Vayeira

Genesis 18:1–22:24

D'var Torah By: Rabbi Edwin C. Goldberg for ReformJudaism.org

Hearing the Cries of Mothers and Children

    Pack your loads on my back. / Force me to your destination. / I will go the mile you demand, and even a mile further. / With your guns and your authority / you can force me to do your will, / but never can you take way my freedom, / for that lies deep within my soul / where your bullets and harsh words / can never reach. / No load is as heavy / as submitting to slavery, / and that load I will never bear.

    (Nyein Chan, resident of a refugee camp in Myanmar [Burma])

Mishkan HaNefesh, the new Reform High Holiday prayer book introduced this year, offers some Torah passages that previously were not chanted in most Reform temples on Rosh HaShanah. These include Genesis 21 (part of this week's Torah portion, Vayeira), which also appears in traditional prayer books. This passage is sure to launch a lot of sermons and provoke some controversy. After all, its main subject is the expulsion of Hagar, the Egyptian handmaiden to Sarah and mother to Abraham's son, Ishmael. Ishmael is also expelled. They almost die.

These words from Mother Teresa resonate with this week's text:

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Lech L'cha

Genesis 12:1−17:27

D'var Torah By: Edwin C. Goldberg

Answers Are Important, But Questions Matter More

Who's there?" is the first thing we read in Shakespeare's Hamlet. It encapsulates the topic of the entire play. "Where are you?" is the first question asked by God in the Torah (Genesis 3:9). From a metaphysical point of view, it captures the topic of the entire Bible. Paying attention to questions is a clever way to get to the heart of any matter. As the physicist Isaac Rabi used to recall, when his mother greeted him at the end of the school day, she always asked, "Did you ask good questions?"

In his excellent business primer, Leadership Without Easy Answers, Ron Heifetz defines leadership as the ability to ask the right questions. This week's Torah portion, Lech L'cha, gives us the chance to ponder Abraham's leadership potential and why God chooses him to begin the enterprise that will lead to Judaism and the Jewish people.

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Noach

Genesis 6:9−11:32

D'var Torah By: David Segal for ReformJudaism.org

The world's first "skyscraper" was built after the great Flood. All of humanity, unified by a single language, decided to build "a tower that reaches the sky" (Genesis 11:4), known today as the Tower of Babel. I've always taken this story as an act of defiance and hubris; God reacted by dispersing the people and confusing their speech.

A midrash depicts the height of the people's arrogance: " 'Come,' they said, 'let us make a tower, place an image on its top, and put a sword in its hand, and it will seem that it is waging war against [God]' " (B'reishit Rabbah 38:6). If there was any ambiguity in the Torah, the midrash has removed it. These people were asking for God's retaliation!

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B'reishit

Genesis 1:1−6:8

Deconstructing Adam

D'var Torah By: David Segal for ReformJudaism.org

Biblical literalism is on the rise. You can see it in the growth of Bible-based mega-churches where the "word of God" is preached as inerrant truth. But any serious reader of the Bible knows it contains contradictions, ellipses, and vague commands that require interpretation to be understood, let alone followed.

The most apparent challenge to biblical literalism occurs at the beginning of the Bible. The first two chapters of Genesis tell two starkly different stories of the Creation of the world and of humanity.

In the first story, humanity is created "in the image of God" (Genesis 1:27), with no mention of the physical body's creation. In the second story, man is created from dust, and God breathes life into his nostrils (Genesis 2:7). Similarly, the first Creation story culminates with humans created together, "male and female" (Genesis 1:27). In the second, Adam is created first, followed by the fish, birds, and beasts; only then does God derive the woman from Adam's rib. While the first account mentions only the word Elohim to refer to God, the second uses the Tetragrammaton (the Hebrew letters, yud-hei-vav-hei) as well as Elohim.

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