Qoton Qlassic: Moses' Black Wife

Moses' Black Wife is a work of paleontology discusses the paleontological origins of the differences between dark-skinned individuals and light-skinned peoples. The following is a new addition to the essay based on the principles set in the paper:

Rashi (to Genesis 12:11) quotes a Midrash (Genesis Rabbah §40:4) that explains that when Abraham traveled to Egypt, he was scared that the Egyptians might abduct his wife because she was beautiful and the Egyptians, being the brothers of the Cushites, were swarthy and ugly. Nachmanides (Genesis 12:11) asks according to Rashi that Abraham hid Sarah from the Egyptians because she was beautiful and the Egyptians, being relatives of the Cushites, were black and ugly why did Abraham do so only on his sojourn to Egypt, but refrained from doing so (like his son Issac) on his visit to the Phillistinian city of Grar. In asking such a question, Nachmanides assumes that the Philistines (Plishtim) were also of a dark complexion just like the Egyptians. This assumption is based on the fact that, according to the genealogical tables established by the Torah (Genesis 10:13-14), the Phillistinian Nation descended from the Egyptians who in turn descended from Ham. Thus, since the dark-skinned trait is hereditary, the inhabitants of Philistia were dark just as the Egyptians were. However, one can reason (in order to explain the view of Rashi) that only the Egyptians were dark-skinned because they were in the geographical area of Africa, but the Philistines were not in that geographical region, and thus were not dark-skinned. This explanation assumes that the dark-skinned trait is not hereditary but rather is the product of one’s locale. According to this explanation, when Rashi points out that the Egyptians are “the brothers to the Cushites”, his intent is that they are the geographical “brothers” (i.e. neighbors) to the Cushites who made up the bulk of human settlement in Africa. Essentially, one can reduce this dispute between Rashi and Nachmanides to whether “being black” is dependent on one’s geographical location over the span of several generations or on one’s ancestral lineage (with the family of Ham possessing this characteristic).

Read the rest of Moses' Black Wife...

The Splitting of the Red Sea

In describing the Egyptian pursuit of the fleeing Jewish Nation, immediately preceding the Splitting of the Red Sea, following the Israelites’ Exodus from Mitzrayim, the Holy Scripture writes “These did not approach near those the entire night.” The Talmud exegetically interprets this verse as referring to the ministering angels in Heaven who wanted to sing of G-d’s praises on the night of the Splitting of the Sea, but G-d countered rhetorically “The works of My hand are drowning in the sea and you request to speak of songs?” Essentially, the Talmud is explaining that because the Egyptians were drowning in the sea, the ministering angels were forbidden by HaShem from singing their songs of praise. Based on this Talmudic passage, Rabbi Yosef Kairo (1488-1575) explains that on the latter days of Pesach one does not recite the Hallel in its entirety, rather one merely recites “Half-Hallel” because the Splitting of the Reed Sea occurred on the Seventh Day of Passover and therefore the Jews should not say the Hallel song in its entirety for the same that the ministering angels were forbidden from singing Shirah at the Splitting of the Sea. That is, as HaShem said, because ““The works of My hand are drowning in the sea and you request to speak of songs?” However, the question arises, according to Rabbi Kairo, why the Jews sing Hallel in its entirety on the First Night of Passover, if historically on that night the ancient Egyptians were massacred by the Plague of the Firstborn, so just like the Jews refrain from saying the complete Hallel on the Seventh Night of Passover because that Egyptians drowned in the Red Sea (Yam Suf), they should also do so on the First Night of Passover because many Egyptians died in the Plague of the Firstborn (Makas Bechoros).Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik (1820-1892) writes that the Ten Plagues in Egypt which afflicted the Egyptians were mainly to punish the Egyptians for their unfair enslavement of the Jewish Nation. He reasons that one cannot say that the main purpose of the plagues was to facilitate the redemption (Geulah) process for the Jewish Exodus from Egyptian servitude because Rashi writes that HaShem commanded the Jews with the commandment of the Pascal Offering (Korban Pesach) and Ritual Circumcision (Bris Milah) so that they should attain some merit in order to be deemed worth of redemption. This implies those prior to their fulfillment of these two commandments, the Jews were “naked from commandments” (as Rashi says) and had no value in Heaven by which to merit being salvation. Accordingly, reasons Rabbi Soloveitchik, one must conclude that the Ten Plagues which occurred prior to the fulfillment of these commandments (or concurrently with them in the case of the final plague) were primarily brought by HaShem in order to punish the Egyptians, but not to save the Jews, for at that point, the Jews were not worthy of being saved. In contrast, Rabbi Soloveitchik writes that the Krias Yam Suf (Splitting of the Red Sea) mainly transpired as means of allowing the Jews to travel through the Sea on dry-land and escape their Egyptian pursuers and continue en route to Israel. Thus, the primary purpose of the splitting of the sea was to save the Jews, while the secondary purpose was to punish the Egyptians who met their watery grave there. In summation, Rabbi Soloveitchik feels that the plagues in Egypt were primarily to punish the Egyptians, while the act of the splitting the sea was primarily to save the Jews.If one understood the converse to the words of Rabbi Soloveitchik then the aforementioned question on the explanation of Rabbi Yosef Kairo can easily be resolved. If one assumed that the purpose of the ten plagues in Egypt was actually to make possible the Jewish Exodus and the purpose of the splitting of the sea was to drown the Egyptians as a means of punishing them for their cruelty, one can clearly discern the difference between the First Night of Passover and the Seventh Night of Passover. The Ten Plagues represented by the First Night of Passover were chiefly to save the Jews and only tangentially were the Egyptians killed then, therefore when the Jews sing the praises of G-d on the First Night of Passover, they recite the Hallel in its entirety. However, on the Seventh Night of Pesach, when the Red Sea was split in order to allow the Jews to cross the sea as a means of luring their pursuers into the sea and killing them, the purpose of the miracle was to kill the Egyptians, not to save the Jews . Therefore, on the Seventh Night of Passover, when the Jews commemorate the splitting of the Red Sea, they do not recite the entire Hallel because the purpose of the miracle was to kill the Egyptians, and as mentioned above, HaShem rhetorically asks ,”The works of My hand are drowning in the sea and you request to speak of songs?” Therefore, only the “half”, abridged, version of Hallel is recited. This idea that the principle reason behind splitting the Sea was to punish the Egyptians, which stands contrary to the words of Rabbi Soloveitchik, are actually found in the writings of Maimonides. Maimonides writes that Moses did not perform miracles to form a basis for the Jewish belief system in G-d, because a faith which is based solely upon miracles is flawed because one can always attribute the performance of a miracle to magic or sleight of hand. Rather, explains Maimonides, Moses performed each miracle because certain circumstances necessitated the performance of each miracle. For example, the Jews had nothing which to eat, therefore Moses performed the miracle of raining Manna from the Heavens. The Jews had nothing which to drink, therefore Moses performed the miracle of “bursting open” a rock in order to bring forth water, etc… Included in his list of examples, Maimonides writes that G-d needed to drown the Egyptians; therefore He split open the Sea and sunk the Egyptians inside. From these words, one can glean that Maimonides understood that the purpose of splitting the sea was to drown the Egyptians, and the fact that the Jews crossed the geographical location of the sea on dry-land was only a secondary facet of the miracle, but not the raison d’être. Furthermore, Rabbi Eli Baruch Finkel of Yeshivas Mir (d. 2008) points out that the entire content of the song Oz Yoshir (spontaneously sung by the Jews upon the splitting of the sea celebrating the miraculous event) records only the Egyptians drowning in the sea and the world reaction to the event, but does not even mention the Jews’ crossing of the location of the sea on dry land. This important omission seems to imply that the grounds for splitting the sea were to insure the death of the Egyptians, not to save the Jews. Immediately juxtaposed to the song Oz Yoshir is a verse in the Torah which states , “When the horses of Pharoah, his chariots, and horsemen came into the sea and HaShem turned the waters of the sea upon them, the Children of Israel walked on dry land amid the sea.” Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra (1089-1167) questions why the Torah first mentioned the Egyptians drowning in the sea and only afterwards mentioned the Jews’ crossing of the sea, if chronologically, first the Jews crossed the sea, which lured the Egyptians to follow their pursuant, and only afterwards did the Egyptians drown in the sea. Ibn Ezra answers that one is forced to explain that some stragglers from amongst the Jews delayed in crossing the sea until the same time that the Egyptians were already attempting to perform the same feat as the Jews. Thus, writes Ibn Ezra, the miracle at the Red Sea was even greater than formerly understood because from here one sees that some Jews were still crossing the sea concurrently with the Egyptians drowning in the same sea. Rabbi Simcha Maimon of the Brisker Kollel writes that one does not necessarily forced into accepting this novel interpretation of the Ibn Ezra. He reasons that according to the above-mentioned concept exhibited by the words of Maimonides that the Splitting of t he Sea was chiefly to punish the Egyptians and only secondarily was to save the Jews, the order of the bases of the splitting of the sea as recorded in scripture make perfect sense: Since the principle reason for the sea’s splitting was to punish the Egyptians by drowning them in the sea, the Torah mentioned first the fact that the Egyptians drowned in the sea, for it is the more important of the two, while afterwards mentions the secondary reason of allowing the Jews to cross the sea on dry land.Footnotes:

  Exodus 14:20
  Megillah 10b
  Beis Yosef to Tur Orach Chaim §490
  The question arises as to why this event which occurred on the Seventh Day of Passover affects the type of Hallel said on every day of Passover save for the first and second.
  Beis HaLevi to Parshas Beshallach
  Alternate routes through the Sinai Desert would have brought the Jews to Israel without necessitating the splitting of any waters. (The Suez Canal was obviously not built at that point in history.)
  Hilchos Yesodei HaTorah 8:1
  Birkas HaPesach, pg. 145
  Exodus 15:19
  In his commentary ad loc.
  Simchas Yehoshua to Parshas Beshalach

"We Are Here" -- The other "black" in frum

Excerpt from a blog post on Beyond BT dated August 4, 2008:

I was not the only one from a survivor family in my time and place – and my parents were not survivors, not in the direct sense (of course when the crime is genocide, any member of the targeted people who lives is a survivor). One small branch of our family had left Europe in the '30's. But the rest were made dust and ash, and the remnants carried this pain from Poland to Cuba to America. It was soldered to my soul for six years at a summer camp (Camp Hemshekh -- "Camp Continuity") run by remnants of the old anti-religious Jewish Labor Bund, who had incorporated as Survivors of Nazi Persecution -- what a name for a group formed to operate a summer camp! -- and rebuilt their fantasy of a Yiddish secular culture paradise, where we sang the songs, read the poetry, acted the plays of Gebirtig and Peretz and Gelbart, celebrating a culture and a conception of a people that were no more.

But unlike the murdered children on whose lives our summers were to be modeled, we had another chapter in our repertoire. We learned the songs sung by the orphaned children and the mourning parents of the Warsaw Ghetto whose names we bear, the poetry of the partisans of the Vilna forests who were the gedolim of my youth, the literature of the rebels of Sobibor and Treblinka who were our models of techias hameisim.

I thank the Ribbono shel Olam that I didn't know enough Yiddish at that age to understand more than a few words of what I was saying, or who knows how bent I would be today! But that intense exposure to this tragic slice of Jewish life obviously affected me deeply. I am astonished when people from the "outside world" tell me that I must see this or that Holocaust movie –- don't they know what I know already, the children's Holocaust I playacted as a child? Did you ever hear of anyone who went to a summer camp that had its own simulated Warsaw Ghetto Wall, complete with cemented-in broken glass and barbed wire?

The Judaism-in-500-words-or-less Challenge

Originally published on Beyond BT on March 16, 2009:

The answer to the question "What Is Judaism?" would be different for a student of comparative religion, a Sephardic resident of an Israeli development town, or someone who grew up in an assimilated Jewish family in America, just to give a few disparate examples. I will address the last one of these, because of course I have the most familiarity with his mindset.

Ethics are of fundamental interest to anyone who cares about anything, but the idea that there are no ethics for the Jew other than those that emanate from the Torah distinguishes Judaism from all that came before and all that comes after.

Judaism is, of course, objectively identifiable as an essential source of guidelines for ethical living. Because of the richness of Judaism's intellectual tradition, and because that richness has the quality of being both ancient and in constant scholarly and practical agitation, Judaism is probably the best developed system of ethics in the world in both its scope and its depth.

But while all that matters to every searching person, every person of conscience, it is not the heart of Judaism. It is necessary but not sufficient. Rather, the central concept is that while our ethics, as well as our laws regarding how people interact with each other even in non-ethical spheres, are completely open to intellectual probing, challenge and debate, they are absolute. They are based on the Torah given at Mt. Sinai, which we can only understand through the received tradition.

That is why between each chapter of Pirkei Avos we find the recitation, "Moshe received the Torah at Sinai, etc.": It reminds us that although we are talking about ethics, regarding which everyone feels qualified to opine, ultimately all our hypotheses, speculations and gut feelings bow to the revealed truth of Torah.

One fundamental corollary of this double-barreled premise – that Truth only comes via Torah, which only comes via Mesorah ["received tradition"] – is that the Truth may conflict with our personal sensibilities, which non-Jewish culture teaches should be supreme.

But our idea of what is right and true and good is necessarily flawed. We are imperfect because of our distance from God, which is axiomatic in being creatures of flesh and blood. We cannot know and understand all, and our capacities for reasoning, empathy, objectivity and foresight are only human. Even at our best, we are tainted by a lifetime of interaction with other imperfect creatures and their ideas, most of whom do not acknowledge the Truth of Torah at all.

The bombshell corollary of this core concept is that not only ethics, but actions – all actions – are governed by the Truth of Torah. This not only separates Judaism from most world religions and moral systems, but presents a fundamental challenge to every possible concept of what my posited non-religious American Jew can have thought about his life, why it matters, and what he does with it. This Truth defines our relationship and responsibility to the rest of Creation. Now sit and learn!

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Reb Noach Weinberg, zt'l

Originally posted on Likelihood of Success on February 5, 2009:

One of my best friends called me this morning at 6:30 AM to say the Hebrew words that translate: "Blessed is the True Judge":

We write these words with great sadness and disbelief -- our beloved Rosh Yeshiva, HaRav Noach Yisrael Noach ben Yitzchak Mattisyahu Weinberg - passed away this morning, Feb 5/ Shevat 11.

"Reb Noach" changed my life more than any other person. We were not very close, but in many important respects he was like a father to me. He was the founder of the Aish HaTorah College of Jewish Studies, as it's called officially, otherwise known simply as "Aish HaTorah" or "Aish." Aish is a system of educational programs, including a full-blown yeshiva for students of all levels in Jerusalem as well as introductory and outreach programs throughout the world based on the premise of getting Jews back to Judaism.

I attended one such program, in Israel, after I emerged from college in 1985 as a puffy purposeless preppy who at least had the good sense to look for meaning, direction and truth. I was a little disappointed to realize, as I did, that Aish HaTorah was actually the vanguard of a whole "movement" -- I didn't want to be part of a movement; I just wanted to move. But I did move, and Aish helped move me, and what I learned and became and, in no small measure, what I left behind have made my life what it is today in virtually every positive aspect of it.

I was not young enough, or at least not in Aish early enough in my life, to be a close student, much less any kind of disciple, of R' Noach. I don't think I could have, anyway. I don't believe we were simpatico that way. But still, personally, R' Noach taught me plenty. He taught me how to live a life of resolute meaning, how to focus ambition on something greater than oneself, and how to give and give and give.

And though R' Noach was sick, and I had been anticipating this day for years, and even had a premonition of his passing yesterday, I am very, very sad.

And when I found the picture above I realized that I loved R' Noach more than I perhaps understood until just now; and when I found the next picture in my scrapbook, of him warmly kissing my then-young children as if they were his own (for they were), I understood this even more, and even harder; and I let myself feel and admit that I miss him far more than I ever thought I would when I anticipated this moment, even already.