a book<\/a>! It must be mine!) provoked new thought by asking if the stories we knew so well didn’t have to go the way we knew them. What if Moses doesn’t<\/I> hit the rock? What if Abraham told Sarah that he wouldn’t<\/I> expel Hagar and Ishmael? What if Delilah doesn’t<\/I> betray Samson? The point, of course, being to try to think about these stories in a new way, to get us out of the nursery habits of thought, after years and years of hearing the stories over and over again. Elie Wiesel is magnificent at identifying interesting questions, and bringing them up in a way that gets me, at least, wanting to read the story again, and think about it.\n\nSo, our Rabbi, who didn’t have the advantage of sitting in the big hall at BU listening to the gentle Carpathian voice, thought this was a great idea, and as she had been looking for a sort of theme to address the text this year, decided to adopt it. And to assign me the task of looking over the text in advance, and trying to come up with those moments when the story might have gone another way.\n\n
Help!\n\n
I’m hoping to post here every week with the parshah, some possibilities, and that link down there that says ‘View and post comments’. If you have never read the texts, this is a pretty good way to get that basic cultural stuff into your reference frame, and (for YHB’s selfish benefit) your impressions will be fresh, without the baggage of your nursery years. If you have read them, and have thoughts, then jump right in too, as that will help me as well. Then I get to pass along our thoughts to the Rabbi, my congregation gets to wrassle with them at Shul, and I get to report back.\n\n
And heck, it’ll be more fun than politics, right?\n\n
,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
OK, here\u2019s a new series of posts for this Tohu Bohu: The weekly parshah. For those who don\u2019t know already, in the Jewish liturgy is a weekly portion of Torah reading. The Books of Moses, or the Humaish (five), are…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scripture"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2320"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17146,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2320\/revisions\/17146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}