Monica

When God speaks to Moshe from the burning bush, he first says "I am Ehyeh asher ehyeh" and later says to tell the Israelites "Ehyeh sent me". Chazal ask why the change in name. Rabbi Yaakov ben Abina said that when God made the first statement, he said to Moshe "I am with your people in their current troubles and I will be with them in their future troubles", and Moshe objected. It's bad enough that they're slaves now, he said; you can't also tell them that there will be times as bad ahead! God agreed, and thus just "Ehyeh" in the second statement -- I will be with them now. (Midrash Rabbah, Sh'mot 3:1)

When Yosef threatened to keep Binyamin as a slave, Yehudah challenged him. According to the midrash he tried three approaches: war, appeasement, and prayer. First he threatened to take up his sword and kill Yosef and all Egypt, but Yosef returned the threat. Then he offered appeasement, giving himself as a substitute. Finally, the midrash interprets his pleas as not to Yosef but to God himself, and this is when Yosef softened and revealed himself. (Midrash Rabbah 93:6)

Rabbi Shimon the Pious taught that when Potiphar's wife tried to seduce Yosef, he was ready to go along with it. But at the last minute, he saw a vision of his father, who he knew would disapprove, and this gave him the strength he needed to resist sin and flee. (Sotah 36b)

I originally found a secondary source that was "based" on this but didn't sound quite right to me -- but it cited Sotah, so I was able to look it up and find what was really there versus the other source's interpretation.

In the talmudic discussion, someone suggests that it's even worse than this and that Yosef planned the rendezvous with Mrs. Potiphar, waiting for a day when all the men were away. (Where were they? Celebrating an idolatrous festival. Mrs. Potiphar begged off, thinking this was her chance to get Yosef.) You can find some unusual stuff by browsing talmud.

Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev said that when Rachel learned of the deception Lavan planned, substituting Leah for her in the wedding ceremony, she went to Leah and taught her her mannerisms to try to prevent Yaakov from rejecting Leah. When Yaakov learned later that Rachel had done this, sacrificing her own happiness to show compassion for her sister, his love for Rachel increased even more.

(Aside: I don't know what, if anything, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak said about Yaakov's developing attitude toward Leah. And I still believe that this ruse harmed Leah at least as much as, if not more than, the other parties involved. I've written about that before.)

Last week some of you gave me suggestions for sources of midrash grouped by parsha (or verse, in some cases). Today I asked my rabbi the same question and he had these additional suggestions:

First, Sefer Ha-Aggadah by Bialik and Ravnitzky is the book to get, he said. (Meta-comment: I wrote down "Bialek" and "Sefer Haggadah"; Amazon search didn't get that for me, but Google did -- and once I had the corrections I could find it on Amazon.)

He mentioned two others that are grouped by topic rather than by parsha. For the first, I wrote down "Montifiore's Jewish Anthology" but that's not turning up results for me (including via Google book search), so I may have gotten something wrong. The other is Voices of Wisdom by Klagsbrun.

S'dom and 'Amorah were destroyed because of their great evil. Rabbi Yehudah said that the leaders of S'dom made a proclamation that anyone who so much as gave a loaf of bread to a poor man would be put to death. He further says that Lot had a daughter who fed a poor man and was punished in this way.

(Source: Pirke d'Rabbi Eliezer)

Aside: can anyone reading this tell me how the translators got from 'Amorah (ayin, patach) to "Gomorah"? There's no gimel there. (The vowel change is less surprising, as random vowel changes in translation/transliteration aren't uncommon. But adding a consonant is novel.)

There's a point in the morning service where we study a little bit of torah. For reasons unknown to me, the weekday morning minyan almost always reads something from Pirke Avot in that slot, rather than the usual text called for in the siddur. So I've been doing that since starting to lead that service because, well, that's what they do. But I've sometimes seen variation from this norm, and these readings didn't really seem to be doing their job, so I decided to try something new -- short bits about the weekly parsha. (Yeah, I should have started last week. Didn't think of it then.) This is supposed to be study, not a d'var torah, so my plan is to repeat something from a source, not add my own layer of interpretation. We'll see how this goes over (no noticable reactions today).

Today's bit:

We might ask: why was it necessary for God to destroy the whole world with the flood? Was there no possibility of redemption? We learn in Midrash Tanchuma that when Noach was commanded to build the ark, he began by planting cedar trees. The people asked him what he was doing and he told them about the coming flood, but they ridiculed him. Later, he cut down the grown trees to make planks, and again the people asked him and ridiculed him when they heard his answer. Noach then built the ark, and only after all of that did God send the flood.

Meta: When we were doing Pirke Avot I just read out of a siddur; with this my choices were to carry a book in with me (the one where I found the passage), make a copy, or do it from memory. I opted for the last. I was a little nervous, but I think it'll be fine next time.

( Why do this? )