Monday, November 12, 2018
Thursday, November 8, 2018
Audio and Essays Parashat Toldot
New Essay
new –
The Best of Intentions
Audio:
Family Dynamics(5min)
Essays:
Stealing Brachot (Hebrew)-ברכות גנובות יימתקו
Monday, November 5, 2018
Parashat Toldot 5779 Family Dynamics
Rabbi Ari Kahn
Family Dynamics
Sometimes family life can be complicated, but the family of Yitzchak and Rivka was particularly complex. At the root of the complexity was a prophecy: God informed Rivka that her two children, Esav and Yaakov, would be in conflict, that each would sire a separate nation, and that the younger of the two (Yaakov) would be superior.[1]As far as we know, Rivka never repeated this prophecy to her husband Yitzchak. Perhaps she reasoned that had God wanted Yitzchak to be privy to this "inside information," He would have shared it with him directly; Yitzchak was certainly no less a prophet than she.
Years go by; the boys grow up, and Rivka acts upon the knowledge of the future she has been given.[2]When she hears that Yitzchak intends to bestow blessings on Esav, she instructs Yaakov to go surreptitiously and take those blessings. Yaakov is afraid that his father will discover the ruse, and will curse him rather than bless him.[3]Rivka assures him that if a curse is forthcoming, she will be the one to bear the brunt of it.
As Yaakov voices his reservations, his inner world is revealed - and it is a place of spirituality: Yaakov fears his father, as a son should, but he does not fear for his own physical safety, nor does he consider what his enraged brother might do to him. He concerns himself only with blessings and curses, with the spiritual fallout of what his mother has commanded him to do; he gives not a thought to the fury or the physical strength of his brother the hunter.
On the other hand, it is altogether possible that Yaakov was not afraid of Esav's reaction because they had already made a deal: Years earlier, Yaakov had purchased the birthright from Esav. This is no trifling matter; the birthright - and more particularly the responsibilities it brought with it - weighed upon Esav like a millstone around his neck. Yaakov had offered him a way out, and he was convinced that Esav loved him for helping him escape the hated burden of being firstborn. Esav detested the birthright, and – at the time – was happy to be rid of it.[4]
Now, years later, perhaps Esav was embarrassed to admit to his father that he had sold the birthright and forfeited his right to the blessing reserved for the firstborn. Looking back on the bargain he had struck with Yaakov years earlier, Esav reconsiders his brother's act of kindness, and with hindsight construes it as having been self-serving, even conniving. Esav manages to forget how eager he had been at the time to accept Yaakov's offer, and how, at the time, he had been only too eager to escape the onerous burden of responsibility.
Yaakov believed, quite sincerely in fact, that Esav was still grateful for relieving him of the birthright, but understood that Esav would have to save face rather than admit to his father what he had done years earlier. The plan to spare both Yitzchak and Esav from this dreaded confrontation was simple and ingenious: Yaakov would present himself as Esav, receive the blessings earmarked for the firstborn which were rightfully his, and neither Esav nor Yitzchak would be forced to confront the sad reality of Esav's negative attitude. There was only one possible problem with the plan: What if Yitzchak saw through the disguise? This was Yaakov's only concern; he feared his father's curse, his disappointment, his hurt response – both to the ruse and to the secret it was meant to conceal.
Rivka allayed his fears; she assured him that if any curse was to come from this plan, it would be on her own head: "On me," she says – "alai" – spelled Ayin, Lamed, and Yud. The Vilna Gaon points out that these three letters form an acronym of the names of three people who tormented Yaakov later in life: Esav, Lavan and the tragedy of Yosef. Despite Yaakov’s clear conscience, despite his conviction that the blessings of the firstborn were rightly his, despite the fact that Rivka devised the scheme because she was convinced that she was acting to fulfill the prophecy with which she had been entrusted, and despite Rivka's assurance that Yaakov would be unharmed and any curse would fall on her own head – Yaakov’s fear was well founded, albeit not as he imagined: Esav was furious, and vowed to hunt him down and kill him. Lavan abused him for years. His own children did not fear or respect him; they abused their brother Yosef, considered murdering him, and sold him into slavery, leaving Yaakov to suffer and grieve for decades.
When Yaakov impersonated his brother and pulled the wool over his father's eyes, he inherited a life punctuated by pain.
Thursday, November 1, 2018
Parashat Chayai Sarah 5779 The Prayer of The Servant
Rabbi Ari Kahn
The Prayer of The Servant
And
Avraham said to the senior servant of his household, who had charge of all that
he owned…go to the land of my birth and get a wife for my son Yitzchak.” (Bereishit
25:2-4)
The elderly Avraham sends his most trusted aide on a
most important mission, to find a wife for his son Yitzchak. We assume that the
identity of this aide is Eliezer, the person who was previously described as a prominent
member of Avraham’s household (Bereishit 15:2). We don’t know that much about
Eliezer, there are rumors that he was a valiant warrior,[1] and some
even claim that his father was the notorious Nimrod.[2]
But he is a close confidant of Avraham, and if we
judge a person by the company he keeps and by the manner he was entrusted by
Avraham, he must have been a person of sterling character.
The servant sets out on his quest; when he arrives
at his destination –Avrahams’s home town - and turns to God in an unusual
prayer:
He
made the camels kneel down by the well outside the city, at evening time, the
time when women come out to draw water. And he said, “O LORD, God of my master
Avraham, grant me good fortune this day, and deal graciously with my master Avraham:
Here I stand by the spring as the daughters of the townsmen come out to draw
water; let the maiden to whom I say, ‘Please, lower your jar that I may drink,’
and who replies, ‘Drink, and I will also water your camels’—let her be the one
whom You have decreed for Your servant Yitzchak. Thereby shall I know that You
have dealt graciously with my master.” (Bereishit 25:11-14)
The servant – by definition, a person accustomed to
obeying orders - gives God a very specific task. If a young, eligible woman behaves
precisely in the manner he has described, his mission will have been a success.
While the propriety of daring to request such a display of Divine
micro-management can be debated,[3] there is
a second, perhaps even more disturbing element to the servant's prayer. The
verses are very specific: He arrived at the specified location at a very
specific time of day, “at evening time,” yet he requests that God's
intervention take place that very same day. “Grant me good fortune this day,” he says,
setting a deadline for the success of his mission, presumably before nightfall.
Keeping in mind that the Jewish day begins just after sunset, the window of
opportunity for success seems extremely limited.
We might be tempted to say that the servant did not
really want to succeed, and did his best to torpedo the mission. In this view,
the very tough terms he set might have been a way to insure that another young
woman, one of his own choosing – perhaps a daughter or niece – would be married
to his master's son, heir to Avraham's great wealth. Yet this approach has one
very serious flaw: This servant was completely dedicated to his master, and
Avraham had put all of his faith in him on more than one occasion. It is hard
to imagine that this trusted aide could have behaved with such duplicity.
Perhaps, then, the seemingly-strange conditions of
success were the result of the years this man had spent in Avraham's service:
As head of Avraham's household, perhaps he had become accustomed to miraculous
events taking place for and around Avraham, and assumed that now, on this mission
on Avraham's behalf, a miracle was sure to happen. He had no doubt that God
would once again do miracles for Avraham; he had come to expect the miraculous.
There may, however, be a third approach.
Although he was in the service of Avraham, on this
particular mission he was also serving also as Yitzchak's proxy – and the text
includes additional information that connects the servant's behavior with
Yitchak's. According to rabbinic tradition,[4] Yitzchak
instituted the afternoon prayer of (mincha); thus, as the servant stands
in prayer at the well in the late afternoon, Yitzchak is also deep in prayer:
And
Yitzchak went out to meditate/pray[5]
in the field toward evening and, looking up, he saw camels approaching. Raising
her eyes, Rivka looked up and saw Yitzchak. (Bereishit 25:63-64)
Yitzchak was certainly aware of the mission on which
his father’s servant was sent. While we may be guilty of some embellishment, it
would not be a huge leap to assume that among his other prayers that evening Yitzchak
prayed that the servant's mission would be successful, and that an appropriate
wife would be found for him. As the daylight wanes, he lifts his eyes to the
horizon, and sees that his prayers have been answered.
Perhaps this explains the strange prayer of the
servant, spoken just before sunset. The master of Avraham's household knew that
this was the hour of day Yitzchak spent in prayer. Mustering up the faith he
has learned in the tent of Avraham, the servant adds his own prayer to the
prayer of Yitzchak; tapping in to the merit of Avraham (for whom God performs
miracles on a regular basis) and the power of Yitzchak's afternoon prayers, the
servant utters his own prayer as the sun tilts downward toward the horizon. He
knows that the combination of faith and prayer are working in his favor at that
particular hour; he has no doubt that God's kindness will be manifest and
immediate.
Essays and Audio Chayei Sarah
Essays and Audio Chayei Sarah
New-
radio interview: Why Bad Things Happen to good people
New-Five minute -D’var Torah – Parashat Chaya Sarah
Walking Together Five minute
Walking Together - YouTube
Finding a Princess
Looking for a Princess - YouTube
Audio:
Avraham and David Comparison between Chayei Sarah and the Haftorah
Where Is Yitzchak , how did the akaida impact Yitzchak? - where was he during his mother's funeral?
5773-The dual lives that each of the patriarchs and matriarchs lived,
Why does Yitzchak pray at the well of Yishmael?
Essays:
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