Toldot: New Life in Old Wells

For this year’s E-Torah cycle, we will approach the weekly portion as a springboard for a learning conversation.  Each week will offer a brief commentary, followed by a prompt for discussion, which you can do with a family member or a friend—or on your own as a sort of internal dialogue/reflection.

American culture puts a premium on innovation, and this often serves us well, as individuals and as a nation.  But sometimes reaffirming and renewing old wisdom is every bit as essential as creative invention.  As a timely example, consider the public health measures we currently employ to protect ourselves and our communities from COVID.  Our best strategy combines the cutting-edge miracle of m-RNA vaccines with the time-tested tactics of masking and social distancing.  

In the Torah’s tales of our patriarchs, Abraham and Jacob are the revolutionary innovators.  Abraham is the first Jew, embarking on an audacious pilgrimage into the unknown, in the service of an unprecedented monotheistic God.  Jacob is the radical who dares to wrestle with beings human and divine.

Isaac, by contrast, is a conservator.  In this week’s portion, Toldot, we read that one of his greatest accomplishments is that he “dug anew the wells that had been dug in the days of his father which the Philistines had stopped up. . . and gave them the same names that his Abraham had given them.” He is not a bold pioneer like both his father and his son—yet Isaac is every bit as important an actor in defining the Jewish people.  Our personal and communal lives sometimes call for intrepid creativity; at other times, we need patience, persistence and preservation.  

Conversation Question:

What do you most need in your life’s journey right now—innovation or renewal or both?

Chayei Sarah: What's Love Got to Do With It?

For this year’s E-Torah cycle, we will approach the weekly portion as a springboard for a learning conversation.  Each week will offer a brief commentary, followed by a prompt for discussion, which you can do with a family member or a friend—or on your own as a sort of internal dialogue/reflection.

Isaac took Rebekah as his wife. He loved her, and thus found comfort after his mother’s death.

                        -Genesis 24:67

The first time that Torah speaks of one person loving another is in this week’s Torah portion, Chayei Sarah.  We’ve seen numerous partnerships and relationships in previous passages, but none are described as loving.  Perhaps it is no accident that the description is accorded to Isaac and Rebecca, the only monogamous couple among our patriarchs and matriarchs.  

As with every couple, both before and after them, their relationship is sometimes rocky.  Rebecca and Isaac struggle over infertility, and when they finally have twins, they have very significant differences in how they relate to their boys, Jacob and Esau.  In some key moments, they are not entirely truthful with one another, and at others, they fail to communicate clearly.  

And yet, we read, they alone amongst almost all of the Torah’s characters forged a relationship defined, from the start, by love.

In the Talmudic collection Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of our Fathers, we learn: All love that is conditional upon something—when that thing perishes, the love perishes.  But love that is not conditional does not ever perish.

Isaac and Rebecca’s love is not easy or perfect, but it does endure.  

Conversation Question:

Reflect on your most significant relationships—romantic, parental, friendship.  What small steps or adjustments might enhance the love you bring to those partnerships and make it more enduring and less conditional?

Vayera: The Wisdom to Know the Difference

For this year’s E-Torah cycle, we will approach the weekly portion as a springboard for a learning conversation.  Each week will offer a brief commentary, followed by a prompt for discussion, which you can do with a family member or a friend—or on your own as a sort of internal dialogue/reflection.

"A time to be silent and a time to speak" (Ecclesiastes 3:7)

This week’s Torah portion, Vayera, begins with Abraham vocally challenging God and concludes with his silent acquiescence. When the Holy One tells him about the imminent destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham repeatedly argues: “Will You sweep away the innocent and the guilty?  Far be it from You!  Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?”  Yet just four chapters later, when God asks him to sacrifice his son Isaac, Abraham responds with obedient silence.

Why doesn’t Abraham stand up for his own family as he did for the strangers in Sodom and Gomorrah?  We don’t know.  His passivity is problematic for most of us, as it was for many of our Sages two thousand years ago.  But like Ecclesiastes, he seems to believe that there is a time for speech and a time for silence.  The trick, of course, is to recognize which is appropriate in any given instance.

Our circumstances are less extreme than Abraham’s, but we, too, wrestle with this question.  When do we protest and when do we go along?  When should we be silent and when should we speak out?

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr addresses this challenge in what we now know as the Serenity Prayer.  I prefer Niebuhr’s earlier formulation, which asks: “Give us the courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other.”  

Conversation Question:

Reflect on occasions when you spoke out and challenged the status quo, and times when you held your tongue.  What principles might guide us in deciding which times call for silence and which for speech?

Lech L'chah--Life's Journey

For this year’s E-Torah cycle, we will approach the weekly portion as a springboard for a learning conversation.  Each week will offer a brief commentary, followed by a prompt for discussion, which you can do with a family member or a friend—or on your own as a sort of internal dialogue/reflection.

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The Holy One said to Abram, “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” (Genesis 12:1)

Over many years of long-distance hiking and paddling, I have learned that those who make it to trail or river’s end are not necessarily either the most skilled or best conditioned adventurers.  I’ve seen many physically-powerful people falter, while those with far fewer natural advantages succeed.  Why?  Because the hardest part of any journey is in our own heads and hearts.  It’s not about who can walk thirty-five miles in a day—it’s about who musters the will to put on their wet socks and set out on the cold, rainy morning when they would rather remain in camp.  As Father Henri Nouwen taught: The farther the outward journey takes you, the deeper the inward journey must be.

This week’s Torah portion, Lech L’chah, marks the beginning of Abraham’s lifelong journey, as God asks him to abandon his native country and navigate by faith alone toward the Promised Land.  The physical hardships are considerable but our Rabbis remind us that for Abraham, too, the inner, spiritual journey is of the essence.  Noting that the Hebrew, lech l’chah, can be read literally as go to yourself, they teach that the real work of our lifetimes is an inward exploration.

Conversation Question:

Where are you on the arc of your own life’s journey—physically, and spiritually?  Are you on course, or is it time to explore in a new direction?  What do you need to keep moving forward when times are difficult?

Noach: Reconciliation

For this year’s E-Torah cycle, we will approach the weekly portion as a springboard for a learning conversation.  Each week will offer a brief commentary, followed by a prompt for discussion, which you can do with a family member or a friend—or on your own as a sort of internal dialogue/reflection.

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I have set my bow in the clouds and it shall be a sign of the covenant between Me and the earth.  When I bring clouds over the earth, and the bow appears in the clouds, I will remember My covenant between Me and you and every living creature, so that the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.  (Genesis 9:11-15)

After the flood, there is vast repair work to be done. The ravaged land will slowly heal and the rescued pairs of animals will reproduce and replenish the earth.  But for Noah and his family, the psychological damage is devastating.  Their relationship with the Holy One is surely strained to the breaking point by the destruction they witnessed and the despair they bore through the raging storm.

How does God begin to heal that breach?  With the sign of the rainbow, a tangible symbol of the Divine promise to never again destroy life on earth.  But why a rainbow?

Ramban (Nachmanides, 1194-1270) suggests that it is an inverted war bow.  He explains that in the ancient world, where battles were fought with bows and arrows, when one side was ready to surrender, they would lift an inverted bow, much as today they might wave a white flag.  Thus, the Ramban notes, the inverted bow in the skies represents God’s gesture of appeasement.  It is, in short, a divine peace offering.

Conversation Question:

In this still-new year, can you identify a conflict in your own life that you would like to resolve?  What kind of gesture might you make toward that end?