Readings for Friday, November 1, 2024
Please note: Rosh Chodesh Cheshvan is a two-day Rosh Chodesh. The first day actually falls on the 30th of Tishrei. The second day falls on the first day of Cheshvan.
Rosh Chodesh Cheshvan
28:1-15 Bamidbar (Numbers)
This is the standard reading for each Rosh Chodesh. Rosh Chodesh is the name of the minor holiday that marks the start of each month. The term Rosh Chodesh is translated as New Moon. The first day of the month is referred to as Rosh Chodesh because the months are lunar and the first day of each month comes with the start of the new moon. In the days of the Temple special sacrifices were brought in honor of the new moon. With the destruction of the Temple, the sacrificial system ended. In place of the sacrifices, Jews read a description of the sacrificial offerings, which is described in the first fifteen verses of chapter 28 in the book of Numbers. The Torah reading takes place during the daily morning service. There are many Jews who have no desire to return to the sacrificial system. They use these readings as a way of providing a connection with the past which is one of the keys to our future preservation. Because of the Rosh Chodesh a shortened form of Hallel is recited. Tefillin are worn until Mussaf or Additional Service. Because of its connection with the moon, Rosh Chodesh is thought to have special meaning for women and should be used as a way of honoring Jewish wives. There are those who use this as a gift-giving event for their spouses. (Alternatively, they give Tzedakah in honor of the women (wives, sisters, daughters, etc.) in their lives.
Cheshvan is the second month of the year
counting from Rosh Hashanah and the eight month of the year from Pesach. In one of those calendar related “tricks”
designed to protect tradition, Cheshvan will have an extra day added to it to
“prevent the next Yom Kippur from falling on a Friday or a Sunday.” Cheshvan may be viewed as quiet month since
it comes between Tishrei with its welter of celebrations and Kislev, the month
containing Chanukah. According to
tradition, the Great Flood took place on the 17th of Cheshvan which
corresponds to
Yarhrzeits
12th
of Cheshvan: Yarhrzeit of Yitzhak Rabin.
15th
of Cheshvan: Yarhrzeit of Matityahu;
better known at Matthias, the man who started the revolt against the Syrians
and was the father of Judah Maccabee.
16th
of Cheshvan: Yarhrzeit for those who
perished during Kristallnacht.
20th of Cheshvan: Yarhrzeit of Shalom Dov Ber, 5th Lubavitcher Rebbe.
Readings for
Saturday, November 2, 2024
This Shabbat
is Rosh Chodesh Cheshvan. Two scrolls
are taken from the ark. The first scoll
is for the regular weekly reading. The
second scroll is for the special reading for Rosh Chodesh. See below for further explanation.
No’ach
(Noah)
6:6-11:32 Bereshit (Genesis)
No’ach is the second sedrah in Bereshit (Genesis). The sedrah takes its name from the third and fourth Hebrew words in the first sentence of the sedrah, “These are the generations of Noah (No’ach). - Noah (No’ach) was a righteous man.…” No’ach can be translated as peaceful or resting. Yaniach is a Hebrew derivative of No’ach and means to leave or let go. What does the meaning of the name say about the character or role of the man? No’ach is the last sedrah dealing with mankind in general. The rest of Bereshit focuses on the Jewish people. Major events in No’ach include the Flood, the Intoxication of Noah and Ham’s Sin, the descendants of Noah and the Tower of Babel. It may be viewed as a second creation story. Having failed with Adam and Eve, mankind gets a second chance. This second chance also ends in failure as is witnessed by the building of the Tower of Babel. The sedrah ends with a foretaste of the ultimate solution - the creation of a special relationship with a group of people who will take the divine message to the world.
The Flood
(6:9-8:10)
Ample evidence exists to prove that there was some kind of flood. Other civilizations have their flood stories. The Biblical story is unique in that it ties this natural catastrophe to questions of good and evil. The text says that Noah was a righteous man perfect in his generation. The qualifying statement “in his generation” has led to two views. One view is that he was not really all that righteous. That he was righteous only in comparison to the evil people who lived at that time and that had Noah lived in another generation he might not have been regarded as righteous at all. The other view was that Noah was really very righteous because he was able to be righteous while living among evil people. The thought is that if he could be righteous while living in a truly evil generation, just think how much more righteous he could have been had lived in a generation of decent human beings. In deciding which view of Noah is more correct consider Noah’s silence when God tells him that He is going to destroy the earth versus Abraham’s noisy defense when God tells him that he is going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. Here are a couple of other questions for your consideration. First, if God had decided that the world was corrupt and needed destroying, why not just blow the whole world away and begin the process anew? Why save the sphere and one family of its imperfect inhabitants? Second why did God have Noah build an ark? Certainly there were other ways that an all-powerful deity capable of flooding the entire world could have saved Noah’s family. One answer to this might be that building the ark is consistent with the concept that man must be an active participant in what is called the on-going process of creation. Man cannot rely on God to save him. Rather man must do his share of the work to ensure the triumph of good over evil.
The Intoxication
of Noah and the Sin of Ham (
No sooner does Noah get saved and offer up sacrifices to God for saving him than he plants a vineyard and gets drunk. In other words, instead of enjoying the fruit of the vine, he abuses it. This creates the environment (think back to our comments about Adam and Eve and the effect of parental behavior on the lives of children) that leads to Ham’s sin. The puzzling thing is that the punishment is stated not in terms of Ham, but in terms of his son Canaan. The positive note is that the other two sons found a way to honor their father despite his behavior. Rabbi Schneerson (of blessed memory) uses this story as tool to teach about the proper way to correct mistakes. His teaching includes the concept that sometimes what we see as most distressing in the behavior of others really mirrors a shortcoming of our own.
The Descendants of
Noah (10:1-32)
The genealogy is split in two parts.
The first portion includes all of chapter ten and lists the descendants
of all three sons. The second portion
starts
The Tower of Babel
(11:1-11-32)
This is a further attempt on the part of the ancients to explain how different nations came to exist. This tale offers an explanation of why we have different languages. At a deeper level, some see the story as raising questions about the use of technology. Technology, in this case the ability that ancient man had gained to build sophisticated structures, is neutral. It is how we choose to use the technology that makes it good or evil. Others have also used this story to raise the question of “just because you can do something, does this mean you should do it?”
Themes
Commandments
None of the 613 commandments appear in this sedrah. However, the sedrah does supply a series of strictures and rules:
9:1: Noah and his sons are told to be fruitful and
multiply.
9:3: Mankind is given permission to eat meat for
the first time.
7:2 and 9:4: Together they provide a precursor to the
Dietary Laws. 7:2 refers to “every clean
animal…and of the animal that is not clean…” while 9:4 prohibits consuming
blood when eating meat.
9:5: Prohibits murder.
The Seven Noahide
Laws, which are the criteria for the “righteous non-Jew:”
Refrain from
Denying God;
Blaspheming the
name of God;
Murder;
Sexual
misconduct;
Theft;
Eating the limb
torn from a live animal;
and
Establishing a
court system to ensure obedience to the other six laws.
(These are based on interpretation and not stated in the Torah).
Names of God
God is referred to both as Elohim and YHVH (the name we do not know how
to pronounce). Some contend that these
differences exist because of different authorship. Another explanation is that the different
names are used when different attributes of God are being invoked. Elohim invokes the image of God as Judge of
the Universe. YHVH invokes the image of
God’s mercy and is used when referring to sacrifices as in
Universality of God
God is the God of all mankind and not just of the Jews. In Bereshit and No’ach, God deals with all men and women. He addresses His first rules to the entire world. As can be seen from the Noahide laws, Judaism differs from some other religions in that it believes that all righteous people will have their share in what we call “the world to come.”
Covenant
God makes the first Covenant or Brit with Noah in
The Teaser
Speaking of next week’s Sedrah, let’s take a look at the penultimate verse in No’ach 11:32. “Terah took his son Abram…and…departed with them from Ur Kasdim to go to the land of Canaan; they arrived at Haran and they settled there.” Why was Terah going to Canaan? In the next Sedrah we find out why Abraham was going to Canaan. (Abraham is the same person as Abram. God changes his name later on.) What made Terah stop his journey? The impact of parental behavior on the lives of their children is a recurring theme in literature and modern psychology. Was Abraham carrying out a journey that his father lacked the faith to continue? Are all children carrying on journeys begun by their parents?
Second Chances
Is the story of No’ach an admission that somehow there were “mistakes” made at the time of creation? According to Immanuel Jakobovits it would certainly seem so since God says “I will destroy them (mankind) with the earth.” In case there is any doubt as to who is responsible for this imperfection, Jackobovits cites the verse from last week’s reading, “’And the Lord repented (yahinnahem) that He had made man on the earth and it grieved Him in His heart’ (Bereshit 6:6). There is no hint here that man frustrated the Divine design.” This is not the only indication of error and the need for the Creator to correct it. In their interpretation of the sacrifice to be made each New Moon (Rosh Chodesh), the Rabbis note that it is called a “sin-offering unto the Lord.” There are many sin offerings but this is the only one that adds the tag line, “unto the Lord.” Why? According to Rashi and other sages, it is an apology for the original creation of a Sun and a Moon that were equal; in effect the creation of two suns. When the moon protested this celestial equality, God responded by creating the diminished Moon we know today. In other words every Rosh Chodesh, we are reminded that there was a mistake at the moment of creation. This is not meant to spark a debate about how a perfect Being could create an imperfect world. Rather, as Jakobovits points out, it is a reminder that making human error is the norm. The challenge is to rectify the error, to learn from the mistake. Whether we are repairing our own personal universe or the Divine Universe, there are numerous second chances if we are willing to take advantage of them.
Table Talk Questions
1. What can we learn from the statement, “and Noah found grace in the
eyes of God?”
The commentators say that although Noah was righteous, that in and of
itself was not enough to save him. It
was necessary for God to bestow His grace on Noah and his family. Regardless of how righteous a person may be
that is not enough. The grace of God is
always necessary. Think of this as a
variation on the theme of justice versus mercy discussed during the high
holidays or prayer versus supplication discussed during the study of the
Sukkoth Haftarot.
2. What is the meaning of the rainbow that came after the flood?
There are several interpretations.
It is a sign of God’s forgiveness.
It is a sign of God’s promise never to destroy mankind with a
flood. It is a sign of God’s control
over the universe. Finally, according to
the Zohar, the colors of the rainbow remind us of God’s attributes of
compassion and judgment.
Moshe Pinchas Weisblum as edited by this author.
Fate of the Animals
You would think that Noah would have used the Flood as an excuse to rid the world of a whole lot of pests. Certainly, many of us would have gotten rid of everything from chiggers to rats to those pesky fleas that caused the Black Plague. But not Noah; he followed God’s command to the letter of bringing a pair of each unclean animals and seven clean animals on to the ark. As Meir Shalev points out, this might not have been such a humanitarian or ecologically responsible move. As soon as the flood was over, Noah built an altar and must have sacrificed five of the clean animals so that the Lord could “smell the pleasing odor.” The acceptability of animal sacrifices stands in stark contrast to other Biblical commandments requiring us to treat animals with care and decency.
Torah Trivia
Why was the tune “Over the Rainbow” part of services at a Temple in Syracuse, New York? (a) The Cantor was from Kansas; (b) the Cantor’s son had written the tune; (c) Because the sedrah of the week was No’ach, which contains the first description of a rainbow. The answer is (b). Cantor Samuel Arluck was the Chazan for the congregation and his son was Harold Arlen, the composer of several popular musical scores including this one.
Gilgamesh
and Noah
In 1872, the English Orientalist George Smith presented a paper entitled “The Chaldean Account of the Deluge” which presented the flood story based on the Epic of Gilgamesh. Modern critics of the Bible considered this another chink in the armor of the traditionalists’ claims about the uniqueness of the Bible. While the re-examination of the tale of Noah certainly has proven to be a lively one, James Kugel points to one unavoidable fact. The story of Gilgamesh is only important when compared to the story of Noah. We look to the story of Noah for lessons about morality and the nature of God because it is in the Bible. In other words, by being in the Bible, the stories of the Bible take on a unique importance.
The Tower in the Tower of Babel
Professor Kugel calls attention to the Tower in the story of the Tower of Babel. He connects the Tower in the Tower of Babel to the Ziggurats of Mesopotamia. He sees the story as an almost satiric commentary on the settled life of Mesopotamia written by later day Semitic nomads. This view of the story gains some additional credibility when we remember that Abraham, the Semitic nomad, left Mesopotamia, rejected its culture, for the land of Canaan, a simpler more rural place to which God sent him.
Crimes of the Times
In the opening of the portion two reasons are given for the destruction of the world. First, “the earth had become corrupt before God.” According to some, this meant that people had become some depraved or so accepting of wrong-doing that only God realized the sinful nature of their behavior. Second, the earth had become filled with lawlessness (or robbery depending upon the translation). This refers to what today we would call corrupt business practices, which have the effect of undermining people’s faith in the whole social system, including government. Unfortunately, the conditions described here could be said to look an awful like our world in the 21st century. But the crime that is not mentioned specifically is idolatry. The only Deity that we meet in the first two portions of Bereshit is Adonai. But by the time of Abraham, humankind has become idolators. How did this happen? How did the descendants of Noah come up with what seems to be a new “crime.” And we call idol worship a crime because it is one of the biggies that makes the list at Mt. Sinai. In fact, much of Jewish history, as well as custom and practice, can be seen as an on-going battle between Adonai and the concept of ethical monotheism and idolatry. In the Haggadah we are reminded that our ancestors were idol worshippers; a level below being slaves since they were enslaved by others but they chose to worship stone and wood fashioned by man. What the Haggadah and the Torah do not tell us is how we got there. But at least it provides us with a way to get out.
Water,
Water Everywhere
On Shemini Atzertz, which usually comes a week or two before the Shabbat when we read Noah, we add an extra line to the Amidah that describes God as the one who makes the wind to blow and the rain to fall. This daily invocation is way of asking for God to send the rains during the rainy season. But if you think of the Flood, it too was a case of making the wind to blow and the rain to fall. Since nothing exists in our text without reason, could there be a lesson in the juxtaposition of the start of the rainy season and the cyclical reading about the Flood? Could one lesson be that nature is neutral and that it is how we use it or misuse it that makes nature good or bad?
The Torah provides a very definite chronology of the Flood. Is there a message in this specificity? Is there a connection between these dates and the future of the Jewish people? In considering this, let’s remember that when the Torah talks about “the first month” it is talking about Nisan, the month when we celebrate Pesach and not Tishrei which is the seventh month.
The flood began “in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month,” (7:11). Ironically the second month which here is tied to destruction, is referred to as “the month Chodesh Ziv," or the Month of Splendor. This is because of the splendor of the sun during this month, when it has reached the height of its brilliance, but does not yet burn with the (sometimes harmful) intensity that it does in the late summer months. It is also the month when Israel is filled with a multiplicity of splendors.
“And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat.” (8:4). In other words the ark came to rest during Sukkoth. Is there a connection between the Ark, the temporary shelter used by Noah and the Sukkah, the temporary shelter we use during Sukkoth?
The first glimmer of hope that the flood was ending came “in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, were the tops of the mountains seen.” (8:5). In the Book of Esther, this is the same date on which the young Jewess went to the King who found her favorable. Unbeknownst to the Jews at that time, this event would provide the glimmer of hope that they would be saved from Haman’s evil decree.
Noah recognized that the flood was over and that a new beginning was in the offing “in the first month, the first day of the month” when “the waters were dried up from off the earth; and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and behold, the face of the ground was dried.”(8:13). Fast forward a couple of thousand years and we find the Israelites in the Wilderness with God saying to Moses in the Book of Exodus “On the first day of the first month you shall set up the Tabernacle of Meeting.” (40:2). On the anniversary of the day when Noah was removing the covering from his ark, Moses was to bring his ark into the Tabernacle or Mishkan. Coincidence or pre-destination; this is something you can discuss during your next Kiddush.
Apparently Noah wasn’t sure about how dry the land really was because almost two months elapsed between when “the waters were dried up from off the earth” and he actually left the ark for good. Specifically it was “in the second month, on the seven and twentieth day of the month” when “the earth was dry and God told Noah 'Go forth from the ark, thou, and thy wife, and thy sons, and thy sons' wives with thee.’” (8:14:16). Fast forward five thousand years (give or take) and in the second month on the 27th day of 5727, Israeli troops left western Jerusalem, entered east Jerusalem and fought the Battle of Ammunition Hill which led to the unification of Jerusalem on the following day.
If all of these dates have not made you dizzy, here is the really big question. What is the connection between the fact that both the Flood and the enslavement in Egypt came to an end in “the first month?” Is there a connection between the new beginning offered to mankind in the first month and the new beginning offered to the Israelites when they went out of slavery in the first month?
Second Scroll: Special
Reading for Rosh Chodesh Tammuz
28:9-15 Bamidbar (Numbers)
Rosh Chodesh is the name of the minor holiday that marks the start of each month. The term Rosh Chodesh is translated as New Moon. The first day of the month is referred to as Rosh Chodesh because the months are lunar and the first day of each month comes with the start of the new moon. In the days of the Temple special sacrifices were brought in honor of the new moon. With the destruction of the Temple, the sacrificial system ended. In place of the sacrifices, Jews read a description of the sacrificial offerings, which is described in the first fifteen verses of chapter 28 in the book of Numbers. The Torah reading takes place during the daily morning service. There are many Jews who have no desire to return to the sacrificial system. They use these readings as a way of providing a connection with the past which is one of the keys to our future preservation. Because of its connection with the moon, Rosh Chodesh is thought to have special meaning for women. There are some sages who suggest that wives and mothers should be presented with gifts on this, their holiday. In lieu of gifts, others suggest giving Tzdekah in their honor. The month of Tamuz is a Two Day Rosh Chodesh. The first day actually falls on the last day of the month of Sivan. When Rosh Chodesh falls on Shabbat, as it does this year, the special Torah reading only covers verses 9 through 15 of the 20th chapter of Numbers.
Haftarah - Special for Rosh
Chodesh
66: 1-24; 66: 23 Isaiah
The Man: The reading is the entire last chapter of the Book of Isaiah. This is one of the chapters attributed to the Second Isaiah or the Isaiah of the Exile. We know nothing about the biography of this anonymous author. He (or she for the matter) lived during the last days of the Babylonian Exile. There are only two things we know with any surety. First, this person was a skillful author who could really turn a phrase. Second, this person was humble, allowing his writings to be attached to those of the historic prophet Isaiah. This kind of humility is a highly valued trait in Judaism. For example, at the Seder, the Haggadah includes the words of Joshua reminding us that originally our ancestors were pagans. In Rabbinic writings, such as Pirke Avot (Sayings of the Fathers), sages will attribute their words to those of their teachers, giving them credit for any learning they might have acquired. “Imagine a world where people were more concerned doing the work than getting credit for doing the work.” (Author unknown)
The Message: Isaiah offers words of comfort as he describes the ultimate destruction of the nations who have made war against Israel. Yes, God will gather in the exiles and the Temple will be rebuilt. But in the opening verses, Isaiah reminds the people that holding Jerusalem is not enough. God demands that we follow His laws. “But it is to this that I look: to the poor and broken-spirited person who is zealous regarding My word.”
Theme-Link:
Usually the prophetic portion has a connection
with the Torah portion. This is one of
the exceptions when the prophetic portion is tied to an event on the calendar -
in this case Rosh Chodesh. Verse 23
which is read and then re-read connects the observance of Rosh Chodesh to the
final redemption.
Copyright;
November, 2024; Mitchell A. Levin
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