#Torah commentary

[penguicorns-are-cool]

I'm pretty sure Avraham failed the test

like if I was given a test and the person giving the test very obviously told me that I was wrong and not to actually do the thing, I would assume I failed the test

also, that's about where the torah switches focus from Avraham to Yitzchak. There were no more tests after that, his story just kind of ends. His next big task is to just marry off his son and that's it he's done.

Like, I really don't think he passed that test I think he failed for refusing to question God for giving him a very unreasonable task.

And it's not like others haven't been rewarded for questioning or even fighting authority

like Yaakov is very definitely rewarding for tricking his Dad cause like right after it says he has a dream where God basically told him good job you will have many descendents. Then later on he literally fights an angel and it's a good thing cause he got renamed Israel as part of a blessing and now we're B'nei Israel

And Moshe definitely questioned authority that was like his whole thing. And even beyond Pharoah, he also had to reason with God to get them to not kill everyone.

Even Avraham that time he convinces God to not kill everyone in Sodom and Gomorrah if there are ten good people. There aren't but Avraham's questioning and reasoning with God is portrayed as a good thing.

Also, Judaism is generally very supportive of questioning authority and child sacrifices are very specifically banned in the torah, so It makes no sense that Avraham passed the test because he would've obeyed God even to kill his child. Like that moral is pretty inconsistent with the rest of the Torah.

so I definitely think Avraham failed that test.

[nonstandardrepertoire]

Parashat Shəmot: נִתְחַכְּמָה | nitḥakəmah

We want to be wise, but so did Pharaoh. How sure are we that our wisdom is any better than his? What stands between the inchoate urgings of our souls and the wholesale slaughter of children?

[Note: Next week, I’ll be giving a dəvar at my shul. Out of respect for the congregation, I don’t want to post my thoughts publicly before I share them with my community, so next week’s installment of one-word Torah will go live on Sunday, Jan 26, instead of Friday, Jan 24.]

The Torah is full of lies. Even without bringing in the all-too-earthly historical accounts in the books of Judges and Kings, there’s no shortage of characters who deal deceitfully in the five books of Mosheh. People fabricate, they selectively omit, they misrepresent what they know and what they think. It doesn’t always work out for them, but that certainly doesn’t stop them from trying.

No wonder, then, that Biblical Hebrew has any number of words for mendacity and confabulation. You might expect one of those words in Shəmot 1:10, when Pharaoh says to his people — as it is rendered in the JPS translation — “Let us deal shrewdly with [the Israelites]”. But if you look at the Hebrew, that’s not what you find.

Instead, Pharaoh uses the word נִתְחַכְּמָה | nitḥakəmah. Despite translations often deploying verbs of deceit and misdirection here, the root has none of those connotations. Nitḥakəmah comes from חכם | ḤKM, a root that very directly and positively means “wise”.

I want to really emphasize the overwhelmingly positive associations with this stem. Iyov 28 includes an entire expansive hymn in praise of חׇכְמָה | ḥokhmah | “wisdom”, deploying exactly this root. The holiest holy of G-d’s dwelling in the wilderness is to be made by כׇּל־חֲכַם־לֵב | kol ḥakham leiv | “all those wise of heart” (Shəmot 31:6). The sages who shaped the foundation of Rabbinic Judaism are regularly referred to as חֲכָמִים | ḥakhamim | “wise ones” as an honorific title. The verb itself, in its various other forms, is used regularly in an uncomplicatedly positive sense, as in Psalm 19:8, where G-d’s instruction is said to מַחְכִּֽימַת פֶּֽת��י | maḥkímat péti | “make wise the foolish”.

What about the specific form of the verb used here? It’s conjugated in what’s known as the hitpa’eil, which generally — tho not always! — has a reciprocal force. If you and I write letters back and forth to each other, that might be described using a hitpa’eil verb. This isn’t always the exact sense of it, but it’s a useful place to start when parsing these forms. And with the hitpa’eil here, we don’t have much else to go on; the only other place the hitpa’eil inflection of ḤKM shows up is in Qohélet 7:16 — אַל־תְּהִי צַדִּיק הַרְבֵּה וְאַל־תִּתְחַכַּם יוֹתֵר | al təhi tzadiq harbeih və’al titḥakam yoteir | “Don’t get excessively righteous and don’t make yourself exceedingly wise” — a passage that supports the notion that this good quality can show up in bad ways, but otherwise does little to pin down the sense of the verb. In a close translation of Shəmot 1:10, we might have Pharaoh say, “Come, let us make each other wise”.

I find this word choice disquieting. Here is this root that generally denotes an unalloyed good being deployed by a tyrannical ruler in plotting a genocide. What is there to say about this?

Of course, one response might be to argue that Pharaoh is laboring under a grave self-delusion: He thinks he is doing something wise and good when actually he’s doing something foolish and evil. That is a perfectly sustainable reading of the text. But as ever, I want to be a little obstinate here: The Torah uses a word for wisdom in this line; in reading it, I want to spend time with wisdom here.

And part of that, for me, means pinning down just what wisdom means. After all, another solution here is to posit that the difficulty is an illusion of translation, that ḤKM, as a root, can encompass not just wisdom but also cleverness, shrewdness, even guile. Maybe it’s wrong to suggest Pharaoh is striving after wisdom here; maybe the Torah really just means he’s striving after intellectual robustness in its most expansive sense, which can obviously be deployed in the service of wicked ends.

Well. Just as Biblical Hebrew has plenty of words for deceit, it has plenty of words for smartness, too. Off the top of my head, in addition to ḥokhmah, we can list binah, dá’at, séikel, and ormah. The last of these, עׇרְמָה | ormah, is worth special attention, because it has exactly these overtones of intellectual deception: The serpent in the Garden of Eden is described as עָרוּם | arum, as full of ormah. And we all know how that turned out.

But ormah isn’t ḥokhmah. And ḥokhmah, as we’ve seen, is overwhelmingly used in a strictly positive sense.

There is, in fact, rather a lot of writing in the Jewish tradition about just what exactly ḥokhmah is, because ḥokhmah is one of the Divine Attributes on the mystical Tree of Life.

Specifically, it is the second attribute, coming between kéter (crown) and binah (discernment). Kéter is, as the Zohar puts it, the most hidden of hidden things; it transcends the human mind’s ability to grasp, representing the infinite mysterious unknown of Divine Abstraction unmixed with even an atom of the tangible materiality of specific creation. Ḥokhmah, in this framework, is the next step on this journey towards absolute physicality, bridging the gap between kéter [a] and binah. Binah is, in a way, easier to pin down: It comes from the same root as the preposition meaning between, and refers to the faculty of telling the difference between one thing and another. Binah is tied to analysis; it lets you find categories and put things in one grouping or another.

[a] There is something to tease out here some other time about the Divine status commonly attributed to kings and emperors of all stripes. Pharaoh is, in his understanding, himself a g-d, which means from his point of view he just is a manifestation of kéter. And if binah is the form of knowing that’s closest to kéter, why shouldn’t it be the first one he reaches to tap into?

Ḥokhmah, then, is a form of knowing that comes before analysis. It is a knowing that comes after, or from, nothingness, a knowing that you know without being able to articulate or explain how you know it. It is a gut feeling, or a bat qol — a fragmentary echo of the Divine Voice of creation. It is a vital intuition; if binah helps you construct categories, ḥokhmah tells you whether those categories are right. Binah without ḥokhmah is sophistry, a dazzling but pointless shuffling of symbols unteathered from the meat and blood and breath of life.

And here it is not hard to see how ḥokhmah could lead us astray. Just as a ḥokhmah-level intuition that murder is wrong may drive us to construct a binah-level moral framework justifying that position, so too a ḥokhmah-level intuition that certain categories of people are inherently disgusting or inferior may drive us to construct a binah-level framework justifying that bigotry. Indeed, this is a common explanatory gloss offered in analyzing certain manifestations of transphobia: Some people intuitively find trans people disgusting, and rather than analyze the sources of that disgust, they instead concoct elaborate theories in an attempt to render that intuitive disgust philosophically justified. It is a common pattern: We feel first, then search for reasons our feelings are correct. First ḥokhmah, then binah.

Pharaoh, then, is saying to his court, “Come, let us strengthen our gut feelings”. In this case, the feelings are ones of mistrust, estrangement, and fear. Strengthen these enough, and it’s easy to construct an intellectual paradigm of dehumanization; it’s easy to think your way to the conclusion that some lives are less fully human than others, that some forms of killing aren’t even murder because the victims aren’t even people. Ḥokhmah’s closeness to kéter now seems a double-edged sword: both a near-perfect communion with the Divine and a hubristic attempt to usurp Divinity for ourselves, a setting out of our own order of creation that metes out life and death by our own unjustifiable impulses, a Tower of Babel built not of bricks but of hunches and unexamined gut-rooted drives. Perhaps it is for this reason that the prayer asking for enlightenment in the weekday təfilah does not ask for ḥokhmah but for other forms of knowing instead (and then, for good measure, immediately leads us to petitions for repentance and forgiveness). Don’t make yourself too wise.

Shəmot is a difficult book. There’s an awful lot of genocide in it on the part of the characters you’re meant to be rooting for. In the face of this difficulty, there’s a deeply relatable tendency to seek for comforting readings, to find those parts of the text that are still relatable to us, so long after its composition. To present the good in it as a way of reassuring us that it’s OK to keep bringing this text into the heart of our sacred communities. That is a valuable project, but I think there’s also value in sitting with the difficulty, in letting it disquiet and unsettle us. We want to be wise, but so did Pharaoh. How sure are we that our wisdom is any better than his? What stands between the inchoate urgings of our souls and the wholesale slaughter of children? The blood in our veins pounds out its heartfelt truth, and blood runs in our streets, covers our hands, clots the water we drink.

The signs and wonders here are meant for us.

This has been an installment of one-word Torah. You can read all the other entries in the series here.

[shalom-iamcominghome]

I'm forever obsessed with the ways in which we interpret g-d and what He's up to. This time, our rabbi was mentioning that we study Torah, but g-d studies the commentaries and what we have to say about it and I'm just thinking...

I'm imagining g-d sat at a desk illuminated by candlelight, and it's the middle of the night, and He gets to one part and He snaps His fingers and goes, "tsk! Why didn't I think of that?!" and keeps murmuring to Himself, "now that was a good one"

[girlactionfigure]

[notaplaceofhonour]

my posts about antisemitism are NOT an invitation to crawl into my mentions to be islamophobic

[returntothewilderness]

What good is a birthright

[judaismandsuch]

A Brilliant Biblical Commentary that I can't Believe

Now, as many of you may know Humanity/ Man is Created twice in Breishit (Genisis) the First time in Breishit 1:27: "And G-d created man in His image....male and female He Created them."

The Second time in Breishit 2:7, and finished in 2:22: "...[G-d] formed man from the dust of the earth.....and Man became a living being." "[HaShem] fashioned the rib He took from man into a woman." (obv a bunch of stuff happens between verse 7 and 22).

Now important notes: 1)There is a lot of established commentary on all of this, but that means there is too much to succinctly summaries other views, so if you are curious about the established interpretations for all this look it up yourself. 2) All the garden of Eden stuff is a cohesive story in chapter 2-3, not mentioned at all in relation to the first creation.

Anyways there is a lot of explanation and reconciiation of these verses, as it is troubling the HaShem would describe the creation of humanity twice, and the stories be very different. There are answers, brilliant ones, bad ones, etc. But I believe I am the first to have this response.

So... it is indeed troubling, until you look a few chapters later, specifically chapter 6.

Now between chapter 2 and 6 a bunch of stuff happens: The garden of Eden, Cain and Abel. Cain taking a wife. The First city builder, the first smiths, the first tent dwellers (more accuaretly the specific ancestor of those, but w/e). The descendents of Cain and Seth, the subtle decrease in life span, etc.

Now aside from the general "Wow this is bullshit, it human civilization didn't progress in that manner." or "Humanity never had a lifespan that long!" Bad faith arguments, you run into an issue.

Who the fuck are they marrying? Hell, it's implied that there are other humans around when Cain kills Abel, where did those guys come from?

Again, loads of commentary but here we are going to my tying all this together:

Chapter 6: The Children of G-d and the Nephilim. 6:2: "The children of G-d saw how beautiful the daughters of Man (or humanity) were, and took wives from among those that pleased them." 6:4:"It was then that the Nephilim (lit. the fallen) appeared on earth when the children of G-d cohabited with the daughters of Man who bore them offspring, they were the Heroes of Old, Men of Great renown."

Now, this has it's own issues, mainly: What the fuck? Who are the children of G-d? Who are the fallen (Nephilim)? And who the hell are the Heroes of Old?

Again, loads of answers for all that already. (BTW, in Numbers/Bamidbar 13:33 Nephilim are mentioned again. by the spies, who use the word to mean 'giant', since that is a quotation of a human speaking, whereas this is not, I can safely ignore "Nephilim means giant" in my exegesis).

Now my commentary (though clever you, you may have already put it together!)

We already have fallen children of G-d mentioned: Adam and Eve. Them getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden can definitely be considered 'Falling'.

And if we consider that there were two separate 'Humans' those in the Garden (Adam and Eve), and those outside from chapter one, we get the answer to who Cain and Seth are marrying.

And then, from Adam's line we get a list of Great Humans: The City Builder, The Smith, The Musician. They could definitely be considered the heroes of old.

Are there issues with this explanation? A couple, none (scripturally) too challenging. Is this explanation original? As far as I know: Yes. But that may just mean my research is garbage.

But the biggest problem with this explanation?

It DEMANDS a fully literal acceptance of that portion of Breishit. If HaShem intended for it to be metaphorical, or a pat explanation b/c creation wasn't important, why would there be an interlock of the two stories?

There wouldn't be.

And I am NOT a (full) biblical literalist. (I do believe that one has to be within a small margin of error a biblical literalist from Avraham to the end of the Torah for Judaism to have validity).

So I have this beautiful, pat, explanation that I can't believe.

Terribly Annoying.

[just-about-nothing]

really funny commentaries on today's portion -- highlights include joseph being extremely passive aggressive towards his brothers like five different times & israel kvetching, in the best of our people's traditions, about his hard-knock life to the king of egypt.

[breakingranksblog]

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[nonstandardrepertoire]

Parashat Vayeitzei: בָּגָד | bagad

If you turned this one-word Torah project into a parashah, you’d get parashat vayeitzei. The portion carries forward the narrative story of the Jewish ancestral families, yes, but it’s also obsessed with individual words and what they mean.

Specifically, it’s obsessed with names. Twelve of Ya’aqov’s thirteen named children are born in this parashah, and each time one of the sons is named, there’s a little explanatory gloss giving a reason that he was named what he was named. (The exception, of course, is Dinah, the only daughter, and the only child named without an explanation. There may be room here to expand on traditional trans readings of Dinah [a] to understand her as self-named, reserving the explanation of her choice to her own private thoughts. Goodness knows she deserves to have control over whatever she can in her own life, given everything she goes thru.)

[a] In Bərakhot 60a of the Babylonian Talmud, Rav explains that Dinah was originally conceived as a son, but then נֶהֶפְכָה לְבַת | nehefkhah ləvat | “was transformed into a daughter” due to Divine intercession.

These naming glosses are sometimes described as etymologies and then critiqued for their sometimes lack of scholarly accuracy, but etymology isn’t really the goal here as much as explanation. It’s like saying, “Oh, I call him Frankie because he’s honest to a fault” — you’re not explaining the philological origin of the name, you’re explaining what the name means to you and why you chose it in this context. And so it is with the names of Ya’aqov’s sons.

But curiously, one of these explanations is emended. We’ve talked about these emendations before — moments where the scribes who fixed the text in its final form looked at the text they had received and sought to fix a typo or the like. There’s one here when Lei’ah explains the name of Zilpah’s first son, Gad. In the emended version, she explains Gad’s name by saying בָּא גָד | ba gad | “Luck has come!” (Bəreishit 30:11). But the uncorrected text drops the silent alef and runs the two words together into one: בגד, which you could take as either a strict contraction bagad or perhaps as a more grammatically fragmentary bəgad | “With luck!” [b].

[b] There is some evidence for the existence of a g-d called Gad in the Ancient Semitic pantheon who had power over chance, fortune, and luck, which creates a slight ambiguity here as to whether the gad in the text is just the generic Hebrew word for “luck” or a proper name of a g-d of Luck, not wholly unlike how “hope” in English can be a generic noun for a feeling or a specific person’s name. Ryan Thomas argues (in “The [G-d] Gad”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 139 (2021): 307–16) that G-d isn’t really an independent deity at all but rather just a common epithet for the local g-d in charge — much as many contemporary Jews might refer to our G-d as “HaMaq-m” or “Sh-khinah” or the like.

This is all linguistically fairly uncomplicated. Two verses later, when Lei’ah names Asheir, she uses the same fragmentary בְּאׇשְׁרִי | bə’oshri | “With my happiness!” construction that the unemended consonants of verse 11 imply, so we might prefer “With luck!” to “Luck has come!” as a reading, but the emended version doesn’t pose any particular problems, and there’s lots of variety in the grammatical structure of the various naming explanations, so one structural parallel is hardly decisive.

Instead of teasing out a problem, I’m interested very specifically in the difference between these two versions in the Hebrew text. In this whole word-obsessed parashah, this is the only instance of this sort of emendation; it’s like a tiny sign saying “Hey, something happened here.”.

The difference is slight. Alef, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, has a numerical value of 1 — the smallest possible value in a system that deals only with integers — and is all but silent in pronunciation [c]. It is a sliver of a difference, the least amount of difference you can get, almost, before two things are just the same.

[c] Technically, it represents a glottal stop, the little hiccup that separates the two vowels in “Latin” when US English speakers say it in normal speech. This is already not a very pronounced sound, but people with US English as a first and primary language tend to drop a lot of these stops when they pronounce liturgical Hebrew; we like to run our vowels together. So alef is very frequently not just subtle but nonexistent, audibly, however up in arms prescriptivists might get over it.

Without the alef, בגד sums to nine in gematria; with it, בא גד sums to ten. Nine is the value of אָח | aḥ | “brother”. Ten is the value of בָּדָד | badad | “separation”. What can we learn from this?

First: Gad shares his brothers’ fate, and also doesn’t. According to the Biblical text, his eponymous tribe is one of the ten conquered by Assyria in 722 BC, whereupon those ten tribes are cut off from the rest of the Jewish people and separated from the rest of our history. So he is a brother to those other lost brothers, isolated from the chain of Jewish continuity by the ravages of empire. Perhaps Lei’ah’s gematrial “Brother!” was a plea that this fate be reversed, that the tribe of Gad persist down thru the ages as a brother to the tribes that escaped Assyrian oblivion, and perhaps the Masoretes’ “Separation!” reflects the sad reality of history as it ultimately played out.

But second: As I said, the difference here is very small. As small as it can be — no word can have a gematria between nine and ten; there is no such integer. And so too perhaps this teaches us that the difference between kinship and atomization is similarly small. Not just as a matter of perspective — Gad being both akin to some of his brothers and separated from others — but as a matter of instruction. Perhaps this, vayeitzei’s sole emendation, comes to teach us that there is not so great a distance between joining together with one another in bonds of trust and community and falling apart from one another in helpless individualized isolation.

And what’s more: This separation is distinguished from kinship not by subtraction, but by addition. It is not that we start out isolated and then add something to bring us together; we start out together and then something comes to drive us apart. And it is a very small something! A miniscule, inaudible something! Something as subtle as a slight hitch in the breath between one vowel and another.

From this we can learn: The roots of separation lie not in grand gestures of opposition, but in the thousand little moments of daily life, moments so small we may not even perceive them. A slight tensing of the shoulders, a subtle raising of the guard. A hitch in your breath when you start to call a man your brother.

[almondemotion]

The cows? What about the cattle and my dirty pants?

Take your cow to the water... Hold on, it is your water? Is it my field? (asks the farmer) - there is a theme here. What is yours is mine and what is mine is mine. Or is it?

I have been listening to a new podcast recently, it is called ‘For Heaven’s Sake’ and created by an Israeli American charity called the Shalom Hartman Institute. Mostly the format is two men, Doniel Hartman PhD, academic, philosopher, rabbi and president of the organisation (also son of the founder, Shalom) and Yossi Klein Ha-Levi an Israeli American writer, journalist and member of the…

[rabbicreditor]

How might we retain an awareness of what is truly human? As the poet Alexander Pope wrote in 1711 in his An Essay on Criticism, “To er is human.” (That was on purpose, just to prove it’s really me doing the writing here.) In this light, to be confused is a blessing. If the look is too smooth, it’s not quite true. Better the typos, the hair out of place, the disquieting verse, the disappointments. Perhaps in order to retain our humanity – or to recognize when it is being skillfully mimicked – we must learn to cherish the imperfection of being human and embrace the mortality that lends urgency to every second of life. Impossible Torah: The Complete AI Torah Commentary https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BYB8ZMF4 #newbook #indiebookstore #ai #chatgpt #aitorah #artificialintelligence #torah #commentary. https://www.instagram.com/p/CqHM4qFN03u/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[small-witch-big-hat]

I generally get a little possessive of the Torah, but I'll forever be OK with anyone and everyone quoting these and taking them to heart:

“You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”(Ex.22:20).

“You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the soul of the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Ex.23:9).

“The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Lev.19:34).

“You too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deut.10:19)

“You shall not hate an Egyptian, for you were stranger in his land” (Deut.23:8).

“Always remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt; therefore do I enjoin you to observe this commandment” (Deut. 24:22)

If you value any words in the Torah, value these.

And never forget:

I’m an atheist. I despise evangelical christians. That said, if more christians were like this guy, I imagine there would be a lot less misery in the world.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

I CURSE YOU WITH LOVE FOR CREATIONISM

what an odd thing to say to a Jewish paleontologist

did you know

young earth creationism was never the jewish interpretation of that text; those jews today who believe it have been influenced by xtians. classic commentary showcases vagueness as to the timing of the creation event, with one talmudic commenter suggesting the time may have been millions of years

YEC'ism, as a result, is filled with antisemitism, as many philosophies that require jewish people to be wrong about their own books are

not a single aspect of the Torah is meant to be taken literally. it is a multifaceted work where higher level interpretations are the bulk of the meaning of the text (Pardes method)

many jewish scholars over the years have pointed out how living things change over time

the amount of evidence we have that the earth is 4.6 billion years old and the universe 13 billion years old is overwhelming

the amount of evidence we have that living things have changed over long periods of time is overwhelming

the amount of evidence we have that populations change over short periods of time (which would then add up to those long changes) is overwhelming

the amount of extremely accessible evidence we have that evolution via natural selection happens is greater than the evidence we have for the force of gravity

many things we deal with today, in our anatomies, geographies, and ecologies, are only explicable with a knowledge of deep time

understanding evolution has been linked with more tolerant attitudes and a better ability to critically evaluate new information (ie, if you're a young earth creationist, you are more likely to be racist and stay that way)

understanding evolution is key to actually fixing many social and ecological problems and ignoring it is, in fact, a self defeating action

the history of the earth is not actually a debatable subject. people who believe in young earth creationism are one thing: delusional.

anyways, I know you didn't read any of that, so have fun sticking your head in a pile of sand. Ostriches don't do that, but you do.

[makingqueerhistory]

Hi! Do you have any recommendations of books that explore the relationship between queerness and Judaism? Thanks so much!

Yes, absolutely; this subject also interests me so I am excited to share some books!

First, the book I always recommend:

Beyond the Pale Elana Dykewomon

Another favourite of mine:

The New Queer Conscience Adam Eli

I also recently got a fantastic list from a patron in our discord!

A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts from the First Century to 1969 Noam Sienna

Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in Jewish Community Noach Dzmura, Tucker Lieberman

Uncommon Charm Emily Bergslien, Kat Weaver

Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible Gregg Drinkwater, Joshua Lesser, David Shneer, Judith Plaskow

The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective Joy Ladin

I hope this list helps!