additional one that make up this parashah. There's the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, and a whole lot of genealogy. When I was little, I took karate classes, and, while I know now that the whole organization to which I belonged was relatively disreputable in the wider martial arts world, one thing that I do remember was reciting the school motto (more like an ethos than a motto) every class. One of the lines of the motto declared that "We use self-control and take responsibility for our actions", something that perhaps could benefit some of this parashah's dramatis personae . After creating the world and its inhabitants, God makes a garden in Eden, and there he places Adam, providing him with...