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Friday, October 31, 2014—Rav Julius’ Erev Shabbat Update
Mazal Tov Re-Announcement
Roz and Joel Etra on the birth of their granddaughter, Ava Dona Clarke, to their daughter and son-in-law, Dori
and Matthew Clarke. (got the baby’s name right this week)
Minutes of Torah
At the Rosh Hashanah Alternative Service this year, we spent the session discussing the paradox between the conflicting messages that permeated the prayer service: On Rosh Hashanah we emphasize the
universal message of our obligations to the world; whereas throughout the year we stress the particular message of our obligations to our family and our people. As we move through the parshiot of the Torah this
same phenomenon appears to arise.
For example, in the very opening sentence of the Torah, we read, “In the beginning God created the
heavens and the earth” – clearly a proclamation of universality. Yet, those who studied the Midrash with me
last night learned that the rabbis of the Talmudic era ‘re-interpret’ this verse to convey a particularistic message of establishing Jewish rights to the land of Israel: reasoning that since God created the world, He can
parcel out specific areas of the world, including Israel, to whomever He feels is righteous in His eyes (this is
the ‘second’ Midrash that I alluded to last night). And that this particularistic message also holds great store
for us in the 21st century!
This tension between these two apparent polar opposites continues with our parshah this week. The
reading begins with God’s telling Abraham,
“Go out of your land, … to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation…,”
The particularistic message is very clear: Abraham is to be the beginning of a new nation – eventually
called the Jewish people -- in a specific location that will ultimately be called the land of Israel.
And yet in the very next verse, Torah reverts back to the universal message emphasized in the previous 11 chapters of Genesis:
“and through you all families of the earth shall be blessed…”
As we see, these two themes, a covenantal nation having a special relationship with God vs. a vision of
world peace and redemption, will be at war with each other as they occupy the messages that our Bible conveys to the very end.
With Abraham, we are constantly reminded of the universal message. First, he rescues five regional
armies that are attacked by four kings bent on destroying them. He then bargains with God to try to save
Sodom and Gomorrah. Subsequently, he opposes the manner in which Hagar, the Egyptian maidservant that
Sarah gave him as a concubine, is being abused by Sarah. This mistreatment eventually causes Hagar to flee
into the dangerous wilderness where she is rescued by an angel and returns to Abraham’s household to
eventually bear Abraham’s child, Ishmael, the father of the Arab people.
Yet, we cannot forget that Abraham is the father of the Jewish people. And we see in this week’s parshah, he is to receive the covenant of circumcision which will physically distinguish the Jewish people from the
rest of the world’s population for the next four millennia.
But perhaps it is the episode involving the second banishment of Hagar, this time with her son Ish-
mael, that helps us understand the conflict between the two warring themes. On this occasion, Sarah has
borne her son, Isaac; and upon seeing that Ishmael’s presence is serving as a ‘bad’ influence upon Isaac’s
rearing, causes Abraham to cast out Hagar and Ishmael to the perilous wilderness once again (and where
they are again rescued by the ubiquitous angel).
How do we understand this first of an unending series of conflicts between the universalistic and particularistic messages of our Torah?
Let me suggest that Sarah’s conduct can help us. When she proposes in the first instance that Hagar
shall be Abraham’s concubine and bear a son to him when Sarah could not, she was willing to work with him
to help fulfill his duty to be the one through whom, “all families of the earth will be blessed” (the universalistic objective). But when her son’s well being was being threatened, she could not suffer this danger to her son
and to the other duty that Abraham had, namely, being a father to “a great nation,” (the particularistic objective) and thus had to separate the apparent danger from her son, and her family.
Thus, we learn the same message in carrying our apparent contradictory obligations: Our identity as a
unique people, and our ability to serve as a “light unto the nations,” must be strengthened and secured – the
particularistic message conveyed by Torah; before we are able to undertake our task to help save and redeem
the rest of the world – the universalistic task assigned to us. Hence, we bear an initial obligation to gird our
Jewish identity in a way that may seem to be antagonistic to those around us who do not share our faith, but
which is really designed to fortify our ability to help others. And once we are confident in achieving that task,
are we then able to fulfill our main goal of helping the rest of the peoples of this earth.
This Week’s Prayer Services
Friday night, 6:00 pm. Kabbalat Shabbat, where the Dvar Torah will continue to dwell on squaring the circle
of conflict between the Universal and Particular duties that we bear as a Jewish people.
Shabbat morning, 9:00 am. This week we are privileged to read from the parshah of Lech Lecha; and the
subject of this week’s Torah discussion will be Sarah’s selection of Hagar to be Abraham’s concubine and its
teachings for the modern practice of Surrogate Motherhood. Kiddush to follow.
Sunday morning, 8:30 am. Morning Minyan.
Monday morning, 7:25 am. Morning Minyan
Shabbat Shalom!
Rav Julius Rabinowitz