D'var Torah in a Minute

There is a story told of a man who invited a great rabbi, visiting the man's town, to come share the Friday night meal and welcome the Shabbat with his family. The host wanted to impress his esteemed guest with how perfect every aspect of the meal was, buying the best chicken for soup, making sure the house was clean, there were nice flowers on the table, etc. The rabbi and his host returned from the synagogue on Friday evening, and everyone sat around the table, they sang "Shalom Aleichem," "Eshet Hayyil," blessed the children, and the man picked up the wine glass to say Kiddush. Looking at the table, he realized that his wife had forgotten to put the cover over the challah. Furious, the man scolded his wife, reminding her of the importance of covering the challah, out of respect for its feelings - bread is typically blessed first, but on Erev Shabbat, we bless the wine first, covering the bread so as not to dishonor it. The rabbi interrupted his host to ask, ...

This week, we read Parshat Toldot: the chronicles of Isaac. The narrative is structured quite symmetrically, beginning with the birth of Jacob and Esau, then there is the story of Esau selling his birthright as the firstborn (even if only by a minute or so) for a bowl of soup; next, there is an episode where Isaac goes to live in Philistine country. The second half of the parashah has Isaac in his late days and the episode of Jacob, with the help of his mother Rebecca, stealing the blessing intended for Esau. Then the parashah ends with Jacob leaving to go live with his uncle Lavan in Padan-Aram. Although we are meant to look favorably upon Jacob in this whole business (though this does not mean that he is perfect - see our discussion of Lot a couple weeks ago), he does behave in a less than above-board manner in this parashah. Esau is, in popular perception, understood to have been a crude, cruel individual, and Jacob is portrayed in the opposite manner; however, the text describes th...

This week marks the 18th anniversary of my bar mitzvah. If you're doing the math, that makes me 31, which, when flipped, is 13 (this mathematical quirk has nothing to do with anything, but I felt like including it anyway). Years ago, when I was preparing my d'var Torah for my bar mitzvah, I didn't really know what I was doing, and I was also sufficiently lazy that I didn't really want to explore the parashah much beyond the last aliyah, which I read during the service. To that end, I skipped over the huge amount of content that there is to talk about - adding life to our years, the value of caring for others, the progressive nature of Rebecca's consent being sought before agreeing to marry her off, etc. - and went to a sort of half-baked discussion of Isaac and Ishamael coming together to bury their father and a nice bromide about their descendants making peace. And something about one spinach. Incidentally, this year, I find a similar topic appropriate. At the end ...

Vayera is a special parashah for me, as it would have been, had my family not been beaten to the date reservation by someone else, the parashah on which I celebrated becoming a bar mitzvah. The year I turned 13, my birthday on the Hebrew calendar fell on Shabbat Vayera, as it did the year I was born, and as it does this year. None of this is at all relevant to the parashah, but it's a nice story. There is a lot that goes on in this week's portion - Abraham is visited by angels, Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed, Isaac is born and nearly sacrificed (two events that some traditions place 37 years apart), Hagar and Ishmael are sent away. It's a busy parashah. As part of the narrative surrounding the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, there are a few famous scenes. There is Abraham's negotiation with God, ultimately getting God to agree that, should ten righteous people be found in the cities, He will not go through with the planned destruction (spoiler alert: there are not ...

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...