Monthly Archives: November 2019

by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper

Toldot is an utterly terrifying parshah for parents.  Yitzchak and Rivkah have two sons. They start fighting in the womb! Their fights – in the womb! – are about both self-interest (who comes out first) and values (idolatry or Torah). Character is determined and destiny. There was nothing Yitzchak and Rivkah could have done to make Esav turn out better, or to prevent eternal fraternal enmity.

Toldot is an utterly terrifying parshah for parents. Yitzchak and Rivkah have two sons. They share a genetic heritage, and an environment – they had the same potential. They fought – but all male siblings fight, especially twins.  They had different strengths and weaknesses – like all human beings. But a series of parenting errors put and kept Esav on the wrong path, and cemented childhood roughhousing into adult hatred.

Toldot is an utterly terrifying parshah for parents. Yitzchak and Rivkah have two sons, and each of them grows up obedient and cooperative. Suddenly, at bar mitzvah (according to Midrash Lekach Tov) –

ויגדלו הנערים –

ר’ פנחס בשם ר’ לוי אמר:

עשו ויעקב דומים לעצבונית והדס שהיו גדלין זה על גב זה

וכיון שהגדילו – זה נתן ריחו וזה חוחיו.

כך

כל י”ג שנה – לא היו ניכרין מעשיהן

כיון שהגדילו – ניכרין מעשיהן,

The boys matured –

Rabbi Pinchas said in the name of Rabbi Levi:

Esav and Yaakov are similar to an itzbonit and a hadasthat grew one on top of the other

Once they matured, this one gave forth its perfume, and this one its thorns.

So too

For the first thirteen years – Esav and Yaakov’s deeds were not distinguishable

Once they matured – their deeds were distinguishable

This one a man of simplicity, this one a skilled predator.

Yet even this striking image is tinged with ambivalence, at least for modern readers.  Jastrow translates itzbonit as wild rose – did Esav still have flowers? (but see also Yeshayah 55:13). In the folk ballad Barbara Allen, the hard-hearted eponym realizes too late, after Sweet William dies of lovesickness for her, that she loved him as well, and has herself buried beside him. A perfumed flower grows out of his grave, a thornbush out of his, but “in the end they formed/ a true lover’s knot/ and the rose grew ‘round/ the briar” (lyrics as sung by Joan Baez).  So, too, Yitzchak and Yishmael apparently reconcile at Avraham’s funeral. Is it too much to hope for Yaakov and Esav to do the same?  (Maybe, and maybe not – that is a tale for another parshah.)

Toldot is an utterly terrifying parshah for high school Torah teachers.  Avraham was buried b’seivah tovah = in goodly old age – this means that Esav did not begin to sin in Avraham’s lifetime.  Avraham died at 175.  He had Yitzchak at 100, which means that Yitzchak was 75.  Yitzchak had Yaakov and Esav when he was 60 – so they must have been 15 at Avraham’s death, which means that Esav began sinning two years before Avraham’s death!  The answer is that Esav hid his sins for the first two years, while Avraham was alive. He was indistinguishable from Yaakov.

When I was Orthodox Rabbinic Adviser at Harvard Hillel, parents or teachers would sometimes bemoan the corrupting influence of the secular campus on their previously innocent children.  I don’t deny that the secular campus, like very other environment, can be corrupting.  But I also taught high school, and high school students who seemed to all the world like the very model of day school success would confide in me that they had no plans to be frum on campus. Sometimes they would “play frum” when their parents came to visit, but the charade generally had to end sometime.

They didn’t confide in all of their Torah teachers.  As the Keeper says to Captain Kirk: “Captain Pike has an illusion, and you have reality.  May your way be as pleasant” (Star Trek, TOS, The Menagerie Part II).

There is another explanation of the chronological discrepancy. Minchat Yehudah (a commentary by the Tosafist R. Yehudah ben El’azar, available on www.alhatorah.org) reports that ריב”א (presumably Rabbi Yitzchak ben Asher HaLevi) found in a midrash that “Yitzchak was hidden away in the Garden of Eden for two years in order to heal from the incision where his father began to slaughter him.”  He suggests that those two years were a sort of suspended animation – like Noach on the Ark! – and  did not count as part of Yitzchak’s life, so Esav and Yaakov were really born 62 years after his own birth, and Avraham died at their bar mitzvah.

I had not previously seen this midrash. It reminded me immediately of Rashi’s explanation of the apparent redundancy of the angel’s cease-and-desist order to Avraham: “Do not send your hand forth against the lad, and don’t cause him an injury.”  Rashi explains that after the first command, Avraham asked whether he could at the very least draw a drop of blood, so the angel banned even injury.

Shalom Speigel’s The Last Trial made famous the crusade-era interpretation in which Avraham in fact slaughters Yitzchak, G-d resurrects him, and the angel succeeds only in preventing the second sacrifice. In other words, Avraham obeyed the second command but not the first.  Minchat Yehudah’s midrash seems to have Avraham obeying the first command – “Don’t slaughter” – but not the second.

Minchat Yehudah does not tell us whether the bacta tanks of Eden completely renewed Yitzchak’s skin. I suspect that he became whole psychologically – not the same as before, but whole – but that he always had a physical scar, and that Yaakov and Esav knew full well where the scar had come from.

What do such children grow up thinking? Some of them are genuinely inspired by both the willingness to sacrifice and to be sacrificed. These are the children of Navaredok – even before the Shoah, in the early Soviet Union – who could endure anything for the sake of keeping Torah alive under oppression. It is a very powerful message, but possibly one that requires continued oppression, or the live memory of oppression, or at least belief in the inevitability of oppression  to be effective.

When Avraham dies, Esav and Yaakov have only Yitzchak’s experience left. They know what they are giving up for Judaism, but Esav no longer feels that the sacrifices are motivated by idealism, let alone justified by idealism.  What kept Esav frum was his connection to Avraham, and let’s be honest – perhaps also fear of Avraham. The possibility that one will be sacrificed tomorrow concentrates the mind wonderfully.  Esav knew that Yitzchak would never be able to punish – to inflict any sort of harm on him – for the sake of religion.

Yaakov connected to Rivkah. Rivkah was a baalat teshuvah – she left with Eliezer voluntarily, against her family’s will, and in rebellion against the worst parts of their culture. She is attracted and overwhelmed from the start by Yitzchak’s capacity for religious experience. No one has ever succeeded in imposing anything on her.

Rivkah never got through to Esav.  That doesn’t mean that his going astray was inevitable – it just meant that she needed help. But to give her that help, someone had to understand in time that Esav’s conformity was shallow, rooted in fear and personality, and find a way for him to develop an autonomous connection to Torah. Too often, I suspect, his teachers, with the best of intentions, tried instead to set themselves up as substitutes for Avraham. To be fair, they probably had success with many similar students. Esav married at 40.  If only Avraham had lived another 27 years, Esav might never have broken away.

Yaakov teaches us that Jewish identity can thrive without being rooted in the expectation of oppression. We have not had many opportunities to try the experiment. This Thanksgiving is a time for American Jews to reflect with gratitude on the beauty and fragility of our experience. Let us resolve to both preserve it and deserve it.

by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper

As a grandstudent of Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, I see human autonomy as a fundamental religious good and goal.  I am therefore instinctively opposed to human relationships which involve one person subordinating their will to another.

As a Jew and as an American, and as someone heartily sick of “Downton Abbey,” I see slavery as an evil, and permanent servitude as morally problematic.

All this makes the relationship between Avraham and his “eved” challenging reading for me, whether eved means chattel slave or some less severe servile relationship.  So I present below what hope is a useful model of reading morally challenging texts with integrity.

Maybe the Ribono shel Olam shares my qualms about avdut? Every phrase in the Torah’s report of the relationship in 24:2 can be read as reflecting and respond to this discomfort.  Let’s read the whole verse, then interpret it phrase by phrase:

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אַבְרָהָ֗ם

אֶל־עַבְדּוֹ֙

זְקַ֣ן בֵּית֔וֹ

הַמֹּשֵׁ֖ל בְּכׇל־אֲשֶׁר־ל֑וֹ

שִֽׂים־נָ֥א

יָדְךָ֖ תַּ֥חַת יְרֵכִֽי׃

Avraham said

to his eved

the zakein of his house

who ruled over all that was his:

Place, please,

your hand under my thigh

a.

Avraham is described as vayomer (=speaking) to his eved, not vayetzav ­(=commanding) or even vayidaber (=speaking dominantly).  The problem is that in a hierarchy, a superior’s request for a favor will often be understood as a command, and often is a command. Condescension (in the original positive sense of the term) can be very helpful in preserving an underling’s dignity, but doesn’t change the underlying power dynamic. Any request to an eved is a command.

b.

But the Torah describes this eved as z’kan beito.  A zakein can be either an old person, or else someone with social authority.

Chizkuni understands it as referring purely to age; Avraham picked a servant who could be trusted not to molest the woman while bringing her back for Yitzchak.  Bekhor Shor, however, translates z’kan beito as “who had aged in his house,” meaning that the relationship was longstanding and therefore Avraham trusted him.

Malbim takes the opposite approach, understanding z’kan beito as “sage of the house,” one whose advice was followed in all matters. Saadia Gaon similarly understands it to refer to knowledge of social norms.

Avraham is described as zakein in the previous verse, presumably meaning old, but it’s not clear whether z’kan beito is intended to create a parallel or a contrast. Rav Hirsch argues that it does both at once; the eved’s wisdom was a reflection of Avraham’s, and derived from being raised in Avraham’s house.

A Midrash Aggadah may go further. It understands z’kan as a contraction of ziv okinin, meaning that the eved’s face looked just like Avraham’s.  This is often a motif for expressing identity.

c.

The eved is not only the zkan of Avraham’s house; he is also hamoshel bekhol asher lo, the ruler over all that was his.

“Moshel/Ruler” seems more antonymic than descriptive of an eved.  A similar tension is resolved in the Yosef story when the master reasserts his power with regard to his wife; a parallel reading here would fit with Chizkuni above, that the eved would return to pure subordination if he mistreated Yitzchak’s future wife.  Torah Temimah similarly cites a responsum of Rosh as using this verse as evidence that the legal meaning of a contract declaring someone “master of all I possess” is revokable power of attorney and not gift.

However, some interpreters evade this tension by reading the eved as master of everything that was his own, not of everything that was Avraham’s.  For example, Keli Yakar understands the phrase to mean that the eved mastered his own possessions rather than being mastered by them and altering his lifestyle to protect and preserve them.

Yoma 28b resolves the tension by transposing “all that was his” to the realm of abstraction.  The eved was moshel betorat rabbo, ruler of his master’s Torah. Being moshel is stripped of any political or social implications, and the Torah he “rules” still belongs to his temporal master and teacher.

Bereshit Rabbah combines these approaches.

“המושל בכל אשר לו”  –

שהיה שליט ביצרו כמותו,

Who rules over all that was his –

Meaning that he had control over his yetzer just like Avraham.

The eved was moshel beyitzro, master of his own evil inclination. This interpretation should be read in contrast rather than as parallel to Chizkuni.  Chizkuni portrays the eved as reliable because he has aged beyond desire; this is no character reference.  This midrash portrays him as virtuous and capable of resisting temptation.  Moreover, it explicitly establishes him as Avraham’s equal.

d.

Finally Avraham qualified the opening verb of his request with the word na (=please). It seems that Avraham is trying his best not to address the eved as an eved.  All the commentators recognize that the eved expresses his subordination by obeying and placing his hand where Avraham asks. Ibn Caspi graphically describes the posture as “as if his hands are chained under the seat of the person he is swearing to.” Ralbag may subtly add a crucial nuance:

והנה אמר אברהם אל עבדו

שעמד בביתו ימים רבים וגדל עימו,

אשר השליטו אברהם על כל אשר לו,

שישׂים ידו תחת ירכו

להורות שידו היא תחת רשותו,

Avraham said to his eved

who had been in his house many years, and who had grown up with him,

whom Avraham had given control over all that was his,

that he should place his hand under his thigh

to demonstrate that his hand was under his authority

In 47:29, Yaakov similarly says na when making the same request to Yosef. Public demonstrations of subordination are necessary only when no subordination is evident. Private demonstrations of subordination are necessary when subordination is voluntary.  By saying na in private, Avraham is indicating that his prior grants of autonomy to Eliezer were genuine deserved, and he has the right to refuse to put Avraham’s will before his own. Eliezer – not without hesitation, for a variety of possible motives – agrees.

It seems plausible to me that the verse’s description of the eved is from Avraham’s point of view.  If that is so, and we take all the autonomy-friendly options for each phrase, the verse means that Avraham acknowledged the eved’s autonomy by speaking rather than commanding; by saying please; by allowing him authority over the rest of the household, or over the estate; by teaching him all he knew; and by recognizing him as a spiritual equal.

Some of these options seem mutually exclusive, and certainly some are more convincing textually than others.  My contention is that collectively they weave a harmonic around the verse’s tune that make it clear that the Torah here is not baldly describing or endorsing the culturally standard eved-master relationship.

Faith in Torah compels the belief that there is a morally acceptable way of reading the Torah’s narratives.  It does not guarantee that we will find that reading, and if we look for shortcuts, we’ll end up cutting the Torah to fit our measure.  But I think it is necessary to search, and fair to treat moral comfort as a “plus factor” when choosing among plausible interpretations.

by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper

Should Modern Orthodox Jews be at peace with the current state of halakhah? No. Does this mean that we should choose against halakhah when it conflicts with the assumptions of the culture(s) we embed ourselves in? No. Does that mean we should seek out and celebrate such conflicts? No.

There are not difficult questions. Just about all of us understand that halakhah as practiced by the overall halakhic community is necessarily imperfect; that halakhah must at least on occasion be able to stand against the moral tide; and that it would be ridiculous to choose to live in Sodom in order to maximize the conflict between halakhah and social norms.

These propositions are not right or left wing. The meaningful ideological arguments are about what the imperfections are (e.g., are you bothered more by our casual resort to civil courts rather than batei din, or by our inability to call corrupt batei din to account?); when we must resist an external moral consensus; and how we can teach that necessary resistance without breeding indecent disrespect for the opinions of humankind and the tzelem Elokim of many individual human beings.

The process of engaging with a moral critique often leads to recognizing imperfections. This is so whether one ends up resisting or rather accepting the critique. Recognizing imperfections leads to pressure for change.  Fear of change therefore leads to fear of engaging with critiques.

Harvard leadership expert Professor Ron Heifetz teaches that a key art of leadership is “managing disequilibrium.”  As I understand it, the idea is that unless people feel dissatisfied with the status quo, they’ll be unwilling to deal with the loss of comfort that is definitionally part of change. But making people too uncomfortable, too aware of the tenuousness of the present, carries terrors that can also be paralyzing or destabilizing. It’s hard to make mature risk-benefit calculations when the possibility of losing everything is constantly before your eyes.

Leaders have to find a way to make people just uncomfortable enough to be productive.  They also have to be honest. This makes leadership extremely difficult when the game is really being played for existential stakes.

Modern Orthodoxy is playing for existential stakes these days. There are two ways in which the conversation about ethics and halakhah can lead to our community’s dissolution.  The first is if we deny halakhah the right to make demands that are morally repugnant to the other cultures we participate in. The second is if we insist that halakhah is impervious to and uninterested in being morally critiqued.

I take these positions on internal Torah grounds. Verses like “for (the Torah) is your wisdom and discernment in the eyes of the nations, who will hear all these statutes and say: None but a wise and discerning nation, this great people,” and the concepts of sanctifying and desecrating G-d’s Name, demonstrate that Judaism values the good opinion of humanity, indeed sees the development of a shining reputation as a goal. But the very same obligation of sanctifying G-d’s Name teaches that sometimes we must carry out halakhah even though others “kill us for it all day long.”

Here’s the thing. In America, until recently, we were able to claim that our conflicts with the dominant cultures were about theology, not morality or ethics.  Take the “Big Three,” the specific mitzvot that Jews must die before transgressing. Idolatry? Theology (and besides, no major American religion admitted belief in fetishistic idolatry). Bloodshedding? Surely we’re all against that.  Adultery? Even the secular movie code banned that.  There always were, and always will be, countertendencies and transgressors, but the weight of the culture was clearly on our side.

None of that is true anymore. Idolatry? Pluralism is a more important value than any theological claim. Bloodshedding? Well yes, we’re all against that, but only if no one considers the possibility that it extends to abortion, assisted suicide, braindead patients, or even euthanasia. Adultery? No longer a public concern, and certainly the category gilui arayot is out if it includes any form of homosexual activity.

I don’t mean to sound like a crotchety old man bemoaning the good old days: “Do not say: ‘What has happened? Because the earlier days were better than these,’ because you have not asked this from a place of wisdom.” Furthermore, the culture shifts have been multidirectional; some of us are afraid that Christian worship will be established, or that abortion to save the life of the mother will be prohibited, or of backlash against sexual minorities. Polarization in America may generate two cultures each of which are less compatible with our morals than the previous default.

All of these challenges are opportunities to examine whether we are in fact understanding the Torah and the halakhic tradition as G-d intended us to. To take one example from each category:

1. We have been challenged to consider how the category “avodah zarah” applies to religions whose intellectual elite clearly espouse philosophic monotheism, and who understand the apparent popular worship of a pantheon as the worship of a single G-d in multiple manifestations. This challenge is intensified when we identify morally more with the “idolaters” than with the monotheists (such as Isis) destroying their idols.
2. More (and more sophisticated) teshuvot and maamarim have been written about abortion in the past century than In all previous halakhic history. We know the range of positions; we have broken up the gestational period; and we are beginning to understand the risks and rewards of extending categories such as pikuach nefesh to mental illness.
3. The Orthodox community’s enthusiastic embrace of IVF and broad use of birth control has made much classical rhetoric about the necessary connection between sex and procreation tenuous (although Judaism has never linked them absolutely). This has led to an efflorescence of sex-positive Orthodox works and reconceptions of the basis of marriage.

I also don’t mean to endorse all arguments for change. I hold that even Meiri categorized medieval Christian religious practice as avodah zarah. The abortion sh’eilot I have been asked were relatively easy to permit, and yet they were soul-searing experiences. It seems very likely to me that American culture is hopelessly naïve about the extent to which we can undermine old rationales for sexual restrictions and still expect  society to maintain any rules at all. I don’t think that requiring the highest standard of consent – even if we get exponentially better at achieving that – can do all the work. We may be Wile E. Coyote long since over the cliff but not yet willing to look down.

But I also don’t mean to rule specific outcomes out of bounds before hearing all arguments for them – which means, an outcome is only out of bounds until I hear a good enough argument for it to bring it in bounds.  We need to explain why, as seems obvious to most of us, the Torah’s radical animus toward avodah zarah does not apply to many contemporary religions that seem to fall within the boundaries of the halakhic category avodah zarah. We need to ensure that nothing in our practice of halakhah reduces anyone to existing merely for the sake of procreating, or to having their existence defined by their sexuality, rather than having holistic ontological significance. We cannot deny the reality that the link between sex and procreation is now a matter of volition rather than necessity, and that this will only become more true over time.

And to be clear – I don’t think all outcomes are equally likely before I hear the arguments for them.  Some outcomes seem impossible to me, and it would take evidence of unprecedented probative weight to get me to accept them as sufficient even to be relied on in extremis when endorsed by great sages.  Others are just waiting for a better argument to be made, or for existing arguments to be embraced by halakhists who have acceptable scholarship and judgment.

Modern Orthodoxy cannot avoid these conversations any longer. We need to engage moral critiques of halakhah, in the context of vigorous internal Torah conversations. These engagements will inevitably lead to changes in the way that halakhah is practiced and applied in our community. These changes will be uncomfortable, and some of them will generate very legitimate controversy.  So we need to find a sufficient counterforce to make us engage.

Maybe we can find it in the text of this week’s parshah.

Akeidat Yitzchak is a deeply uncomfortable text. The profound discomforts it generates in us can lead to paralysis; to amoralism; to radical change that masquerades as continuity; or to abandonment of the halakhic project as a serious basis for living in the world.

In the hands of effective and serious leaders, though, perhaps reading the akeidah together can also lead to enormously productive halakhic and religious conversations that give us the courage, self-confidence, and humility needed to navigate our changed cultural position with integrity. And true courage, as Dumbledore said, is standing up both for and to our friends. Sometimes it involves both at the same time.

We need to have more “Akeidah conversations.” And we need to have them in full realization that Avraham’s moral struggle plays out on Yitzchak’s cheshbon.

Not because child sacrifice is a live issue, thank G-d, but because unwillingness to have these conversations will sooner or later leave us religiously hollow. These conversations will be hard, and not everyone will be ready to engage in all of them. I know that I am not. But in the absence of such conversations, integrity vanishes, and the worst rule, and the best leave.