#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 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.

[yeshowdy]

What's in a Name?

Last week the World Union for Progressive Judaism published my commentary on Parshat Shemot, the first Torah portion in the book of Exodus. Here is the video they made https://www.facebook.com/wupjudaism/videos/709873530667909 And here is the written commentary https://wupj.org/library/uncategorized/56798/a-good-name-parashat-shemot/

[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 Vayishlaḥ: אִישׁ | ish

G-d speaks the world into creation at the beginning of the book of Genesis. The world is created thru words; to know the name of a thing — to know whence the name of a thing — is to know a little bit the source, the root, the spark of the creation of that thing. Or is it? And is that a good thing?

Before we talk about this week’s word, I want to talk about the structure of Hebrew words more generally.

A normal word in Biblical Hebrew is built around a root of three consonants. English words have roots too, of course — the omni- in omnipotent, the -itis in arthritis — but Hebrew roots function a little differently. For starters, you usually can’t stack roots together in Hebrew. English is perfectly happy to throw together conglomerations like unpigeonholeability, but outside of exceptional situations, in Biblical Hebrew, each word has one, and only one, root. Secondly, the consonants of a Hebrew root function something like pillars that frame the façade of a building while leaving plenty of room for other architectural details to fill in the gaps between them. The three Hebrew consonants גדל | GDL make a root having to do with being big, but in turning those consonants into full words, you often fit things in between them, as with גָּדוֹל | gadol | “large” or הִגְדִּֽילָה | higdílah | “she did great things”. If you aren’t familiar with all the rules (and, frankly, sometimes even when you are), these journeys from root to word can sometimes be hard to trace. נְטוּיָה | nətuyah, מַטְּךָ | matəkha, הַטֶּֽינָה | hatéinah, and וַיֵּט | vayeit all come from the same root, נטה | NTH, which has to do with extending, or stretching out.

This feature of Hebrew opens up many linguistic doors. Just by tweaking the vowels, you can shunt a word from being a noun to a verb, and the persistence of the consonants can reveal etymological linkages with striking clarity even between words with very different surface meanings. Small wonder that scholars and mystics across the ages have made a lot of hay out of tracing back the roots of scripturally significant words. Hold on to that thought.

In parashat vayishlaḥ, Ya’aqov wrestles with an angel. It’s a famous story; many of you probably know it well. Ya’aqov is waiting overnight to cross a river, an angel shows up and they wrestle, the angel can’t win so cheats by wrenching Ya’aqov’s hip, Ya’aqov refuses to let the angel go without a blessing, the blessing turns out to be a new name: Yisra’eil.

Except the Biblical text never actually calls Ya’aqov’s wrestler an angel. Ya’aqov seemingly ascribes divinity to it in Bəreishit 32:31, but the narrative is more laconic. It just says that Ya’aqov wrestled with an אִישׁ | ish — with a “man” (32:25) [a].

[a] As an aside, the verb for wrestle used here is יֵאָבֵק | yei’aveiq, a word that only shows up in this story, nowhere else. Altho the root is clearly אבק | ’VQ, it’s almost certainly used here as a play on יַבֹּק | Yaboq, the name of the river Ya’aqov is waiting to cross. (Yaboq probably comes from the unrelated root בקק | BQQ; for all that Hebrew root linkages illuminate the language on a deep level, Biblical writers sometimes do just follow sound instead of etymology.)

Modern translations often fudge this. It’s rare to find the ish of 32:25 translated directly as man — much more common is something like JPS’s “figure”. The usual explanation is that the narrative is giving us a tight focus on Ya’aqov’s perspective: He thinks he’s wrestling with some guy at first and only later realizes that something more than human is going on here. This is a pretty standard technique in Biblical prose, and on a factual level, this is a perfectly serviceable explanation. Which is why I’m going to ignore it and go haring off in another direction.

What’s the root of ish? At first blush, this might seem like a trivial question. Hebrew roots are usually three letters long, אִישׁ is three letters long, surely the root is just ish minus the vowels, אישׁ. But perhaps you know that a yod (י) in the middle of a Hebrew word is frequently not part of the root. And perhaps you also know that the plural of ish is אֲנָשִׁים | anashim, and that there’s another word in Hebrew for a human being, אֱנוֹשׁ | enosh, that looks pretty similar. You may even know that the Hebrew word for woman, אִשָּׁה | ishah, looks a lot like the feminine version of ish, and that the plural, women, is נָשִׁים | nashim. All of which might make you start to wonder whether the correct root isn’t | ’NSh, or maybe even something without that initial alef (א) at all.

And this is where it becomes very important to pay careful attention to morphological rules, because it turns out none of these words are etymologically related at all.

Like English male and female, Hebrew ish, enosh, and ishah, despite their similarity in spelling and closeness in meaning, come from different roots. They’re not the same substrate sprouting into varied forms; they’re rooted in disparate soils at the source [b]. Enosh and ishah come from two distinct אנשׁ | ’NSh roots [c] — the former perhaps having to do with sociability and the latter with softness — and ish comes from . . . well.

[b] In English, male comes from Latin masculus by way of French (which is how it lost the SC that masculine retains), while female comes from Latin femella — the earliest English spelling is femele, but the second E changed to an A due to the misleading closeness of male. [c] This isn’t all that an unusual thing for a language to do. In English, scale as in “we ask for donations on a sliding scale based on income” comes from the Latin scala, “ladder”, and is unrelated to scale as in “the little things that cover a snake or a fish”, which comes from Proto-Germanic *skæla, “to split, divide”. Languages are always sloshing around and playing tricks on you.

The Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon has a whole excursis about the etymology of ish, a rarity given its usual preference for concision abbreviated to the point of crypsis. The upshot is that “probability seems to favor” ish deriving from the root אישׁ | ’YSh, even tho the “existence & [meaning]” of this root are “somewhat dub[ious]”. BDB usually gives a meaning for the root itself, or at the very least a selection of meanings for equivalent roots in other Semitic languages; here, they can’t even really do that [d]. Ish definitely comes from somewhere, but where that place is and what it might mean are lost to the white-noise oblivion of time long past.

[d] Because, they note, there is a “lack of clear parallels for אישׁ in cogn[ate] lang[uages]”. You can’t offer a translation of a word that doesn’t exist!

I think that’s beautiful, especially here. Much has been written about the identity of the entity Ya’aqov wrestles with. Was it really an angel, or was it some shadow version of himself? Did Ya’aqov have to grapple with his past — his treatment of his brother, his dealings with Lavan — before he could move forward into his future? The Biblical text seems to get out ahead of all this furore by using the word it does in this moment. Ya’aqov wrestles with an ish. And what is an ish, at its linguistic heart [e]? A shadow, a ghost, a thing whose past is lost to us. In an ambiguous moment of an ambiguous story, an ambiguous word comes to name a critical, mysterious being. “Why would you ask my name?”, the being says, when Yisra’eil seeks to know who he’s been wrestling with. Yisra’eil’s question is one that can have no answer.

[e] G-d speaks the world into creation at the beginning of this very book. The world is created thru words; to know the name of a thing — to know whence the name of a thing — is to know a little bit the source, the root, the spark of the creation of that thing.

This teaches us that the past need not always preordain the present. Like ish, we all come from somewhere. We have a past that we were shaped by, and in knowing that past, there is a danger of being trapped by it — because thing A happened then, thing B must happen now. There is an easy inevitability to it, the ceding of agency to the momentum of history. It can be frightful to be known; knowing a thing can fix it in place with no room for growth, change, surprise. It can do that to a person, too; being known can be like being embalmed. But this is not the only way to be.

Ya’aqov/Yisra’eil is hemmed in by the weight of etymology; his names are freighted with meaning. He is the one who grabs his brother’s heel, the one who schemes, the name-giver to a nation, the one who prevails in wrestling with G-d and man. His is a nominative determinism that seems almost too much to bear. Perhaps he would have been better off simply being an ish, unburdened from the obligations of etymology, untethered from the demands of history, free to choose a future based on the needs of the moment, not the reverberations of the past. It is a terrible thing to lose one’s connections to the past, but it can be a terrible thing to keep them, too. Perhaps that is one of the duties of being human: to have a past, to be deeply shaped by it, while still being free to make a different future in spite of what has come before.

Or maybe that’s not us, not quite. Perhaps it is still night, and we are still alone, wrestling with an unmoored way of being in the world. Watch out for your hip; freedom likes to cheat.

This is the latest entry in my One-Word Torah series. You can read the rest on my website.

[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.