Toladoth: Thanksgiving

Wikipedia on Thanksgiving:

The 1621 Plymouth, Massachusetts thanksgiving was prompted by a good harvest. The Pilgrims celebrated this with the Wampanoags, a tribe of Native Americans who, along with the last surviving Patuxet, had helped them get through the previous winter by giving them food in that time of scarcity, in exchange for an alliance and protection against the rival Narragansett tribe.^[13]

This year American Thanksgiving  ( known by some as National Day of Morning  and others as Restorative Justice Week) is celebrated during the week of Parshath Toledoth.  Of course, that is a coincidence. 

Parshath Toledoth describes a competitive relationship between Jacob and Esau. Esau is strong, Jacob is clever. Immediately, we are told a story. Esau was identified as  ruddy at birth, 

וַיֵּצֵ֤א הָרִאשׁוֹן֙ אַדְמוֹנִ֔י כֻּלּ֖וֹ כְּאַדֶּ֣רֶת שֵׂעָ֑ר וַיִּקְרְא֥וּ שְׁמ֖וֹ עֵשָֽׂו׃ The first one emerged red, like a hairy mantle all over; so they named him Esau.^*

^{Esau sells his birthright, the privileges that come with being born first ( the animal sacrificial rights, according to Rashi, the right to a double portion of the inheritance according to Rabbi Yehuda Henkin [z'"l]{}Chibbah Yeteirah (CY) on Torah quoted in Sefaria}) for a bowl of red lentils.  It is on account  of this that he is called Edom, Red ( by Jacob per CY). 

וַיֹּ֨אמֶר עֵשָׂ֜ו אֶֽל־יַעֲקֹ֗ב הַלְעִיטֵ֤נִי נָא֙ מִן־הָאָדֹ֤ם הָאָדֹם֙ הַזֶּ֔ה כִּ֥י עָיֵ֖ף אָנֹ֑כִי עַל־כֵּ֥ן קָרָֽא־שְׁמ֖וֹ אֱדֽוֹם׃ 

And Esau said to Jacob, “Give me some of that red stuff to gulp down, for I am famished”—which is why he was named Edom.^*

Many are named Red.  Malcolm X was called Detroit Red in his youth.  It is a frequent nickname for red haired people ( Maybe someone will call my granddaughter, Evalina, Red  some day). In the spirit of the day, I cannot avoid that this color was a  designation of the Native peoples that survived into the names of many sports teams and Western movies.  It is also the color of the international communism that was associated with Soviet Union and China. Now, it designates Republican states in the US map. Red is not merely a convenient color, it invites conflict.  Mars is red.  Red is the other who is willing to shed your blood and  for whom the  spillage  of red blood can be justified.

Esau could have been called Red, benignly, because of his newborn appearance. ( He was named for an equally non value laden quality, his hairiness). It was not until he did the red thing, indebted himself to his clever brother, put himself in the red, that he purchased this appellation.  

Was this exchange of the birthright, a privilege that the 13 year old Esau did thing much of  at the time, like the trade of wampum for Manhattan or the many treaties signed with the North American Indiginous?

 Happy Thanksgiving.

Isaac comes as an immigrant to Avimelech's domain of Philistia.  When he succeeds too well, he is invited to leave, but every well he subsequently  digs is claimed by the Philistines. Ultimately, the treaty of Grar,  between Avimelech and Isaac is made over a meal. How is this meal like the model for Thanksgiving?

וַיַּ֤עַשׂ לָהֶם֙ מִשְׁתֶּ֔ה וַיֹּאכְל֖וּ וַיִּשְׁתּֽוּ׃ Then he made for them a feast, and they ate and drank.

וַיַּשְׁכִּ֣ימוּ בַבֹּ֔קֶר וַיִּשָּׁבְע֖וּ אִ֣ישׁ לְאָחִ֑יו וַיְשַׁלְּחֵ֣ם יִצְחָ֔ק וַיֵּלְכ֥וּ מֵאִתּ֖וֹ בְּשָׁלֽוֹם׃ Early in the morning, they exchanged oaths. Isaac then bade them farewell, and they departed from him in peace.

...

וַיִּקְרָ֥א אֹתָ֖הּ שִׁבְעָ֑ה עַל־כֵּ֤ן שֵׁם־הָעִיר֙ בְּאֵ֣ר שֶׁ֔בַע עַ֖ד הַיּ֥וֹם הַזֶּֽה׃ {ס}         He named it Shibah;^*Shibah As though “oath.” therefore the name of the city is Beer-sheba to this day.

Here is another example of re-naming the same name.  Beer-sheva was the name Abraham gave to  the place, because of the seven ( the other meaning of sheva; it can mean either seven or oath)  sheep that Abraham gave his Avimelach.  This oath of peace ( that did not last over the generations) is a reassertion of some land and water rights granted to Isaac and his descendants.  It emphasizes the tenuous position of the children of Abraham in relation to the (more) indigenous Philistines.  Isaac needed to, once again, establish a deed that already been granted to his father, Abraham.  The basis of this peace is shaky, it has an aspect of  respect for Isaac's success.  There is no guarantee that this will continue, especially in his offspring. 

Jews have (almost) always lived at the mercy of indigenous people. They have come to foreign lands, occasionally by limited invitation, more often by stealth.  When they were downtrodden, they were a burden on the society and carriers of an alien belief system; they strongly rejected the dominant faith.  When they succeeded, they were portrayed as exploiting the people who had a right to the land.  When they ascended too far, it was time to expel them.

Reacting to a famine, Isaac moves to Philistia. He plants and prospers. The king reacts by saying

וַיֹּ֥אמֶר אֲבִימֶ֖לֶךְ אֶל־יִצְחָ֑ק לֵ֚ךְ מֵֽעִמָּ֔נוּ כִּֽי־עָצַ֥מְתָּ מִמֶּ֖נּוּ מְאֹֽד׃ And Abimelech said to Isaac, “Go away from us, for you have become far too big for us.”

In modern times, the "locals" keep their (filthy) possessions. Jews are persecuted as oppressors.  They had  no haven; they lack indigenous-ness on all sides. 

Happy Thanksgiving.

Chaye Sara: How many lives

וַיִּהְיוּ֙ חַיֵּ֣י שָׂרָ֔ה  The life(span) of Sarah 

As a non-native Hebrew speaker, I am  impressed by the plural construction,  The word  חַיֵּ֣י chaye is a plural. Ibn Ezra deals with this. 

חיי. לשון רבים ולא יתפרדו.

THE LIFE OF. The word life (chayyim) is always encountered in the plural. We never find it in the singular. 

Is the Ibn Ezra writing this anomaly off as a linguistic quirk? Or is it an insight into the nature of life.  We all live many lives, go through various phases. The meaning of my life changes in the course of a day.  Of course, life should  be a plural. 

We are told that Sarah had at least 3 lives.  She had a life in Ur, prior to the migration to Canaan.  She had the life in Canaan prior to her name change, and she had the life of the mother and defender of Isaac. Other divisions are equally plausible. These do not correspond to the stated intervals: one hundred, two decades  and seven years. Although the dates do not match, the idea of separate phases of her life is conveyed by the repetition of the partitioning word  שָׁנָ֛ה  shanah, year; a word that also means change. 

The reading of Chaye Sarah, the obituary of our founding mother, marks the week of my own mother's passing. My mother also had ( at least) three lives. She was a girl and young woman in Poland.  She was born in an authentic shtetl: outhouse, no running water, kapotes, no cars.   Circumstances forced her move to the city.  (I suspect she would have left the shtetl even if she were not forced by the war.) She endured the challenge of severe persecution.  Her survival is true to the  meaning of the word. She lived, vive, over and above ( sur) the circumstances that killed 90% of her cohort, as the sole member of her clan. These were her first decades

She was a mother; at first on the run from Poland to the American sector of vanquished Germany;  on to DP camp and finally the USA. She and my father lived by their wits, in a twilight zone of poverty, ambition and modicums of success.  A new generation arose; the children were protected. They developed a sense of themselves - enough to respect their past and make the necessary compromises. My mother survived these hundreds of crises. 

Her last years in Florida began with some joy. She saw nine of her ten grandchildren born, and the tenth, Esther, carries her name. 

A person has many lives. Every moment and action has multiple dimensions and ramifications. Breaking a biography  into sections has a post-hoc artificiality. It was nor like that when it happened. 

The parsha also attests to the distinction between the events and the story. The parsha relates the story of Abraham's messenger identifying and retrieving the (only) acceptable wife for Isaaac, Rivka. The previous parsha identified Rivka as someone that Abraham had heard about. Abraham's servant, charged with finding an appropriate mate primarily on the basis of geneology,  devices a test of kindness ( or perhaps enterprise) to identify a person with the qualities he, the servant, think important. When he asks for a drink of water from the well, she will go above and beyond  and offer to water the camels. Immediately, a woman who passes the test arrives.  Without checking her genealogy, he gifts her the prenuptial jewelry. It turns out, she is Rivka (lucky!).  When he retells the story, he checks the genealogy before  adorning her.  The story is somewhere between what happened and what the teller wanted to happen. That space allows for any chronicle to be questioned.   

Every life is a diamond in the rough. When we tell the story, cut the diamond, the facets emerge. There are too many angles to imagine. It can only be described through simplification.

 

Vayera: Detection

 As the title suggests, this  parsha is filled with visions. At critical moments, characters become aware of things  they desperately need ... that are already there. 

In medical school I attended a lecture. It was one of the most memorable and enetrtaining experiences of mu life.  The lecture was given  by  Eric Kandell.  He would subsequently win a Nobel Prize.  The lecture was called "Seeing is believing; touching is the real thing." One  point I took away from the talk was that what we think we see is a combination of what is there and what we bring to the data. The brain is programmed to imagine edges and faces. Hints of these shapes are enough, our imagination supplies the rest in a systematic manner. 

The parsha deals with things that are not seen; they are overlooked. Awareness is a gift from heaven; in moments of need this cognizance is a miracle. When Abraham needs a substitute for his son Isaac as an offering he notices the ram caught in his horns.  When Hagar becomes certain that she and her son, Ishmael, will die of thirst. and angel has her notice a spring .. and they are saved. 

Two years ago, during an outdoor Neilah service on the Covid Yom Kippur, it became too dark to read the words.  Just then, the lights came on in the park. 

 A major theme in the parsha is how parents sacrifice children. Lot, Abraham's nephew, who has returned to Sodom after his rescue from capture by the four  kings, takes two strangers into his home, and the aggressive, violent people of Sodom want them. Lot offers his virgin daughters instead ( the offer is refused by the Sodomites).  He is willing to sacrifice his daughters for the safety of the strangers.  Lot has very strange values.  There may be some murky relationship to subsequent events in that family. 

Everyone sacrifices Ishmael. Sarah had given Hagar, her servant, to Abraham as a wife on the condition that she be the parent of the offspring, Ishamael. When she sees him as a competitor for the legacy, against the issue of her body, Isaac, she demands his exile.  Abraham, Ishamael's father ( on the direction of the Divine) allows the expulsion. When Hagar sees a terrible death by thirst looming, she separates from the boy.  Divine intervention, pointing out the overlooked spring saves Ishamael. 

Abraham's  zealous  obedience to his understanding of the instructions to  sacrifice Isaac, to kill him and burn his body, is a complex story. Abraham's obedience to the most heinous instruction becomes a lasting credit to his offspring. It is the identification of an alternative solution, the overlooked ram, that becomes our model. Keep the commandment, but don't sacrifice the child. 

Today, some friends are using our house as the venue to circumcize  their eight day old son. It was not until my grandsons were circumcized on my lap that I appreciated how crazy is this custom, and how wonderful it is to fulfill this commandment of the invisible  and inaudible  Gd. 

Lech Lecha: Relationships

Where is Gd when we are in need ?

Gd speaks to Avram four times in Lech Lecha.  Gd tells Avram to go to Canaan. Avram obeys and goes. Gd appears to Abram and tells him that his offspring will inherit the land. Then there is a famine. Avram and his party - wife Sarai and nephew Lot - will quickly be impoverished and possibly starve. What a deal! Avram's imaginary offspring will inherit a drought prone land;  a place that occasionally cannot support life.  Gd offers no advice.  Avram must handle the  situation that his migration has generated. 

On his own, Abram decides to go to Egypt. It is not clear that there was another another choice. Going back to Haran is not mentioned as an option. Egypt, fed by the fertility of the Nile, with an authoritarian regime that eased commercial transactions, was to be the source of food. Avram recognized the problem. The Egyptians respected marriage.  They would not take another man's wife. They would simply eliminate the other man. Sarai was very attractive. Avram instructed her to mislead the Egyptians about their marital status

אִמְרִי־נָ֖א אֲחֹ֣תִי אָ֑תְּ לְמַ֙עַן֙ יִֽיטַב־לִ֣י בַעֲבוּרֵ֔ךְ וְחָיְתָ֥ה נַפְשִׁ֖י בִּגְלָלֵֽךְ׃

Please say that you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that I may remain alive thanks to you.” 

Avram assumes a debt to Sarai.  He will now owe her his life. 

Was this plan indirectly dictated by Gd? Did Avram have a better alternative?  We cannot know.  This is how the events are related. A tradition of women making the greatest sacrifices for the survival of their clan starts. The characters in the story confer an an approval on the process. 

Why didn't Gd provide a better solution? It would have ruined the story.  More importantly, we can now derive that Gd does not work that way. You cannot expect a Divine solution to a problem.  Gd can give instructions: Go to Canaan, obey the precepts.  Gd can intervene: a plague on the Egyptians to foil their intentions, an unlikely  victory in war against powerful armies - but the interventions are not announced, the best alternative is not  usually revealed.  Gd appears after the fact or hundreds of years before. The immediate and local decision is left to the actor. 

Avram's rescue of Lot appears to be an unguided decision. Lot, captured by the united Emperor's of Persia and Babylon, had joined forces with the five city-states of evil, led by Sodom. Avram had to  act as an ally of Sodom, rescuing its people and treasure from the armies that overwhelmed them.  Once again the text deals with a dilemma: Is  an alliance with evil justified to rescue kin? 

[After the fact, Avram rejects any payment or aid from the king of Sodom in the name of Gd.  [Gd, J, who has just acquired the title of the Most High Power]. This new title signals a wider acceptance of a singular power that created the world.  It adds to the credibility of the promise. ]

It is only "after these things"  אַחַ֣ר ׀ הַדְּבָרִ֣ים הָאֵ֗לֶּה  that Gd speaks to Avram in a dream, promising that he will have infinite offspring and revealing that they will be immigrant slaves for 400 years before arriving in the  Promised Land ( subject to occasional famine). This is a very long term plan, almost abstract. Are we being taught to look far into the future?  

Hagar's flight from angry Sarai seems an exception. Here we have some Divine intervention.  In that story,  Hagar, carrying Avram's child,  abandons the clan because  she is rejected. Sarai is angered by the degradation she feels from Avram and Hagar, demonstrating her infertility. Avram, indebted to Sarai for his life, tells her  to do as she wishes with her servant  Hagar. It is too much for Hagar, so she leaves. Here, heaven intervenes. An angel ( later referred to as Gd [J, no less]) confronts  Hagar and questions her actions.  The angel instructs Hagar to return... because the ultimate outcome will be fortunate. She refers to the experience as roi, seeing, and the well (perhaps the well  she and Abraham  expected  to find when she fled, once more, with her son Ishmael)  was named Lechai Roi: I am seen by  the one who is Life.  Hagar has a more intimate relationship with heaven, but she is not as close as Avram  to Gd. 

As the parsha ends, Avram is instructed to prove his allegiance by cutting off a piece of his body. This becomes a test for all generations, and the reward for passing the test remains vague.  That is the nature of our relationship with Gd.  Somehow it works.