Shabbat
Vayera Genesis 18: 1-22:24
Candle Lighting Time: Friday, November 14, 2008 4:20 p.m
Last week I wrote how Abraham prospered because he obeyed God. I just
finished reading Rabbi Harold Shulweis’ book “Conscience: The Duty to
Obey and the Duty to Disobey.” Rabbi Shulweis proves that Abraham was
not a mindless believer, a yes-man, who only obeyed orders. I would
like to share with you from this very interesting new book published by
Jewish Lights.
“My earliest and lasting impression of the conflict between the word of
God and the conscience of man began with Abraham’s confrontation with
God as depicted in the Bible (in our parasha this week-Rabbi Greene).
“The encounter between the father of the Jewish people and the God who
has chosen him forecasts the role of moral conscience at the heart of
the divine dialogue. That God would intend to visit judgment on the
entire population of Sodom and Gomorrah is for Abraham grievously
unfair:
Abraham came forward and said, “Will you sweep away the
innocent among the guilty…Shall not the Judge of the all the
the earth deal justly? And the Lord answered, “If I find within
the city of Sodom 50 innocent ones, I will forgive the whole
place for their sake” (Gen. 18: 23)
“The overture to Abrahams robust altercation with God is introduced by
God’s self revelation…(see Gen. 18: 17) God who reveals his design to
destroy the cities of sin, feels it necessary to explain this motivation
so that Abraham may know how and why God functions in history. God’s
‘justice and righteousness’ are the crucial moral predicates that
informs the character of moral conscience in this story.
“Once God reveals these moral traits, God is open to human moral
critique…God is not enmeshed in a veil of inscrutability, but is open to
reciprocal exchange….
”The event at Sodom introduces a paradigmatic model of behavior for a
patriarch, prophet, and sage whose moral dissent against authority-human
and divine-will not be dismissed as acts of treason against God. To the
contrary, as we see repeatedly in other divine-human conflicts, God not
only accepts human moral criticism, but is augmented by it. The
theological implications and moral consequences of such a reciprocal
dialogue affect Jewish belief, practice, and temperament.
”We are conventionally raised to believe that Jewish faith demands
unwavering obedience to the law and the law-giver. That attitude tends
to cultivate a temperament of compliance and passivity. For
conventional thinking, ‘talking back to God’ smacks of heresy. But a
significant genre of religious, moral, and spiritual audacity toward the
divine authority-chutzpa klapei shmaya-finds a place of honor in Jewish
religious thought.” (Pages 8-10)
Abraham shows us in last week’s and this week’s Torah portion that the
challenge for all of us is to know when to obey and just as important
when to disobey.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Gary Greene
Services Schedule:
Friday night 7:00 p.m.
Shabbat 9:00 a.m.
Mon. & Thurs 6:30 a.m.
Sun. -Thurs night 7:30 p.m.
Mark Your Calendars:
Shabbat, November 15th Our first Lunch and Learn of the Season. This
week’s topic: Where is the Garden of Eden?
Sunday, November 16th 8:00 p.m. Our next interfaith dialogue with the
Community Church will be held here at MJCC. I shall teach the group how
we Jews study Torah and Rev. Drake will teach us how Christians study
the Gospels.
Tuesday, November 18, 10:00 a.m. Adult Education Classes
8 pm Free screening of Elisabeth of Berlin with a
discussion with the director Steve Martin at St. Anastasia Catholic
Church.
Elisabeth Schmitz was a member of the Berlin parish where Martin
Niemöller served as Pastor. Her efforts to prod the church to speak out
for the Jews were unsuccessful and she and Bonhoeffer condemned the
failure of the Confessing Church — which was organized specifically in
resistance to the Nazis — to move beyond a very limited concern for
their church and its Jewish converts to advocacy for all people and
especially those suffering the most. Elisabeth responded to the
Confessing Church's timid action in 1935 by saying: “Why does the church
do nothing? Why does it allow unspeakable injustice to occur? …What
shall we one day answer to the question, where is thy brother Abel? The
only answer that will be left to us, as well as to the Confessing
Church, is the answer of Cain." ("Am I my brother's keeper?" Genesis
4:9)
When Elisabeth Schmitz died in 1977, only seven persons attended her
funeral. But this forgotten woman, a student of the greatest theologians
and scholars of twentieth century Europe, was one of the only voices of
resistance to the Nazis in the church. Could this forgotten woman be the
one we should most remember?
This event is free and open to the community and is co-sponsored by
Marathon Jewish Center.
Thursday, November 20 Belly Dancing
Shabbat, November 22nd We celebrate the Bat Mitzvah of Alexandra Ofer.
Save these dates:
December 13th Our next lunch and learn. The topic will be “Did Joshua
fight the battle of Jericho?”
December 19th Sisterhood sponsors our Hanukkah dinner
December 24th Our 2nd annual Israeli Film Festival begins tonight
screening the movie Hershele
