Vayera: in the nick of time

Vayera: in the nick of time

The Akeida, the binding of Isaac, is the climactic story of this parsha. 

Gd tells Abraham to take his favorite, beloved, son, Isaac and offer him as a holocaust offering in the place that will be revealed.  Abraham does not protest ( as he did on behalf of Ishmael), he does not negotiate ( as he did for the people of Sodom and environs),  he does not offer his aged self instead of his young son ( as so many did later);;;; he just  does what the (ultimate) authority commands, he follows the orders. 

After all, who could have expected this miracle son, born when Abraham was 100 years old and his mother  Sarah was 90?  He was not supposed to happen.  Abraham and Sarah openly doubted  that such a miracle could happen.  Perhaps Isaac's life was a  temporary event to prove the power of Gd; and now there would be retribution for the doubts of his parents.  All statements would be made true.  Isaac would be born, but his life would be negated.

The story has a happy ending.  The heavenly voice saves Isaac! And to make everything  all right, a ram has trapped itself by the horns, making it available as a substitute offering. The drama of the rescue in the nick of time. 

Does this scenario become the expectation of the devout? 

I heard a joke from Marty Jaffe:  There is a war in Isarael.  Soldiers are coming and going around the Western Wall  A chasid is crying: "Soldiers don't rely on miracles...recite Tehlim!

But every rescue is in the nick of time.  The damsel is always saved by Superman just before the onrushing locomotive reaches her body tied to the railroad tracks. 

And I see that in my Oncology practice.  The new miracle drug becomes available just in time to rescue the patient from his horrible metastatic cancer.  The recovery from induction chemotherapy comes just as the platelet transfusions stop working.

And often, the rescue does not occur.  Did I fail in effort  or faith? 

Sometimes, it is the dream of the last minute rescue that makes the act of courage possible

Lech Leach: Aliya

Monday Morning, at 5 0'clock, as a day began....my daughter Shoshana went to Israel.  Her visa was for aliya, an emigration of ascent. 

Like Avram in the parsha, she left the land of her birth and went to her future, the place that  will be revealed to her. This is a common transition for a recent graduate, aliya to Israel gives it a special flavor.  This is the land that was shown to Avram.  A land with conflict and troubles, but they both went...Avram and his distant descendant, Shoshana. 

The overriding theme of lech lecha  is courage. 

 Avram leaves his comfort zone,

 almost starves in the new land, 

seeks refuge in an Egypt 

    that kills husbands to acquire their wives 

          who are then traded up to the rulers, 

defeats the dominant military power of his era 

   to save a nephew

      ( who has some questionable values),

 and invents a urological procedure that he performs on himself

    and promises to continue, as a covenant, on male babies born to his household. 

Why does Gd ask for courage?  Perhaps, relative to Gd, that is all people have to offer.

Noah: Violence

Noah: Violence

An important theme in Noach is the generation of nations. We know that Noach and his family  will be the sole  survivors of the deluge. All of humanity is descended from the righteous Noach. It is by virtue of his righteousness that our species ( and many other species)  was saved. 

After the flood, the curse of Ham separates him, and his descendants,  from Shem and Japheth.  The story  implies that Ham's problem  included child rearing because we are told of the involvelemt of his son Canaan. 

The story of the Tower of Babel is foundational in the generation of  nations. Language is  one of the  most important ways in which peoples are divided. A lack of understanding is very helpful in making people not get along.

The parsha ends with the birth of Abraham and the saga of his family: Terach is an old father, Abraham is born when Terach is 90.  Terach is a refugee from Ur Casdim.  He son  dies there ( circumstances not given in the text)  They  emigrated to Haran., on the road to Canaan  Is there a parallel between Noah and his three sons and their wives and Terach , his three sons and their wives? Is Terach going to Canaan to fulfill the Noach's words, that Canaan will be a servant, thus the land of Canaan is open for domination by the Semites?

I find it tempting tp  read the theme of domination into this chapter.  The tower of Babel could be seen as a watchtower, a way to make sure that no one strays from the official gaze of the government.    The violence that brought the deluge must have had an element of one person trying to dominate over another person or group.

In the Torah, the individual perpetrators  of violence are usually sentenced to exile.  They are removed from the polis, their threat and message is isolated.  In the age of the social media, there is no exile. The violence message is instantly broadcast and magnified.  Malcolm Gladwell  wrote a piece in the New Yorker called  "Thresholds of Violence".  He says that acts of violence facilitate further acts of violence.  This is a position that is syntonic with studies  behavioral economics... it feels right.  This lowering of the bar to violence is going on in America and it is an element of the current violence in Israel.  The situation in Israel is inflamed by politicians casting these acts of adolescent rage as political.  I reject the idea that a 15 year old with a knife is making a political statement. Politicians should not lower the threshold to violence further.

There are political problems in Israel.  Those problems have a root in domination, definitions of peoplehood, the status lands, the meaning of sales, national and racial prejudices, conflicting religious directives, evolving ideas scriptural interpretation.  Those issues are present on all ( there are more than 2, more than 20) sides of the conflict. We should not glorify the violence....it could bring a flood...of violence

Bereshith: Science Fiction

Bereshith: Science Fiction

This week we start the Torah again  It starts at the beginning, the Lrd creates heaven and earth. The Torah  is a very old, carefully  preserved document.  It survives on the basis of what we can do with it. the lessons that we can learn from it.  It is not a science text, nor is it a science fiction story

And he Lrd said: Let there be light! and there was light.

This  means  that  something can be created by  a mere statement. Now we live in an era in which that is (almost)  literally true.  A set of statements  to a computer can create complex machines, 3 D objects, DNA.. The internet, the phone system, the street  lights work by virtue of a set of statements in computer code.  Is this the dream of those that studied Sefer Yetzira? The( magical) power of properly uttered words.  With the right code you can build your dream, get rich.

 We each create our own world.  with words, the words we say to others, the words we read and write: our world of relationships, our worlds of poetry, our view of the world.

I think of the speed of lilght. The Michelson Morley experiment  that proved the absence of a medium for light ( the ether) and calculated the speed of light  [c]( 186,000 miles per second, 3 X 10E8 meters per second) .  It is the square of that quantity (  9 X 10E16)  that is the conversion factor between mass and energy  ( E=mc**2),  .  This is the basis of the potential to destroy the world in minutes ( the atom bomb). A big light, then never light. Light breaks where no sun shines.

Science is a branch of mythology. Science creates models of reality  with an emphasis on mathematics  Science claims truth by virtue of its utility:; it works to predict important events and create useful objects.  The Torah is a useful object that is outside the realm of modern science.  It is useful to recognize a far greater power than than the human.  It is useful to believe that that that power cares about people and interacts with history.

May this new year be blessed.

Vizoth Hanracha: Now what?

Vizoth Hanracha: Now what?

We call this last parsha of the Torah, the one that does not have a Shabbath associated with it, "And these are the Blessings"   This week, Eitham and Naama Henkin z'l, like Moshe in the parsha,  passed into the world of blessing

וַיִּסְעוּ מִסֻּכֹּת; וַיַּחֲנוּ בְאֵתָם בִּקְצֵה הַמִּדְבָּר" שמות י"ג כ'. 

This verse in Shemoth is the only place the word Eitham appears in the Torah.  It is the name of the place that the Israelites went, the place were they were assigned the guiding  pillars of cloud  and fire, the signals that would conduct their passage through the wilderness to the promised land.  This is the name that R. Yehuda  and R. Chana Henkin gave their son, the son that was murdered in a cloud of smoke that came from the firing of a gun, while he and his wife and children were driving through the wilderness. 

Eitham's father was my guiding cloud.  R. Yehuda Henkin showed me Zionism. What I leaned in Mizrachi Hatzair put my life in perspective.  Israel was the answer to the Holocaust. I come from an ancient  tradition of  longing for Zion, a tradition  that my parents truly carried in their hearts and that they could trace back indefinitely. In Mizrachi, (pre 1967)  religious Zionism, it all converged.  There could be nothing closer to where I belong. It stuck with me, it formed my core social life, a longing that I transmitted to my children ( Shoshana, my middle daughter,r is making Aliya in 2 weeks; Elisheva is in Israel now; Jack works for AIPAC ). It is, possibly,  the most important formative experience of my life. 

And it is like a cloud. ideas that do not have a defined shape. The Holocaust means that my people need a haven. The modern state of Israel is that haven. Israel is the fulfillment of a prophecy, but the statement of that prophecy needs interpretation,  The displacement and disenfranchisement of populations  is a  crimes that cannot be imitated.  Permission to maintain a Judenrien zone, in a territory that Jews consider their ancestral homeland, cannot be taken for granted. 

Eitham and Naama Henkin pass from being children, parents, teachers to being symbols and martyrs Their parents were a true bracha for me. May their memories be a bracha and ay their parents find comfort in all the lives they improved.