Saturday morning services will begin at 8:45 am.
Following a noontime Kiddush, Landers Playspace will be open. Talmud will convene at 4:00 pm. Mincha will be in our Rabb Chapel at 3:42 pm. My Mincha and Metaphysics topic will be "Entering Exodus." Havdallah takes place no earlier than 4:57 pm.
From the Torah Commentary of Richard Elliot Friedman
Commandments can be promises and blessings.
Chapter 48:4 I'm making you fruitful and multiplying you, and I'll make you..But God did not say "I'll make you fruitful.." God said, "Be fruitful.."(35:11). Why does Jacob tell Joseph that God promised to do it when God actually told him to do it? Perhaps it is because Jacob has only one more son (Benjamin) after God tells him this, and so the becoming fruitful must refer to the births of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Jacob would not see this as in his power but rather as God's doing, and so he understands God's words not as a command but as a promise and a blessing.
Judah's Preeminence
Chapter 49:8 Judah. Reuben is demoted from firstborn preeminence (49:4); Simeon and Levi are condemned to be scattered (49:7). The fourth-born Judah is the one to receive praise, success, and dominion. The fulfillment will come when Judah becomes the largest of the tribes, and its royal family, the kings descended from David, rule for centuries and hold the messianic promise, Judah was the brother who saved Joseph's life, who promised to be the protector of Benjamin, whose relationship with Tamar resulted in the birth of the clan of the future kings of Israel. The patriarchs will all be buried in Hebron, the capital city of the tribe of Judah. Here at the end of Genesis we find the denounement of the stories of the brothers, and we are made aware of their significance for the future.
Mourning and healing
50:16 Your father had commanded before his death. We never find out whether Joseph - or his brothers - ever told Jacob what his brothers did to him. The brothers claim that Jacob commanded that Joseph should forgive them, but we do not know if they are making it up or not. Either way, it is the right message: after a parent's death, the children should try to heal any old wounds and draw close.
Why is Joseph (eventually) buried in Shchem?
Chapter 50:15 When Joseph's brothers saw. According to a Midrash, (Tanhuma 17) when Jacob's body was brought to Hebron for burial, the brothers saw Joseph make a side trip to the pit into which he had been thrown as a child. Joseph went there to reflect on the wondrous deliverance he had experienced since that day, but the brothers feared that he was harboring thoughts of revenge. Where was that pit located? Shchem. I prefer to imagine that Joseph was offering a nod to his brothers that, in the future, their descendants will bury him in this place as a form of repair (Tikkun), as the Talmud states "from that place he was removed from the Land, and to that place he shall be returned to the Land."
From The Beginning of Wisdom (Leon Kass)
The last chapter of Genesis begins with the burial of Jacob at Machpelah and ends with the mummification of Joseph in Egypt. The contrast between burial and embalming/mummification reveals a crucial difference between Israel and Egypt: the difference between acceptance and denial or defiance of death. Embalming the body is an attempt at human control over death. The putative beneficiary of this treatment is the deceased: embalming resists time and change, prevents decay, beautifies the body, and prepares for reanimation and continued life - not to say immortality. Burial accepts that we are "dust to dust." It manifests a different attitude toward the body and its fragile beauty, toward time and finitude and memory...The way of Israel is the way of memory, keeping alive not the bodies of the dead but their ever-living legacy in relation to the ever-living God, who in the beginning created heaven and earth and made man alone in His own image, and who later summoned Father Abraham and his descendants to "walk before Me and be wholehearted."
In honor of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel's yahrzeit, this coming Wednesday evening, I offer a couple of passages which I find particularly resonant.
"Mindfulness of God rises slowly, a thought at a time. Suddenly we are there. Or He is here, at the margin of our soul? When we begin to feel a qualm of diffidence lest we hurt what is holy, lest we break what is whole, then we discover that He is not austere. He answers with love our trembling awe. Repentant or forgetting Him even for a while, we become sharers of gentle joy; we would like to dedicate ourselves forever to the unfolding of His final order."
"How often does justice lapse into cruelty and righteousness into hypocrisy. Prayer revives and keeps alive the rare greatness of some past experience in which things glowed with meaning and blessing. It remains important, even when we ignore it for a while, like a candlestick set aside for the day. Night will come, and we shall again gather round its tiny flame. Our affection for the trifles of living will be mixed with longing for the comfort of all men."
"We must learn how to study the inner life of the words that fill the world of the prayer book. Without intense study of their meaning, we feel, indeed, bewildered when we encounter the multitude of those strange, lofty beings that populate the inner cosmos of the Jewish spirit. It is not enough to know how to translate Hebrew into English; it is not enough to have met a word in the dictionary and to have experienced unpleasant adventures with it in the study of grammar. A word has a soul, and we must learn how to attain insight into its life."
SHABBAT SHALOM
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