Hebrew speaking Egyptian princesses and a 'ciao' to the paisans

Its Friday. which means its time for my absolutely brief indispensable comments on the weekly portion.

First of all, Shemot is fascinating for a few reasons. First, the origin of the name 'Moshe', derived, so the text tells us, from 'Min hamayim mishiteehu' or 'I drew him from the water'. So an Egyptian princess, it seems spoke perfect Hebrew. But shouldn't he have been named at his Brit Mila? And shouldn't we have been told what that name was? Josh Waxman on parshablog insists that the definition provided in the text for his name is correct, grammatical contortions notwithstanding, and in any case is better than the alternatives. One of these is 'Moseh', an Egyptian word meaning 'is born', and appended to the name of many Egyptian kings such as Thutmoseh and Ramoseh. Sounds most likely to me, but I guess I don't have a frum agenda.

There is also an interesting reference to 'Bayamim harabim hahem' (roughly 'those many days ago') which of course implies that the text was written many years after the events.

Finally, Shemot seems to be a rich vein for documentary hypotheses research. In the first two chapters god is called 'Elohim' while Tzipora's Midianite father is called Reuel (notice the typically Hebrew 'el' in his name, which means 'see el'). Then in Chapter 3, the YHVH name appears and Reuel is now known as Yitro. Space and audience attention span grow short. The multitudes of readers must get back to work. I welcome all insights on these issues.

Today in 1493: The Jews were expelled from Sicily. The island had been under Spanish control for 81 years. This ancient community had flourished on the island since before the appearance of Christianity, through the Muslim and Norman periods, never suffering the degradations of Jewish communities elsewhere in Europe. They possessed a rich liturgical tradition and even had a university.

But 514 years ago today they were sent off in ships, as their long-time neighbors waved goodbye from Palermo's rooftops. Of course, before departure the crown forced them to pay an extortionate tax, as a sort of going away gift.

Shabbat Shalom.

Vanity and posterity

My plump, semitic tukhis is attached to a swivel chair in a cubicle, itself in a cubicle ocean, a cubic-acre beehive of cubicles, for eight hours a day in a leafy town north of NYC. While my usual work schedule is, shall we say, chronically unhectic, I've been assigned 'busy work' which has required my drowsy semi-undivided attention over the past two days. The purpose of this work is to make sure someone else is actually doing their own job, which they probably aren't. You see, politics are so pervasive in large corporations (as they are in a small company, classroom or three year old play group) that people fear confrontation.

Even the most minute of confrontations are to be avoided at all cost. So instead of asking someone directly if they're completing the task they're paid to do, they avoid even the whiff of confrontation by getting someone else (in this case, me) to do the work too, to make sure the job is complete. This sort of 'busy work' is only the latest example of the plague of waste of time and money rampant in my large company and most probably throughout corporate America.

In short, its wonderful to know that the value of whatever I do and will do here at work will amount to exactly gurnisht, efes. I know, I know...anything is better than the four (or was it five) layoffs I've endured since 1998. And as I'm fond of saying, its also much better than leprosy, or venereal warts, or one of those diseases once can read in detail about in Tazria-Metzora. In stark contrast, winning at least third place in the 'work that outlasts one's life' contest, let me introduce the subject of the present edition of...

...Today in the life of the Jews: Abraham Mapu was born near Kovno, Lithuania on this day in 1808. His books served as the ideological basis of the Zionist movement. Mapu introduced the first Hebrew novel in 1853. Until then, only Hebrew translations of novels from other languages were published. His masterpiece, Ahavat Tzion, was eventually translated into Yiddish, German and English. He died in Konigsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia) in 1867, while writing a book about Shabbtai Tzvi.

Sabbath without gravity

I've been riveted by the thousands of beautiful images being transmitted to Earth from the Cassini space craft orbiting Saturn, each resembling a masterful abstract painting.

Many of you know that Cassini launched a smaller minicraft (known as Huygens) at Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Titan is a complex world in its own right, similar in many ways to primordial earth as it existed (with apologies to devout readers) billions of years ago. Huygens snapped many photos as it parachuted down to Titan's surface.

You'd see something like this if you were gazing out an airplane window over the lake regions of Minnesota, southern Finland or northern Quebec. In fact the lakes in this picture are filled with liquid methane and dot Titan's northern latitudes.

Titan is just one of several moons orbiting Saturn and Jupiter which may be home to primitive alien life forms. And we haven't mentioned Mars. Astronauts will visit these places one day.

There are many Jewish laws which will face challenges if and when religious Jews ever leave the orbit of planet earth.

But I'd like to focus on the question of Shabbat. How does a devout Jew observe Shabbat, or daven in space? Let's assume a devout Jew in the year 2037 moves permanently to a base on the moon, which doesn't spin. How would one daven three times a day in an environment where day and night don't alternate? And what if our little frum astronaut friend gets transferred to a space station orbiting Saturn, which revolves around the sun once in almost 30 years. What would that do to our (24 x 7 x 365 earth schdule) weekly parsha reading?

On this day in the life of the Jewish people in 1784: the poll tax was abolished in France by Louis XVI. Until then, Jews living in the eastern provinces of Alsace and Lorraine (just an FYI -these regions are a mix of German and French cultures) were required to pay a special road toll upon entry or departure from all cities. Known as Impot de Pied Forchu (poll of the cloven foot) this tax was identical to one imposed on every animal going to market. It's worth noting that despite the delay to full emancipation for the Jews of England, degradation was always much worse in most countries on the Continent, as late the French Revolution.

Colors scrubbed into black & white, and grim events in Basel 658 years ago

Black and white aren't merely the preferred wardrobe colors of the Jewish hyper-devout. They're also a reflection of the way view the Torah's personalities.

What makes the Bible wonderful? It's that its characters are lovingly painted in various colors, warts and all, glorious in their many flaws, people we can identify with and not some perfect gods. And thoroughly human.

Look at some of our heroes: Abraham essentially gives his wife (twice) to a king to protect his own skin, then, like a zombie attempts to sacrifice his son, Isaac who in turn grows up to be passive and semi senile. Isaac is cheated by his mama's boy, second born son Jacob, who with his mommy's help underhandedly gains the rights of the first born from his slightly dimwitted brother Esav.

Jacob blatantly and stupidly favors his son Joseph, who brags to his brothers about being 'da man'; his brothers will one day be the founders of our twelve (or eleven, or thirteen, depends where you read) tribes; yet they sell their brother to a bunch of proto-arabs (Yishmaelites or Midyanites, the scripture can't decide here either) and tell their father that a mean animal ate him up. Meanwhile, our saintly four mothers exhibit jealousy, competitiveness and are not shy about pulling shtiks. Great stuff.

Jump foward to King David who we revere so, head of a legendary line of kings, forefather of the Messiah to come....Yet this same David undermines King Saul, was a mercenary for the despised Philistines, had rivals routinely assasinated, voyeuristically watched Bathsheba showering below his window and seized her from her husband Uriah who he sent to a sure death at the front on the Golan Heights...I can go on and on.

And there are the raunchy stories which you and I relish. Take Tamar. Make that the two Tamars. One poses as a hooker to lure her father in law Yehuda (Judah) in Genesis (as a result of the sexual problems of Onan his son and her husband).
Then another Tamar, this time David's daughter, has incestuous sex wth her brother Amnon. My perush (commentary) on it is that Tamar was a word in lushon hakodesh (holy tongue) for 'hottie' or 'vixen'. In fact an echo of this definition has trickled into Englsih. How? the definition of Tamar is 'date', as in the fruit of the palm. But this word's homograph (same spelling different meaning) is another sort of date, the one that guys take out. So we can say that Tamar was, shall we say, a hot 'date', involved in two of the naughtiest stories in the Tanakh...

As I was saying, these are all colorful, ambiguous personalities, drawn in pastels, anything but black and white. Thoroughly imperfect.
And human.

So what did the Rabbis do? They took these carefully crafted characters and turned them all into good guys and bad guys. The three fathers and four mothers? Perfect and godlike. Everything they ever did was perfect in every way. And not only that: they were all great scholars and prophets, knowing Torah, halachot, Rashi, Tosfot and each and every other commentator to ever come. And what of the abandoned Yishamel (Isaac's brother) and cheated Esav (Jacob's older twin)? Reshaim. Evildoers.

I once had a brief exchange at table 12 ar some relative's vedding in Ir Hakoidesh (Borough Park) with my cousin Heshy about Yaakov and Esav. As we awaited the khatan and kallah (groom and bride)to emerge from seclusion, I said something about Esav getting screwed by Yaakov. Heshy rose up, almost tipping over his soup, knaidalakh (dumplings) and all, thundering, pointing wildly:

"But Esav was a rasha (evil)!".
"That's not how he's portrayed in the scripture." I said. "And if he was a rasha, how come Isaac loved him so much?"
"All the mefarshim and midrashim, everyone knows he's a rasha! What do you know?"

And so it is with all the characters. Heshy's response is typical of fundamentalist Jewish thinking. Over the ages the rabbis scrubbed the colorful multi dimensional tapestries scrubbed into flat blacks and whites. I guess we shouldn't make things complicated for our kolel boys and ulpana girls.
Brought to you by the same guys that insist that Shir Hashirim (Song of Songs) isn't an erotic love song.

On this day in 1349, a massacre took place in Basel in what is today Switzerland. This was one of the most tragic in a series of anti Jewish spasms of sadism that occurred during the Black Death, which decimated a third of all Europeans. Jews were accused of having spread the pestilence by poisoning wells, though people knew that this wasn't so; Jews died with everyone else.
A massive wave of massacres had swept the region of Savoy. When it spread to Basel, city elders attempted to protect the Jews, in vain. The mob gathered all of the town's Jews, and forced them all into a shack on an island in the middle of the Rhine River. The shack was set alight and burned down with the Jews inside.
Against their parents wishes, a few of their children were saved and baptized.
A decree was later issued banning Jews from Basel for 200 years; the decree was overlooked as soon as the town's requirements demanded it.



*lithograph by Marc Chagall 'Tamar, the daughter in law of Juda'

The Bible is fun! But, alas, no one cares. Also, evil in 1575 Seville

Where are you? I've now been blogging religiously for a couple of weeks, and I'm still eagerly and impatiently looking for an uptick in the number of visitors. Where are you people? I need fans.

I was hoping to find some comment on last week's parsha, but '0 comments' it remains, day after day. The sort of anomalies discussed (see the entry for this past Friday) are what make the Torah (and the rest of the Hebrew Bible) the incredibly fascinating 25 century old puzzle it is.

As many of you know, we can find examples of contradiction, doublets (two versions of the same story), triplets, and transmission mistakes in practically every portion of the Torah. None of the questions I raise are new, and many of these issues have been remarked upon by commentators through the ages (but secularly only over the past 2 centuries). Yet relatively few people know or are interested in the subject. Why has the remarkable topic of secular biblical research remained obscure? Why do people know so little of the work of biblical critics since the enlightenment?

Devout believers for the most part, and with a few exceptions, are certainly uninterested. These issues scare them. So how might many of them they explain these biblical mistakes and contradictions? Simple: 'There is no contradiction or mistake, and it's arrogant and rude to even consider that mistakes may exist in God's handiwork. It's that you don't understand. If you want understand, go ask a brilliant rabbi who'll have all the (appropriate) answers. But whatever you do, do not dare draw any conclusions yourself! The Rabbi will provide them for you.'

And 95% of everyone else, including supposedly educated Ivy Leaguers? They'd say something like: 'Bible? God? history? Judaism? Criticism? What's that? And oh yeah, who cares? Whatever.'

I don't think I exaggerate here.

Its also interesting how many highly educated secular people who do have an interest in Judaism don't ever think of investigating the bible with a critical eye, which is the most interesting way of exploring it. It doesn't occur to them to ask: Why was it written this way? Why was this particular story inserted here? Why would later writers and editors allow contradictions and mistakes to remain? I'm getting ahead of myself: they wouldn't think of the existence of writers or editors, and they simply aren't aware of the incredible research done and insight gained in the area of critical Biblical scholarship by many intellectual giants over the past 200 years to this very day.

I suppose, and its been remarked on elsewhere, many secular people who one would expect to exhibit secular curiosity are really attempting to escape the rational, and are searching for some form spirituality. They just assume without question that there's some vague 'divinity' attached to the Bible in some undefined way, whatever that may mean, and they don't know how to think about what that may (or may not) mean.

On this day in the life of the Jews: In 1575, the so-called Auto de Fe, or Act of Faith, took place in Seville. This was the solemn proclamation and execution of Inquisition sentences against heretics, many of whom were marrano (hidden Jews). Considering spilled blood much too messy, Spaniards and Portuguese preferred execution by fire, which took place at the Quamadero ('place of burning). Please note that not everyone was burned alive, since formal confession and repentance (An Iberian Christian form of tshuva) secured strangulation before burning. It appears that gathering at the fiery spectacle at the Quamadero was a fashionable pastime. YS"V.

Next, a reflection on the substituting of stark black and white for pastels in the Bible.