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The Twice-Told Story of Choosing a Wife for Isaac

In this week’s Torah reading, Abraham tasks his servant Eliezer with traveling to Abraham’s homeland (northern Mesopotamia) to select a wife for his son Isaac. Eliezer serendipitously meets Rebecca at a well and is taken to her family’s home. There he presents a marriage proposal, and in doing so he retells the story—previously told by the narrator—of Abraham’s assignment to him and of his encounter with Rebecca at the well. There are numerous differences between Eliezer’s account and the earlier one, and these have been subjected to careful analysis by such great rabbinic commentators as Isaac Abarbanel (1437–1508) and Samuel David Luzzatto (1800–1865), as well as by modern academic scholars. These differences, however, were either ignored or dismissed by the major medieval commentators, generally known for their meticulousness and their focus on the plain-sense reading of the text (p’shat). Martin Lockshin explains why:

The medieval commentators turned to p’shat in the first place because they opposed what they saw as over-reading of the Bible in classical Midrash [talmudic-era rabbinic exegesis]. They consistently dismissed what has been labeled the midrashic principle of omni-significance, the idea that everything in the Bible has to have significance. As Samuel ben Meir (1085–ca. 1158) often wrote, “according to the p’shat, there is no reason to analyze this further.” By this, he meant that, on the [plain-sense] level, nothing more could be legitimately read into or out of the text than what he wrote in his commentary. Samuel ben Meir often knowingly offered prosaic interpretations of biblical texts in order to demonstrate that not everything was significant.

Thus, it seems that the Jewish creators and strongest proponents of p’shat exegesis in the 12th century were so opposed to midrashic over-reading of the Bible that they on occasion under-read the text, as happened in the case of Abraham’s servant, causing them to miss fine points that were then left for later exegetes to discover. This investigation suggests that while it is problematic to over-read a text, it is equally problematic to under-read it.

Read more at theTorah.com

More about: Abraham, Biblical commentary, Genesis, Hebrew Bible, Midrash, Rashbam

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic