“Time is sequential — a thread spanning the distance between birth and death. Events, however, are more like a Persian carpet. Thousands of richly colored threads woven into intricate patterns and images. Any attempt to place events into purely chronological order would be like pulling threads loose and laying them end to end. It might be simpler but you would lose the design.”

When I expectantly opened Mosab Hassan Yousef’s “Son of Hamas” this was not the first thing I expected to read. Aside from giving me a framework for understanding this week’s Torah portion, Mosab provided me with many surprises, not the least of which were the fact that I didn’t hate his father as much as I expected nor was I as comfortable with Israeli practice as I hoped. But more importantly, I was surprised, and I don’t think this is a spoiler alert, that his story, with the exception of the first chapter, was largely chronological. I had expected to read the narrative equivalent of a Persian carpet.

His conceptual opening reminded me of a rabbinic concept: Ein Mukdam o m’uchar baTorah, meaning There is no early or late in the Torah. Like Mosab’s tract, the Torah is largely chronological. If this is so, why does Mosab and, for our purposes more importantly, the rabbis insist on this concept?

I believe there are at least three reasons for this, two of which I will share now and one later.

First, the rabbis never wanted the Torah to be imprisoned in mere chronology. They were certain that some events occurred in an order other than that presented. For instance, they believed that Yitro, Moses’ father-in-law, advised his exhausted son-in-law to delegate most of his judicial duties AFTER the revelation at Sinai and not before as implied by the order of the narrative.

Secondly, the rabbis understood that each story in the Torah was related by similar words and concepts to other events in the Bible that deepened its significance, making it as beautifully designed as a Persian carpet.

There are many such connections between this parasha and earlier events we have read this year of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as well as allusions to later stories, including the book of Ruth. Each of these allusions make clearer the pattern and deepen the significance of the actions reported.

Last week, Rabbi Slosberg spoke about such a connection when Jacob was leaving for Egypt. On the way, by Beer Sheva, he prays and offers sacrifices to the God of his father Isaac. This is a pretty unusual statement — we don’t normally hear ‘God of Isaac’ all by itself. But the language of the event alludes strongly to one of the most dramatic events in the early patriarchal text: the binding of Isaac.

In a night vision, reminiscent of the last time he left Canaan, escaping his brother’s wrath, God assures Jacob that leaving for Egypt with his family is not something to fear. Both his remains and his descendants will eventually return. The depth of Jacob’s concern for the future of the people that will be called by his new name, Israel, is emphasized through the language God uses in this nocturnal communication: God calls, “Jacob, Jacob” and Jacob answers, “Here I am” “Hineni”. This is a clear allusion to God calling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and later, using his name twice, calling off the slaughter.

The parallel concern between the Binding of Isaac and Jacob’s sojourn to Egypt is God’s demand for patriarchal loyalty to counterintuitive commands that are ultimately proven to be part of the grand design. Just as the death of Isaac would have been the end of the chosen people, so too Jacob fears that leaving Canaan will be the end of its connection to the promised land. In both stories, God assures the relevant patriarch that the divine promise still holds.

At the beginning of our parasha, Jacob calls on Joseph to swear to him, while holding his thigh, that he will be part of God’s plan to return his corpse back to Machpela where his parents, grandparents and wife Leah already lie. This story brings back two patterns of the weave.

The holding of the thigh recalls the promise made by Abraham’s servant that he would return to Canaan with an appropriate wife for Isaac. Again, the future of the people depended on it. In addition to the physical gesture of oath taking, Jacob’s demand that Joseph explicitly ‘swear’ is a direct reference to the lentil stew with which Jacob forced his brother Esau to barter the birthright, the right of primogeniture.

The allusion to Esau leads us into the next scene, where Jacob goes out of his way to continue the patriarchal pattern of younger-brother-preferential-treatment. We might have thought that Jacob had learned the disastrous results of showing favoritismto his younger son. We would be wrong.

Jacob tells Joseph to bring Ephraim and Menashe to him for a private blessing with grandpa. Like his father Isaac, Jacob is not seeing well, but he understands full well what he is doing with a hint that perhaps his father wasn’t so blind either when he blessed Jacob and Esau. Jacob raises Ephraim and Menashe, his two grandchildren through Joseph, to the tribal status of his own children. He shows his preference for the younger over the older in at least four ways.

1. We know that Jacob has many grandchildren at this time. These are the only two he raises to tribal status; we have forgotten most of the names from their generation. Ephraim and Menasha are remembered to this day.

2. Jacob raises Joseph, by default, to the level of first born. The definition of primogeniture is the receipt of a double portion by the first born. By giving two sons of Joseph the status of full sons, he gives Joseph that double portion.

3. The qualitative effect of the above is exacerbated by the fact that Jacob doesn’t say I’ll make them like ‘any two’ brothers, Naftali and Asher, Issachar and Dan, Gad and Zevulun. No, he says, like ‘Reuven and Simon’ the first two of his sons, one of whom should have received the gift of primogeniture that is being offered to Joseph through his children.

4. Jacob intentionally switches his right hand over his left to give the younger grandson Ephraim a slightly greater force of his spiritual power. When Joseph tries to correct him, assuming that Jacob must be confused, Jacob states explicitly that he intends for Ephraim to be preferred. Menashe will also have a tribe and status, but Ephrayim will be the greater of the two.

But let’s not be so hard on Jacob. I think we can say, in his defense, that he only ever intended to marry Rachel and she bore him only two children. For him, this may have simply been a way of rewriting history to suit his original intent.
So it’s only fair to note the manner in which he mitigates the seeming unfairness:

1. He does it in private — not in the faces of the other brothers. Will they figure it out? Certainly, but compare this to the very public way in which he preferred Joseph to his brothers: the special coat, the fact that Joseph didn’t have to go shepherding with them in faraway places (what else was he doing at home when Jacob told him to go find his brothers in Shchem?).

2. Unlike the blessing he receives by deceiving his father, Jacob doesn’t express his preference in poetry. In the ancient world, the curse or blessing of an important person, like a patriarch, was considered to have more than mere psychological or subjective power. It had objective power. The blessing he received from Isaac was separate from the one that was given to Esau. They were hierarchical blessings that included a winner and a loser. The fact that Menashe is receiving a less potent blessing is only evident in prose and in the position of Jacob’s hand – the blessing itself is offered to them simultaneously and it is not, in and of itself, hierarchical.

3. The word sikel is used for ‘crossing’ his arms; a term that has the same root as seichel or mind. It’s an unusual term not normally associated with hands. There are some commentators who suggest that Jacob’s hands acted as if they had minds of their own such that Menashe would think this was something beyond grandpa’s control — lessening his embarrassment.

4. Most importantly, after delivering the blessing, Jacob declares rule that ALL boys who descend from him should receive the blessing, “May God make you like Ephraim and Menashe.” Boys are traditionally so blessed to this day.

But what does that mean — May God make you like Ephrayim and Menashe? Does it mean that all of us should be heads of our own tribes of Israel? That all of us should be given a larger share of our grandparents’ inheritance?

No, I don’t think so.

Think about it: Why do grandparents and grandkids get along so well? They have a common enemy!

The parent child relationship is fraught with all sorts of unavoidable conflicts. It’s the parent’s job to raise a child to be independent. It’s the very success of that task that manifests itself in hurt feelings. After all, if kids are going to become independent, they are going to need to separate, to say I’m not merely a part of your success but my own person. As proud as a parent may be, there will always be a loss, a longing for those days of throwing the child up and down in the air, of unconditional obedience and respect.

Grandparents, under normal circumstances, can leave the maturation responsibility to the parents. If they’re lucky, they don’t even have to change diapers. They can just play with the kids and spoil them rotten. That’s their job.

When we say to our sons, May you be like Ephrayim and Menashe, we are saying we want them to experience the unconditional love of grandparents as well as the approval of the the parents. Every child prays for the approval of their parents even as they break free to create their own lives. The prayer that Jacob gives us is symbolic of achieving that impossible balance of approval, respect and love.

But let’s not leave out the daughters!

This line alludes to a later Biblical text from the book of Ruth. When she is declared before the people as the wife of Boaz, the people respond that God should make her like Rachel and Leah. Here it’s not a grandfather issue. Here, Ruth, the Moabite who becomes part of the Jewish people, is elevated even as a convert to the status of the sister matriarchs — both the one who was loved more and the one who had more kids and thus garnered more respect from her social context.

I would not leave out Sarah and Rebecca from the blessing of girls as we traditionally practice. Still, I think there is a particularly poignant message to be garnered from the fact that every girl should be loved for what she is (as was Rachel) as well as for what she achieves (and in our context it’s certainly more than having children).

And this brings me to the third point of the rabbinic concept with which we started: There is no early or late in the Torah. The stories of the Torah have a timeless application in the history of our people and of humankind. There has never been a generation during which children have not desired to be loved unconditionally as by grandparents, approved of by their parents and loved for what they are as well as for what they achieve.

May God make us all like Ephrayim and Menashe, like Rachel and Leah.

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from Cantor Lipp

My brother owns a large sound and lighting equipment catalog business. One of the clips he shows his sales staff in training is from the Monty Python film Life of Brian. Brian, a parody of the character of Jesus, in fleeing from Roman soldiers is trying to buy a disguise from a vendor in the shuk. He asks the price, is told 20 Shekels and just gives it to the merchant. The merchant objects.

We’re supposed to haggle! the merchant complains.
Okay 19, answers Brian.
No, that’s not haggling, sneers the salesman.
Okay 10, answers Brian, looking around, worried about the approaching soldiers.
10! And me with a dying grandmother?

Every time Brian gets too close to the merchant’s most recent offer, the salesman tells him he’s doing it wrong. Every time he doesn’t raise it enough, the merchant haggles as required by the dance: It cost me 12! he complains when Brian, forced to ask for a better bargain asks for 11.

After the death of Sarah, Avraham needs to bury her. He asks the Hittites of Hevron to sell/give him a burial site for his wife. The word T’nu in Biblical Hebrew can mean give or sell. They say he can bury her anywhere. He asks for Efron son of Tzochar. Efron reiterates that Avraham can bury Sarah in his plot for free. Avraham says let me pay the full silver price. (According to my brother, NO ONE pays list price). Efron offers it for free again after Avraham persists saying: What’s 400 Shekels between friends? Avraham hears the price, weighs it out and acquires the land to bury Sarah in the presence of the entire town’s population.

There is a classic rabbinic assumption that Efron has cheated Avraham. The problem with this assumption however, as well stated by our Humash, is that without knowing how large the plot of land or the relative value of the shekel circa 1300 BCE we can’t know that. But here’s a clue to the likelihood that Abe paid more for the plot than it was worth. After all, bargaining was not invented by Monty Python. They are making fun of what is an age old custom of the Levant. It seems likely that Abraham paid LIST PRICE for the land, something no one else would have done but it’s not the same thing as being cheated. If you don’t enter the coupon code when you purchase online, you don’t get the discount. Abraham clearly wanted a title that could never be challenged. Not only did he not pay less than it was worth by skillfully negotiating, he paid MORE than it was worth by NOT negotiating.

Even more astounding, Abraham sets up an ambiguous expectation that he wants it to be given to him but when he is offered the specific land he offers FULL price defying that expectation. So what could have been a standard negotiation between the owners of a land and a valued resident, became a legal transaction that would be remembered for its wonder: That Hebrew Abraham didn’t even haggle with us — he just paid Efron full price! Similarly we read that when Abraham greeted 3 strangers in his tent in last week’s parasha, he promised a morsel but delivered a feast. This was a man who wanted to be known for his mythic magnanimity, for his humongous hospitality.

Just so you know, if you call Full Compass Systems to buy some high end technical equipment, I’m not sure you’ll have the same kind of bargaining experience you would have in the shuk in the Old City of Jerusalem. But my brother’s sales team, trained with Life of Brian, is likely to try and engage you in a conversation to make sure that you get what you need at a price that makes sense. They will, I’m sure, hope to develop a relationship with their customer to make sure their modern day Abraham want to come back for more.

The beauty of shabbat is that we indulge in deepening relationships without the necessity of a commercial transaction. If the week that has just passed is a time for negotiation: the price of goods, the value of time spent at work, the value of relationships professional & personal; then Shabbat is a priceless time, a time when we give ourselves over to the beauty of 25 hours of dedicating ourselves to good food, good drink, good conversation, and significant relationship building with those we love and with God.

It’s not worth haggling over.

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from Cantor Lipp

Avram is taking care of his dad’s idol shop. He’s a teenager. Can you imagine Avram as a teenager? Well, it’s about time.

What kind of idol shop, you ask? To help farmers with rain, young men find the right woman for marriage, herders to ward off wolves from their sheep. You need it, Terach’s got it.

When his dad comes back from doing an errand, all the idols but one are smashed to smithereens and littering the floor. Oh, except for one, that is. One lone idol stands unmolested with a stick in his hand.

“What the hell happened?” Terach asks Avram.

(It reminds me of my five year old self struggling to help my mother unload the groceries from the car after she had told me not to. Inevitably, the bag falls from my hands and numerous glass containers are broken. My mother asked me what happened and I told her the cat did it. Well, I was five!)

Avram is far more gutsy than I.

“The idols started fighting amongst themselves,” he said. “Then one of them, this one with the big stick, hit them all until they lay smashed on the floor.”

“Do you think I’m an idiot,” asks Terach? “These idols can’t move — they’re made of clay!”

“Then how do you have the gall to sell these useless sculptures to people and defraud them of their hard earned money?”

This is a great midrash. Some people think it’s actually in the Torah. It’s not. But it does attempt to answer a question the Torah will not: Why did God choose Avram to be the progenitor of the Jewish nation of today? The answer, according to the midrash, is that Avram demonstrated an early proactive monotheistic streak.

A long time ago, when I became interested as an adult in the study of Torah, the following verses jumped out at me: God says, “Shall I hide from Avraham what I’m about to do since Abraham is to become a great and populous nation and all the nations of the earth are to bless him? For I have singled him out that he may instruct his children and his posterity to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is just and right, in order that the Lord may bring about for Abraham what He has promised him.”

This was the first time I had read in the Torah of God’s self-reflection, the part of God’s image that has presumably been transferred to us, the part of God that most obviously separates us from the rest of God’s conscious creatures. Even more so, in the conversation that proceeds from this self-reflection, Abraham challenging the justice of God’s impending decree against Sodom and Gomorrah, God simply continues speaking out loud, as it were. When the dialogue continues, we are never told, And God said to Abraham as in earlier conversations, just God said, implying a significant Divine-human intimacy.

A couple of weeks ago, I was teaching Melton the midrash with which I began.

It occurred to me to ask a different question: Why cast Avram as the lonely monotheist of his age? 10 generations after Noah is it not likely that more than one descendant would remember the flood was caused by God and that any other divine beings would be, at best, woefully overvalued? And why assume Avram is the only good or just person? After all, God saved Noah, who was good and, according to the post-deluvian history recorded, one son was presumably good (Shem), one bad (Ham) and one neutral (Japeth). It seems likely to me that God approached many of the good and just monotheistic descendants of Noah and said to them: Go to the place that I will show you.

One said, I won’t leave my family. Another said, I make a good living here. Another said, I’m scared. Another said, Where are you sending me? Another asked for guarantees of descendants, land, money. Avram didn’t say anything — he just went and took his wife Sarai and nephew Lot with him.

Avram was not only a good, just monotheist; he was a risk taker, open to possibilities, open to a future he could not control. He may well have been an iconoclast as the older midrash suggests, but more importantly he was willing to follow the Divine voice where it would lead him. Once he got there, he had no compunction about asking questions and challenging that divine presence as we see following God’s self disclosure. But he had to be willing to enter into the relationship without pre-conditions.

Shabbat is a moment of our week when we are asked to consider the possibilities of the roads open to us that we have not yet travelled, to imagine, to dream. Let’s remind ourselves that Abraham isn’t the only one on a road to a place that God will lead us, to a place we do not yet know.

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from Cantor Lipp

I’ve always wondered why the dove holding the olive branch has become a ubiquitous symbol of peacemaking. There is nothing in the portion of Noah itself which we read which gives us an explicit answer.

In reading through the portion this week, I was reminded of and discovered for myself many parallel structures, the last of which led me to an answer for this year’s study at least.

First of all the flood itself is described as an undoing of God’s work during the 2nd day of creation in which the waters of the deep are separated from the waters of the heavens. One has to imagine that the ancients would look up into the sky of a beautiful day and see the same blue they would see when they would look at the sea or any other large body of water. The flood, in their minds, was the contraction of the firmament created on Day 2 of creation to allow for the waters from below and above to rejoin.

Another parallel that jumped out at me this year was God closing the ark door at the beginning of the flood yet there is nothing keeping Noah from opening it himself when he realizes he can get off the ark and release his passengers, animal and human, onto dry land. Still, God has to tell him to get off the ark even though Noah is able to open that door by himself.

These parallels come in threes. The third I noticed this year was that of the dove and the olive branch. The dove is sent out three times as well. The first time it comes back empty beaked, there is no place for it to rest except for the ark. The second time it returns with an olive branch indicating the trees are finally breaking through the waters. The third and final time, the dove doesn’t come back at all; it has found a place to land outside the microsystem of the ark.

I understand that the association of the olive branch with peace is most likely from Greek antiquity and not originally from the Bible although it became associated as such later on. Still, since this association is so central to the symbol, it seemed to easy a solution to simply blame it on the Greeks.

By using the same parallel structures that can be found relating to the reversal of creation and the opening and closing of the ark, I noticed a parallel for the first time between the olive branch and the rainbow. The olive branch is the compromise position between the dove having nowhere to land but the ark and a place to live permanently. Similarly, the rainbow, the sign that God will no longer destroy the earth, can only exist when the water making clouds and the sun are in balance – when the weather is overcast with no sun means no rainbow just as a clear day without clouds mean no rainbow. A rainbow is the compromise between absolute rain and sun.

Peace making requires mutual sacrifices and compromises, some of which will taste as bitter as the olive which has not yet been marinated to be edible. When Ehud Barak made his offer to Yasser Arafat at the beginning of this century my first reaction was shock. How could he give away so much? How could he split Jerusalem? But my second reaction, one that I have confirmed with other Israeli citizens who, unlike myself, have served in its armed forces, was that if this compromise were accepted and led to real peace, I could live with it.
Perhaps more importantly, the olive tree lives for a thousand years. As bitter as its fruit can be without marination, those who are able to make peace tend to be those who can transcend the benefits of the short term, even mere lifetime benefits of an agreement, and see the rewards to future generations who will benefit from the necessary compromises.

Every shabbat we get to review the many compromises we needed to make during the past week between the life we lived and the life we perhaps wanted to live or ought to have lived. Shabbat is a taste of the infinite time symbolized by the olive tree, a time to view our compromises in a larger context, to let go of the angst associated with them, to breathe deep from the perfume of eternity.

A man who’s a tzadik, a righteous man: faithful to God, a life of good deeds, constant devotion, good family man, treats his wife well, raises good kids, a community leader; in short, not your ends-justifies-the-means kind of guy. When he dies he is rightly rewarded and praised by the heavenly court but he has a complaint.

“All these years I was so faithful but I had to struggle so hard; didn’t I at least deserve to win the lottery to make my lot on earth just a little easier.”

God, who rarely responds to such questions even from the greatest of tzadikim, answers with a hint of defensiveness: “You could have helped me out, Shmuel. You could have bought a ticket!”

There is an interesting divergence in language between two verses in our parasha this week.

In the first Moses tells Joshua to be strong and of good courage (חזק ואמץ) and that he will be entering the land with this people.

Later, when God speaks to Joshua for the first time, the new leader is told again to be strong and of good courage (Chazak veEmatz) but then is assured that he, Joshua, will BRING the children of Israel into the new land.

The Etz Hayyim chumash explains that when Moses tells Joshua publicly about entering the land, he wants there to be no question who is the power behind the throne. God is the one doing the bringing and Joshua is merely the earthly organizer. However, in the later verse, when God speaks to Joshua privately for the first time, there is no such concern.

But this begs the question. If God is indeed responsible for the Israelite’s military victories to come, why does God need to give his new general so much credit? After all, Joshua was chosen 38 years earlier specifically because of his faith in God’s ability to make the military conquest of the land possible.

I’d like to suggest that perhaps this is God’s way of telling Joshua that although these victories would be impossible without divine assistance that Joshua, like the proverbial faithful man in the joke, also needs to buy a ticket! There could be neither military victory without both Joshua’s leadership and God’s assistance. It is a symbiotic relationship; a partnership.

In the psalm that we recite all the month of Elul prior to Rosh haShanah and beyond through most of the holidays of Tishre, we are told at the end to be strong and of good courage in the same terminology God reserves for Joshua not because most of us serve in the army. The fight the psalmist refers to is the one we wage within our own individual souls. God has given us the strength and liturgical infrastructure to help us confront our faults, apologize to those we have wronged and forgive those who have begged our pardon. God has given us the courage to make the appropriate changes in our habits and behavior necessary to make it less likely such transgressions occur again.

The rest is up to us.

We need to buy a ticket, of the proverbial variety, of course.

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from Cantor Lipp

Taking Care of Business

What separates us from the animal kingdom? Bipedalism? Opposable Thumbs? Cooking, leading to larger brain size vis a vis stomach size?

According to Matt Ridley in the Rational Optimist there is one thing we started doing that no other animal had done before which changed everything — our standard of life, our intelligence; it even helped to tame our violent natures toward one another: Trade.

Many animals will return favors, literally scratch each other’s backs, even with the idea that the payback might be in the future, but the explicit simultaneous trade of one thing for another became uniquely human and allowed for a gradual then breakneck improvement in the standard of living for most of humanity. The more self sufficient we are, the less we benefit from the relative advantages we get from specializing in one realm of endeavor and trading the fruits of that labor for someone else’s special gift. Physical division of labor led to the interaction of ideas. It took awhile to get from the male/female hunting & gathering paradigm to the internet, but here we are. And chimpanzees, our nearest cousin in the animal kingdom, are not — no matter how cute they may be.

In our portion, Ki Tetze, there is a strong emphasis on the protection of personal property, the necessity of returning that which is lost, the prohibition against owning more than one kind of weight which might be used to cheat others in a business transaction, as well as strict rules against the punishing charging of interest and the insensitive demand for a pledge. According to the Talmud, the first question we are asked when we are judged after we die is whether we were honest in business. The Torah realized that trade needed to be fair in order to continue to make all our lives better.

There are two Hebrew words which, in their similarity, emphasize that trade and unfair advantage are two sides of the same proverbial coin: Esek which means business and Oshek which means oppression or taking unfair advantage. Although they’re spelled differently, the words are related as the outer letters are identical (ayin & koof) and the middle letters, shin and samech, are first cousins through the sin. In fact, I looked this up in Even Shushan, a Hebrew/Hebrew dictionary and found that the presumed origins of the words are similar. On the one hand, we are supposed to say a blessing every morning thanking God for commanding us to “ENGAGE (LAASOK)” in the study of Torah, i.e. to make it our business. But the other side of the coin is from our portion: You shall not take advantage (TAASHOK) of your workers but pay them on time since they depend on that payment.

Every month I go through the same drama. My first voice lesson of the month, I too often forget to bring my check to pay for the upcoming month’s lessons. My voice teacher is generally touched that I care so much. I come by it honestly. My voice teacher is not a poor laborer of the type that is envisioned in this particular verse but the rabbis consider it a special mitzvah to get ones financial obligations taken care of in a timely fashion, regardless of the status of the vendor.

So much to do: We are approaching the High Holidays, the season of tying up the loose ends of our relationships. As important as that is, relationships are sometimes ambiguous. We may not be sure that we have apologized for what need and let go of what we must. Perhaps a good place to start is with those practices that are clear and unambiguous — our basic business relationships, the timeliness of our payments. If we can begin by practicing the habit of paying those who depend on us when the bills are due, we might follow up with the people in our lives and adopt habits of transparency and sensitivity of interaction. If we were to spend a few minutes prior to each shabbat to review the week and make sure that we had concluded our financial obligations from the week that passed, perhaps the tying up of those pesky emotional loose ends would be soon to follow. Not only would it make our shabbat experience more free of angst, but we’d have far less baggage for our souls to lug around and, hopefully, release come Yom Kippur.

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from Cantor Lipp

I read in Newsweek that the University of Arizona, while taking a break from studying the efficacy of identity verification, bred a genetically mutated mosquito that doesn’t carry malaria. They intend to test them in the field and give perhaps help them develop other ‘artifically’ selected evolutionary advantages so they will eventually become the dominant strain of mosquito in Africa and other areas where this disease is rampant.

In our parasha we are warned against all sorts of diviners: soothsayers, augurs, sorcerers, casters of spells, ghost or spirit consultants. This list of prohibited activities is followed by the following statement: You must be Tamim with the Lord your God. Tamim means perfect, simple, trusting or, as translated for us, wholehearted with God.

If we were to translate it into modern parlance, we might say we are not to PLAY God. Are scientists who manipulate the genetic code of the animal kingdom, in essence, playing God?

I would argue that there is a fine line between Playing God and Partnering with God. Using magical techniques to see the future, a domain reserved for God’s knowledge, is Playing God. However, using our God-given intelligence to make the future a better place based on the best our knowledge has to offer can be understood as a way of Partnering with God to perfect Creation.

It’s true that these mosquitos, if they are unleashed in Africa, will have unintended effects and we have to use the best information at our disposal to help predict the best and worse scenarios that are likely. We need to perform a cost benefit analysis to decide whether the benefits of getting rid of malaria in this way outweigh the risks of creating a mosquito that might someday carry far worse diseases or become immune to any controls we might devise to limit their spread.

Shabbat is a moment of possibility each week when we are asked to lean back and imagine a world perfected through the combined actions of our applying our best efforts to complete creation. The week is our time for implementing those visions.

That’s why we can sleep a little extra on shabbat. I always tell the preschoolers that even I take a nap on shabbat — they can’t understand why anyone would look forward to nap time! We get to sleep more not just to catch up on much needed rest but so we can give ourselves the opportunity to see things that have not yet come to pass. We may not be allowed to divine the future, but we are allowed, indeed encouraged, to dream.

Welcome to Kabbalat Torah Talk a new occasional feature on the Adath Jeshurun website where Cantor Lipp will share his weekly Kabbalat Shabbat Torah talks.

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by Cantor Lipp

I have a hard time working out without something entertaining to watch. So, while lifting weights last week, I began the American version of “The Office.” For those who haven’t seen it, it is a mockumentary sitcom with Steve Carell as a comic wannabe manager of a regional paper company in Scranton. The episode called, ‘Diversity Day, features the manager, Michael Scott, trying to outdo the nice African-American man who came to undo the damage of a lily-white manager performing a Chris Rock routine in the office. After the facilitator leaves, Scott has everyone on staff wear a card on their forehead announcing a race without them knowing and having others ask them questions to simulate a ‘conversation’ about race. Of course, one staff member, the receptionist, is given the card that says Jewish (even though we’re not a race…) and the Assistant Regional Manager or Assistant to the Regional Manager goes up to her and says, “Shalom, may I have a loan?” Thankfully, my daughter didn’t get the joke. Except, of course, for the Shalom part.

In the portion of R’eh which we read this past shabbat, the laws of the Shmita year stipulate that all loans must be repaid on the 7th year. The problem was that as the 7th year approached, poor people couldn’t get loans because the wealthy knew it would become, in effect, a gift. These were not generally the kind of business loans or mortgage loans we are so used to in our time. These were generally loans intended to help a person through a bad financial patch, a higher form of Tzedakah if you will, one in which the lendee could retain a sense of dignity. The wealthy, in this context, are told in our portion to open their hands to lend the poor sufficient funds for what they need even when the 7th year is approaching.

Our Torah Sparks use this directive as an opportunity to ask why there is no blessing for giving Tzedakah. Most positive commandments do require a blessing; why not this incredibly important one?

1. Rashba of the 13th century says that we don’t know whether the poor person will accept the tzedakah when we offer it. If we are to follow the natural format of a mitzvah blessing, one normally pronounces the benediction prior to performing the act in question. If the person who needs help refuses the tzedakah proferred, the blessing would be a case of using God’s name in vain. After all, one can’t give tzedakah alone!
2. Rabbi Aharon Yaakov Greenberg of the 20th century says you may not recite a blessing over someone else’s misfortune. It’s one thing to be thankful we are wealthy enough to share some of what we have. When the implication is that someone else has to be less fortunate, it’s a case of unintended shadenfreude.
3. Finally, Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Pryshcha of the 18th-19th century says the truly pious would go through such an elaborate ritual production to prepare for such an important mitzvah that by the time the tzedakah was given, the poor person would starve.

The reasons for avoiding blessings for Tzedakah put the many blessings we use for greeting Shabbat in stark relief:

1. By pronouncing the blessings we are, by definition, observing Shabbat regardless of whether we fulfill all it’s ritual commandments. Although celebrating Shabbat alone is not at all recommended, it’s certainly possible and it would be a terrible waste to skip it altogether.
2. I am embarrassed that I know how to spell the name Sypher. Even more, I’m embarrassed that I know anything about her trial other than the fact that our justice system seems to be working reasonably well. Although it’s hard to avoid shadenfreude completely, I believe that Shabbat should be anti-shadenfreude day. At the very least, we should be able to set one day aside a week to avoid celebrating and glorying in the misfortune of others.
3. Shabbat does require significant preparation to pull off – cooking, cleaning, leaving work early enough to set the table, making the environment of the home such that it can be truly enjoyed. Edison said success is 99% perspiration & 1% inspiration; God said that success in life is 85% perspiration & 15% Shabbatspiration.

I’m not a betting man, but those sound like good odds to me.