Angel for Shabbat

(This is the first sermon I delivered from the pulpit of Congregation Shearith Israel, Simhat Torah 1969. Forty-five years have passed since that first sermon, and yet the ideas within it continue to ring true.)

We have spent many months reading about the life of Moses. Today, in one of the most dramatic episodes of the Torah, we read about his death—a very agonizing scene. Moses, the great leader, teacher, and prophet, climbs to the summit of Mount Nebo and looks out over the horizon at the Promised Land. As he stands silent and alone, God tells him: “You are beholding the land that I have promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob saying, ‘I shall give it to your descendants.’ See it with your eyes. You shall not cross into the land.”

God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and gave them the following instruction: “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat of it; for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Bereishith 2:16-17). It did not take long, though, for Adam and Eve to eat of this forbidden fruit, having been tempted by the serpent to do so.

But they did not die upon eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

In sorting out the genealogical information in the early chapters of Genesis, it turns out that Noah and Abraham were alive at the same time. Abraham was 58 years old at the time of Noah’s death.

(Interestingly, the numerical value of the name of Noah is 58!) Did Abraham and Noah know each other? The Torah does not so indicate, and Midrashic literature sheds little light on this question. Here are some of my speculations on this topic.

(Much of this essay is excerpted from my book, Losing the Rat Race, Winning at Life.)

During the course of a lifetime, a person may wear many masks. In order to curry favor with others, one adopts their attitudes, opinions, styles and behavior patterns. Above all, one wants to belong, to play an acceptable role. At the same time, one also has a separate individual identity within, the hard kernel of one’s own being. When one loses sight of his separateness from the masks he wears, he becomes the masks; i.e., a superficial, artificial human being. A person may go through life without examining carefully who he really is. One simply becomes an assortment of ever-changing masks, living life on the surface.

“…Abimelech king of the Philistines looked out a window, and saw, and, behold, Isaac was sporting with Rebecca his wife…(Bereishith 26:8).”

Rabbi Harold Kushner, in a shiur for the New York Board of Rabbis, offered keen insight into what this verse might actually mean. Instead of translating metzahek as “sporting,” Rabbi Kushner suggested going to the root meaning of the word: laughter. Isaac was making Rebecca laugh! (See also Targum Onkelos on this verse.)

The verse relates to a difficult time, when Isaac and Rebecca were in a precarious position vis a vis Abimelech. Isaac feared for his life. Rebecca was posing as Isaac’s sister, and was in a vulnerable state. At this time of crisis, Isaac makes Rebecca laugh. He attempts to soothe her.

“And the sister of Lotan was Timna” (Bereishith 36:22).

This seemingly irrelevant piece of genealogy has an important underlying message according to the Midrash. Timna had wanted to convert--to become part of the people of Abraham, Isaac and Israel. Yet, our forefathers did not accept her into the fold. The rejected Timna then became the concubine of Elifaz, son of Esau, and gave birth to a son: Amalek! The arch-enemy of the people of Israel was the child of a rejected convert! Had Timna been accepted into the Israelite nation, there would have been no Amalek.

This ancient lesson has continuing meaning in our days, when the conversion crisis in the Orthodox world is a burning issue. The following is drawn from an article I wrote, published in Hadassah Magazine, November 2008.

God is the ultimate Melamed, teacher. He teaches by enabling us to learn, to think carefully, to analyze, to overcome obstacles. When we realize that indeed it is God Who so endows us with our ability to learn, we reach a profound religious insight. It is an insight that is at the very root of an enlightened religious worldview.

As Jacob neared his death, he instructed his son Joseph: “please do not bury me in Egypt” (Bereishith 47:29). Joseph was compelled to take an oath to bring Jacob’s body to the burial place of his fathers in the land of Canaan.

Rashi, citing the Midrash on this verse, offers several reasons for Jacob’s insistence on not being interred in Egypt. One of them has Jacob worrying “lest Egypt will make me into [a shrine] of idolatry.”

In the first verse of this week’s parasha, we learn that God led the Israelites out of Egypt through a longer route, “lest they regret [their departure from Egypt] when they see war, and they return to Egypt.” If they had taken the more direct route toward the Promised Land, they would have had to confront the Philistines in battle. God “worried” that the Israelites would be daunted by war and they would run back into the slavery of Egypt.

But the very next verse informs us that “the children of Israel went up armed out of the land of Egypt.” Apparently, the Israelites gathered weapons before departing Egypt, so that they would be ready to face enemies that confronted them.

In a recent sermon, Rabbi Shaul Robinson of the Lincoln Square Synagogue in New York City referred to an amazing incident in the life of Dr. George Dantzig (1914-2005), one of the greatest American mathematicians of the 20th century. In 1939, when Dantzig was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, he arrived late to class one day. The professor had written several problems in statistics on the blackboard.

Dantzig assumed that these problems were a homework assignment. He copied them into his notebook and then worked on them over the next few days. When he turned them in, he mentioned to his professor that the problems were a bit more difficult than usual and he apologized for handing in the assignment late.