Blog/December 2009/Dec 11th

Dec 11th (See this week's devar torah)
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Hi again!

This shabbat is also chanukkah, the celebration of the victory of a small group of Jews who remained true to Torah, over the much larger group of Hellenized Jews and the Greeks themselves. It also happens to be Sarah's birthday; but since it falls on shabbat, her real celebration will be Saturday night. Last week I told you how old my sister is. But as for Sarah: one fifteenth her aunt's age is the difference between her and her sister's age. In thirty-four years, her sister will be as old as her aunt is now. Now she's lording it over her sister that she will be "legal" before her.

Esther has mostly recovered from her bout with whatever it was; I've been fighting it on and off. Daniela is definitely coming home for pesach, which makes us very (!) happy.

Important news:

• In case you were worried that sufganiyot are too healthy, now you can get vodka-filled sufganiyot
• Israel was rated most expensive on the IKEA Billy Index. But not to worry, we're cheapest on the Melech Hafalafel Index
• A man was arrested for smuggling lizards in his pants. He could have come here, I'd have given him some for free.

Not nice news:

• Those arbiters of peace, the fun-loving Swedes are at it again! What will they think of next? Perhaps we should partition Stockholm -- but who would want it?
• Our Quisling leaders arrest a bride for moving her lips
• Anti-semitic British legal decision. I'd suggest we retaliate and boycott British products, but… who buys any to begin with?

This week I came across a very interesting book (originally published in the 1930s), which shows a number of connections between Biblical Hebrew and ancient Egyptian. It makes an excellent case for Joseph's story (yes, from this week's Torah portion) being true based on the strong correlation between the descriptions of Egyptian court life in the Torah and those from various archaeological sources. Essentially, his thesis is that only someone who knew the royal Egyptian court intimately could have written the stories in the Torah and gotten the details correct.

That is fascinating to me, because our tradition says that there are many layers of meaning embedded in the Torah, and that not all that meaning is readily apparent to readers in each generation. This is a case in point: the generation which left Egypt may have been familiar with the details of court life in Egypt, but surely later generations would have no idea of the literal accuracy of the text! So we find later Biblical commentators coming up with interesting but often forced reconciliations of various statements… and only now, thousands of years later, can we view the text and understand that the odd phraseology and descriptions are meant as a subtle hint that the Author knew what was going on in Egypt! As I was thinking all that, I read another article about coincidences in Torah. Very interesting stuff.

Until next week,
Shabbat shalom!

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