Chaye Sarah: Divine Destiny

Such a strange story.  The trusted servant is sent to find a bride for  the young master.  He wonders: How would he identify the right woman?  What criteria would he use?  He constructs a fantasy.  He will ask for water. She will give him water  and offer to water the camels, too. Beautiful  Rivkah  appears. He asks the planned question.  She gives the answer he had dreamed.  That seals the deal.  When he retells the story to her kin in detail, they declare: The matter was decreed by the LORD; we cannot speak to you bad or good. Reality coiincides with the dream.  That means it is from the Lrd, the maker of reality ... and dreams

How does one decide?  Looking at a young woman, a girl, and trying to find a spouse, a mother, a matriarch.  So much will change through the years and decades.  She will need to adapt to so many circumstances.  Perhaps he was looking for  qualities that would be useful  for this long endeavor, or behaviors  that reflect the right stuff.

The desired, and delivered, response is sympathetic , class-blind, ambitious and efficient  resolution of the entire problem. Once she is made aware of the problem, the human need for water, she undertakes to solve it.  She understands the request for water as an expression of need, not an attempt at dominance.  She does not presume that the requester can do it for himself, she takes this request for water by an able-bodied man with a retinue, as evidence for a hidden issue that validates the request.  She does not look at their relative social states ( he is a servant, she is the daughter of a prince) . She grasps the possibility of a larger problem in getting water, and solves it for the stranger.  These are all fine qualities, immediately revealed by her response: Drink, and I will water you camels,too."  This is a fine test.

The Rabbis criticize the servant for immediately presenting Rivkah with the jewelry, selecting her as the bride.  The servant failed to ask any more questions.  He took the positive response to his test as a sign, he had changed  the test  from a source of information to a revelation.  The question was a Tarot card.

When the servant retells the story in detail, he recognizes  the problem and changes the tale accordingly, falsely reporting that  he interviewed Rivkah prior to the  gifting
 Rivkas's (idolatrous) relatives  also confuse Gd and fate and the incidental when they say: The matter was decreed by the LORD; we cannot speak to you bad or good.
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 When Rivkah  returns she observes something special about Isaac.  He is meditating, per Onkelos, he is praying.  This is a man who does more than work, consume and enjoy.  This is a good sign.


May we all find the god signs.  May they steer us correctly .  May we show good signs to others.

Vayeira: Hidden

How do we deal with the revealed?   Avraham sees the angels in the wilderness and he offers them his finest.  Avraham becomes the models for hospitality; he makes hospitality a value for all his descendants. 

The angels reveal to Avraham that Sarah will bear him a son.   The parsha ends with Avraham taking that  one and onlt  (yechidicha) son to be a burnt offering.  Along the way, Avraham answers Yitzchok: Gd will show (yireh)  the lamb for sacrifice.  Ultimately this deflection becomes a prophecy and Avraham sees the ram caught  by its horns. The murky vision becomes  a reality. 

When the angels reveal the plan to annihilate the 5 towns of the valley ( Sodom, et al)  to Avraham, he sees the challenge of, once ,again ,saving those people.  He becomes their advocate in negotiations.  Between Avraham and Lot, they save one of the five (Tzoar).  Again, Avraham sees revelation as opportunity. 

Lot finds it difficult to act on information,  After he sees how evil his fellow citizens of Sodom are, after he sees how their evil drags him into  their web, he stalls and must be dragged to his own rescue.  On the way, his wife sees too much. 

Lot's daughters act on their extrapolation of events into the future.  They see the world outside their rescued family doomed .  They devise a plan of action, based upon their limited field of vision.  How many people have been killed in wars based upon the fear generated by limited resources?  And then, new solutions are found.  The underpinnings of  Stalin ( and perhaps Hitler)  a limited food supply that should be directed to the favored peoples, a belief that killed tens of millions,  was invalidated by the subsequent application of a discovery that had already been made ( the Haber process  to produce organic nitrogen for fertilizers).   What has shale oil done to the meaning of the Gulf war?

Will Gd continue to show us the lambs?

Lech Lecha; Self

The parsha, named for Gd's instruction to Abra(ha)m has an obvious extra word, lecha: for you.   Rashi says that the Lecha implies: for your benefit, for your good.  Perhaps it could also mean: for your "you". to establish your identity.  This exodus of Abra(ha)m, separating from his ancestral home. from his parents, is the  first step in his discovery of self. 

Leaving his father to journey to Canaan is an act of great courage.  He is leaving his tribe, his support and entering the unknown,  Once he leaves the tribe, he cannot return- even when there is a famine in the new land.  Instead, he goes to Egypt, the great autocracy.  In Egypt, if it is good, it goes to the officers.  If it is great, like beautiful Sara(i), it goes to the Pharaoh. Here Abra(ha)m deals with desperation and becomes indebted to his wife for saving his life, Here Abra(ha)m stays with his wife, even though it could cost  him his life, [He could have disavowed her]

Throughout the parsha we see Abraham interact with other people and peoples: and remain separate from them,  He does not join the Emori, or the Egyptians, or the Five Towns people ( Sodom, etc).  He interacts with them, intercalates among them, sometimes he rescues them in war ; but he remains separate. He does not adopt their values

The latter portion of the parsha deals with Abraham's desire for legacy.  He does not find it in his first son - call him Ishmael; he finds it in the  circumcision, the act of courage for the sake of identity that we still do to our baby sons at 8 days.  We impress the identity that we inherit from Abraham upon babies is a way they can never reverse.  ( The Nazis used it to identify Jews for victimhood). 

Courage is the road to identity  Identity requires courage.

Noach: environmentalism

Here it is, the deluge, the great ancient description of the consequences if global warming.  The ice caps and glaciers melt, sea level rises, the world drowns.  There is even a hint in the  Hebrew text: 

  חָמָֽס  a possible contraction of  חָמָֽ      heat and מָֽס     tax.  The carbon tax?

But this is a story of environmental catastrophe and the cause is the behavior of mankind.  The relationship seems to be interpreted religiously.   In the parsha, the flood comes because of human misbehavior, presumably people abusing one another.  A process has begun and its inevitable end is the destruction of all flesh ( 6:11,12) . But perhaps this interpretation is not so far from our own.   IN our modern, "scientific", conception of the global warming that leads to the flood,  we can also see  greed, leading to the degradation of peoples, leading to the catastrophe that is beyond any human control. 

We, moderns, live in a world  enlightened by Lyle and Darwin; and Smith's discovery of the tablets of Gilgamesh.  Our "understanding"  encompasses a far longer history of the earth, the concept that time is so long that everything will eventually  happen.  We have turned to Chronos who answers all questions: "given enough time, it will happen."   In our modern mind, Chronos battles with E: the creator of  the world and the executor of justice. 

There are scientific aspects to the Noah story.  Noach must intervene to maintain a human and animal presence: he builds an ark  There is also a strong sociological aspect.  E perceives that an irreversible downward spiral of human behavior has occurred that will, on its own, cause the destruction of all animal life.  The flood is inevitable.  Gd's intervention is purely a rescue.  this kind of [arrogant] certainty from the data is familiar and comfortable to us

Everything gets swept away.  The forces of the world are both beyond  control and beyond understanding

Noach (and his kin) are the sole survivors of the deluge. They will  restart humanity,  They will generate some combination of the old tradition and the new order.

My parents were such survivors.  Their world was destroyed, all of their kindred were murdered, the culture was killed, the land  of Poland evicted them.  They were replanted in America and spawned children to synthesize a new way of life.  Their old ways were important to them.  They are important to me. I hope that my ways are important to my children

We are all the children of survivors.  Our children are likewise.  Our charge is to help in the rescue.