Vayra: escape

Vayera: escape

The parsha is a series of rescues.  Avraham tries to rescue the five towns  ( Sodom, Amorah, Admah, Tzevoim, Tzoar) from the wrath of Gd.  With the aid of Lot's whining and pleading, they ( at least temporarily) save one (Tzoar).  The angel's save Lot and his daughters from the murderous lust of the Sodomites. The bloodline of the Philistines is saved from extinction  by the prayer of Abraham.  An angel saves the outcast Hagar and her son Ishmael from death by dehydration.  Isaac is rescued from being a human sacrifice by a timely heavenly voice.

The parsha reveals two personalities: Gd and Avraham. What Gd does is unfathomable. Avraham heeds Gd to an unfathomable extent. 

We learn that Gd's decisions are open to some negotiation. Avraham haggles down the price of sparing a city to 10 righteous people! Presumably, the cities slated for destruction do not meet that cutoff.  Perhaps Tzoar had nine  and Lot's migration  made the necessary minyan. When I read of this negotiation and this criterion, I wonder about Warsaw and Krakow.  Was there no minyan pure enough to save those communities?  Were they all fakers? Presumably, the precedent does not apply. 

Avram's plea for Sodom contrasts with failure to plead for Isaac when he is instructed to make him into a burnt offering.  Avraham had pleaded for Ishmael when Sarah asked that he be banished, but he acceded to Gd's instruction to heed Sarah.  For Isaac, his father did not even put up a fight.  Perhaps, by now, he had lost the sense that he understands the way the world worked. The sequence of events called normal, cause and effect, are an illusion, transcended by the word of Gd. Arguing would not help. The future would just happen

I am the product of rescue. So are you.    

Lech Lecha: Drama

This parsha is the archetype of literature,  We read stories of  ambivalence, desperation, oppression war, conflict, envy.  The stories are moving and the characters are complex.

The hero, Avrum, goes on his Odyssey. He leaves the familiar and follows the lead of an invisible Gd who talks to him, often in riddles. He goes to a land and soon there is a famine.He cannot stay in this Promised land.(What kind of promised land experiences famines? ). Starving, he goes to Egypt.  His level of desperation is revealed  in the most distasteful requests he makes  of his wife.  Even if she were not his wife, how could he ask her to use her beauty for his advancement?  Starvation can justify almost  anything.  The important thing is that they leave Egypt together. 

They return to that land that could not support them, an inhabited land, a land that has become a vassal state to( the 4 kings of )Babylon.  In the war of liberation from the foreign oppressors, Lot, Avrum's nephew, a sojourner in the area, is captured. Family  loyalty seems to motivate Avrum's entry into this first organized mutual killing event (war) - and he is victorious.  The text has already established that the people of Sodom were sinful, but for the sake of his kin,  Avrum  has allied himself with the evil nation.

Gd now communicates with Avrum , promising great reward.  Avrum replies that the promise is empty because he has no offspring.  Gd glorifies the offer -  the offspring will be like the stars in the heaven.  Avrum  believes and he  performs a rite. Animals are bisected. He shoos away the  birds of prey ( the forces of  loss through violation) and falls into a night terror, until  a heavenly fire consumes the offering.  A message is delivered in a dream: Avrum's offspring will be enslaved for 400 years in exile. Is this a full disclosure moment? After their ordeal, they will emerge with great wealth and inherit the land (presumably without the famines).


Avrum now believes that he will have a biological heir. Sara thinks that  she will not be the mother. (Gd's message might have been clearer.)The couple is not sure about how the world is run, so they try to do their part in fulfilling the promise by enlisting Sara's maidservant, Hagar, as a proxy mother.  This action seems to be a misinterpretation of Gd's intention, but it leads to Hagar's pregnancy . Her gravid state spawns contempt for Sara, which, in turn, generates a harsher mistress. Hager runs away from her servitude, but an angel convinces her to return to have her son. He will be the father of a great nation - Ishmael.

Gd rewards the faithful. Misinterpretation  is a  problem.  The  corrections are costly.

Noach: Technology and politics

Gd, ruler of the world, observes that the people ( and animals?) are destroying  the world, they have veered from the intended path. Survivors, who will be the seeds of the future rebirth, are chosen; and a technological marvel, the ark, is built by the righteous leader of the chosen remnant, Noach.  The selected gather together to from their group and are rescued by a great feat of engineering. 

The tower of Babel, at the end of the chapter, has points in common with this story.  The tower of Babel, another paradigm of organization , science and skill,  was a confrontation of Gd an history. Perhaps the tower of Babel was intended to rise above the next flood, it was to be used to escape.  A tower narrows as it ascends. Those at the top of the tower would be only ones who could use it . This does not look like the selection of the righteous that opened the chapter.

The Tower was built to keep the people together, to discourage the dispersion , to keep the current power structure in place.  It was built so that all would continue to speak the same language, united.  The internet started as a universal language without apparent hierarchy. Now, it is an instrument for the subjugation of the people by the powerful few. Truth through equality has become confusion through access.

The story of the Tower of Babel begins with the first mention of bricks. The text tells us that the bricks  were fired and used as  stones.  Bricks are the first interchangeable part, the first industrial product. The production of bricks implies a division of labor.  Some people produce bricks, others place them and build, perhaps others assure the proper placement.  Bricks reappear when the Hebrews are enslaved by the Egyptians. In the Mendelkern concordance, every  subsequent  use of the word,leveina(im), is connected to the slavery in Egypt.  The industrial process is closely associated with the stratification of society and the subjugation of the oppressed.

The beacon of unification reappears in Jewish national history where it is called Zion.  Here is a force that uses the preserved common language and customs of our dispersed people to unify us for survival. It returns on itself to resurrect the common language. It created a modern state that depends upon technology for survival. I hope that the subjugation is minimized.

Technology is not neutral.  It is good and bad.

Bereshith: Beginnings

Bereshith: Beginnings

The Genesis, as it is described in this week's parsha is the archetype of anti-science.  The educational enemy of science is called "Creationism. "As technology moves forward, reading Genesis becomes stranger as it begins to make more sense. Let's skip the first sentence, for now, and go to: And E said 'Let there be light.'  Now, almost any person can say the same words... and there will be light ( per Alexa, Google, etc).  The power to say something and have it happen has descended from the Divine to the mundane. Does that reduce the impact of the text?  Does it help us understand what happened here?  

The first thing the text tells us is: there was a beginning. It removes the idea of an eternal world  that always was and always will be. There was a before;   there was a beginning ; there is a now; there will be an end. 

The scientific idea that the universe has a beginning has had its ups and downs.  It is less than 100 years from  since Hubble concluded that the universe is expanding, based upon the red shift ( a Doppler effect on light: A source of light that is moving away from the observer causes the waves of light  to appear a little longer.  Red is the longest visible wavelength) . If the universe is expanding, it must have been more compact yesterday than it is today, and much more compact  long ago.  Taking this idea of expansion back as far as it can go, there may have been a time when the universe was maximally  compact, before the expansion began.  That means that there was ( at least a relative)  beginning. 

But what was before the beginning?  Chazal say that the story bgins with a ב፣ 

a letter that looks like a parenthesis, a delimiter, One cannot go further back.  An attempt  to go further back  leads to the right  sided border of the letter, into the the letter itself, a place of utter darkness and no sense of direction.  Going with the words leads to Heaven and Earth and Light.  

The story of the powerful E creating the world lends itself to the science-fiction of a techno-deity, a being so much more advanced than humans ( especially pre-electrical humans) that it is natural to consider that being divine. It is not the power of Gd , nor Gd's ownership of the world  that generates my, modern ,allegiance.  It is the direction that Torah provides in our efforts improve the world, and the cooperation in the effort that earns my faith.