Sermon on Vayeshev
Jan. 10th, 2010 09:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livWhen I give sermons, I don't normally speak from notes, I prefer to start with a mentally prepared rough outline and then ad lib from it. (The same is true when I lecture: I will prepare some slides, which provide both important visual information and a skeleton structure, but I never have written notes in front of me.) So when communities ask for a written text of my sermon, it's hard to provide one since I've forgotten exactly how I embroidered the theme by the time I get to writing it up. Over chanukah, though, I felt that the Stockholm community were paying me as a professional and had the right to expect a professional service from me, including a copy of my sermon for their future archives. So I made far more extensive notes than I usually do (about a page of a journalist's notebook), and I went back and reconstructed the sermon to send to them.
I thought I'd post it here, partly to give an example forhatam_soferet of how my Progressive sermons differ from the kind she's used to in a right-ier context. And partly because I mentioned that the sermon was a success (perhaps a little boastfully), and kerrypolka asked to see a copy. Obviously, don't feel under any obligation to read; I expect this to be interesting only to a small subset of my readers.
(For clarity, a parshe is the assigned weekly section for reading from the Torah. They are usually named after the first (significant) word. The week in question, the parshe was Vayeshev, namely Genesis 37:1 to 40:23 in the standard English Bible. The KJV translation is:
This week's Torah portion, Vayeshev, opens with: "And Jacob settled in the land where his father was a stranger". Not "the Promised land", not "the Holy land", not even simply "Canaan", but "the land where his father was a stranger". The thing about Jacob is that he doesn't really, wholeheartedly believe in abstract promises. He doesn't have the vision Abraham had, the faith in the future when his descendents would be powerful and own the whole land even though the only thing that he himself owned was a grave, and he lived in tents and had to keep moving on when things got too hot politically. No, Jacob is a realist; when God appeared to him at Beth-El with a restatement of the promises of Abraham's covenant, what was Jacob's reaction? That's all very well, but what about practical things like food, clothing and shelter?! He spent 21 years, probably the most formative part of his life, the period when he fell in love and learned his trade, in Haran. For him, Canaan isn't the promised land, it's the land where his beloved wife died, where his daughter Dinah was raped, and his sons took brutal revenge by massacring an entire city. The land where everybody, even his own brother, is a threat to him, the land where he, like his family before him, is a stranger, a perpetual outsider.
And this parshe is the story of Joseph, Joseph whose connection to the Promised land is extremely tenuous. He spends a few years in Canaan as a teenager, but our story opens with him being dragged off to Egypt against his will, sold as a slave by his brothers. The readers know that this is all part of the Divine plan to bring the tribe to Egypt so that they can be enslaved and eventually redeemed, but to teenaged Joseph, it can only seem a traumatic, inexplicable experience. Yet Joseph turns out to be extremely adaptable. As a slave in Potiphar's household, he is the best slave he possibly can be, eventually rising to a position of trust, second only to his master in charge of everything. After Potiphar's wife's false accusation, he is thrown into prison, where he proceeds to become the best prisoner he possibly can be. Again, he gains the trust and protection of a powerful figure, the prison guard, and again rises to be second in command. And finally in Pharaoh's court, he becomes the best Egyptian courtier he possibly can be. He doesn't really act in the interests of his religion or background; apart from wangling a minor favour for his family, all his decisions serve the interest of his new master Pharaoh. By the time he rises to the position of vizier, effectively running the whole country, you might say he is more Egyptian than the Egyptians. He not only marries out, he marries the daughter of a priest of the pagan, polytheist Egyptian cult. His only connection to the Promised land is that he asks to be buried there, but for this to happen he has to follow the funeral customs of his adopted country and have himself mummified, and it takes several centuries before his embalmed corpse is finally returned to its resting place in the land of God's promise to his descendants.
So why does Joseph have more chapters devoted to him than any other figure in Torah, apart from Moses? Could it be because in fact most of Jewish history has happened to a people who were a minority in countries ruled by other cultures? Over and over again, Jews have found ourselves forced to live in alien cultures, or sometimes we have chosen to do so. Even Israel itself has very rarely been a Jewish state; since Biblical times we've had a century or so of Hasmonean rule, a few decades under Herod who was anyway a puppet of the Roman power, and the modern state of Israel which we may hope will be secure for a long time, but the fact it is it has only been independent for 60 years so far. Other than that, it was Greek or Assyrian rule, or Roman rule, or contested between the Christian crusaders and the Arab Muslim powers, or an outpost of the Ottoman empire ruled from Turkey, or under British rule in the 20th century. So Joseph's story provides a situation we can relate to, to balance the hypothetical ideals of much of Torah which can only be implemented in the historically rare situation where Jews live in a Jewish land run by Jewish authorities.
You're aware that Joseph's sons, Ephraim and Menasseh, are mentioned in the blessing for sons on Friday night. Daughters are blessed to be like the matriarchs, which is easy to understand, but why do sons get Ephraim and Menasseh? Rabbinic tradition has it that we want our sons to be like those two, because even though they lived their whole lives in a foreign culture, they remained true to their Jewish roots. But how can we put that ideal into practice? This year in Sweden, Chanukah coincides with Lucia; what do we do about that? Do we just assume that Lucia is purely a cultural thing, nothing to do with religion at all in spite of its connections with a Christian saint and the Christian Advent period? Or do we try to combine the two celebrations, since both have to do with lights and hope in a dark period of the year? Or is a good Jew expected to studiously ignore Lucia, refusing to sing any carols or eat any saffron buns? That's a minor example, of course, but it brings me to something I've been thinking about a lot recently; being a member of a cultural minority in the UK is a very different experience from being part of a minority in Sweden, and I spent the summer in New York where it's a completely different story again.
What models does Torah provide for us of how to hold this balance? There is Abraham, the visionary, who no matter what the reality is on the ground always has his eyes on the promised future. The modern equivalent might be living in Europe, but being passionately committed to Zionism, buying Israeli produce, taking all your holidays in Israel, trying to learn modern Hebrew, and defending Israel politically when as so often it is criticized. Or there is Isaac, whose approach was to keep his head down and hope that his neighbours would ignore him as much as possible. I could compare that to the sort of ultra-Orthodox Jews who refuse any contact at all with the culture they live in, eating food bought only in one shop, refusing even television, the internet and secular books. And then there is Jacob, who interacts with the surrounding culture through a lens of paranoia, always looking over his shoulder, always ready to defend himself against the next attack, whether by stealth or by open violence as necessary.
I think Joseph makes a better role model than any of the patriarchs. Culturally, he is fully Egyptian, he #walks like an Egyptian# in almost every way. Yet religiously, he is nothing but Jewish; he constantly expresses his gratitude to God for his successes. I think that can be a really positive option for us European Progressive: being fully part of society, appreciating everything that is good about our adopted cultures, but insisting on being guided by ethical and religious values from our tradition.
It's not a coincidence that we read about Joseph during chanukah. Chanukah is the epitome of this dilemma, of how to live as a minority in a culture whose values clash with your own. On one side of the conflict we have the Hellenized Jews, who were happy to read Greek literature and philosophy, who dressed like Greeks and even took part in naked sport contests, some going as far as having cosmetic surgery so the fact that they were circumcised would not be so obvious while they competed. The other side, the Zealots, vehemently rejected all this, and were willing to kill not only Greeks, but even fellow Jews they felt had gone too far in becoming part of the foreign, idolatrous culture. In a way it's a strange festival for Progressive Jews to be celebrating, as we remember the victory of those Zealots who so violently refused to be part of their society. And yet, although the Zealots won in one sense, what was the first thing they did when they took charge? They instituted a festival to remember their victory, which is much more of a Greek thing to do than a Jewish one. And nowadays, they are commemorated by the Maccabi games, the Jewish equivalent of the Olympics - you don't get much more Greek than that!
It's not by any means an easy question, but in the end it's a very important one: how can we find the way to settle and make our home in "the land where our ancestors were strangers"?
Thanks tohatam_soferet for pointing out how much space Joseph takes up in Torah, and to AF's mother P, who ran a great class on the character of Jacob relating to the parshe from a couple of weeks earlier, with the dream at Beth-El.
I thought I'd post it here, partly to give an example for
hatam_soferet of how my Progressive sermons differ from the kind she's used to in a right-ier context. And partly because I mentioned that the sermon was a success (perhaps a little boastfully), and kerrypolka asked to see a copy. Obviously, don't feel under any obligation to read; I expect this to be interesting only to a small subset of my readers. (For clarity, a parshe is the assigned weekly section for reading from the Torah. They are usually named after the first (significant) word. The week in question, the parshe was Vayeshev, namely Genesis 37:1 to 40:23 in the standard English Bible. The KJV translation is:
And Jacob dwelt in the land wherein his father was a stranger, in the land of Canaan.The verse is somewhat ambiguous, with two words to do with living, one implying permanence and one a more temporary situation. So, to be very literal: Jacob [dwelt | lived | settled down | made his home] in the land of his father's [sojourning | wanderings | temporary residence | stranger-hood].)
This week's Torah portion, Vayeshev, opens with: "And Jacob settled in the land where his father was a stranger". Not "the Promised land", not "the Holy land", not even simply "Canaan", but "the land where his father was a stranger". The thing about Jacob is that he doesn't really, wholeheartedly believe in abstract promises. He doesn't have the vision Abraham had, the faith in the future when his descendents would be powerful and own the whole land even though the only thing that he himself owned was a grave, and he lived in tents and had to keep moving on when things got too hot politically. No, Jacob is a realist; when God appeared to him at Beth-El with a restatement of the promises of Abraham's covenant, what was Jacob's reaction? That's all very well, but what about practical things like food, clothing and shelter?! He spent 21 years, probably the most formative part of his life, the period when he fell in love and learned his trade, in Haran. For him, Canaan isn't the promised land, it's the land where his beloved wife died, where his daughter Dinah was raped, and his sons took brutal revenge by massacring an entire city. The land where everybody, even his own brother, is a threat to him, the land where he, like his family before him, is a stranger, a perpetual outsider.
And this parshe is the story of Joseph, Joseph whose connection to the Promised land is extremely tenuous. He spends a few years in Canaan as a teenager, but our story opens with him being dragged off to Egypt against his will, sold as a slave by his brothers. The readers know that this is all part of the Divine plan to bring the tribe to Egypt so that they can be enslaved and eventually redeemed, but to teenaged Joseph, it can only seem a traumatic, inexplicable experience. Yet Joseph turns out to be extremely adaptable. As a slave in Potiphar's household, he is the best slave he possibly can be, eventually rising to a position of trust, second only to his master in charge of everything. After Potiphar's wife's false accusation, he is thrown into prison, where he proceeds to become the best prisoner he possibly can be. Again, he gains the trust and protection of a powerful figure, the prison guard, and again rises to be second in command. And finally in Pharaoh's court, he becomes the best Egyptian courtier he possibly can be. He doesn't really act in the interests of his religion or background; apart from wangling a minor favour for his family, all his decisions serve the interest of his new master Pharaoh. By the time he rises to the position of vizier, effectively running the whole country, you might say he is more Egyptian than the Egyptians. He not only marries out, he marries the daughter of a priest of the pagan, polytheist Egyptian cult. His only connection to the Promised land is that he asks to be buried there, but for this to happen he has to follow the funeral customs of his adopted country and have himself mummified, and it takes several centuries before his embalmed corpse is finally returned to its resting place in the land of God's promise to his descendants.
So why does Joseph have more chapters devoted to him than any other figure in Torah, apart from Moses? Could it be because in fact most of Jewish history has happened to a people who were a minority in countries ruled by other cultures? Over and over again, Jews have found ourselves forced to live in alien cultures, or sometimes we have chosen to do so. Even Israel itself has very rarely been a Jewish state; since Biblical times we've had a century or so of Hasmonean rule, a few decades under Herod who was anyway a puppet of the Roman power, and the modern state of Israel which we may hope will be secure for a long time, but the fact it is it has only been independent for 60 years so far. Other than that, it was Greek or Assyrian rule, or Roman rule, or contested between the Christian crusaders and the Arab Muslim powers, or an outpost of the Ottoman empire ruled from Turkey, or under British rule in the 20th century. So Joseph's story provides a situation we can relate to, to balance the hypothetical ideals of much of Torah which can only be implemented in the historically rare situation where Jews live in a Jewish land run by Jewish authorities.
You're aware that Joseph's sons, Ephraim and Menasseh, are mentioned in the blessing for sons on Friday night. Daughters are blessed to be like the matriarchs, which is easy to understand, but why do sons get Ephraim and Menasseh? Rabbinic tradition has it that we want our sons to be like those two, because even though they lived their whole lives in a foreign culture, they remained true to their Jewish roots. But how can we put that ideal into practice? This year in Sweden, Chanukah coincides with Lucia; what do we do about that? Do we just assume that Lucia is purely a cultural thing, nothing to do with religion at all in spite of its connections with a Christian saint and the Christian Advent period? Or do we try to combine the two celebrations, since both have to do with lights and hope in a dark period of the year? Or is a good Jew expected to studiously ignore Lucia, refusing to sing any carols or eat any saffron buns? That's a minor example, of course, but it brings me to something I've been thinking about a lot recently; being a member of a cultural minority in the UK is a very different experience from being part of a minority in Sweden, and I spent the summer in New York where it's a completely different story again.
What models does Torah provide for us of how to hold this balance? There is Abraham, the visionary, who no matter what the reality is on the ground always has his eyes on the promised future. The modern equivalent might be living in Europe, but being passionately committed to Zionism, buying Israeli produce, taking all your holidays in Israel, trying to learn modern Hebrew, and defending Israel politically when as so often it is criticized. Or there is Isaac, whose approach was to keep his head down and hope that his neighbours would ignore him as much as possible. I could compare that to the sort of ultra-Orthodox Jews who refuse any contact at all with the culture they live in, eating food bought only in one shop, refusing even television, the internet and secular books. And then there is Jacob, who interacts with the surrounding culture through a lens of paranoia, always looking over his shoulder, always ready to defend himself against the next attack, whether by stealth or by open violence as necessary.
I think Joseph makes a better role model than any of the patriarchs. Culturally, he is fully Egyptian, he #walks like an Egyptian# in almost every way. Yet religiously, he is nothing but Jewish; he constantly expresses his gratitude to God for his successes. I think that can be a really positive option for us European Progressive: being fully part of society, appreciating everything that is good about our adopted cultures, but insisting on being guided by ethical and religious values from our tradition.
It's not a coincidence that we read about Joseph during chanukah. Chanukah is the epitome of this dilemma, of how to live as a minority in a culture whose values clash with your own. On one side of the conflict we have the Hellenized Jews, who were happy to read Greek literature and philosophy, who dressed like Greeks and even took part in naked sport contests, some going as far as having cosmetic surgery so the fact that they were circumcised would not be so obvious while they competed. The other side, the Zealots, vehemently rejected all this, and were willing to kill not only Greeks, but even fellow Jews they felt had gone too far in becoming part of the foreign, idolatrous culture. In a way it's a strange festival for Progressive Jews to be celebrating, as we remember the victory of those Zealots who so violently refused to be part of their society. And yet, although the Zealots won in one sense, what was the first thing they did when they took charge? They instituted a festival to remember their victory, which is much more of a Greek thing to do than a Jewish one. And nowadays, they are commemorated by the Maccabi games, the Jewish equivalent of the Olympics - you don't get much more Greek than that!
It's not by any means an easy question, but in the end it's a very important one: how can we find the way to settle and make our home in "the land where our ancestors were strangers"?
Thanks to
hatam_soferet for pointing out how much space Joseph takes up in Torah, and to AF's mother P, who ran a great class on the character of Jacob relating to the parshe from a couple of weeks earlier, with the dream at Beth-El.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-10 03:29 pm (UTC)I almost feel silly even mentioning it, because I'm sure you must have considered it already, but would some sort of technological recording device (probably whatever has replaced the dictaphone in this modern MP3-based era) not be an obvious way to refresh your memory at writeup time?
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-10 03:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-10 11:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-11 01:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 07:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-10 03:42 pm (UTC)That is akshuly food for thought, because I always see Yosef as a ghastly brat and an unpleasantly manipulative adult, I've never tried seeing him as a role-model. Hm.
In paradigm terms, I think that's what I'd call Personal, but from the sort of Person who's got a good education, if you see what I mean. But will reconsider whether that's the right way to think about it.
Oh, and shkoiyach, of course. Yay you being all leaderly.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-11 12:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 07:44 pm (UTC)I don't think that my discussing Joseph as role-model is the most natural reading of Vayeshev. I'm working on the assumption that the author (whether Divine or human or a committee, I'm not getting into that) had something more to say than just portraying a character having adventures. So he's not a role-model because he was a totally wonderful human being in every way, but I think it's still fair to look for behaviours and approaches that he does model which we may find ethically positive. Also, on a pshat level I think it's easy to get a bit biased against Joseph because he was a truly awful teenager, I think he does improve with maturity. Though there are definitely some questionable elements to his adult behaviour too!
I can see this as a subset of a Personal dvar Torah, yeah. In this case I worked quite hard to bring some personal stuff in, because this community is people who like me and haven't seen me for 6 months, so they actively want to know something about my own personal opinions and experiences. If I had been preaching a different context, I would have kept it much more abstract. The point where I wasn't sure about your classification is that I don't think this is at all a dvar about "me and Torah", it's about reaching into Torah for a framework to discuss issues around Jewish identity in a diaspora context. Those issues are only to do with me in as far as I am a Progressive, diaspora Jew like the rest of my audience.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-11 12:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 07:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-11 06:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-12 07:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-26 02:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-26 03:05 pm (UTC)I don't know if he was ethically superior to the Egyptians; because of the way the story is told, we just don't get a lot of insight into Egyptian culture as such. We just see a few individuals, some of them performing admirable actions and some of them behaving badly. But I do think it's a useful reading to see his open piety as a positive thing. In our society we are a bit suspicious of someone who is pious, because often they are trying to impose their religious views on us, or just stop us from having fun. But Joseph's framing everything in his life as coming from God, his gratitude for the good things and his faith that God will see him through his troubles, those are admirable qualities even if perhaps not very trendy, and even if he had some other much less admirable qualities as well.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-27 05:29 pm (UTC)