Parashat Noach (Genesis 6:9 - )

Reflections on the Torah Portion – Rabbi Andy Vogel

Can the Torah’s story of Noah help teach us how to live in a world where destruction and turmoil dominate the headlines?  When God tells Noah that the world will be destroyed, that “every living substance that I have made will I blot out from off the face of the earth” (Genesis 7:4), and that Noah must build the ark, Noah’s reaction is silence.  British-born modern commentator Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg writes that his silence “is essentially a metastasis of the sickness of his time.”  Rather than express shock or outrage, or even concern for his neighbors, Noah is isolated in his lack of feeling for humankind.  Aviva Zornberg sees him as “imprisoned” in his remoteness from others, symbolized by the “small, enclosed safe space” of the ark (Genesis: The Beginning of Desire, p. 58).

We should try to break out of our own isolation from the brokenness of the world.  Though, like Noah, we might try to protect ourselves emotionally from the violence in Iraq, the genocide in Darfur, the devastation to the environment caused by our consumerism, or the poverty that exists in our own city, such self-protection is instead a kind of self-imprisonment.  To be a tzaddik, a righteous person, while he is in the ark Noah must learn to care for living beings – first the animals, and then humankind.  We, too, must live beyond the compartmentalization in which we hide, to bring repair and blessing to the world.

            - Rabbi Andy Vogel

Sinai Update – Week of October 15-21, 2006

Parashat Bereshit (Genesis 1:1 – 6:8)

Reflections on the Torah Portion – Rabbi Andy Vogel

How can it be that light was created on the very first day of Creation, but the sun and moon were not created until the fourth day?  The rabbis of the Midrash noticed the strange order of the Creation in the opening verses of the Torah, read this week in Parashat Bereshit, and they taught that the light God created on day one was not sunlight, in fact, but a different type of light: the light of the Messianic Era.  They taught (Midrash Genesis Rabbah 3:6), “God hid that light away for the righteous.”

What does it mean that the Messianic era will be filled with this special type of light now hidden from us?  The first chief rabbi of the Land of Israel, Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) wrote that in the Time-to-Come all people will attain a high level of both behavior and theological understanding.  “[Today,] all the names and designations, whether in Hebrew or in any other language, give us no more than a tiny and dull spark of the hidden light toward which the soul aspires and calls it ‘God.’ … [But in the future,] in place of sterile speculations, the heart will entertain the enlightened concern with morality and man’s higher heroism, which radiate from the divine light, and are at all times linked to its source” (Orot, p. 126, in Ben Zion Bokser, pp. 9-10).  The day that humankind awaits is filled with the light of deep understanding and of honorable acts, holy lights.

            - Rabbi Andy Vogel

Sinai Update – Week of October 8-14, 2006

Simchat Torah begins Friday evening, October 13

Reflections on the Jewish Calendar – Rabbi Andy Vogel

Jews around the world dance with the Torah this weekend at the holiday of Simchat Torah (observed in the Reform movement beginning this Friday night).  Before reading the very end of the Torah (the death of Moses) and the very beginning (the Creation story), Jews take hold of all the scrolls in the Ark and we rejoice at completing the cycle of reading.

Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin writes that “the first time one holds the Torah is often a moment of elation as well as a rite of adulthood, like being given the keys to the family car.  The one with the Torah leads the dancing, but most also be careful not to drop or mishandle the scrolls.   Supportive and encouraging, the congregation dances – with abandon and love, with joy and energy.”

Please join us this Friday night at 7:00 p.m. to rejoice with the Torah, with music, singing and dancing!  Chag same’ach!

            - Rabbi Andy Vogel