In Honor and Memory of My Father and Teacher Leonard Konigsburg

On April 29, 2007 (11 Iyyar 5767) my father and my teacher, Leonard Konigsburg went to claim his portion in Olam Habah. I dedicate these lessons to my father who was an inspriation in my life and through his gentle teachings became the founder of the Konigsburg Rabbinic Dynasty.

Monday, October 31, 2011

Genesis Chapter 1 part 2



It has always fascinated me how the Torah looks at the creation of the world. Of course it is a primitive story; the bible has no concept of evolution or prehistoric time. One of the great problems of the text is the entire issue of time; not just the length of a day, but how the entire concept of time is derived. Jewish time begins with creation. The current Jewish year is calculated by scholars who try to derive the date of creation by working back through the centuries and through the Torah to discover how long ago the world was created. We know of course that the almost 5800 years of the Jewish calendar does not include prehistoric time that includes the rise of life in the oceans, the rise of plant life and then animal life on the land, the age of reptiles/dinosaurs and the early ages of mammals. The calendar really only figures the historical time of civilization in the Middle East. As with the historical accounts of all peoples and civilizations, the “authors” of the Torah see themselves as the center of the universe. To look for something here beyond what was known in the “civilized” world of ancient Mesopotamia, is to go beyond the boundaries of what the Torah is about.

Another issue is the idea that God created the world (something) from nothing. The opening lines of the Torah tell us that there was “tehome” called “the deep” and apparently water. There also seems to be some kind of atmosphere where God's spirit can “hover” in the wind. It seems to be a dark chaotic ball of water that is first illuminated and then split in half. Where the upper and lower parts meet, God introduces a bubble of air and in that bubble will the world be created. The first three days mirror the second three days. The first three days set the scene for what will be created on the final three days. The creation of human beings is thus the pinnacle of creation, the last and greatest of God's creative acts.

It is also a point of some discussion about how human beings were created. The text of chapter one indicates that there was just one person created and that one individual was both male and female. I am not sure if this was one body with two sets of genitalia or if one side was male and the other side female. I know that there is a different story about this creation in the next chapter but I will wait until we get there to address that concern.

More importantly for Judaism, the human, whatever the gender, is created in the “image” of God. This is a real issue because Judaism believes that God has no image. This means that if we want to “see” God, we need to really “see” our fellow human beings. No matter how many different faces, colors, styles and genders, every single human being has this “image” of God and therefore all human life is holy.

Notice also that humanity is instructed to eat only a vegetarian diet. Permission to eat animals will come much later in our text. Humanity is also given a job to do. Human beings are to populate the world and serve as stewards for all the other animals, helping them live their lives and keeping them in their divine place in the world that God has created.

Finally, we note that the seventh day is not part of the creation story, but the opening lines of chapter two. I want to teach from the very start that the Torah, as passed down through the generations from one Jewish community to another, never had any chapters at all. The only divisions were the parshiot, the list of weekly readings for synagogue use every week. The chapters were introduced by Christian scholars in the middle ages and the Jewish community eventually adopted this chapter/verse configuration in order to be able to talk to Christians about the text. If you look at where the Shabbat aliyot break up the text, you see the first reading does include the verses on Shabbat as part of the creation story.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Genesis Chapter 1 : Part 1



I think that this chapter is so difficult that it alone is responsible for more people ignoring the Torah than almost any other chapter. At the beginning of almost every Bible class I teach there are some present that tell me that they tried to read the Torah from the beginning and got so confused from the creation story that they put down the book in disgust. How could they take seriously a book that begins with a story that clearly has no relationship to the reality of the world?

In a different way, this question has been asked for thousands of years, even before there was a Darwin and a theory of evolution. The first question Rashi, the great 12th century commentator asks is “Why does the Torah begin here rather than with Exodus Chapter 12?” The real issue that underlies all the questions is: Just what is the purpose of the Torah? Why was it “written” at all? What is it supposed to do? If we don't understand what this book is about, then how can we ever understand what it contains. If we are reading a novel, we understand what a novel is so we know what to expect. If we are reading an astronomy textbook, we have an understanding of what we will find inside. If we are reading a history book, we assume that it is about interpreting the historical facts that have come down to us. The reason Rashi asks his question is because, for most Jews, the Torah is a law book. It contains the fundamentals of Jewish law. But if that is the only thing that the Torah is about, then it would indeed have started with Exodus chapter 12, the place where the mitzvot, the commandments, the laws really begin to be stated and explained.

Since the Torah begins with Genesis, chapter 1, then there must be another purpose for Torah. There are some who think that it is a science text; that it is teaching us the real history of the world. These people think that Genesis is opposed to the theory of evolution, rather chapter 1 is the factual account of how the world was created. There certainly are many fundamentalists who believe this is the purpose of the story. It is hard for me to agree with them. The story of creation is way too muddled to call it a history of the creation of this world. It is, first of all, very hard to know how long it took to create the world. The text tells us the world was created in six days and on the seventh day God rested. How are we supposed to define what a “day” is when the sun and moon are not created until day four! I am sure that there are many who believe that if this is what the Bible says, then this is what it means. I am not one of them. If you are a person who takes the Bible at face value and hold whatever it says as “true” then this commentary of the Torah is not for you. I am not going to try and change your mind so you don't have to try and change my mind. We can agree to disagree and you can follow some other blog on the Bible.

If you are trying to come to some understanding of the Torah and a fundamentalist approach is not for you then I hope you will continue to participate in this study. If the Torah is not a law book; if the Torah is not a science text; if the Torah is not a history of the world, then what is it?

My take on the Torah is that this book is a morality text. The creation story is a story about the beginning of morality. God creates a world. It does not exist forever. Only God is forever. The creation story is to prove that God is the only real power in the universe. Each of the items that God creates should be considered as if the item is a proper name, the name of a pagan god. I believe the creation story is a story about how God created even the things that other nations called “god” to show that all the other “gods” were really the creation of the one God. The creation story was never meant to be a history of the world; it was meant to explain why the one God was the true creator and the other gods were false. If you want to hold the theory of evolution, the Torah is not contradicting you. If you want to hold that the universe was created with a big bang and is billions of years old, there is nothing here to contradict you. If you want to believe that “light and darkness” the “sun and moon” or any of the animals are really gods, then the Torah is here to tell you that you are wrong. However all these things got here, it was not because they are separate powers in the universe. They are all parts of the natural world and thus “created” by the one God. That is why I think this story is here, to declare the mythology of other pagan religions as false.

Now that we have put that issue to rest, let us take up the text and examine some of the other textual issues it raises...