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Chayei Sarah – The complex life of a matriarch

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The sidra Chayei Sarah, which begins with the death of Sarah, focuses initially – and in great detail, on Abraham’s purchase of a burial place for her in Hebron. Abraham then sends his servant on the quest to find a wife for Isaac, and we are introduced to Rebecca, who fulfils Eliezer’s requirement for God to show him a sign that he has met the right woman for his master’ son by offering water not only to him but to his camels. She marries Isaac, comforts him for the loss of his mother, takes on the role of the matriarch

And then “Abraham took another wife, whose name was Keturah. She bore him Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah. Jokshan begot Sheba and Dedan. The descendants of Dedan were the Asshurim, the Letushim, and the Leummim. The descendants of Midian were Ephah, Epher, Enoch, Abida, and Eldaah. All these were descendants of Keturah. Abraham willed all that he owned to Isaac; but to Abraham’s sons by concubines Abraham gave gifts while he was still living, and he sent them away from his son Isaac eastward, to the land of the East.” (Genesis 25:1-6)

Next we are told of the death of Abraham at the great age of 175,his burial by Isaac and Ishmael in the family tomb in Hebron where Sarah is already interred, and then the text rather dispassionately tidies up the family history by listing the descendants of his son by Hagar, Ishmael:

“This is the line of Ishmael, Abraham’s son, whom Hagar the Egyptian, Sarah’s slave, bore to Abraham. These are the names of the sons of Ishmael, by their names, in the order of their birth: Nebaioth, the first-born of Ishmael, Kedar, Adbeel, Mibsam, Mishma, Dumah, Massa, Hadad, Tema, Jetur, Naphish, and Kedmah. These are the sons of Ishmael and these are their names by their villages and by their encampments: twelve chieftains of as many tribes.— These were the years of the life of Ishmael: one hundred and thirty-seven years; then he breathed his last and died, and was gathered to his kin.— They dwelt from Havilah, by Shur, which is close to Egypt, all the way to Asshur; they camped alongside all their kin. (Gen 25:12-18)

At least three family deaths are recorded in this sidra, as well as the births of many more sons of Abraham by other women, and even some of Abraham’s grandchildren from these sons. Bible records their names and the fact that Abraham gives them gifts and sends them off eastward to live in places well away from where Isaac was living in the Negev.  Isaac is clearly  marked out as the sole heir to Abraham and the covenant.  Isaac marries Rebecca, the daughter of Abraham’s nephew Betuel, and the stage is set for the next chapter.

I described the final verses of genealogy and geography as “tidying up” the family tree before moving on to focus on the central characters going forward. It is important to acknowledge Hagar and Keturah, the wife/concubines of Abraham who between them provide him with seven sons and twenty two grandchildren at the time of recording. It is important to note that all the children of Abraham have value and their names recorded. The listing provides a genealogical base for the future – perhaps the most famous being the Midianite tribes and the those of Ashur.

But something else happens as a result of the recording of the names of these descendants –  we are left in no doubt that Isaac is different. He alone is to receive the covenant God had promised long before his birth. The text is making very clear that being a son of Abraham was insufficient qualification for this covenant.  It was a necessary one, but what was also necessary was that the covenant was to be continued through a son of Sarah.

Keturah is a mysterious figure. Unlike the narrative that immediately precedes her marriage to Abraham – the marriage negotiated between Rebecca and Isaac – we know nothing about Keturah  – not where she comes from, not who her family might be, not how Abraham chose her to be his wife. She does not speak. We don’t know her age, or whether she predeceases Abraham or lives on after his death. We don’t know where she is buried.  Some traditions suggest she is Hagar, married to Abraham after the death of Sarah. Rashi, quoting Midrash Bereishit Rabbah (61) says “This is Hagar. She was named Keturah because her deeds were as beautiful (sweet) as incense (Ketoret)”. Targum Jonathan also says “And Abraham added and took a wife, and her name was Keturah; she is Hagar, who had been bound to him from the beginning.”. Whereas Ibn Ezra says “Keturah is not to be identified with Hagar because Scripture explicitly states, But unto the sons of the concubines (pilagshim), that Abraham had, Abraham gave gifts (v. 6)” whereas Keturah is described as “isha” – a wife. (However in the first book of Chronicles  (1:32 – 33), Keturah is described as a פִּילֶגֶשׁ אַבְרָהָם – Abraham’s concubine.

The life that Keturah and Abraham have together is glossed over, only the sons seem to matter. And while the text is silent about Keturah, we may not notice immediately that it is silent also about Abraham – apart from the work he does to ensure that all his other sons have an inheritance and are sent out into the world away from Isaac.  Abraham lives almost forty years after the death of Sarah – yet we learn nothing of his life in that time, there are no more encounters with God, no relationship with any of his sons, no travelling or meeting others….

Our patriarchal tradition usually names people according to their father’s name, and ignores that of their mother.  Whether it be the Hebrew name for the purposes of ritual, or the secular tradition of taking one’s father’s surname as the default, the primacy of the male line is underscored in so many ways. Yet here the bible is reminding us of the deep importance of the mother.

There is a mystical tradition in Judaism that the essence of a person’s soul is shaped by the mother.  The spiritual identity of the mother directly influences her child’s soul from the time of conception and beyond the birth. This tradition is one of the reasons sometimes given for the matrilineal principle of Jewish status being conferred by the mother.  And this tradition bases itself on the importance of it being Sarah’s child – not Hagar’s, not Keturah’s – who is the one to take up and inherit the covenant promise.

There is a lot to be said about the women’s who bear the children of Abraham – Sarah, Hagar and Keturah. None of them have an easy life, each hopes to protect her sons from a father whose focus on God’s promise of descendants and homeland must have made him a somewhat difficult life partner.   Each of them seems to be a lonely and isolated figure – Sarah who has left Ur Chasdim with Abraham, leaving her family behind; Hagar the Egyptian concubine who will later find a wife for Ishmael from her own people; Keturah whose homeland and family is not mentioned at all. But that is for another day. 

Parashat Vayera – from Sarah to Maacah, who are the women behind the famous stories?

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The women in Sidra Vayera cry out to be noticed.   We begin with Sarah, inside the tent while her husband sits in the doorway and looks outwards. One of the travelling angels asks the question ו אַיֵּה שָׂרָה אִשְׁתֶּךָ  “Where is Sarah your wife?”, and when told she is in the tent makes the prophecy of the child who will be born to them. Where is Sarah? Just like her husband was described at the beginning of the sidra she too is now at the opening of the tent “פֶּתַח הָאֹהֶל”.   Abraham looks up and sees, Sarah hides behind the flap of the doorway and hears.

And what is recorded?  The view of Abraham who sees men where there are angels;  and the speech with its promise to Sarah, followed by her laughter at the news.

But then who does God respond to?  To Abraham. With a question about the motivation of Sarah.

God asks Abraham  ““Why did Sarah laugh, saying, ‘”  I will return to you at the same season next year, and Sarah shall have a son.” –  the child of the promise to Abraham is specifically the son of Sarah.

Sarah evidently hears, because she is frightened, and she lies to cover herself-  “I didn’t laugh!” only to get the direct reply to her from the divine messenger – “No, you laughed!”

Then follows the famous discussion between God and Abraham about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, after which we have an echo of the meeting of the messengers of God with Abraham at the beginning of the Sidra, when now his nephew Lot urges them to take up his hospitality, makes a feast for them gives them a place to rest.

Lot has two unmarried daughters still living in the family home, as well as his wife.  Unlike the story at the beginning  of the sidra, these woman are nowhere to be seen or heard.  When the inhabitants of the city mob the house and demand the foreign guests be given up to them to be raped, Lot does something I have never been able to make sense of. Yes, hospitality and looking after guests’ wellbeing is exceedingly important in the inhospitable environment of the desert regions, but protection of the guests cannot justify Lot’s proposal to the Sodomites.

Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you may do to them as you please; but do not do anything to the others, since they have come under the shelter of my roof.”  (19:8)

Clearly, the divine messengers are also not happy with this solution. They pull Lot into the house and then send out a bright light that blinds the mob outside.  And they tell him:

“Whom else have you here? In-laws, your sons and daughters [themselves]—anyone else that you have in the city—bring them out of the place. For we are about to destroy this place; because the outcry against them before GOD has become so great that GOD has sent us to destroy it.”

Lot goes to the households of his married daughters, but speaks only to the sons-in-law who thought he was playing games with them, or possibly he was drunk. And so, they ignored him. One has to wonder what might have happened had he spoken to his daughters.   And there is no record of him speaking to either his wife or his daughters in his own home.

The angels urge Lot to flee the city, but he prevaricates and delays, to the point where the angels take his hand and also the hands of his wife and daughters, taking them outside the city walls. What must his wife and daughters think? These strange men urging them, with physical force, taking them out of their home and out of the city?

The angels leave Lot and his household outside the city walls and tell Lot he must flee to the distant hills to save his life – the language is in the singular, it is Lot they are talking to, not the group. They tell him not to look back,  not to stop anywhere, lest he be swept away. Lot chooses this moment to negotiate – asking if he can instead flee to a nearby small town because he fears he will not reach the hills before the calamity would overtake him, and the angels graciously agree. He can go to the small town (Zoar) and it will be spared.  The focus in the narrative is entirely on Lot, on saving his life, not that of the family. So it is probably not surprising that Lot’s wife has not heard the instruction not to look back. Sulphurous fire rains down on the cities of the plain, Lot’s wife looks from behind him – an echo of Sarah hidden behind the tent doorway flap behind the messenger – she looks and understands what is happening to the place where she has left her married children and their families – and  וַתַּבֵּט אִשְׁתּוֹ מֵאַחֲרָיו וַתְּהִי נְצִיב מֶלַח  -we usually read this as she looked behind her and was turned into a standing pillar of salt.  But the verb v’tabeit is a hiphil form – she did not merely glance back at the destruction while running.  Instead the verb insists that she paid attention to what she was seeing – she considered carefully what she saw– a process that takes time and intention. And then she was not turned into something, she became something – a netziv melach. A standing object that was salty – could it be her tears as she stood and watched and understood the enormity of the destruction?  Could she have been transfixed in her grief and her horror, unable to move from her place. Whatever happened – she is no longer a character in the narrative.

Lot and his two daughters very quickly leave Zoar, afraid for their lives. After all they are strangers, and we know what can happen to strangers in these terrible cities of the plain.

There follows the only story entirely directed by women – the two daughters, believing themselves to have witnessed the end of the world, decide to get their father drunk, to procreate with him, and so to continue life in the world. One has to wonder about the inhabitants of Zoar, a city which was protected from the great calamity – but maybe Lot ensured that his daughters were not seen while they were there, and in turn they did not see that other people lived.

The decision of Lot’s daughters has far reaching consequences – this is the origin story of the Moabites (Mei-Av, from my father) and the Ammonites (ben Ammi, son of my people), two tribes who will forever be the enemies of Israelite people.

And now, again, we have a version of the wife-sister story – but this time Sarah does not speak at all, though later Abimelech defends himself by saying not only that Abraham has told him that she is his sister, but that Sarah had agreed that Abraham was her brother.   God intervenes in a dream to tell him that she is in fact a married woman and therefore forbidden to him. She is וְהִוא בְּעֻלַת בָּעַל׃ the property of her master, she is אֵשֶׁת־הָאִישׁ   the man’s wife.   Abraham claims that Sarah is indeed his sister, through another mother, and Abimelech seems to accept this when he tells Sarah he will give a thousand pieces of silver to “her brother”. 

And now the focus changes again. Sarah does indeed bear a child, whom Abraham names Isaac – meaning “he will laugh”.  Sarah contextualises the name by saying – “God has brought me laughter; everyone who hears will laugh for me.”

But at his weaning feast Sarah notices the son of Hagar the concubine – Ishmael – מְצַחֵק. It could mean laughing with Isaac, but it could mean making sport of him, toying with him, mocking him…. Whatever Ishmael is doing, Sarah will not allow him near her boy and demands that Abraham send Ishmael and Hagar away. Abraham is distressed, but God reassures him, telling him both that “whatever Sarah tells you, do as she says, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be continued for you.” And that “As for the son of the slave-woman, I will make a nation of him, too, for he is your seed.”

Hagar and Ishmael are sent away into the desert with food and water, but when the water runs out Hagar put her child under a bush and moved away some distance, unable to bear the sight of her child’s death.  The text tells us that Hagar cries bitterly, but that God hears the voice of the boy. To make the point it repeats it. That God hears the cry of the boy, and then Hagar is told that God hears the cry of the boy.  The voice of Hagar is evidently unheard.  Ishmael and Hagar survive, he grows up to be a skilled hunter, and his mother gets him a wife from Egypt – from her own people.

After another encounter with Abimelech, the sedra ends with the story of the Akedah. Sarah has quite vanished from the narrative, instead we hear that Abraham’s brother Nahor has eight sons from his wife Milcah, one of whom, Betuel, will become the father of Rebecca, and that his concubine Reumah, has borne him three sons and a daughter, whose name is Maacah.

So we end with the birth of a daughter and many sons to Abraham’s brother. Who is Maacah? It is hard to say, the name appears in bible at least nine times, belonging to nine different people. But maybe we should just note that this daughter, the child of a concubine rather than a wife, who is the first bearer of the name, exists. All the more so since the verbal root from which the name is derived means “crushed” or “oppressed”

A fitting end to a sidra where many women are crushed or oppressed, where their voices are rarely heard, and where their bodies are offered by their own male relatives to other men, in order to smooth their path.

Maybe the text is trying to tell us something  – that it notices all these women, that it hears and sees them, and that their attempts to be heard, their feelings and their very existence, will not be lost for those who look for them.

Lech Lecha – but should it have been Lechi Lach? Finding Sarah in the text

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“Then Abram journeyed by stages toward the Negev. There was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was severe in the land. As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, “I know what a beautiful woman you are. If the Egyptians see you, and think, ‘She is his wife,’ they will kill me and let you live. Please say that you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that I may remain alive thanks to you.” When Abram entered Egypt, the Egyptians saw how very beautiful the woman was. Pharaoh’s courtiers saw her and praised her to Pharaoh, and the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s palace. And because of her, it went well with Abram; he acquired sheep, oxen, donkeys, male and female slaves, jennies, and camels. But GOD afflicted Pharaoh and his household with mighty plagues on account of Sarai, the wife of Abram. Pharaoh sent for Abram and said, “What is this you have done to me! Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her as my wife? Now, here is your wife; take her and begone!” And Pharaoh put some men in charge of him, and they sent him off with his wife and all that he possessed.”   Genesis 12: 9-20)

Three times in the book of Genesis we have the strange story of the “wife-sister tale”, what the late feminist biblical scholar, Phyllis Trible, called “texts of terror”, where the woman is used as a chattel or commodity in the negotiations between the men.

Here in Egypt where Abram fears that the Pharaoh will take Sarai into his harem and kill Abram if he knows that Sarai is married to him; again a few chapters later when Abraham and Sarah meet Abimelech, the Philistine King of Gerar (Genesis 20), and finally when Isaac and Rebecca meet Abimelech in Gerar (Genesis 26).

In the story here in Parashat Lech Lecha, Abram persuades Sarai to lie both because he is afraid for his life. In the other two stories, at least Abram and Isaac tell the lie themselves rather than expect the woman to lie on their behalf, and commit herself to the unwanted attentions of another powerful man.

Abram is acutely aware of the beauty of his wife, indeed, he refers to it and to the danger it places him in should an Egyptian man see her and desire her. And his fear is borne out – her beauty is such that even the Pharaoh hears of it, and takes Sarai into his harem – but with the twist that Abram is given huge wealth as payment for her.

It seems that Abram is content with this arrangement – as the “brother” of the beautiful foreign woman he gains power and status. It takes God to intervene, and luckily for Sarai, God does.  Pharaoh and his household are afflicted with mighty plagues – a foreshadowing of events in the Book of Exodus. And apparently Pharaoh understands the reason for this great misfortune.

So much is left unsaid in this passage. How does Pharaoh know to ascribe the plagues to God’s displeasure on behalf of Sarai? The Midrash – Bereishit Rabbah – comes to the rescue:

“Rabbi Aḥa said: Even the beams of his palace were afflicted. *[This is the meaning of “The Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his household [beito],” the literal meaning of beito being “his house.” ] And everyone was saying: “It is over the matter of Sarai, Abram’s wife.” Rabbi Berekhya said: All the insolent ones have come in to touch the noblewoman’s shoe. [*This is a saying, referring to insolent behaviour on the part of lowly people who dare to touch the princess’s shoes, and are severely punished. The Midrash applies this saying to the members of Pharaoh’s household who acted disrespectfully toward Sarah.]
Throughout that night Sarah was prostrated on her face and saying: ‘Master of the universe, Abraham departed [from our home country] with a promise, and I departed only on faith. Abraham departed outside the cage, but I am in the cage.’ [*I am here is the cage with all these beasts.] The Holy One blessed be He said to her: ‘Everything I do, I do on your behalf.’ And all of them were saying: “…over the matter of Sarai, Abram’s wife.”
Rabbi Levi said: Throughout that night, an angel was standing with a rod in his hand. He said to her: ‘If you say: Strike, I will strike; if you say: Cease, I will cease.’ [*This is what is meant by “over the matter [al devar] of Sarai.” Al devar Sarai can also mean “by Sarai’s word.” ]
Why [was Pharaoh punished] to such an extent? It is because she kept telling him: ‘I am a married woman,’ but he would not keep away from her. [*“Over the matter of [al devar] Sarai, Abram’s wife” is expounded to mean: “by the words of Sarai, who said that she was Abram’s wife.”] “  Bereishit Rabbah 41)

But it introduces another problem – it looks like Sarai doesn’t tell the lie that she is Abram’s sister. Instead she prays, and her prayer is extraordinary – “Abram began this journey away from our home country with a promise from you, but I didn’t get that promise, I acted only in good faith in You – and where does that lead us? -Abram gets a great life, but I am trapped in this terrible situation”

She is up front with Pharaoh too, repeatedly telling him not to touch her, she is a married woman and not available to him.  Not a chattel to be bargained away, but a strong an courageous person of integrity.

In Parashat Lech Lecha we begin the story of Abram, the man described as Ivri – who crossed a border and became a Hebrew, the man whose covenants with God are foundational to the history of Judaism. And we see from the midrash that the story of this man who is often upheld as the role model for great faith is incomplete without the woman who journeyed with him – that her faith was greater than his, for she did not hide who she was, nor allow herself to be a passive actor in this story. The midrash fills in the missing details. God intervenes because of  Sarai’s prayer, and God’s reassurance to her – “everything I do, I do on your behalf” is a far greater commitment than the promise to Abram of an eventual homeland and myriad descendants. The scene is set for the divine blessing to be bestowed on both Abram and Sarai – it will ultimately be Sarah’s son with Abraham who will continue the covenant, not any of the other sons of Abraham listed in bible.

The pattern of these texts of terror, of male fear and even self-centredness, of women’s strength and faith, and of God’s interventions in history, raise many questions about how bible understood our patriarchs and matriarchs.  So often what bible presents as the male preserve of power is undermined or redirected by the women in the text – think of Sarah and Hagar, of Rebecca ensuring her favourite son gets the blessing from his blind father, of the race to bear sons between Leah and Rachel… But I think the relationship between God and Sarah shows a respect and a tenderness towards her that is particularly worth noticing. And I cannot help noticing that when Abram and Sarai have their names changed in this sidra, for him the addition of the letter “hey”  a letter used to signify the name of God, for her not only the “hey” but she loses the “yud”. The letter yud is used to denote the number 10. The letter hey denotes the number 5. It is as if Sarah has given half of her “ten” to Abraham, to bolster his faith – another hidden nudge to remind us that without the supportive presence of Sarah, Abraham might have been yet another biblical figure who fades into the text without changing it. 

Phyllis Trible wrote of the bible and its patriarchy (ironically quoting the book of Joshua)  “I face a terrible dilemma: Choose ye this day whom you will serve: the God of the fathers or the God of sisterhood. If the God of the fathers, then the Bible supplies models for your slavery. If the God of sisterhood, then you must reject patriarchal religion and go forth without models to claim your freedom.” (Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation Phyllis Trible Journal of the American Academy of Religion Vol. 41, No. 1 (Mar., 1973), pp. 30-48

Indebted as I am to the works of Phyllis Trible, I would venture to say that we can in fact find the models in the biblical text to claim our freedom, and in this parasha it is, quite unequivocally, the matriarch par excellence, our ur-mother Sarah.

Parashat Noach – The Tower of Babel from another perspective

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ירד ה’ לראות

Targum Onkelos – the translation of Onkelos, is a understood to be an authentic translation of the torah text into Babylonian Aramaic, probably composed around 80-120 CE.

In the Talmud (Megilla 3a:7) the rabbis thought it to be from the time of Ezra and Nehemiah and the return to Israel from Babylonian exile – around 450 BCE, showcased in the famous event on Rosh Hashanah when Nehemiah and Ezra read the whole Torah to the returned exiles at the water gate, translating and explaining as they went (Neh 8).

We read:

וְתַרְגּוּם שֶׁל תּוֹרָה, אוּנְקְלוֹס הַגֵּר אֲמָרוֹ? וְהָא אָמַר רַב אִיקָא בַּר אָבִין אָמַר רַב חֲנַנְאֵל אָמַר רַב: מַאי דִּכְתִיב: ״וַיִּקְרְאוּ בְּסֵפֶר תּוֹרַת הָאֱלֹהִים מְפוֹרָשׁ וְשׂוֹם שֶׂכֶל וַיָּבִינוּ בַּמִּקְרָא״. ״וַיִּקְרְאוּ בְּסֵפֶר תּוֹרַת הָאֱלֹהִים״ — זֶה מִקְרָא; ״מְפוֹרָשׁ״ — זֶה תַּרְגּוּם;

The Gemara asks: Was the translation of the Torah really composed by Onkelos the convert? Didn’t Rav Ika bar Avin say that Rav Ḥananel said that Rav said: What is the meaning of that which is written with respect to the days of Ezra: “And they read in the book, the Torah of God, distinctly; and they gave the sense, and they caused them to understand the reading” (Nehemiah 8:8)? The verse should be understood as follows: “And they read in the book, the Torah of God,” this is the scriptural text; “distinctly,” this is the translation, indicating that they immediately translated the text into Aramaic, as was customary during public Torah readings.

Quite who Onkelos was is impossible to know. There are those who consider him to be the same person as Aquila of Sinope, a convert and a student of Rabbi Akiva, who translated the Hebrew bible into Greek (possibly before his conversion) , and into Aramaic after converting.

We may never know who he was, but one characteristic stands out – the Targum Onkelos revises and mitigates language that might suggest that God has any kind of corporeality, or any anthropomorphic aspects. 

The other thing that the translation of Onkelos avoids is the sense of a spatial relationship between the heavens as the abode of the divine, and the earth.

So in the story of the Tower of Babel, when the biblical text (Gen 11:4-7) reads:

וַיֹּאמְרוּ הָבָה  נִבְנֶה־לָּנוּ עִיר וּמִגְדָּל וְרֹאשׁוֹ בַשָּׁמַיִם וְנַעֲשֶׂה־לָּנוּ שֵׁם פֶּן־נָפוּץ עַל־פְּנֵי כׇל־הָאָרֶץ׃

וַיֵּרֶד יְהֹוָה לִרְאֹת אֶת־הָעִיר וְאֶת־הַמִּגְדָּל אֲשֶׁר בָּנוּ בְּנֵי הָאָדָם׃  

וַיֹּאמֶר יְהֹוָה הֵן עַם אֶחָד וְשָׂפָה אַחַת לְכֻלָּם וְזֶה הַחִלָּם לַעֲשׂוֹת וְעַתָּה לֹא־יִבָּצֵר מֵהֶם כֹּל אֲשֶׁר יָזְמוּ לַעֲשׂוֹת׃

הָבָה נֵרְדָה וְנָבְלָה שָׁם שְׂפָתָם אֲשֶׁר לֹא יִשְׁמְעוּ אִישׁ שְׂפַת רֵעֵהוּ׃

And they said, “Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world.”  GOD came down to look at the city and tower that the mortals had built, and GOD said, “If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach. Let us, then, go down and confound their speech there, so that they shall not understand one another’s speech.”

Onkelos translates it as:

וַאֲמָרוּ הָבוּ נִבְנֵי לָנָא קַרְתָּא וּמַגְדְּלָא וְרֵישֵׁיהּ מָטֵי עַד צֵית שְׁמַיָּא וְנַעְבֵּיד לָנָא שׁוּם דִּילְמָא נִתְבַּדַּר עַל אַפֵּי כָל אַרְעָא:

וְאִתְגְּלִי יְיָ לְאִתְפְּרָעָא עַל עוֹבָדֵי קַרְתָּא וּמַגְדְּלָא דִּי בְנוֹ בְּנֵי אֱנָשָׁא:

וַאֲמַר יְיָ הָא עַמָּא חַד וְלִישָׁן חַד לְכָלְּהוֹן וְדֵין דְּשָׁרִיוּ לְמֶעְבָּד וּכְעַן לָא יִתִּמְנַע מִנְהוֹן כֹּל דִּחַשִּׁיבוּ לְמֶעְבָּד:

הָבוּ נִתְגְּלִי וּנְבַלְבֵּל תַּמָּן לִישָׁנְהוֹן דִּלָא יִשְׁמְעוּן אֱנַשׁ לִישַׁן חַבְרֵיהּ:

Then they said, Come, we will build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach the height of the heavens. Thus we will make ourselves a name, so that we will not be scattered all over the face of the earth. Adonai became revealed in order to punish them because of the building of the city and the tower that the sons of man built. Adonai said, Behold, they are one people, all having one language, and this is their first undertaking. Now will nothing be unattainable for them, [to do] whatever they have a mind to do?  Come, let us be revealed and jumble their language, that they will not understand one another’s language.

Why does Onkelos reject the idea of God descending to earth to see what is happening there?

The phrase “va’yered Adonai”  ירד ה’  appears in Tanach in a very few places – here in the story of the Tower of Babel, and once in potentia in Genesis 18:20 when “GOD said, “The outrage of Sodom and Gomorrah is so great, and their sin so grave! I will go down to see whether they have acted altogether according to the outcry that has reached Me; if not, I will take note.”

It appears twice in the book of Exodus, once at Sinai when God “descends on Mt Sinai and calls Moses up the mountain” (Ex 19:20) and again when Moses, having shattered the original tablets of stone on which were engraved the ten commandments, is told to come and repeat the process – this time God appears in a cloud next to Moses and declares the attributes of God (Ex 34:5).

The next time God “descends” is in the Book of Numbers, in the strange tale of the prophesying elders. The people are exhausted and frightened and complain against God, angering God and causing a fire to break out against them. They cried out, Moses prayed to God and the fire ends. But the people are hungry and demand meat to eat, remembering the fish, cucumber, melons, leeks, onions and garlic that were so plentiful in Egypt, whereas now all they have is manna to eat. The people complain and weep, distressing Moses and angering God, and Moses says to God “why do I have to carry the burden of these people alone? I would rather die than continue trying to lead them”  God’s response is to tell Moses to collect seventy elders of the people, bring them to the Tent of Meeting, and God will spread the burden of leadership from Moses alone to the seventy elders.  God then tells Moses to say to the people “Purify yourselves for tomorrow and you shall eat meat, for you have kept whining before GOD and saying, ‘If only we had meat to eat! Indeed, we were better off in Egypt!’ GOD will give you meat and you shall eat.” When Moses queries the logistics of feeding so many people the meat God appears to be promising, God asks “is there a limit to My power?” So Moses gathers the elders, and sure enough: “Then, after coming down in a cloud and speaking to him, GOD drew upon the spirit that was on him and put it upon the seventy elders. And when the spirit rested upon them, they spoke in ecstasy, but did not continue.” The end of the story is graphic and gory – an enormous number of quail appear, the people eat and eat and overeat, and God causes a plague among them and many of them die…..

And the final time that God “descends” in the Tanach – in Numbers 12, Miriam and Aaron are complaining about Moses and his marriage to the Cushite woman, and that they too have the gift of prophecy and leadership, not only Moses. God calls all three siblings to the Tent of Meeting and descends in a pillar of cloud, calls Miriam and Aaron forward and in no uncertain terms explains the very particular relationship with Moses that they do not share, and follows up by causing Miriam to be struck by a skin disease of pure white scaliness which causes her to be exiled from the camp until she is healed.

It would appear that when God descends it is either to demand more moral behaviour, or to punish those who are complaining about God or even challenging God’s decisions.  But there is also an element in these narratives of God revealing something particular about God-self – the covenant at Sinai, the organiser and provider of the exodus and sojourn in the desert with its concomitant expectations, and most clearly the unique nature of the divine relationship with Moses.

While much of bible has a sort of perpendicular dimension – God is most naturally to be found in the highest heavens, to be met or worshipped at the tops of mountains, a figure who might occasionally descend from there to earth, or send heavenly angels to do this on behalf of the divine, Onkelos rejects the imagery of God descending from one realm to another in favour of God revealing God’s self and purpose with acts of judgement.

The survivors of the great flood, traumatised and determined never to feel so vulnerable again, make a decision to reach into God’s domain by building a tower so high it reaches into the heavens. It is as if they are not only aiming to challenge God, but to venture into the divine domain, even to take on the role and responsibility of God. They are determined now to וְנַעֲשֶׂה־לָּנוּ שֵׁם פֶּן־נָפוּץ עַל־פְּנֵי כׇל־הָאָרֶץ  to make for themselves a name, to prevent them from being scattered across the earth.  The phrase echoes the story of Adam and Eve: the creation of names, the expulsion and scattering from a place where they feel secure and unified, to fend for themselves in a frightening environment.

It is as if the people imagine the way to protect themselves is to infiltrate the heavens and so they build a vertical bridge in order to claim that space.  Onkelos, living and writing a generation or so after the cataclysm of the destruction of the temple (or if some are to be believed living and writing after the Babylonian exile), reads the text with a different lens. What the people desire – a tower so high it reaches into the heavens – will not cause God to “descend” into our world, will not form a bridge or a ladder between domains. Instead, Onkelos sees the reaction of God not to come closer, not to inspect their work or discover something about their activity – Onkelos sees God choosing instead to reveal the very presence of God, to both punish and destabilise them.

In the garden of Eden, after the eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, God says (Genesis 3:20ff)

וַיֹּאמֶר  יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהִים הֵן הָאָדָם הָיָה כְּאַחַד מִמֶּנּוּ לָדַעַת טוֹב וָרָע וְעַתָּה  פֶּן־יִשְׁלַח יָדוֹ וְלָקַח גַּם מֵעֵץ הַחַיִּים וְאָכַל וָחַי לְעֹלָם׃ וַיְשַׁלְּחֵהוּ יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהִים מִגַּן־עֵדֶן לַעֲבֹד אֶת־הָאֲדָמָה אֲשֶׁר לֻקַּח מִשָּׁם׃

וַיְגָרֶשׁ אֶת־הָאָדָם וַיַּשְׁכֵּן מִקֶּדֶם לְגַן־עֵדֶן אֶת־הַכְּרֻבִים וְאֵת לַהַט הַחֶרֶב הַמִּתְהַפֶּכֶת לִשְׁמֹר אֶת־דֶּרֶךְ עֵץ הַחַיִּים׃ {ס}        

And the ETERNAL God said, “Now that humankind has become like any of us, knowing good and bad, what if one should stretch out a hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever!” So the ETERNAL God banished them from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which they were taken: humankind was driven out; and east of the garden of Eden were stationed the cherubim and the fiery ever-turning sword, to guard the way to the tree of life.

The first humans are sent out from Eden not because they ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but because having done so, they might next eat from the tree of eternal life – becoming immortal, a quality that belongs only to the divine.

Now the surviving humans are sent out from the plains of Shinar where they are building their city and tower to challenge the heavens, and their languages multiplied so that they cannot understand each other easily.

In the first story God has created a garden in which both human beings and God can co-exist, in the second people create a tower in which both human beings and God can be together – and both stories end in pain and distress.

I think that Onkelos rejects the whole idea of the creation of “shared space”, or of God in the highest space yet “descending to our world” as being somehow too dangerous to exist. Instead, he chooses an ineffable unknowable God, a God we cannot request or require, a God not in a far-off and separate domain, but one who is present even in our distress, a God who does not need to come and see what we are doing because God is already present, able to observe us at close quarters. In Onkelos’ translation, God chooses to make visible what the people have not understood – God is present and continues to be so, and that our role in this world is to be human beings who trust in God’s presence even when it is hard to see, rather than challenging God or trying on the role of divinity for ourselves.

There is a poem written on the wall of a cellar in Cologne during the second world war, the author is unknown, but I think Onkelos would have approved:

I believe in the sun
even when it is not shining
And I believe in love,
even when there’s no one there.
And I believe in God,
even when He is silent.
I believe through any trial,
there is always a way
But sometimes in this suffering
and hopeless despair
My heart cries for shelter,
to know someone’s there
But a voice rises within me, saying hold on
my child, I’ll give you strength,
I’ll give you hope. Just stay a little while.
I believe in the sun
even when it is not shining
And I believe in love
even when there’s no one there
But I believe in God
even when he is silent
I believe through any trial
there is always a way.
May there someday be sunshine
May there someday be happiness
May there someday be love
May there someday be peace….”

Bereishit – For Reishit God Created: Challah, Bikkurim, Ma’as’rot

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“Rav Huna said in the name of Rav Matana: The world was created for the sake of three things: For the sake of challah, for the sake of tithes, and for the sake of first fruits. What is the source? “In the beginning, [bereishit] *Or, for the sake of reshit. God created,” and reshit is nothing other than challah, as it is stated: “The first of [reshit] your kneading basket” (Numbers 15:20). Reshit is nothing other than tithes, as it says: “The first [reshit] of your grain” (Deuteronomy 18:4). And reshit is nothing other than first fruits, as it is stated: “The choicest of [reshit] the first fruits of your land…” (Exodus 23:19)”  (Genesis Rabbah 1:4)

. רַב הוּנָא בְּשֵׁם רַב מַתְנָה אָמַר, בִּזְכוּת שְׁלשָׁה דְּבָרִים נִבְרָא הָעוֹלָם, בִּזְכוּת חַלָּה, וּבִזְכוּת מַעַשְׂרוֹת, וּבִזְכוּת בִּכּוּרִים, וּמַה טַּעַם, בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים, וְאֵין רֵאשִׁית אֶלָא חַלָּה, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר (במדבר טו, כ): רֵאשִׁית עֲרִסֹתֵיכֶם, אֵין רֵאשִׁית אֶלָּא מַעַשְׂרוֹת, הֵיךְ דְּאַתְּ אָמַר (דברים יח, ד): רֵאשִׁית דְּגָנְךָ, וְאֵין רֵאשִׁית אֶלָּא בִּכּוּרִים, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר (שמות כג, יט): רֵאשִׁית בִּכּוּרֵי אַדְמָתְךָ וגו’.

We have other rabbinic statements about the world and three things – for example in Mishnah Pirkei Avot we read  “Shimon the Righteous was from the remnants of the Great Assembly. He would say, “On three things the world stands: on the Torah, on prayer/worship and on acts of lovingkindness.” Pirkei Avot 1:2

And  Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel says, “On three things the world stands: on judgment, on truth and on peace, as it is said (Zachariah 8:16), ‘Judge truth and the justice of peace in your gates.'”  (Pirkei Avot 1:18)

Much of Jewish philosophy is predicated on the relationship between God, Torah, Israel and/or Creation, Revelation, Redemption… but Rav Matana’s statement as reported by Rav Huna speaks of something even more foundational. 

Why did God create the world? This is a question that intrigues theologians of every stripe and in every era. And Rav Matana has an answer – for the sake of the three “reishit” found in the biblical text.  He ties this to the almost untranslatable “b’reishit”, reading it not as “at the first” (or for those who love the KJV version “in the beginning” but “for the first things”.

At first glance we can see that the reference is to three significant concepts in Jewish thought – Challah, Bikkurim (first fruits) and Ma’as’rot (tithes) are all things that the religious Jew living on the Land of Israel are expected to offer up rather than take for themselves, they are all offered to God both to acknowledge that God is the source of these products (and therefore the source of the blessing they bring), and to show gratitude that God has provided them.

All three are foods that we give away at least a part of – they remind us that we are not the owner of our provisions, that we have responsibility to feed and support others, that the world is created for us to share.

And in effect, all three are used in repeated iterations of ritual to remind us that ultimately we are dependent on God for our food and for our continued existence.

 As Moses warns the people in one of his final homilies, and as we take into our own Birkat Hamazon liturgy (Grace after Meals)

וְאָכַלְתָּ וְשָׂבָעְתָּ וּבֵרַכְתָּ אֶת־יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ עַל־הָאָרֶץ הַטֹּבָה אֲשֶׁר נָתַן־לָךְ׃ הִשָּׁמֶר לְךָ פֶּן־תִּשְׁכַּח אֶת־יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ לְבִלְתִּי שְׁמֹר מִצְוֺתָיו וּמִשְׁפָּטָיו וְחֻקֹּתָיו אֲשֶׁר אָנֹכִי מְצַוְּךָ הַיּוֹם׃

פֶּן־תֹּאכַל וְשָׂבָעְתָּ וּבָתִּים טֹבִים תִּבְנֶה וְיָשָׁבְתָּ׃ וּבְקָרְךָ וְצֹאנְךָ יִרְבְּיֻן וְכֶסֶף וְזָהָב יִרְבֶּה־לָּךְ וְכֹל אֲשֶׁר־לְךָ יִרְבֶּה׃

וְרָם לְבָבֶךָ וְשָׁכַחְתָּ אֶת־יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ הַמּוֹצִיאֲךָ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם מִבֵּית עֲבָדִים׃ הַמּוֹלִיכְךָ בַּמִּדְבָּר  הַגָּדֹל וְהַנּוֹרָא נָחָשׁ  שָׂרָף וְעַקְרָב וְצִמָּאוֹן אֲשֶׁר אֵין־מָיִם הַמּוֹצִיא לְךָ מַיִם מִצּוּר הַחַלָּמִישׁ׃

הַמַּאֲכִלְךָ מָן בַּמִּדְבָּר אֲשֶׁר לֹא־יָדְעוּן אֲבֹתֶיךָ לְמַעַן עַנֹּתְךָ וּלְמַעַן נַסֹּתֶךָ לְהֵיטִבְךָ בְּאַחֲרִיתֶךָ׃

וְאָמַרְתָּ בִּלְבָבֶךָ כֹּחִי וְעֹצֶם יָדִי עָשָׂה לִי אֶת־הַחַיִל הַזֶּה׃ וְזָכַרְתָּ אֶת־יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ כִּי הוּא הַנֹּתֵן לְךָ כֹּחַ לַעֲשׂוֹת חָיִל לְמַעַן הָקִים אֶת־בְּרִיתוֹ אֲשֶׁר־נִשְׁבַּע לַאֲבֹתֶיךָ כַּיּוֹם הַזֶּה׃ {פ}

וְהָיָה אִם־שָׁכֹחַ תִּשְׁכַּח אֶת־יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ וְהָלַכְתָּ אַחֲרֵי אֱלֹהִים אֲחֵרִים וַעֲבַדְתָּם וְהִשְׁתַּחֲוִיתָ לָהֶם הַעִדֹתִי בָכֶם הַיּוֹם כִּי אָבֹד תֹּאבֵדוּן׃

When you have eaten your fill, give thanks to the ETERNAL your God for the good land given to you.  Take care lest you forget the ETERNAL your God and fail to keep the commandments, rules, and laws that I enjoin upon you today.  When you have eaten your fill, and have built fine houses to live in, and your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold have increased, and everything you own has prospered, beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget the ETERNAL your God—who freed you from the land of Egypt, the house of bondage; who led you through the great and terrible wilderness with its seraph serpents and scorpions, a parched land with no water in it, who brought forth water for you from the flinty rock; who fed you in the wilderness with manna, which your ancestors had never known, in order to test you by hardships only to benefit you in the end— and you say to yourselves, “My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.” Remember that it is the ETERNAL your God who gives you the power to get wealth, in fulfilment of the covenant made on oath with your fathers, as is still the case. If you do forget the ETERNAL your God and follow other gods to serve them or bow down to them, I warn you this day that you shall certainly perish; like the nations that GOD will cause to perish before you, so shall you perish—because you did not heed the ETERNAL your God. (Deuteronomy 8:10-20)

As we dismantle our succot, used to remind us of the fragility of our existence and the importance of not only working with and caring for our environment to provide ourselves with enough food but also of recognising the ultimate Source of both environment and food, this midrash is a timely reminder that our physical world should never be taken for granted.

But Judah Loew ben Bezalel, known as the Maharal of Prague (1524-1609) had a different perspective on the items in this midrash.

His world view was ordered and structured – the natural realm of order (seder) and the exceptional or transcendent moments within it (nivdal).  A single unified reality can be layered into different dimensions, and those dimensions relate to each other either actively, or as acted upon. (P’al / Niphal)

And when the different levels or elements of reality interact, they can either stay the same and unique (yesodot) , become a mixture of two or more separate and recognisable units (ta’aravot), or else they become something entirely new (tark’ovot).

For the Maharal, the three things for which the world was created – challah, bikkurim and ma’aserot –reflect these three realities –

The bikkurim – the individual first fruits – are the yesodot.   The bikkurim are taken from the first ripening fruits of the seven species of Israel –  Deuteronomy 8:8 speaks of the Land of Israel as “A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees and pomegranates; a land of olive oil and (date) honey. Any farmer was commanded to notice the first ripened fig or bunch of grapes or pomegranate etc and to mark it, declaring that these are the bikkurim. They would then bring them to the Temple in Jerusalem and offer them to the priests.  The mitzvah is focused on individual fruits, and the actions of the individual farmer, and so exemplify the individual nature of this reality.

The ma’as’rot is different – it refers to the grains of wheat or barley, harvested at different times according to the summer and winter rains. One cannot separate a grain, so the farmer was to aggregate the harvested grains, separate out a tenth, which can then be offered. The scale of the tithe is very different to that of bikkurim – tithing grain is a much larger operation, yet the individuality of each grain remains distinct. It is as if the individual retains their individuality, but is also part of a bigger group – a community, a people. This is ta’aravot

And finally Challah – Challah dough is a mixture of ground grain (flour) and water, with maybe the addition of salt or of oil. But once mixed, none of these components can be unmixed, nor can they be recognised as their individual parts.  A new thing has been brought into being, a fully unified creation (tark’ovot). And this too is offered to God in gratitude and understanding.

The Maharal understands the three – bikkurim, ma’as’rot and challah – as being points on a journey of creation. We begin as self interested individuals, gradually we mix and join with others, forming relationships, propinquity,  community; and finally we create a new thing entirely, where each of us has an important role but where separation becomes unnecessary – we have completed the task we were created for.

And the Maharal  understood too that God created each stage, that each point on the journey is iterated and reiterated until we come to our final days.

So why was the world created for the sake of challah, bikkurim and ma’as’rot? One might say it was created to teach us humility, to teach us the importance of developing mutual relationships, to teach us community and the recognition of the value of each other, and to teach us gratitude.

Not a bad lesson to take with us into the coming year.

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם שֶׁהֶחֱיָנוּ וְקִיְּמָנוּ וְהִגִּיעָנוּ לַזְמַן הַזֶּה:

Blessed are You Eternal our God, Sovereign of the Universe, who has kept us alive and established us and brought us to this season.

Sukkot – Trust in God is important, but we also have to take ourselves in hand

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The two mitzvot associated with the festival of Sukkot can be found in the book of Leviticus, chapter 23. In verse 40 we are told “On the first day [of the festival] you shall take the fruit of goodly trees, branches of palm trees, boughs of leafy trees and willows of the brook…..”. These are the four species that we today know as the etrog, lulav, myrtle and willow. The rabbis taught that we hold the four species together and wave them in all of the directions of the compass, as well as upwards and downwards. In this way, we mobilize the winds that blow from all directions to bring rain for the new season of sowing and harvest.

Then in Leviticus 23: 42-43 we read, “You shall live in booths [Sukkot] seven days; all citizens in Israel shall live in booths, in order that future generations may know that I made the Israelite people live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt…..”.

So what is Sukkot about? Is it a harvest festival of thanks towards the end of the agricultural year, or is it a theological festival of reminder of our history and unrootedness? Is it a about richness and plenty in the land in which we live, or about fragility and vulnerability and a sense of mobility? How do we allow it to be about both – plenty and fragility, rootedness and journeying?

To begin to understand it, we can look to Rabbi Yitz Greenberg who contrasts Sukkot with Pesach. He points out, “Pesach celebrates a single, intense moment of freedom in the life of the Jewish people. At the exodus from Egypt, the divine erupted into human experience. Pesach is therefore a season of miracles. At the exodus the people were required only to take the first step, and God did the rest.

Sukkot, on the other hand, does not celebrate a moment of miracle, a moment when ordinary time ceased. On the contrary, Sukkot calls to mind a protracted period of wandering, of marking time. At Sukkot God is, as it were, hidden in the everyday. Sukkot reminds us of 40 years during which the people Israel had to deal with the basic requirements of everyday existence: water, food, the clothes on their backs, the roof over their heads. “

Greenberg’s insight is that these two festivals, Pesach and Sukkot, are two sides of the same coin. As human beings, we seek moments of “divine rapture”, moments that take us out of time, beyond the everyday. Such moments deepen our spiritual appreciation of life; they give us a sense of God’s grandeur. But our reality is that we spend most of our lives journeying through uncharted territory, facing the everyday demands that life places upon us, and a long distance from any moments of certain and wonderful encounter with God. Our daily life is routine, it is a constant struggle to keep up with what needs to be done, and our prayers are also to some extent routine and regular rather than heightened by awareness of God.

Just as Pesach and Sukkot represent two sides of the same coin of connection with God, so they fall at opposite ends of the Jewish year: Pesach on the 15th day of the first Hebrew month (Nisan), and Sukkot on the 15th day of the seventh month (Tishrei). Our lives revolve around these two poles of the Jewish year, which represent our longing for the miraculous, on the one hand, and our everyday experience of reality, on the other.

The two mitzvot of Sukkot focus on the basic needs of everyday life: water (represented by the waving of the four species) and shelter (represented by the sukkah). At Pesach, when we recall how the natural world was overturned and slaves became free, it is easy to acknowledge the impact of the divine on the life of our people but Sukkot reminds us that even in the absence of such dramatic moments of miracle, God is still at work in our lives and can be encountered in the everyday, the natural world, the regularity of fulfilling basic needs and living each day successfully.

Pesach and Sukkot remind us of the presence of God in our lives in very different ways. In the dramatic and in the ordinary – we can find God both at times of crisis and in the mundane routine of our lives, should we choose to really look.

A connection with the Divine Being is both nourishing of and challenging to our spiritual lives. Each festival has its way of directing our attention to that connection, and to the way the trajectories of our lives are developed. But there is another way to look at the symbols of Sukkot – specifically at the four species.

Rabbi Moni taught about the lulav and etrog using the verse from Psalms “all my limbs shall say, ‘God, who is like You?’ (Ps. 35:10). He said “This verse was only said in reference to the lulav. The spine of the lulav resembles the spine of a person; the hadass (myrtle) resembles the eye; the aravah (willow) resembles the mouth; the etrog resembles the heart. [King] David said: these are the most significant organs of the body, for they encapsulate the entire person. (Vayikra Rabbah 30:14)

It is a Midrash we know well, that in using the bundle of lulav and etrog together in worshipping God and in calling for the rains, we are taking our whole selves into the activity. But extend this idea a little further and you see that when we take hold of the lulav and etrog, we are in effect holding ourselves in our own hands, enjoying a rare chance to look at ourself from the outside. Just five days after Yom Kippur, when we have spent over a month in introspection and thought about ourselves and our lives, we are privileged to take one last external and objective look at ourselves. But more than that, we can see ourselves clearly but we also have ourselves literally in our own hands. We can decide in which direction to point ourselves in the year ahead and actually ‘take our own life in our own hands’ and start the process with a clarity of our own making, with our own decision making and with ownership of our own choices.

Sukkot, that most universal of festivals, rich with symbolism of our own vulnerability and dependence on God – yet at the same time with the powerful symbolism of our trust in our continued existence, is a time when we begin our journey anew, when we take ourselves in hand and make something of the year to come. Trust in God is all very well, the symbolism reminds us, but we have to rely also on our selves and not wait for some divine intervention to bring about the purpose of our lives, or to save us.

Tu b’Shevat – make us more tree

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Mishnah Rosh Hashanah begins with two different set of four dates – the first mishnah speaks of the four new years for taxation/institutional official purposes-

אַרְבָּעָה רָאשֵׁי שָׁנִים הֵם. בְּאֶחָד בְּנִיסָן רֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה לַמְּלָכִים וְלָרְגָלִים. בְּאֶחָד בֶּאֱלוּל רֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה לְמַעְשַׂר בְּהֵמָה. רַבִּי אֶלְעָזָר וְרַבִּי שִׁמְעוֹן אוֹמְרִים, בְּאֶחָד בְּתִשְׁרֵי. בְּאֶחָד בְּתִשְׁרֵי רֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה לַשָּׁנִים וְלַשְּׁמִטִּין וְלַיּוֹבְלוֹת, לַנְּטִיעָה וְלַיְרָקוֹת. בְּאֶחָד בִּשְׁבָט, רֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה לָאִילָן, כְּדִבְרֵי בֵית שַׁמַּאי. בֵּית הִלֵּל אוֹמְרִים, בַּחֲמִשָּׁה עָשָׂר בּוֹ:

They are four New Years: On the first of Nisan is the New Year for kings; And for (the order of) the Festivals, On the first of Elul is the New Year for animal tithes; Rabbi Elazar and Rabbi Shimon say: on the first of Tishrei. On the first of Tishrei is the New Year for years, (including for counting)Sabbatical Years and Jubilee Years, for planting young trees , and for (tithing) vegetables, On the first of Shevat is the New Year for the tree in accordance with the statement of Beit Shammai. But Beit Hillel say: The New Year for trees is on the fifteenth of Shevat.

The second Mishnah tells us about the four days of judgement:

בְּאַרְבָּעָה פְרָקִים הָעוֹלָם נִדּוֹן, בְּפֶסַח עַל הַתְּבוּאָה, בַּעֲצֶרֶת עַל פֵּרוֹת הָאִילָן, בְּרֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה כָּל בָּאֵי הָעוֹלָם עוֹבְרִין לְפָנָיו כִּבְנֵי מָרוֹן, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר (תהלים לג) הַיּוֹצֵר יַחַד לִבָּם, הַמֵּבִין אֶל כָּל מַעֲשֵׂיהֶם. וּבֶחָג נִדּוֹנִין עַל הַמָּיִם:

At four times of the year the world is judged: On Passover judgment is passed concerning grain; on Shavuot concerning fruits that grow on a tree; on Rosh HaShana, all creatures pass before Him like sheep [benei maron], as it is stated: “He Who fashions their hearts alike, Who considers all their deeds” (Psalms 33:15); and on the festival of Sukkot they are judged concerning water, i.e., the rainfall of the coming year.

At first sight, the connection between the two seems to be simply that the author of the Mishnah is grouping sets of four. But look a little closer and we see some quirks within the texts that draw attention – specifically I’m interested in the preponderance of trees – three of the eight special days mention them, and that in fact each time rather than mentioning trees (plural), the mishnah speaks of “tree” (singular) – even though the mishnaic word for tree – Ilan – has a regular plural.

The word for tree in bible is עץ  (eitz) whereas the rabbinic literature tends to use the word  ָאִילָן ilan”, influenced by the Aramaic, and also probably in order to distinguish more between different species of tree. 

Curiously in Biblical Hebrew, the word עץ seems to mean either ‘a’ tree (singular) or trees (plural), and when found in the plural form עצים (eitzim), the meaning is never “trees”, but “wood”.

It is likely to be a two letter root, though it may be derived from יעץ ya’atz – meaning to advise or to counsel, or the verb עצם atzam – to be strong or mighty, from which we get the noun  עצם etzem, meaning bones.  Or it could be connected to עצה meaning to bind or to attach.

What does this tell us about ancient Judaism’s view of trees?  Trees appear frequently in our texts and at critically important junctures in the narratives.. In the first story of Creation, on the third day God separated the sea from the dry land and then created the very first living things – trees.

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֗ים תַּֽדְשֵׁ֤א הָאָ֙רֶץ֙ דֶּ֗שֶׁא עֵ֚שֶׂב מַזְרִ֣יעַ זֶ֔רַע עֵ֣ץ פְּרִ֞י עֹ֤שֶׂה פְּרִי֙ לְמִינ֔וֹ אֲשֶׁ֥ר זַרְעוֹ־ב֖וֹ עַל־הָאָ֑רֶץ וַֽיְהִי־כֵֽן׃

And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation: seed-bearing plants, fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so. (Genesis 1:11-12)

In the second creation story we read וַיִּטַּ֞ע יְהֹוָ֧ה אֱלֹהִ֛ים גַּן־בְּעֵ֖דֶן מִקֶּ֑דֶם וַיָּ֣שֶׂם שָׁ֔ם אֶת־הָֽאָדָ֖ם אֲשֶׁ֥ר יָצָֽר׃

The ETERNAL God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and placed there the Human who had been fashioned.

וַיַּצְמַ֞ח יְהֹוָ֤ה אֱלֹהִים֙ מִן־הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה כׇּל־עֵ֛ץ נֶחְמָ֥ד לְמַרְאֶ֖ה וְט֣וֹב לְמַאֲכָ֑ל וְעֵ֤ץ הַֽחַיִּים֙ בְּת֣וֹךְ הַגָּ֔ן וְעֵ֕ץ הַדַּ֖עַת ט֥וֹב וָרָֽע׃

And from the ground the ETERNAL God caused to grow every tree that was pleasing to the sight and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and bad.  (Genesis 2:8-9)

It seems as if the creation of trees and the creation of human beings are intimately connected. Each are at the pinnacle of their category of creation.

The midrash (Kohelet Rabbah 7:13) tells the following story ““When God created the first human being he took him and showed him all the trees  of the Garden of Eden and said to him, ‘See my works, how beautiful and praiseworthy they are. And everything that I created, I created it for you. Be careful not to spoil or destroy my world–for if you do, there will be nobody after you to repair it.’”

God tells Adam that the trees were created for human beings, and warns him that any damage to them will be irreparable – beautiful trees created for humanity must be cared for scrupulously. The lives – and potentially the deaths – of trees and humanity are intertwined.

This is, I think beautifully embedded in the idea of our bones being connected to the word for tree. Beyond the idea of a human skeletal frame mirroring a tree, beyond the idea of bones being strong and supportive and connected, the bone is the innermost and most enduring part of the body and so the word comes also to express the core of a person, their essence or substance or ultimately, themselves.

Louis Ginzberg in his “Legends of the Jews” – a compendium of stories and midrashim in Jewish text, tells us

The  main  creation  of  the  third  day  was  the  realm  of  plants,  the  terrestrial  plants  as  well  as  the  plants  of  Paradise. First  of  all  the  cedars  of  Lebanon  and  the  other  great trees  were  made.  In  their  pride  at  having  been  put  first, they  shot  up  high  in  the  air.  They  considered  themselves the  favoured  among  plants.    Then  God  spoke,  ”  I  hate  arrogance  and  pride,  for  I  alone  am  exalted,  and  none  beside,” and  He  created  the  iron  on  the  same  day,  the  substance  with which  trees  are  felled  down.  The  trees  began  to  weep,  and when  God  asked  the  reason  of  their  tears,  they  said :  ”  We cry  because  You have created  the  iron  to  uproot  us  therewith. All  the  while  we  had  thought  ourselves  the  highest  of the  earth,  and  now  the  iron,  our  destroyer,  has  been  called into  existence.”  God  replied :  ”  You  yourselves  will  furnish

the  axe  with  a  handle.  Without  your  assistance  the  iron will  not  be  able  to  do  aught  against  you.”  ”  (Ginzburg legends of the Jews Creation of the World 19)

Deuteronomy 20:19 speaks of behaviour in war,

כִּֽי־תָצ֣וּר אֶל־עִיר֩ יָמִ֨ים רַבִּ֜ים לְֽהִלָּחֵ֧ם עָלֶ֣יהָ לְתׇפְשָׂ֗הּ לֹֽא־תַשְׁחִ֤ית אֶת־עֵצָהּ֙ לִנְדֹּ֤חַ עָלָיו֙ גַּרְזֶ֔ן כִּ֚י מִמֶּ֣נּוּ תֹאכֵ֔ל וְאֹת֖וֹ לֹ֣א תִכְרֹ֑ת כִּ֤י הָֽאָדָם֙ עֵ֣ץ הַשָּׂדֶ֔ה לָבֹ֥א מִפָּנֶ֖יךָ בַּמָּצֽוֹר׃

“When in your war against a city you have to besiege it a long time in order to capture it, you must not destroy its trees, wielding the axe against them. You may eat of them, but you must not cut them down. Are trees of the field human to withdraw before you into the besieged city? “

While we traditionally read the last part of the verse as if it is a question, many commentators note that the literal meaning is not interrogative, but instead translates as “for a human is a tree of the field” (see for example BT Ta’anit 7a, or the comment of Ibn Ezra (ad loc) man is a tree of the field… In my opinion…The meaning is as follows: You may eat of them, but do not cut them down, for man is a tree of the field (i.e., the life of man depends on the trees of the field).

The interconnectedness of human beings and trees can be found all over our texts – from the trees in the Garden of Eden whose forbidden fruit is the catalyst to humans leaving that place, to the Proverb (3:18) that Torah is “Etz Chaim” a tree of life to all who grasp it עֵץ־חַיִּים הִיא לַמַּחֲזִיקִים בָּהּ וְתֹמְכֶיהָ מְאֻשָּׁר׃.  Trees provide shade and security in multiple narratives, most notably when Abraham sits under the oak trees of Mamre when he is visited by the angels who will announce the birth of Isaac, gopher wood  is used in the building of Noah’s ark, olive branches signpost the existence of dry land at the end of the great flood, Deborah sits under a palm tree to act as Judge. Bezalel makes the ark of the covenant from acacia wood, Aaron’s rod blossoms into an almond tree, and of course there is reference to cedars and cypress and olives and figs throughout the text. Trees accompany us through life, and even mark our graves (for example Deborah the nurse of Rebecca is buried under an oak and the place named “alon bacut – a tree of weeping). They are with us in the desert, in the mountains, on the plains – and in exile.  They act as sentry and as shade, signal the presence of water in dry lands and produce essential foods – olives, figs, pomegranates and dates….

So it is possibly not surprising that we have a particular blessing for seeing fruit trees in blossom. However this blessing is unusual, indeed it is unique, for in no other blessing do we refer to any natural being or event as being “of benefit to human beings”. We don’t bless the rain like this, nor crops, nor sunshine nor animals nor food nor wine –it is only when we see more than one flowering fruit tree together that this blessing is invoked.

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה
יהוה אֱלֹהֵֽינוּ
מֶֽלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם
שֶׁלֹּא חִסֵּר בְּעוֹלָמוֹ כְּלוּם
וּבָרָא בּוֹ בְּרִיּוֹת טוֹבוֹת
וְאִילָנוֹת טוֹבוֹת
לְהִתְנָאוֹת בָּהֶן בְּנֵי אָדָם׃

Blessed are you, Adonai our God, ruler of the universe
who has made nothing lacking in the world at all, 
but Who created a good creation and good trees
for the children of Adam to benefit from them

To return to the midrash: in Bereishit Rabbah we read that as a response to the arrogance of the trees, God is said to have created iron on the same day. The trees cried out in fear – God had created the very material that would be used to destroy them. God’s response is telling – indeed there is the possibility of an axe being used to fell trees, but for such a destruction the trees would have to play a part – the handle of any axe would of necessity be made from wood.

I think of this story every time Tu b’Shevat comes around, and we focus on environmental ethics and ecological need. We often remind ourselves with the midrash from Kohelet that the world was created for human beings, but that if we damage it there is no one who will be able to put it right afterwards. This  is a frightening thought – there are long term and unmitigable consequences to our behaviour towards our world. But I think we should also remind ourselves that when great damage is done, it requires our participation or at the very least our assent. Environmental damage is done not by “others” with no connection to ourselves, but we have to admit that we too are part of the process.  Whether it is the clearing of rain forests for planting crops or palm trees for their oil. Whether it is the plague of plastic pollution in the oceans as well as on land, or the greenhouse gasses, emissions from transport vehicles of all kinds, food waste and food miles…. – we all partake of the creation of the damage. We are the wooden handle holding the iron blade, we are complicit.

I think it is almost impossible not to be party to the damage, though it is good for us to educate ourselves to mitigate our contribution. And trees also teach us that there can be growth and regeneration if the destruction is halted. The very word means has meanings of connection, of strength and wise counsel. And how often have we seen a tree stump regrow – be it the very real sycamore gap tree by Hadrian’s wall (https://www.npr.org/2024/08/01/nx-s1-5060047/sycamore-gap-tree-regrowth-go-tree-go) or the messianic metaphor in the prophesy of Isaiah (11:1-3) that A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. /2 The Spirit of the Eternal will rest on him— the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord—3 and he will delight in the fear of the Lord”.    Trees can, and do, regenerate.

We should maybe be “more tree”. Planted firmly on the earth and reaching up into the sky, Generous with our offerings to the world – the fruit and flowers of trees sustain not only human beings but many wild animals and birds. Bringing beauty and stability and strength and comfort to the world -trees provide shade and security and homes for many insects and birds.

Even to begin to understand our connectedness to nature,  to begin to mitigate our actions and our assent to the damage being done in our world, so that with small changes in behaviour we can make a difference, that I think is what these texts are telling us.

Tu biShvat is a date to focus our attention. And I think the date – even the disagreement about the date – is an important signal to us. It is the only  “new year” not to fall on the first of the month, but instead on the new moon. Discussion around the chosen date recognises that it fits no obvious good time for planting, or for the blossom to be open and seen – instead the traditional commentators make rather random claims that the rain is “mostly fallen” – it is still within the rainy season in Israel, a terrible time to plant as any gardener will advise.  So why claim a date that cannot be said to be seasonal for the calculation of tax of the fruit of trees? I think because tradition wants us to look further than the dry calculation of tithing and accountancy, to think about the importance of trees in our world, and to remind us of their deep connection to us.

In the poem by Max Halperin

Aseini K’Ilan: Make Me Like A Tree, Max Halperin
Make me like a tree rooted on the water, with fruit to give in its time.
Make me like lightning descending from the sky, illuminating the earth for a moment.
Make me like rain, light or heavy, that gives strength to a tired world.
Make me like wheat, simple and common, that brings forth our bread from the earth.
Make me like myrtle aside the lulav, that gives its color to joy.
Make me like a red rose with thorns, beautiful and strong in its way.
Make me like an olive with pure oil, a symbol of serenity and our dedication.
Make me like the sun that rises with us, which colors the sky with its light.
Make me like the dew on the grass, making the land glimmer at each dawn.
Make me like the sea, vast and unified, which renews the shore and itself.
Make me like a windflower, little and tall, a dot of color in the winter fields.
Make me like the moon alight in the darkness, smiling from among the stars.
Make me like the desert, open on all sides, strengthening all who trust it.
Make me like a river on the forest floor, rushing to enliven its world.
Make me like a bush with colorful flowers, beautifying its surroundings with its presence.
Make me like a cloud in a blue expanse, and its community that dances with the spirit.
Make me like an unripe fruit on its branch, constantly growing and sweetening.
Make me like nectar within a flower, feeding the smallest animals.
Make me like a rainbow against the gray, a promise of improving times.
Make me like a pomegranate with many seeds, a symbol of new beginnings.
Make me like a lily resting on the water, reaching up from the depths.
Make me like an apple waiting on its tree, prepared to ripen at its time.

עֲשֵׁנִי כְּאִילָן שָׁתוּל עַל הַמַּיִם, עִם פֵּרוֹת לָתֵת בִּזְמַנּוֹ

.עֲשֵׁנִי כְּבָרָק יוֹרֵד מִן שָׁמַיִם, שֶׁמֵּאִיר אֶת הָעוֹלָם לִשְׁנִיָּה

.עֲשֵׁנִי כְּגֶשֶׁם קַל אוֹ כָּבֵד, שֶׁנּוֹתֵן כֹּחַ לְעוֹלָם עָיֵף

.עֲשֵׁנִי כְּדָגָן פָּשׁוּט וְרָגִיל, שֶׁמּוֹצִיא לַחְמֵנוּ מִן הָאָרֶץ

.עֲשֵׁנִי כַּהֲדַס עַל יַד הַלּוּלָב, שֶׁנּוֹתֵן רֵיחוֹ לְשִׂמְחָה

.עֲשֵׁנִי כַּוֶּרֶד אָדֹם עִם קוֹצִים, יָפֶה וְחָזָק בְּדַרְכּוֹ

.עֲשֵׁנִי כַּזַּיִת עִם שֶׁמֶן זַךְ, סֵמֶל שֶׁל שַׁלְוָה וְשֶׁל חֲנֻכָּתֵנוּ

.עֲשֵׁנִי כְּחַמָּה עוֹלָה אִתָּנוּ, שֶׁצּוֹבַעַת הַשָּׁמַיִם עִם אוֹרָה

.עֲשֵׁנִי כִּטְלָלִים עַל הַדֶּשֶׁא, הַמְּנַצְנְצִים עַל הָאָרֶץ בְּכָל זְרִיחָה

.עֲשֵׁנִי כַּיָּם גָּדוֹל וּמְאַחֵד, שֶׁמְּחַדֵּשׁ אֶת הַחוֹף וְאֶת עַצְמוֹ

 .עֲשֵׁנִי כְּכַלָּנִית קְטַנָּה וּגְבוֹהָה, נְקֻדָּה שֶׁל צֶבַע בִּשְׂדוֹת הַחֹרֶף

.עֲשֵׁנִי כַּלְּבָנָה נָגַהּ בַּחֹשֶׁךְ, הַמְּחַיֶּכֶת מִתּוֹךְ הַכּוֹכָבִים

.עֲשֵׁנִי כַּמִּדְבָּר פָּתוּחַ בְּכָל צַד, שֶׁהֶחֱזִיק אֶת כָּל שֶׁהֶאֱמִין בּוֹ

.עֲשֵׁנִי כְּנָהָר עַל רִצְפַּת הַיַּעַר, שֶׁרָץ לִחְיוֹת עוֹלָמוֹ

.עֲשֵׁנִי כִּסְנֶה עִם פְּרָחִים צִבְעוֹנִים, יָפֶה סְבִיבָתוֹ עִם נוֹכְחוּתוֹ

.עֲשֵׁנִי כְּעָנָן בָּרָקִיעַ כָּחֹל, וּקְהִלָּתוֹ שֶׁרוֹקֶדֶת עִם הָרוּחַ

.עֲשֵׁנִי כְּפָגָה עַל עֲנָפָהּ, גְּדֵלָה וּמוֹתֶקֶת תָּמִיד

.עֲשֵׁנִי כְּצוּף בְּתוֹךְ הַפֶּרַח, מַאֲכִיל לְהַחֲיוֹת הַהֲכִי קִתְנוֹת

.עֲשֵׁנִי כְּקֶשֶׁת כְּנֶגֶד הָאָפֹר, הַבְטָחָה לִזְמַנִּים מְשֻׁפָּרִים

.עֲשֵׁנִי כְּרִמּוֹן עִם גַּרְעִינִים רַבִּים, הַמְּבַשֵּׂר לְהַתְחָלוֹת חֲדָשׁוֹת

.עֲשֵׁנִי כְּשׁוֹשָׁן נָח עַל הַמַּיִם, שֶׁהוֹשִׁיט כִּתְרוֹ לְמַעְלָה מֵהָעֵמֶק

.עֲשֵׁנִי כְּתַפּוּחַ מְחַכֶּה עַל עָצוּ, נָכוֹן לְבַשֵּׁל בְּעִתּוֹ

Shemot: God and we are both in the process of becoming. We will be what we will be.

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When Moses first encounters God he asks for God’s name so as to be able to prove to the Israelites that he did indeed meet their ancestral deity, and God tells him not a name he will understand, but to say “Ehyeh asher Ehyeh – I will be what I will be – tell them Ehyeh sent you to them”

 The word Ehyeh is the first person future of the verb ‘to be’, and suggests that God is not a fixed and definable figure, knowable nameable and therefore predictable to human beings, but is rather an evolving, mysterious and dynamic power that is always in process of becoming more than what it was or is. The implication is that God grows and changes through contact with us, just as we grow and change in contact with God.

In the earliest books of the Hebrew bible God is very present – God speaks to individuals, walks with them, appears in our world.  Encounters with God are recognised as being what they are, the significance is understood.  And while much of the language describing the experience is of necessity quite simple and concrete – walking with, appearing, speaking – signs and wonders, outstretched arms, and so on, the writers of the text knew quite clearly that the real encounter was complex and abstract.  There is no language even to begin to paint the sense of the evolving, mysterious and dynamic power which is always in process, always becoming rather than merely being.  God may have been revealed to individuals, but making a sensible remembrance of that revelation is beyond the skills of human transmission.

Increasingly it seems to me we are losing the ability to communicate real religious experience as we more and more try to define, describe and explain everything around us, and more and more we seek to explain God.  Scriptural literalists take refuge in the minutiae of the meaning of the bible as they read it; secularists scoff at what they see as the inability to transmit coherent systems of understanding; people searching for spiritual depth are put off by the archaisms or anthropomorphisms.  How do we get across the reality of our encounters with God, the vibrancy of them, the totality of that transient understanding that has nothing to do with language?   How do we begin to recognise God, to recognise the significance of our meetings with God when we have no framework to do so? 

Every generation has created its own language for its religious encounters – the rabbis of the Talmud say that there are 70 names for God within the Hebrew bible, and they created many more. The mystics created the name EIN SOF – meaning “the entity without end”. The truth is that even after having called God every possible word, we still would not come close to revealing the mystery of the identity of God.  But that doesn’t give us the reason not to try to come closer.   Every generation is responsible for understanding God in its own way.  If God is truly always becoming as well as always being, then what God is in the process of becoming must have something to do with us and our own evolving, our own developing, our own relationship with God. 

If we are serious about our Judaism we have to base ourselves on the understanding that our own process is connected to God’s, the imperative for our continual ‘becoming’ is a reflection of Gods continual ‘becoming’, God is bound up with us and we with God: as God says at Sinai “You will be my people and I will be your God”. There is within such a statement the almost-heresy – if we no longer choose to be God’s people then God will no longer be our God.

For God to work in our world, we have to do God’s work. That we are partners with God in the world, Co-creators with God, is not a pious statement: it is an imperative we should not take lightly. God always ‘is’ regardless of what we do or don’t do, but what God ‘becomes’ is in our hands.

Vayechi: the deathbed blessing that bequeaths the certainty that the people and the land have an indissoluble bond.

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Twice in this sidra, Jacob issues instructions about his burial.  The first time he speaks to Joseph alone, and the conversation is brief –“Don’t bury me in Egypt, bury me in the family tomb”

“And the time drew near that Israel must die; and he called his son Joseph, and said to him: ‘If now I have found favour in thy sight, put, I pray thee, your hand under my thigh, and deal kindly and truly with me; bury me not, I pray thee, in Egypt.  But when I sleep with my fathers, carry me out of Egypt, and bury me in their burying-place.’ And he said: ‘I will do as you ask.’  And he said: ‘Swear to me.’ And he swore it. And Israel bowed down upon the bed’s head. (Genesis 47:29-31)

But when the instruction is repeated shortly before his death, it is done in front of the whole family, and is much more detailed. Nothing is superfluous in biblical text, so what can we learn from this comprehensive deathbed request? Firstly, this final instruction is given to all of his sons, rather than just to Joseph. The language used with Joseph is framed as a request “If I have found favour with you, then please…..” and he then makes a formal ceremony of Joseph’s agreement with the swearing of an oath. With the other sons we have the firmer language of instruction that will – must – be obeyed. But possibly the most important difference is the framing of the two countries, Egypt and Canaan.  When Jacob requests Joseph it is to ensure he will not be left in Egypt. When Jacob instructs the brothers about his final journey it is to describe the place in Canaan where he will be brought – given in greater detail than when Abraham bought the land – not only the location of Machpela near Mamre, bought from Ephron the Hittite – but also the clarity of who is buried there – Abraham and Sarah his wife, Isaac and Rebekah his wife. Leah (sadly not described as a wife).

“And he commanded them, and said to them: ‘I am to be gathered to my people; bury me with my fathers in the cave that is in the field of Ephron the Hittite, in the cave that is in the field of Machpela, which is before Mamre, in the land of Canaan, which Abraham bought with the field from Ephron the Hittite for a possession of a burying-place.  There they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife; there they buried Isaac and Rebekah his wife; and there I buried Leah. The field and the cave that is therein, which was purchased from the children of Heth.’  And when Jacob made an end of charging his sons, he gathered up his feet into the bed, and expired, and was gathered unto his people.” (Genesis 49:29-33)

When talking with Joseph, his father treats him carefully – the burial in Canaan is requested briefly, the desire not to be buried in Egypt rather more forceful, but even so the language is that of asking for a kindness from someone who may or may not grant it. What stands out however is the swearing of the oath and the choreography of this event – the placing of the hand under the thigh, the act of swearing that he would fulfil the request. It is reminiscent of the conversation between Abraham and the unnamed elder servant of his household who ruled over his estate: “Abraham was old, advanced in years … and Abraham said to the senior servant of his household, who had charge of his entire estate, ‘Put your hand under my thigh and I will make you swear by the Lord … that you will not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites amongst who I live..” (24:1-4)

The two oaths – one to ensure that Isaac did not marry a local Canaanite girl nor leave the land himself, the other to ensure that Jacob would not be buried in the local Egyptian way, but would be returned to the land of his ancestors, resonate with each other. They build into the narrative the primacy of the land that has been promised, the land that will become known as Israel. And at the same time they reject the “other” culture, the local culture of Canaanites or of Egyptians, in favour of the covenantal culture being formed between the people of Israel and God.

Isaac is perceived as being too easily swayed – either by the local pagan tribes should he marry one of their daughters, or that in leaving the land he might never return. Jacob now is concerned that his own children should not themselves be swayed – either into adopting Egyptian traditions or to remain in exile from the land of their ancestors. Joseph, who had left the land as a very young lad, has already married an Egyptian, taken an Egyptian name, and brought two children into the world who might easily become fully identified with Egyptian peoplehood and lose their patrimony. Jacob deals with that by blessing and essentially adopting the boys as his own. The other brothers are in a way more complex – their identity may flow in any direction – and Jacob is determined they will retain their Hebrew identity and connection to the land of Israel. So he describes in detail not only the place for his burial, but echoes the narrative of who bought it and why, who of their forebears is buried there, pressing home the reality that this is their real place, the place to which they must return, and the covenant with God that they must retain.

As Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch comments: (on Genesis 47: 27-29)

“Jacob who had lived seventeen years in Egypt, must have noticed what a powerful influence the “being gripped by the land” (47:27) was beginning to have on his descendants. How they had already begun to see the Jordan in the Nile, and to find in their stay in Egypt no sad exile. This must have made him decide with such ceremonious solemnity the command that they should not bury him in Egypt, but that they should carry him to the land of their old true homeland. It was motive enough for him to say to them: You hope and wish to live in Egypt. I do not wish even to be buried there. This is also why he did not express this wish as Jacob, from his individual personal standpoint, but as “Israel” as bearer of the national mission, as a warning of the national future of his children.”  

The metanarrative here is about the identity of the descendants of Jacob – the “Children of Israel”. We take our patronymic not from Abraham or from Isaac, but from this flawed patriarch who struggled with God and with humanity and who prevails. Indeed the very first time the phrase “Children of Israel” is used in bible is within this very narrative at the Ford of Jabok – (Genesis 32:33) explaining the origin of not eating the sinew of the thigh vein because it was there that Jacob was wounded in his night-time struggle.

On his deathbed, Jacob is quite clearly doing all he can to infuse his sons with what we might now call a Jewish identity, to mitigate their Egyptian experience. He both refuses the siren call of Egypt and causes them to look towards the Land of Israel – specifically that land bought by Abraham to bury his wife, land to be part of the family holding in perpetuity. At this point the “Jewish identity” is a national identity – the earliest and deepest forms of our collective identity are not “religious” per se, but connected to land and to peoplehood. We are first and foremost a tribe and have tribal identity and behaviours. A tribe bound together in covenantal relationship with each other and with God, in shared stories and myths, in kinship with a sense of a shared lineage.

It is no accident that the children of Jacob become the exemplar for the twelve tribes of Israel. The first usage where the tribe is named as a tribe is in this sidra, (Genesis 49:16) when Jacob blesses Dan with the words

Dan shall judge his people, as one of the tribes of Israel.

 דָּ֖ן יָדִ֣ין עַמּ֑וֹ כְּאַחַ֖ד שִׁבְטֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל:

With the death of Jacob we come to a pivot in history. The covenant between the patriarchs and God must now be reframed into that between the people and God. The endpoint of the process will be at Sinai, when the formal relationship is sealed with the giving of Torah. And with the last demands of the dying Jacob, the process is set in motion.

The sons of Jacob are a complicated bunch. Born of four different mothers – two full wives whose own sibling rivalry echoes in the text, one deeply loved, the other merely tolerated; and two lesser wives, the servants and surrogates for the sisters. It is a recipe for jealous competition among the offspring of Jacob, who are quarrelsome, violent and antagonistic men. It is clear from the story of the only daughter, Dina, that Jacob has no control over his sons, whose pride and anger are barely contained.  

Now here they are in Egypt – having stayed for seventeen years already – dependent on the goodwill of Joseph, the brother so hated that they had plotted fratricide. Yet for all the imbalance of power among the brothers, life was clearly good in a material sense, and there was a clear danger that the brothers were accommodated to the situation and would forget their homeland, and the destiny of the covenantal promise Jacob had betrayed both his own father and twin brother to attain.

The tradition of a deathbed blessing is a powerful one. It is less an act of blessing than a statement of searing honesty, intended to hold the “blessed” to account and to shape their future in the light of their past. As Jacob says “gather yourselves together, that I may tell you what will happen to you in the later days….hear sons of Jacob, listen to Israel your father”

Jacob is manipulating time. He is holding both the past and the future together, setting his sons in both past behaviour and future destiny. He calls them the children of Jacob, and himself Israel their father. As time becomes increasingly fluid and unstructured, what becomes clear is that these men are to be the bridge between what was and what will be, they become less individuals and more exemplars, the covenant will not be passed to a single person but be shared and embodied in the peoplehood, divided into families, households and tribes. Whatever it was he did, it worked. As the book of Exodus opens some four hundred years later, we will find that the Jewish people identify themselves by their tribe as well as by their family name.

Jacob will bequeath the certainty that the people and the land have an indissoluble bond. By rejecting Egyptian burial in favour of being buried with his forebears, he recalibrates the mindset not only of his sons, but of the generations who will follow. They will never forget throughout centuries of slavery that they have a land to which they must return. They will never forget the names of their Hebrew tribe; they will not allow their identities to dissolve or to assimilate into the people among whom they live. Identity politics has been created and sustained. Joseph too will ask for his bones to be taken back home, and hundreds of years later those who rebelled against their slavery in the name of a never forgotten God and with the aim of return to a never forgotten land, will take his remains home with them.

We Jews have retained not only our tribal habits but also our attachment – often without being able to convey exactly why this attachment – to the land of Israel.  Sometimes that attachment is expressed in life, sometimes in death. The Talmud already records the traffic in dead bodies being brought for burial in Israel, noting with some irritation that it is better late than never. Religious Judaism as we understand it is a post-biblical phenomenon. The deeper identity we share is a tribal one – we are a people with a shared story that is formed in us and accepted without conscious activity. And our identity shapes how we see the world and how we behave within it.

The deaths of Jacob and Joseph bring to an end the narratives of sibling rivalry that has plagued us since the fratricide of the children of Adam and Eve. And it sets up a different model – not individuals but tribes, no longer patriarchs but people.

The identity politics begun at Jacob’s deathbed are with us still, as are the internal rivalries that fracture but never break the collective. Jacob reminds his sons, and us too, that wherever life takes us and however we live there is an older and deeper identity that is rooted in us and that we must pass on down the generations.

We read in Talmud (Shevuot 39a) “Shekol Yisrael areivim zeh ba’zeh” – the whole Jewish people are considered responsible for each other”. This principle is actually found in two different forms, one “zeh ba’zeh” and one “zeh la’zeh”, leading to interpretations about what else may be understood. We generally accept the rabbinic idea that every individual Jew has responsibility for the moral behaviour of others, but there is another perspective open to us – areivim can mean “to be responsible for” but it also mean “to mix together”. The Jewish people, kol or Klal Yisrael, is a diverse and heterogeneous tribe, with different customs and differing appearances, organised in different families and groupings, the sub-groups mixed sometimes uneasily together. But in spite of our disparate and varied ways we all remain authentic members of the tribe “b’nei Yisrael” – and this is the legacy of Jacob, to whose tribe we all belong.

Haftarah for Vayigash – approaching and confronting – but will it lead to reunification?

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Ezekiel, master of metaphors and mystical visions, lived in the days before and after the destruction of the First Temple, and preached to his fellow exiles in Babylon in the early years of the 6th century BCE. They were captives in a foreign country, and they never ceased to hope for an eventual return to their homeland. 

            The sidra tells us of the reunification of Joseph with his brothers.  Ezekiel foretells that the ten lost tribes will be reunited with the tribe of Judah, which, with Benjamin, had formed the southern kingdom.  As we know, history did not bear out Ezekiel’s hope. The Northern Kingdom disappeared into the mists of history, and we Jews – Yehudim – are so called because we are the inheritors of Judah – Yehudah.    Yet still we retain Ezekiel’s text, the story of his vision, because we see that it bears more than one interpretation, that the united Israel is more than the physical bringing together of the 12 tribes, but is the spiritual coming together of those who have held on to the vision, who are gathered in by being united in a return to covenant with God.

             The sidra begins with the words “Then Judah came near to him”.  This meeting between Judah and Joseph, and the dialogue which followed it, marks one of the most dramatic incidents in the whole narrative of the children of Jacob, the forefathers of the tribes of Israel, until their exile into Egypt.  The midrashic literature makes a great deal of this drawing near, and the meeting is used as the model of the later interpretational rule that ‘the histories of the ancestors are the paradigm for the children’.  Hundreds of years before the  historic national events, here in vayigash we have recorded a confrontation between the tribe of Judah, (who settled in the Southern Kingdom,) and what would later be known as the kingdom of Israel, the ten tribes led by the tribe of Ephraim, Joseph’s son – and in this version in Genesis the confrontation ends with reconciliation.

            It is curious that the haftarah chosen for this portion is that of Ezekiel’s vision of unification of the two kingdoms that existed in the land of Israel, for while one can read the text at its face value as being a reflection of the reunification of Joseph and his brothers, it is open also to reflecting on that reunification as superficial and temporary.  Just as one could make the case that there was never a single state in which all the tribes came together as one easy unity, but that instead there was always some resistance to merger, so too one could read that the approaching of Judah and Joseph remained just that – a coming closer without the final step which would have brought about true shalom, completion. 

            There are those who say that even at the earliest time of a nation state, during the days of David and Solomon, there were effectively already two separate kingdoms under a joint king who ruled both, (Y. Leibowitz) so that immediately after Solomon’s death the formal partition was inevitable.  So how then, if we see the two stories as intimately linked and commenting on each other, do we read of the approaching, the confrontation and the meeting of Joseph and Judah in Egypt, of what was really happening for the forefathers of the two kingdoms?

            Ezekiel prophesied after both the ten tribes of the Northern Kingdom and the tribes who lived in Judah had already been exiled.  His vision was that the two nations would return, and that this joint experience would somehow forge the full unification which had never quite taken place.  Jeremiah, his contemporary, foretold in a very emotional style the return of the ten tribes, and of course, there were Hosea and Amos, Northern prophets who foretold the destruction of the kingdom of Israel, who also added their view that in the future Israel would return.  We know all of these visions did not materialize in fact.  And I think that we cannot reconcile this knowledge by accepting the midrashic view that prophesies that have not yet been fulfilled must be in abeyance, ready to be fulfilled at the end of days.  Surely we must accept that the ten tribes, including the descendants of Joseph, were destroyed from the face of the earth, assimilated into other peoples, spiritually erased.  Even in Talmudic times Rabbi Akiva stated that “the ten tribes will not return”.  Even then he knew that they were lost.

            But the fact that the prophecies didn’t happen needn’t undermine our understanding in the prophetic tradition, for the truth is that Jewish prophecy isn’t about fortune telling, but about what will occur if we carry on the way we are doing, or else what ideally should happen – as the Tosafot says “No prophet foretells but what ought to occur, if there is no sin”. 

            Judah approaches Joseph, comes closer.  There is confrontation and there is meeting.  One can read the text so that the meeting was a papering over the cracks; or one can read the text to see that the meeting was profound.  Certainly it had the potential to be either.  The haftarah leaves us with tantalizing hints – Ezekiel prophesying the reunification of the tribes which descended from Judah and from Joseph, should it be a superficial reunification or a will it be a complete one? 

                            One can look at the sidra and the haftarah either way – either there is hope that even after a series of almost murderous problems with each other, the family of Jacob can come together in peace and harmony, approach each other and meet at a fundamental level; or that there has never been a true unity within the Jewish people, that we have always operated a model of dynamic tension, of coming closer but never actually merging.  That doesn’t have to be hopeless of course; It could be said that it is the inbuilt diversity of such a model that actually allowed us to survive all of this time. But wouldn’t it change our perception of ourselves if we acknowledged it, that we have no one orthodoxy, there is no one form of the Jewish people, that we thrive on the antagonisms within our structures.

            Our great prophets foretold events that never historically happened.  Our midrashic literature relocated those events to some mythical end of days, when all problems will be solved and unity will be achieved.  We could use our prophetic tradition as a guide to remind us that whatever our differences, our ideals remain – it is that matrix of ideas and beliefs which support us on our continuing journey in Judaism, that blend of varieties of vision which keep us aware of the significance of our journey.