Miriam’s Death
Jun 16, 1999 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Balak | Hukkat
Biblical narrative begs for reader participation. Time and again we come across a story short on context, background and human emotions, traces of an event barely recalled and crying out for elucidation. This week’s parasha contains a gem of an example.
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The Power of Tish’ah Be’av
Jul 17, 1999 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Devarim | Tishah Be'av
The Shabbat before Tisha b’Av (the 24-hour fast day on the ninth of Av) bears the name Shabbat Hazon (the Sabbath of Vision). It derives from the first word of the haftara: “The vision [hazon] of Isaiah son of Amoz that he beheld concerning Judah and Jerusalem… (Isaiah 1:1).” In English the translation conveys a note of irony, because the word “vision” tends to connote a depiction of beauty and inspiration, whereas Isaiah is delivering a stern reprimand of the hypocrisy and injustice of Judah in the late eighth century B.C.E. The Hebrew word “hazon”, in contrast, is neutral, stressing the divine source of the vision rather than what is depicted. The prophet is a seer by virtue of his access to an experience of revelation, irrespective of its content.
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The Power of Jewish History
Jul 10, 1999 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Masei | Mattot
No Jewish historian ever had a greater impact on his time than Simon Dubnov. He died at the hands of the Nazis in Riga in December 1941 at the age of 81. Because he was too frail and infirm to deport, they shot him in the ghetto. Those who witnessed the murder reported that Dubnov’s last words were, “Jews, write it down.” And they did, in Kovno, Warsaw, Lodz and elsewhere. In his spirit, Jews organized collective and clandestine efforts to record the many terrifying faces of the Final Solution. Unarmed and unaided, they found solace in assembling the evidence that would one day convict their mass murderers in the court of human history.
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Entering the Covenant
Jul 3, 1999 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Pinehas
This past Shabbat the Schorsch family celebrated the bris of their seventh grandchild. The previous Shabbat, our younger daughter had given birth to her second child. Once again we made use of the small, faded blue velvet kippah, hand sewn and embossed with my Hebrew name by my father’s artist friend in Germany, Fanny Dessau. As it covered my head at my bris, it has now graced the bris of our son and that of three out of four of our grandsons. To me, it is not just a treasured artifact of family pride, but also a symbol of just how valuable is the transmission of consciousness and culture from one generation to the next.
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Moses the Man
Jun 19, 1999 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Korah
Nowhere does the Torah provide us with a single, well-rounded profile of the figure who dominates most of its narrative. We, its readers, need to gather for ourselves the traits of Moses, alluded to in piecemeal fashion, into an integrated profile. Plot mediates the contours of character. Last week, for example, the Torah depicted Moses as the most humble of men in recounting the recriminations brought against him publicly by his own brother and sister (Numbers 12). In the stories from the time before he ascended to the leadership of his nation, he exhibits a deep-seated inability to countenance acts of injustice (Exodus 2:11-13, 16-17; 3:7-9). Given to outbursts of anger against the inconstancy of the Israelites (Exodus 32:19-28), he also is moved repeatedly by compassion to intercede with God on behalf of those who have transgressed (Exodus 32:30-32; Numbers 12:13; 14:11-20).
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My Father’s Legacy
Jul 1, 1999 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Shelah Lekha
From the beginning, the culmination was to have been a land of their own. The progeny of Abraham, grown from a clan into a nation, would be freed from Egypt and returned to the land of Canaan, where once their ancestors briefly dwelled. But on the southern border at Kadesh, the people succumbed to a failure of nerve and decided to abort. The report of ten of the twelve spies sent by Moses to scout the land utterly demoralized them: “We looked liked grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them [the inhabitants of Canaan] (Numbers 14:33).” Fear overwhelmed their newly found faith, which rested largely on miracles rather than conviction. Clearly, in a single generation, God could take Israel out of slavery, but not the mindset of a slave out of Israel. A steady diet of miracles had merely perpetuated their state of dependency.
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The Gifts of Jewish Unity
May 29, 1999 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Naso | Hanukkah
We modern readers have little patience for repetition. To us it marks the absence of novelty and we hurry on. The end of this week’s parasha is a particularly trying instance: an extended list of twelve tribal chieftains dedicating the Tabernacle cult each with his own gift. But the gifts are absolutely identical: “one silver bowl and one silver basin, each filled with choice flour and oil for cereal offerings, one gold ladle filled with incense and the same number and kind of sacrificial animals (Jacob Milgrom, JPS Torah Commentary, Numbers, p. 53).” Individuality expresses itself barely in the fact that each leader is duly named and allotted his own day for bringing his gift. But the Torah feels obliged to repeat with relentless persistence the details of each gift, adding up to a numbing total of 76 verses of unrelieved sameness (Numbers 7:10鈥�86).
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Fulfilling the Commandments
May 1, 1999 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Emor
Piety and morality diverged once again recently when Rabbi Hertz Frankel, the English studies principal of Beth Rachel (the network of Satmar girls’ schools in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg), pleaded guilty to embezzling more than six million dollars of public funds over nearly two decades for the welfare of his employer. Despite a light sentence 鈥撯�� three years of unsupervised probation and a fine of one million dollars on Beth Rachel 鈥撯�� Rabbi Frankel was unrepentant. “The end justifies the means,” he told the New York Times, which I take to mean that he believed the Jewish children in his care were more deserving of the money than the non鈥揓ewish children, no less impoverished and deprived, who lived in his school district.
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