"What's it all About, Yankel" (dvar torah)

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Saturday December 22, 2018 · 5:30 AM PST

2018/12/22 · 05:30

^{(addendum/postscript: My experience in presenting this, today, to an audience and continuing it into the question of what we owe (?) to the next generations in living the end of our lives without Jacob’s bitterness was met with a great deal of criticism and considerable crying. I think I knew of only one person in the room who had a single living parent … I guess it could be called the Orphan’s Minyan.)}

Fifty Three years ago, today, Marsha and I married. We were young enough for someone in pain to look at us and say: “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” And today is the day Jews read the end of our Patriarchal/Matriarchal saga … the closing chapters of the book of Breishis/בראשית. I have grown accustomed to read, each year, the Tzava’ah/צוואה … the Ethical Will … of my Grandfather’s Grandfather, for whom I was named. He was R. Chayim Tzvi ben Avraham who led the Jewish communities around the Czech/Hungarian Hungarian-speaking towns of Kleinverdun which had a Hungarian name, too, when the wars and treaties went the other way. My ancestors were part of the pre-Chassidic Satmar communities of scholars and I suspect Great-Great-Grandpa visits me to remind me of the need for kindness.

Still, I don’t know why I read this sweet note in late December … this note that expresses confidence that his children and grandchildren will continue leading a Torah life while imploring them to take care of his second wife … not their Mother who had died decades before he penned these words. This Second Wife was kind and cared for him and for them.

I do wonder about my idiosyncratic habits. Here, again, I fascinate: Is it for our Anniversary? Maybe. Is it thinking of the beautiful holiday that purportedly celebrates the birth of Little Baby Jesus but gives gifts to all-God's-Christian-children, helping each believe that they are special. Nice sentiment … nice holiday. May it only be God’s will that all children can feel special, on this holiday … Buddhist, Christians, Hindu’s, Jews, Moslems and little C. American Pitzalach trying to find a better country in which to live. Each year, I think: maybe it's the closing of Breishis that draws me ... with Parshas va'Yechi and Ya'akov's tormented blessings of his children. Maybe it was the movie that came out 3 months after we married? Alfie "What's it all about, Yankel" is it just for the progeny we live? ... That’s what the evolutionary Psychologists say?

Years ago, a widely educated 40’ish divorced woman came to see me. She wore flamboyant coats and would sachet into my office. She was not the only one who came at a time of life when (according to folk like Levinson and Sheehy) Nubie-Middle-Agers recognize that their dreams of how life would turn out didn’t quite come true. The thought was that either the failed dream would be reformulated or folk would stumble off into a defiant depression. (Sadness is an experience we have when our loss pushes us to share those feelings with others; depression is when, instead, those feelings move us to withdraw or rage at the World in solitude.) She felt her life was meaningless and, she said, “like a Poem, I need to know what it means to appreciate it.” I wondered if she had read Archibald McCleish’s “Ars Poetica” where McCleish ends with something like: “A poem does not mean, a poem is.”

By the time she stopped visiting my office, she came to believe that the meaning of life was to be found only in relationships … closer to Kunitz’s admonition in “The Layers,” where he advocates that ‘we live among the layers and not the litter.’ Indeed, she came to believe that the layers of her life are the relationships that we cultivate and nurture as we paint on our allocated canvas of unknown dimensions.

Fifty three years with Marsha? Fifty chapters of Genesis? Some thirty years ago, I began asking (appearing lastly in Oedipal Paradigms in Collision: A Centennial Emendation of a Piece of Freudian Cannon (1998/2016)) what the Ethos of Genesis was (Chapter 5), asking what mussed the Divine Dander in this book, no bigger than a novella. I concluded that it was a call to relinquish narcissism ... to give up Ich-Es relationships for Ich-Du relationships … to embrace others as Subjects in Their Own Right. Genesis didn’t show us how that worked but taught us that its absence left us adrift on the River Asheron, as they say … without a paddle.

I won’t belabor details but will list some of the Paired Characters in Conflict that pepper the book and demonstrate the manner in which Preferential Treatments cause pain.

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Paired Characters in Conflict in בראשית … most the result of preferential love:

Adam and Chava ... I suppose Trump might say that Adam was the first Rat. God had planned otherwise … hoping their relationship would be based on עזר כנגדו … a helper to stand with one’s spouse or against them, depending on earned deservedness (Rashi).

Kayin and Hevel ... He whose offering to God rejected kills the brother whose sacrifice was accepted … Maybe Hevel could’ve empathized with his brother? I don’t know.

Avraham and Lot ... The troublemaker has a miserable life and the Saint goes on to greatness. Poor Lot … loses his wife … is incested by his daughters. Couldn’t God lend a hand? And even the Winner? Tries to kill both of his children blaming Sara’s envy for the first attempted murder and a “deep resonant voice he heard in the Wilderness” for the second.

Sara and Hagar ... The more powerful subjugates and expels and then tries to kill the less powerful seeking to be the preferred one.

Isaac and Yishmael ... Both are nearly killed trying to please their Father throughout their lives. Isaac says but 7 words until he’s married and messes up his relationship with the non-preferenced son.

Ya'akov and Eisav ... The Maternally Chosen whips the Unchosen ... Both succeed … The Chosen spends his life in bitterness and in paranoid fear that the Unchosen will kill him. He’s all for show and even today’s dramatic blessing/cursing for me is a cheap actor’s final and painfully dramatic scene.

Ya'akov and Lavan … He who cheats his Brother and cannot rejoice in his Brother’s blessings (sic), carries such behavior throughout life.

Leah and Rachel ... The preferred dies of preeclampsia or something ... the not preferred has worse-than-delinquent children. Their descendants remember Rachel as crying … ורחל מבכה על בניך.

Ya'akov and Ish … Who wins?

Yoseph and All-the-Others … Erich Fromm described a character who is feelinglessly pragmatic, narcissistic and sadistic. He called such folk Malignant Narcissists.

And even at the end of the Saga and just before Ya’akov’s dramatic curtain-call, he tries to set up a preferential adversarialness with his Grandkids, M'nasheh and Efrayim.

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In the end, I hear the voice of my Great-Great-Grandfather in his Ethical Will messaging to “My dear and Sweet Childen, Wife and Grandchildren who I’m confident will make Torah choices in their lives”

As I write these brief notes, R. Chayim Tzvi’s Torah that my Grandfather R. Chayim Avraham ben Pinchas carried to the New World and later bequeathed to me is stored just feet behind me … the Torah that does indeed talk of kindness and of one law for all … even the stranger and sojourner.

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We end each book of the the Torah by calling out: חזק חזק ונתחזק … Strengthen! Strengthen! Let US ALL be strengthened!

Gutte Shabbos

(For those who haven’t read Genesis, recently, here’s a very brief summary

God creates a world. Two (possibly contradictory) accounts are offered with each apparently culminating in the creation of an original couple, Adam and Eve[1]; they are housed in a lush garden. They fail to abide by God’s one proscription, a dietary one, lose their original innocence, and are punished. They initially have two children[2], with the one killing the other in a rage of envy. Other children are born and, presumably, through unavoidably incestuous mating, a race proliferates.

Mankind becomes corrupt and God decides to destroy-by-flood all but a boatful of animals, together with one righteous man, Noah, and his family. God’s wrath is quieted and humanity is given a fresh start. Some generations later, the descendants gather and attempt to erect a prideful skyscraper; God scrambles their languages, thus putting a temporary end to their hubris. This leads to a renewed distribution of men over the face of the Earth. So much for the first eleven chapters.

The scenes depicting the lives of the patriarchs and matriarchs are cast in the oases of the inhospitable badlands that are the Judaean desert and span some three hundred Biblical years. A variety of family themes appear in stories of the first Patriarch, Abraham. These themes, particularly envy, fear, and barrenness, will be repeated in the life of his son, Isaac, and, thereafter, in the life of his grandson, Jacob; these themes will resonate in overt acting out among Abraham’s great-grandchildren. Abraham is afraid of neighboring Chieftains and cannot live with his nephew, Lot, who is often in considerable trouble. Lot becomes entangled in sinning Sodom and is saved by his uncle who argues passionately with God, in a failed attempt, to save the city. During the period following the devastation, Lot is incested unwittingly by his daughters. Thereafter, Abraham claims that the erstwhile barren Sarah is his sister and, pointedly not his wife, in order to protect himself from several desert potentates. He has a child, Ishmael, with his concubine, Chagar, and, somewhat later, Isaac is born to Sarah. Sarah orders Abraham to expel Chagar and Ishmael after she sees Ishmael playing with Isaac; God concurs with Sarah and Abraham cooperates in the deed with some reluctance. In the next chapter, God tells Abraham to kill Isaac; Abraham scrupulously follows God’s directives, this time with speed, if not alacrity, and perseveres until divine intervention stills his hand.

Isaac appears to have never recovered from this ordeal[3]; he is given but several lines of script with a total of seven words until his marriage, from which time on he remains under the control of his barren wife, Rebekah. Apparently in identification with his father, Isaac lies to a local chieftain fearfully claiming that his wife is his sister. Rebekah gives birth to twin sons, Jacob and Esau; they fight and are lost in envy from the womb and through their youth. Jacob purloins Esau’s birthright and, later, Rebekah hoodwinks Isaac into arranging for her favorite son, Jacob, to receive his befuddled father’s blessings. Jacob runs away fearing for his life.

Jacob passes much of his life in paranoid-like concerns that Esau will retaliate while Esau appears, after the initial shock passes, curiously nonplusedby the matter. Jacob has two wives; each chooses a concubine in a competition for favor (from their husband); this envy is quite openly portrayed as directly related to fecundity. The favored wife, Rachel, is initially barren, like her mother-in-law and hers before her. Thirteen children are born: Leah gives birth to the first four children; Rachel’s handmaiden, Bilha, to the fifth and sixth; Zilpa, Leah’s handmaiden, produces numbers seven and eight; Leah the ninth through the eleventh child; and Rachel, at long-last, mothers the two youngest sons, including Joseph, the favorite and twelfth child.

Things are not well in this family whose troubles would cross the eyesof the most seasoned of family practitioners working in one of today’s violent inner cities. We see, for instance, the following:

• Jacob and Leah’s daughter, Dinah, falls in love with a local. His male clansmen are convinced by Dinah’s brothers to circumcise themselves so that a marriage might receive their blessings. They do so; nonetheless, her full-brothers, Shimeon and Levi, slaughter the entire village while the men are recovering from their surgeries.

• Another of Leah’s sons, Reuven, in the meantime, incests one of his father’s concubines.

• Rachel’s firstborn, Joseph, is busy gossiping and telling his dreams; he ends up in Egypt after the brothers nearly kill the brother they dub: This Master of Dreams.

• Judah, another of Leah’s children, has three sons. The eldest, Er, is killed by God for an unspecified reason related by the text to divine disfavor. The second, Onan, receives the same punishment after utilizing coitus interruptusin order not to impregnate his brother’s widow as was expected of him according to the Law of the Levirate. Judah ends up unwittingly having twins with his now twice-widowed ex-daughter-in-law.

Meanwhile back in Egypt, Joseph rises to power after extricating himself from a seduction-gone-sour; his boss’s wife had falsely accused him of instigating an erotic chase. Joseph’s political elevation, just as his previous fall, occurs due to his facility with dreams. A famine breaks out in Canaan leading Jacob to send his sons down to Egypt to purchase grain. Joseph, now second to Pharaoh, conceals his identity, toys with his brothers, torments them, and eventually puts his old father at some risk to depression for several months at the thought of losing yet another son. A rapprochement occurs followed by a family move to Egypt. Jacob and his tribe, despite their foreign ways and practices, are treated like royalty by the Pharaoh.

Jacob effusively blesses Joseph, his successful son, gathers all his clan together, sparingly blesses the lot and, once again, bestows wondrous prophecies on Joseph, his favorite. Jacob finishes his blessings and curses ... and dies. The sons escort Jacob’s body back to Canaan, as he requested. Genesiscloses with Joseph asking that the same be done with him and assuring his brothers that he harbors no ill-will towards them. So ends this brief history of the world from creation to the soon-to-come bondage in Egypt that began after Joseph’s death, perchance some 3600 years ago.)

A Rule with No Exceptions? Ain't a Rule/ DOJ's Holding on Indictability

hhcovitz

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Monday December 17, 2018 · 5:11 AM PST

2018/12/17 · 05:11

There's a piece in WAPO today on the indictment question ... Can SMOTUS be indicted? I hope someone who writes well does a piece somewhere ... Huffington, Daily Kos, elsewhere on the absurdity of A Rule with No Exceptions. I responded (below) but it requires an expanded and well-thought-out piece.

(Note to WAPO: Help me with a hypothetical. What if Trump pulls an M bin S molded into a Kim-shot? The President becomes irked with the slowness of Jim Acosta and Gen. Kelly’s departure from the White House, today, and shoots them dead, citing executive privilege and screaming “No collusion, no indictment.” Okey-dokey .... the AG cites and the DOJ publishes the holding that POTUS cannot be indicted. So, how does that play? Oh! I see. Kelly gets a burial at Arlington, Acosta’s body is not released citing National Security, DJT gets his military parade on the Champs du Drumpf, and planning continues without a standup comedian for next year’s journalist soiree. Oh. Oh, Indeed ... Oh! Beautiful for specious lies .... Oh, Help this Country Psychoanalyst understand ... Maybe you can walk me through this? I need help! This, by the way, is all too reminiscent of the Goldwater Rule dispute ... another Rule that purportedly had no exceptions and said I couldn't speak up about pubic figures, such as DJT. As in ... if as a psychoanalyst, I was invited for tea with Melania and POTUS shows up running through the Rose Garden buck-naked screaming "Bring me my Nuclear Codes," in the name of the unboundaried Goldwater Rule, I am to limit my clinical comments to "please, Dahling, pass the sugar." All this to say ... A rule that has no exceptions is no rule ... to paraphrase the familiar saying: the exception does indeed DEFINE the rule. ... Alas ... this "cannot be indicted" trope would be as poorly thought out as a Red Light Rule that could not be superseded by the presence of someone bleeding out in the back seat. Message to Attorneys General: In circumstances dangerous to the Republic, approach the Red Light slowly, look both ways and put the pedal to the metal ...

Dvar Torah: "It's that Time of Year"

hhcovitz

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Thursday September 20, 2018 · 3:00 AM PDT

2018/09/20 · 03:00

no image description available — Getting close and figuring out the Moods of the Gods

Dvar Torah: “It’s That Time of Year”

Kol Nidrei is no waltz “in three quarter time.” What is it that draws us to prayer communities at this time of year? Hardly a hootenanny. I learned — only after moving to Philadelphia in 1974 with my wife and our two older kids — that this High Holiday gig is more about brisket and how it’s made than about Taiglach. I never particularly liked dead slabs of cow. Perhaps, I’ve had too many tete-a-tete’s with bovine. Indeed, just two weeks ago that same wife and I made more than a half-dozen stops to find candied fruit. One of our last stops was at a Kosher mega-grocer where the young manager asked me to define Taiglach. As his tzitzis (fringes) were hanging out, I just assumed he knew about Taiglach.

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“Maybe you’re saying something about the Yiddish word Tag (day),” he asked.

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“As in a nechtiger tag (‘twas a dark and dreary night!’),” I quipped. In any case, he knew not from candied fruit.

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Neither of us were amused. I wanted to make taiglach for my grandkids and he wanted to get on with the business of keeping a Kosher store open in a secular world and not dealing with my petulant na’arischkeit (youthful folly) and distaste for dead cow. Now, let me add: I don’t know what made my making Taiglach for my grandkids, those who were pre-collegers and therefore at home to visit G&G, so important. In any case I learned that apparently in the Grocery Biz, ‘tis not that time of year until the Gentile world begins making fruit cake.

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This year, it just felt very important to make Taiglach. Oops, some may not know what this is. In brief … Dough deep-fried (well deep-honey-boiled) mixed with fruits and nuts, as it’s cooling until it coalesces into a Sweet Mostly-Solid Confection that can be picked at and pulled apart and threatens any caps and loose teeth that may have made it through years of dental madness … but with sweetness. There y’have it: Taiglach.

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So, why this year and this time of year. The Days of Awe … Yomim Nora’im … are not primarily (as in the Xmas Waltz in the title) a time “when all the world is in love.” No. The Jewish New Year season for me is a walking melange of troubling primal difficulties that face the ritualistic (believing or not) Jew in their readings and prayers. Here are some of the calendar highlights … the lights and stars and ornaments on the Jewish calendar for me.

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(A) The Summer visits the commemoration of the destruction of the Temple on Tish’a b’Av … on the 9th of Av. My birthday? The day the cosmos decided it needed me is the 7th of Av. Grew up wondering if there was some connection. We read the Book of Lamentations … Whoopee! Any case? We mourn on Tish’a b’Av.

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(B) The Torah readings during this period (August through September or so) surround Moshe’s anger at being told that he was not taking the cruise to Israel, and was going to die. We’re acquainted with his pleading for divine intervention on this untidy matter of his mortality, and his swan songs (last 4-5 Parshas of Dvarim/Deuteronomy) comprised of curses and warnings and a so-called blessing. First, he hits the people with “lemme tell ya … what I ask of you is not in the heavens or across a difficult-to-navigate river or far … but right up and close and you fershidiners still couldn’t do it.” All thru this, the accompanying readings from the Prophets comfort us. ‘If it’s Summer, it’s Y’shayahu comforting and Moshe whipping us.’ A cycle of abuse? Maybe.

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He repeats in various forms: עם נבל ולא חכם … ‘an empty headed people and not all that smart, either.’ As Fathers go, I much prefer Yonah’s God who teaches him allegorically and by lesson how important it is to be concerned about all of humanity. God’s magic schtick with the Kikayon in the end of Yonah is pretty good teaching, to my way of thinking. God grows the Kikayon to protect Yonah then withers it and asks him:

“Hey, Jonah? You depressed?”

“You’ve gotta be kidding and, yes, I’m fffffine-depressed … good and kashered!”

And God hits him with:

“You’re depressed about your Kikayon that y’didn’t toil and sweat for and I shouldn’t have feelings for the tens of thousands Ninevites and their Moo-cows just because they don’t pray like you”

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But Moshe just rails at the people. I guess that’s what happens when you grow up without a Father.

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(C) Then, at last come … the days of Rosh ha’Shannah. (May y’thought I was gonna quote Rogers and Hammerstein’s Carousel: “Then at last come the clams” … but not a my R”H table). What do we read? Avraham on day one blames Sara for expelling Hagar and Yishmael to die in the Badlands and on day two he blames his God for his pretty good try at killing hapless Izzy. Then comes Yom Kippur. We read from Leviticus/va’Yikra 16 about how these two he-goats (not hee-hee-goats, nothing hee-hee about it) have no clue as to which one will be privileged to get the schnitz by the very well-dressed and groomed Kohen Gadol … the Biggest … the Summa Priest who is poised “to cut off my head.” And, again, the Prophet readings give us a whisper of hope.

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(D) We do in the afternoon read Yonah (I cantillated it, today, in our Chavurah), this children’s story (see last year in my rant on Jonah) which talks of BIG storms and BIG boats and BIG cities and BIG fish. It’s a good story and, as I already copped to, shows a helpful God who teaches Yonah in the manner a good parent teaches their kids — no, not the he-goats. Now, that’s a bloody bad way to teach your kids … as if … “Lookee-here, Kid … Do it my way and I may let you live like those Turkeys in the White House … no, not those Turkeys who run the shop but those two poor birds strutted out with a 50-50 shot of losing their heads.

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OK. OK. Cut me some slack! It’s been a tough year for those of us who take the interfaith underbelly of the Yonah story seriously. Did Yonah think that Ninevites were mostly rapists and murderers? Maybe but I do need some humor in my life and so do you, I presume to say! Here’s an example. I’m working on the finishing sections of a talk I’m giving in November and needed — it was like a need — to begin with a little witticism. I’ll share it with you and then go on to a favourite sentence in Zos ha’Brachah, the last Parsha in Torah. OK … so here’s the witticism:

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When work on the Wall was halted, the Giza Pyramids, China's Great Wall and the supports for Nebuchadnezzar's Hanging Gardens all shook. Some of the citizenry were shocked that the Greatest American since FDR had not lived to see its completion and they gathered together hither and yon to call out:

Long Live the King! Long Live the King!

Alas! The Wall around Graceland never was completed.

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Ouch and Sorry but it did make me laugh and I needed that more than my hair-barren head needs Brillcream!

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So on to a favourite sentence that fills me with some hopefulness, though I don’t know why.

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ולזבולן אמר שמח זבולן בצאתך ויששכר באהליך

And to Zvulon

he (Moshe) said: Rejoice, Zvulon in your goings-out

and Yissachar in your tents.

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Rashi opines that the brother worked out a partnership. Zvulon was blessed to live on the shores of seas and to go out in boats for trade and prakmatia (he uses the Old French) while Yissachar studied in his tents … in the Kollel … in the Yeshiva. What I’ve long-liked and Rashi doesn’t mention is the way Torah hints that there’s no point in talking to the ethereal types like Yissachar: And to Zvulon, he said.

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So, yes … ויהי ערב ויהי בקר … it’s the evening and day after Yom Kippur … Shabbos is coming for Moshe’s poem and then the “blessing” that we all coulda lived without comes next Shabbos! It’s a difficult time in our calendar and in our and other countries. Hatred, violence and partisanship fill the air … Still, I wish and hope for us all and for all our Others that live in Nineveh and Minneapolis, Mexico City, Damascus and Rishon l’Tzion … a year full of Love and Gratitude, Kindness and Play … don’t forget to Play ... לתקן עולם במלכות שדי … A year, I hope, in which we move the needle towards a Goodly and Godly World.

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גמר חתימה טובה

A Rant: Trump and the Media

hhcovitz

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Sunday August 05, 2018 · 9:52 AM PDT

2018/08/05 · 09:52

A much too long rant ... mea maxima culpa.

After these three years of struggling first against the outrageousness of a 70+ year old huckster seeking to be President and then the absurdity of him being elected and now the attacks on both decency and the attempts to forge an ethical republic, I find it difficult to find the path ... call it Dao, The Way, Halachah, Sh'riyah, ... to find a path at the forks in the road and a sense that convinces me that my footfalls are moving in a virtuous direction.

It seemed pretty clear to me (most often a dangerous sign) that DJT was presenting to us all the image of an ill man. His apparent Narcissism was not of the type we see in clinical practice where folk come in who are hypersensitive to wounds against their self-esteem and who split in response to such wounds ... The Good becomes Bad ... and folk who are in their orbit are seen as either Gooder than they are or Worser that Dog-shit. This man presented ('who knows what actually lurks in the heart of man) as needing to thoroughly destroy anyone who was not willing to be an adoring subordinate to his powers and will. Even the sickest of Borderlines and Narcissists that I had treated for the previous 40 years didn't split so completely and didn't need everything before them to be vitiated and everything after them destroyed. Senat Prezident Schreber had fantasies such as these but he didn't act them out (Freud's discussion of his autobiography); Trump did. He didn't present as a "counterpuncher," as he claimed, unless one considers the outlandish attacks on the Khans, on Women, on opponents, on beauty pageant contestants, on workers and on the man who publicly chided and humiliated him in public in front of the Press Corps.

A brief pause: the comment he made in an interview just after the Khans asked him if he had known sacrifice ... repeated by the interviewer: 'Yes, I've sacrificed. I gave thousands of people jobs.' I had rarely if ever heard such a wild claim running counter to the notion that employers and employees live under the terms of a mutually beneficial contract -- either an implicit or explicit one. It is as if he was suggesting that the implied sharing of benefit was, in itself, an offense to his sense of the right.

John Gartner began using the diagnostic category employed by Fromm to describe despots ... Malignant Narcissism ... in short, the worst parts of Narcissistic and Borderline and Sociopathic Personality Disorders. It certainly seemed to fit the manifest behaviors openly shared by this candidate.

Bandy Lee and her group (my group) took a different tack and emphasized Trump's dangerousness, skirting the original Goldwater Rule's prohibition against Diagnosis and focusing on what was "the issue" ... This guy, whether he fit this or that category, by virtue of the fact that he was now, as President, armed to the teeth was a danger to the Republic and to the World, at large. Jim Gilligan (one of my heroes) and Bob Lifton and Judith Herman and two dozen others very thoughtful therapists joined Bandy in the Dangerous Case group and many local organizations put together meetings and rallies in dozens of cities -- those organized by John. The book appeared early October 2017 and the rallies were held mid-October. My brief contribution was about what I'd been talking about for two years, then ... the tension between the Right of Public Figures to maintain Privacy (Goldwater) and the Duty to Warn and to Protect (Tarasoff), so clearly set out in Leviticus 19: 'Don't go loose-lipped gossiping among your people but don't stand idly by as your neighbor bleeds.' (Another co-author of the Dangerous Case book, indeed, had removed me from a discussion group for not agreeing to stop talking about this tension on that discussion board.)

In the meantime, there were a number of psychotherapists accusing these two groups of practicing armchair psychiatry, an attack homologous to those brought against the authors who wrote about Barry Goldwater in 1964.A number of these dissenters were not speaking in support of Trump but rather arguing that he was evil or "a putz" and that diagnosis was besides-the-point. By the way, many of the attacks against (may I call us) the Resistance were, at best, misguided and sometimes misrepresented the Resistance. The vast majority of the Bandy Lee group never offered a diagnosis, nor did they indulge what Freud called "Wild Analysis" ... discussions of a Mommy Complex or developmental lacunae of this or that type. And the Gartner group, too, was using Fromm's descriptor carefully examining Trump's manifest behavior.

In any case, I began to fascinate about the Lower Level Personality Disorders. My own belief was (again with der alte hexenmeister fum Wien) that these people -- those as disturbed as the Persona that Trump presented -- lived behind a "Stone Wall of Narcissism" and were untreatable. That was not to say that folk with limited problems in the Narcissistic and Ego Integration sectors (NPD and BPD and maybe even some Sociopathic tendencies) were untreatable ... Kernberg, Kohut, Masterson, Meissner and a slew of us demonstrated treatment viability with certain of these people but there are some who, to my way of thinking, are untreatable. I went so far as to wonder whether the inclusion of these broad PD diagnostic categories might not be there in DSM/ICD to allow us clinicians to bill 3rd parties for their treatment. A bridge too far? Maybe. But these folk who have no apparent capacity to view others as Subjects in Their Own Right but as objects to be used ... maybe they are evil ... not practitioners of dark arts as in the Maleus Maleficarum but people who seek to harm others and are not ever gonna get better.

What struck me as interesting was that the Bandy Group and the John Group and those naysayers I mentioned above, all seem to agree that Trump is dangerous ... Oh! And the media and maybe even the legislatures seem to have come around. So let me end with the media ... Middle and Progressive and maybe the Rightists, as well. I don't know where I stand on the Terribly Dangerous or Malignant Narcissistic or Evil questions. Frankly, I see no real difference. But I do get supremely pissed off day-after-crazy-day when the media conflates what Trump says with what he believes. It pisses me off when my supervisees do that, too.

Frankly, when MSNBC or CNN talks about what "Trump believes" ... my kishkas turn upside down ... a psychic gastric torsion. Did Trump believe that his inauguration was bigger than Obamas? Who knows but I bet not ... the pictures are too obvious. Does he believe that the Democrats are obstructionist in Republican controlled Legislatures? I think not. Does he believe that abortion is bad? C'mon. This poor sick or evil bastard who would use racism to his advantage, hangs little kids and Dreamers out to dry for his own purposes, seeks to destroy anyone who stands in his way and risks devastating consequences in his destruction of an alliance that equilibrated the World for two thirds of a Century and align himself with tyrants and plays with wars ... he shows no belief beyond self-aggrandizement ... no value in anything outside of himself.

Enough ranting: How do I/We get the media to stop playing with words. Freud once described something as eine harmlose Nachlassigkeit des Ausdrucks ... a harmless figure of speech. Frankly, the Old Guy shoulda known better ... there are few, if any, harmless figures of speech ... and this game of attributing a belief system to this fellow is not harmless, either. ... Oy! I've lost confidence in my path.

Dvar Torah: Va'Eschanan ... Just a little dvar torah -- just sayin' ... days late ... a Lirah short

hhcovitz

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Wednesday August 01, 2018 · 7:51 AM PDT

2018/08/01 · 07:51

Shabbos Nachamu and the rich Parshah Va’Eschanan is so full of basic texts and a soulful haftorah that the supplication with which Moshe begins this Sidrah may be overlooked.

The translators of אתה החילות (Shmos 3:24), I think were motivated by the whitewashing that is so typical of the מפרשים, of the biblical exegetists. We often wonder how the supporters of this or that fascist are capable of viewing all the leader’s grievous sins through rose-colored lenses, as the expression goes. Yet, we watch the Patriarchs be forgiven for all kinds of transgressions, from child sacrifice to risking their wives lives (as with Avraham — at least twice with each sin), from piss-poor-parenting to out-and-out parental cruelty (as in Yitzchak having no empathy for Eisav’s plea) and from gross filial malfeasance to narcissistic concern about one’s self image (as with Ya’akov worrying about how he’ll stink among his neighbors if they discover the Chamor genocide). And to my way of thinking Yoseph’s sadistic narcissism and Moshe’s battle with some incipient modesty complete the pictures that the Commentators would choose to whitewash.

In this week’s Parsha, I recommend looking through the commentaries that give two thumb drashas on why God refused moshe’s plea to allow him to see the fruits of his labor for leading a difficult people. I won’t review them; they are there for the picking.

I will but call our attention to the opening of his supplication to God (Shmos 3:24).

ה׳ אלוקים אתה החילות להראות את עבדך את גדלך

God, You began to show (I) your servant your strength

As far as I know, the word החילות only appears one other time and that's with Haman's wife ....”Hay-my-man, now that you've “begun” to fall before Morty, you're Oisgephukte in gantzen.” Any case ... Here, it is not unreasonable to my way of thinking to read אתה החילות only as 'You began to show your servant' ... And there is, to my way of thinking, but one way to parse this:

'now that you did start to show me, you're obligated to continue.'

חוצפה .… Chutzpah

I would turn down such a request, too. And so typical of the Moshe who feels entitled and is full of rage ... as he is in his cursed-blessings in האזינו and זאת הברכה and having no intention of going quietly into that dark night. Interesting that in this Parsha, Moshe refers to the people by their “wisdom and understanding” חכמתכם ובינתכם … and in just some weeks we shall read those later Parshas when he screams:

עם נבל ולא חכם

An imbecilic people … oy! … and not wise, either.

Always preferred, to my way of thinking, to take reality and people ‘neat’ … באשר הוא שם (In that they are there … Breishis 21).

Any case, let us not be surprised when followers of either a malevolent or a beneficent leader find every means to whitewash those sins of their leader. Call it Tribalism, call it Group-Think, call it Grunsk-in-the-morning, if you like. There is a Fundamental Attribution that the Psychologists talk about … one version of it leads to seeing everything that is ours as Kosher and all else as Road-Kill.

Don’t believe it? Listen to someone locked into some form of athletic chauvinism singing the praises of their losing team.

Disclaimer: I’ve been married to a sports fan for ~53 years.

A Riff for Mr. Sulzberger: Take "Apres Moi la Deluge" seriously ...

hhcovitz

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Monday July 30, 2018 · 4:06 AM PDT

2018/07/30 · 04:06

“Tell me, Father. How shall I know when the Great Unravelling has begun?”

“Look not for great signs and wonders in the sky, my Son.”

“Then, how shall I know, Father?”

“Look for an extra flutter in the sparrow’s wing.

Listen to the cries of children seeking their Mothers!

Hear the little voice seeking to be heard over the Evil King’s great din!

The sparrow will speak to you, my Son, and I pray you’ll listen.”

******************************************************************

It was not so long ago that a young writer named Sulzberger visited the r-aging King. He spoke to him:

“Oh, King. I pray you ... your voice calls out in the wilderness. I hear it calling. Its words impel your servants to strike out against the prophets who speak words of your dangerousness.”

“You fool! You think I seek to destroy the prophets, alone. You are a fool.”

******************************************************************

Where is the Great Seer, Teresias? Why has he not made public and certain the intentions of a King who wishes to destroy all, as his own powers are waning? Why has he not called out from his blindness to educate … to lead out of darkness … the people?

“After me, there is nothing and to this end I bring you civil unrest.”

“As the writers fall, thus shall you all perish in the War between Gog & Magog.”

“After me there will be Tohu va’Vohu … nothing but chaotic emptiness.”

“As I speak, so shall it be. You are a fool!”

******************************************************************

And why should we expect otherwise? A great leader of nations once asked:

“Do you wish to forfeit even that little to which your efforts may have entitled you?”

He warned us that there was but one way out:

“Only if your endeavors are inspired by a devotion to duty in which you forget yourself completely, can you keep your faith in their value. This being so, your endeavor to reach the goal should have taught you to rejoice when others reach it.” (Dag Hammarskjøld - 1957 in Markings, p. 153, 1964)

We, the People chose a leader who knows nothing of Dag Hammarskjøld’s view of the World, his Weltanschauung … but knows nothing but himself which runs counter to Dag’s naivete.

Oh, Mr. Sulzberger. I do hope your words attract attention from other warriors but I fear you’re no match for the Evil King who has nothing to lose. You are young and he has busily fucked himself (and coincidentally others) to death and can only carry on as he has and destroy all.

www.nytimes.com/...

Yiftach ha'Gileadi ... Son of a Hooker Woman ... Father of a Daughter with No Name

hhcovitz

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Thursday June 21, 2018 · 5:32 PM PDT

2018/06/21 · 17:32

I’ve long mused over whether the life we are given is constituted by series of tragic comedies or whether, instead, comic tragedies dominate it. In my better moments which “thanks God,” as we say, have been many, I think more holistically of life as a precious stretched canvas with unknown dimensions upon which I have been given the opportunity to paint .... is that what my Christian Brothers and Sisters mean by Grace? Maybe.

Approaching this Shabbos while on Rest and Relaxation from my clinical practice at the ends of the World ... at the Seashore ... I feel gratitude for my canvas but filled with sadness ... North Atlantic Black Sea-gobs of sadness. Children, as the prophets predicted, are being sacrificed as bargaining chips by a blackmailing my-will-be-done government and while these holidays on the Eastern Virginia Shore have wonderful memories for my children and grandchildren (my 19 yo grand has been told by her parents that she was conceived on this island and I wrote the first draft of my Oedipal Paradigms volume here and there are volumes of memories here since 1979), this year there was some tension between some of my spawn. Tension often yields to growth! Deo volente.

And — Egad— Shabbos Chukas was suddenly upon me with its discussion of the Parah Adumah (the Red Heifer) and the death of Aharon and the Wars of Conquest … and what people and which topless pots are contaminated by death and Mosheh and Aharon’s tapping instead of cajoling-with-words the rock that might’ve warded off the plague of the biting poisonous snakes that beset the wandering Jews who were just about to possess their own nationhood and arbah amos, their four cubits of land ... their own version of William Tecumseh Sherman’s promise of 40 acres and a mule for centuries of slavery. OMG.

I would not call myself clinically depressed but profoundly sad. Unlike the ads from Big Pharma that make everyone sad think they need antidepressants, for my way of thinking, it’s easy to separate sadness and depression. I think it was Ellis who first described depression as a F**K YOU but whoever! The depressed push everyone away with withdrawal and anger while the sad, like babies crying in the middle of the night for their Mothers, retain the wish for comfort and use energies to move closer to people, at least for about 10 days until they give up (as demonstrated by the works of Rene Spitz and the Symingtons in the UK). I have not given up, though I wish my Mother were alive to comfort me and I seek comfort from family and friends.

So, Death to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right ... and Chukas upon me.

The Sages chose for the Haftorah the story of Yiftach (maybe best translated as “the opener” ... a man defined in Judges 11 by his function as the one who would open lands for settlement by conquering the locals). Yiftach is described in the text as the son of a hookerwoman who was driven out by his half-brothers for not being one of them. The resonance to our modern version of “kill the alien” is impossible to miss. The people call him back to lead the charge against the enemy ... exactly what we do to populate our armies, today, as well, while we send our well-healed to Officer Training School and, some, to the Academies, while we defer others with letters from their doctors who say they’re not well enough to fight but will be more than well-enough to sit in the Board Rooms and offices of government when the time is right. We send the poor … metaphorically, I suppose, the Sons of Hookerwomen.

But back to Yiftach ... the Can Opener and my vacation! Chincoteague Beach, though gentrified in the past 39 years that my family has visited there, still has its share of Yiftach-folk. There was this guy, yesterday, with tattoos (KaaKaa in Biblical Hebrew), feeding the seagulls, drinking beer, listening to loud Country Music even when in the water, chain-smoking cigarettes and scaring my three grandkids who were still with us. Pirkei Avos says it straight: Don’t judge the person you’re near (Chaverchah) until you’re in his place. Yiftach spoke of how he was seen as just a hired gun who the townsfolk disrespected but agreed to lead the troops if only they would agree to appoint him leader when the wars were done. Any case? on his ways to one of these wars, he promised his God that in the case that he was successful, he would (much as Agamemnon would later in history) sacrifice the first person to come out of his front door on his return.

In WW1 and WW2, folk talked of War Neuroses. Gene Kelly put together a film on Shell-shocked troops, found by his psychoanalyst daughter not too many years ago. Recently, we hear of cases of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the armies tell us of people violently freaking out and killing people after their war experiences. I’ve heard colleagues say things like “it’s a matter of resilience” ... I don’t buy it. Come back from war unmoved and you’re among the sickest, to my way of thinking. Agamemnon? Yiftach? Did their rage over being sent into the fog of war require a sacrifice? Are the school shooters and Pfeiffer’s Little Murders window-shooters all folk who had been demolished by their Worlds? I don’t know. Any case it was Yiftach’s only child, his adolescent daughter who came out that door first.

And Yiftach’s daughter while accepting her fate begs her father for the opportunity to celebrate her youth up in the mountains with her girlfriends. It’s hard to not fault Yiftach ... but Yiftach is not obviously a willing monster but a conscripted one, perhaps. Just like the ones that we make year after bloody year. This is his only child and I suppose it not unreasonable to assume that he knew she would be first out the door screaming for “Papa ... Papa! Papa!” Buffy St. Marie blamed the Universal Soldier but it is we who sit idly by as our leaders send our kids off to die or to become constructed monsters and when they trample through our villages like Mary Shelley’s creation, the good doctors make up reasons for the carnage. It all makes me sad.

In the end, Yiftach accedes to his daughter’s request ... 2 months in the Mountains to celebrate her never-to-be-spent youth, after which alia jacta est ... the deal is done. And so the Haftorah sums it up:

31 And it will be, whatever comes forth, that shall come forth from the doors of my house towards me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall be to the Lord, and I will offer him up for a burnt-offering."

וְהָיָ֣ה הַיּוֹצֵ֗א אֲשֶׁ֨ר יֵצֵ֜א מִדַּלְתֵ֚י בֵיתִי֙ לִקְרָאתִ֔י בְּשׁוּבִ֥י בְשָׁל֖וֹם מִבְּנֵ֣י עַמּ֑וֹן וְהָיָה֙ לַֽיהֹוָ֔ה וְהַעֲלִיתִ֖הוּ עוֹלָֽה:

34 And Jephthah came to Mizpah, to his house, and behold, his daughter was coming out towards him with timbrels and with dances, and she was an only child, he had from her neither a son nor a daughter.

וַיָּבֹ֨א יִפְתָּ֣ח הַמִּצְפָּה֘ אֶל־בֵּיתוֹ֒ וְהִנֵּ֚ה בִתּוֹ֙ יֹצֵ֣את לִקְרָאת֔וֹ בְתֻפִּ֖ים וּבִמְחֹל֑וֹת וְרַק֙ הִ֣יא יְחִידָ֔ה אֵֽין־ל֥וֹ מִמֶּ֛נּוּ בֵּ֖ן אוֹ־בַֽת:

35And it was, when he saw her, that he rent his clothes, and said, "Alas, my daughter! You have made me fall and you have become one of those that trouble me; and I have opened my mouth to the Lord and I cannot go back."

וַיְהִי֩ כִרְאוֹת֨וֹ אוֹתָ֜הּ וַיִקְרַ֣ע אֶת־בְּגָדָ֗יו וַיֹּ֙אמֶר֙ אֲהָ֚הּ בִּתִּי֙ הַכְרֵ֣עַ הִכְרַעְתִּ֔נִי וְאַ֖תְּ הָיִ֣יתְ בְּעֹֽכְרָ֑י וְאָנֹכִ֗י פָּצִ֚יתִי־פִי֙ אֶל־יְהֹוָ֔ה וְלֹ֥א אוּכַ֖ל לָשֽׁוּב:

36 And she said to him, "My father, you have opened your mouth to the Lord, do to me according to that which has issued from your mouth, since the Lord has done for you vengeance from your enemies, from the children of Ammon."

וַתֹּ֣אמֶר אֵלָ֗יו אָבִי֙ פָצִ֚יתָה אֶת־פִּ֙יךָ֙ אֶל־יְהֹוָ֔ה עֲשֵֹ֣ה לִ֔י כַּאֲשֶׁ֖ר יָצָ֣א מִפִּ֑יךָ אַחֲרֵ֡י אֲשֶׁ֣ר עָשָׂה֩ לְךָ֙ יְהֹוָ֧ה נְקָמ֛וֹת מֵאֹיְבֶ֖יךָ מִבְּנֵ֥י עַמּֽוֹן:

37 And she said to her father, "Let this thing be done for me, refrain from me two months, and I shall go, and wail upon the mountains, and I shall cry over my virginity, I and my companions."

וַתֹּ֙אמֶר֙ אֶל־אָבִ֔יהָ יֵעָ֥שֶׂה לִּ֖י הַדָּבָ֣ר הַזֶּ֑ה הַרְפֵּ֨ה מִמֶּ֜נִּי שְׁנַ֣יִם חֳדָשִׁ֗ים וְאֵֽלְכָה֙ וְיָרַדְתִּ֣י עַל־הֶֽהָרִ֔ים וְאֶבְכֶּה֙ עַל־בְּתוּלַ֔י אָנֹכִ֖י וְרֵעוֹתָֽי (כתיב וְרֵעֹיתָֽי) :

38 And he said, "go," and he sent her away two months; and she went with her companions, and she cried over her virginity upon the mountains.

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר לֵ֔כִי וַיִּשְׁלַ֥ח אוֹתָ֖הּ שְׁנֵ֣י חֳדָשִׁ֑ים וַתֵּ֚לֶךְ הִיא֙ וְרֵ֣עוֹתֶ֔יהָ וַתֵּ֥בְךְּ עַל־בְּתוּלֶ֖יהָ עַל־הֶהָרִֽים:

39And it was at the end of two months, that she returned to her father, and he did to her his vow which he had vowed; and she had not known any man, and it was a statute in Israel.

וַיְהִ֞י מִקֵּ֣ץ | שְׁנַ֣יִם חֳדָשִׁ֗ים וַתָּ֙שָׁב֙ אֶל־אָבִ֔יהָ וַיַּ֣עַשׂ לָ֔הּ אֶת־נִדְר֖וֹ אֲשֶׁ֣ר נָדָ֑ר וְהִיא֙ לֹא־יָדְעָ֣ה אִ֔ישׁ וַתְּהִי־חֹ֖ק בְּיִשְׂרָאֵֽל:

And so it ends … From year to year the daughters of Israel went to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite, four days in a year.

We have much for which to mourn … beginning with Yiftach’s nameless daughter and stretching to 2,000 nameless Central American kids.

Donald as the First or Second Coming

hhcovitz

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Monday June 11, 2018 · 4:44 AM PDT

2018/06/11 · 04:44

I've long wondered where the USA is going from a Jewish point of view ... not a political one ... not choosing sides but a Jewish one. As a Jew, I was trained to consider that the appointment of an unfit leader or president or one who we present as God was equivalent to idolatry (maybe Sanhedrin p. 7 ... but I don't recall ... כל המעמיד דין שאינו הגון כאילו נטע אשירה אצל מזבח ה׳. Yesterday, one of the White House leaders, talking about Justin Trudeau, said -- tho I cannot recall Nevarro's exact comments but -- something akin to 'there's a special place in hell for any one who goes against Donald Trump.' I was struck by the specificity of the statement. It wasn't 'there's a special place in hell for any one who goes against comrades in arms' and not even 'there's a special place in hell for any one who goes against a president of the United States.' The call was clear ...And DJT is not treated like Eliyahu who according to tradition (Malachi) would be the harbringer of the Messianic era הנא אנוכי שולח לכם את אליהו הנביא לפני בא יום הי who would bring people together והשיב לב אבות על בנים ולב בנים על אבותם ... but ... DJT IS to some folk ... the Moschiach, himself. It was, need I add, one of the complaints that Misnagdim (anti-Chassidim) leveled against Chassidim hundreds of years ago. As a Jew who believes in Jewish ethics, how can I respond? I worry.

Dvar Torah: Jethrotics and not Socratics ... Eine Kleine P'shat

hhcovitz

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Thursday February 01, 2018 · 5:00 AM PST

2018/02/01 · 05:00

Dvar Torah: Jethrotics and not Socratics

There's a piece that Jews in Synagogues run through … actually, there are many such pieces but I have on in mind one read on Shabbos. I am thinking of an Aramaic piece from the Zohar (va’Yakhel) that in most modern Siddurim is included just before the crying of the Sh'ma Credo immediately preceding the reading of Torah on Shabbos and Yomim Tovim …

**************************

בריך שמיה דמרי עלמא …

Blessed is the Name (or

Bend the Knee to the Name or

Have Gratitude to the Name)

of the Master of the Universe.

***************************

It talks about what S/He rules over and admonishes us not to rely on mere Mortals (לא על אנוש רחיצנא) or even to sidle up to them (ולא על בר אלהים סמיכנא) but to our Heavenly God, whose Torah and Prophets are Good. Most of the faithful race through the unfamiliar-to-most-Aramaic words to arrive at a song … mournful or marchlike, depending on the Group. It's likely to be familiar to most readers, here ביה אנא רחיץ. ….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y2ZgGxhINk

But Jews are not discomfited by paradox and in Pirkei Avos, they're admonished just the opposite … to learn from every mortal …

איזהו חכם? הלומד מכל אדם! …

Who is wise? A Person who learns from everyone.

So which is it or is it another one of those Talmudic לא פלוגתיא … ‘If you look at it just right, you'll see the difference in apparently paradoxical thoughts is only superficial’ and do not constitute counterexamples, at all.

I mention this for Parshas Yisro, thinking that this reading is among the few in Torah where human-to-human teaching is done … Aaron and Ziporah do a bit when Moshe is getting fetchata’d , Tzippie helps him through his circimcision haemophobia (see, below) and God does the Big Teaching of the Kikayon in Yonah ... but this one is special. Yisro, qua Father-in-Law and Grandfather (I am both … thus, I claim it as MY PARSHA! <-(-;)- … napping in my tie and beret au nom du grandpere or not!), counsels Moshe on structures that might keep him from biting off more than he can chew. Moshe, famously, is trying to be everything to everyone and Yisro intimates that he'll fall under the weight of these responsibilities if he fails to institute organization … Officers of the 1,000's, and 100's and 50's and 10's to deal with the details of the big principles (like the Ten Utterances, later in the reading) that he will speak to them from the Volcanic Mountain shooting off sparks out of the three-fold and dense-dark fog (חשך, עב וערפל).

I thought it appropriate, then, to look at the teaching. Let me add, it is different that Socrates browbeating Charmides or any of Socrates other hot young graduate students … I think of Yisro as the Great Teacher.

Shmos/שמות 18 … Good Teacher/Good Student

Yisro hears about all the good stuff that God has done for "Moshe and Israel."
Yisro gathers up Ziporah and Gershon and Eliezer and treks off to find Moshe … the Buddha left his wife just before their first child was born in order tio save his suffering people in Egypt … the Buddha because he wanted to become a peripatetic preacher is mindful of his son-in-law feeling like a Ger and naming his firstborn Gershon.
He names his first son, Gershon, after recognition of his Ger status … his being not even a Landed Immigrant in foreign Midyan.

4. He is similarly mindful of his naming his second son "God helps" … Eliezer … and of his son-in-law's history, escaping Pharaoh.

5. Yisro goes to Moshe … doesn't beckon him to come to Midyan … he recognizes the complexities of being the Other and loads up his portable classroom to bring the word to his Son-in-Law.

6. Yisro introduces himself … "I am your Father-in-Law, Jethro, who has come to you. And this is your wife and her two children." He doesn't approach Moshe with questions of alimony or child-support: "Hey, remember these!" No. The teacher approaches respectfully.

7. Moshe reciprocates and lays a big kiss on his Father-in-Law and invites him into his tent.

8. Moshe fills him in on the travail in and leaving Egypt.

9. Yisro expresses happiness for his successes.

10,11. Yisro offers gratitude/blessing for the God who so helped his people and recognizes God as great. Midrash has it that he was also a monotheiest.

12. Yisro throws a party and Aharon and the Elders come, too. Good things happen? Party, Party!!

13. Next day, Moshe solves legal dilemmas with the people from morning to night. Yisro watches.

14. From these visuals, Yisro begins with a simple question: Why do you sit alone and all the people tower over you morning till night? (Notice how he doesn't go beyond "A good question about the observable" … the hallmark of Science.)

15. Moshe misses Yisro's central point and responds "For the people comes to me to seek God."

16. Moshe answers with two points: (a) When a "matter" arises, I judge between a person and their neighbor. (b) And I teach them God's statutes and Torah.

17. Yisro says: I differ … I think this is not good.

18. Yisro: You'll certainly fail as you've taken on too much.

19. And here we see quite a nice phrasing: שמע בקולי: איעצך … "listen to my voice: I'll make a recommendation for you." Yisro doesn't say: 'follow my recommendation' but is satisfied with 'listen me out and I'll advise you and you’ll take what you want.' Cool! Yisro advises Moshe to give up (a) the judging of torts between complainants … 'stick to the Godly stuff, Moe!'

20. Yisro goes on: Instruct them in the Ways of God … that’s your gig!

21. And, then, you vet "god-fearing men, men of truth, who hate corruption" (Aside: Trump could use a Father-in-Law!) and appoint them to courts with varying responsibilities … for the 10's, 50's, hundred's and thousands of subgroupings.

22. Yisro continues: "And they'll judge the people day-by-day and they'll rule on such small matters … “it will lighten your load and they shall carry that load with you." What a wonderful phrasing at the end. והקל מעליך ונשאו איתך … it will lighten your load and they shall carry (that load) with you.

23. Yisro ends by noting that: "If you do this and God concurs, you will be able to stand up (to your tasks); and the people, too, will come to rest/peace in their roles."

Geez! Quite a Master Class.

And Moshe was convinced, sent his Father-in-Law with his task completed home to Midian, and they all lived happily ever after. Now that’s a good teaching.

Do we learn only from God? Do we learn from folk whose journeys intersect our own?

Father-in-Law and Grandpa Yisro, to my way of thinking, deserved the naming of a Chapter of Torah in his honor.

Aside: So much of teaching is dependent on the spontaneous reaction to present needs and the recognition of the particular needs of one's students. When I ran a school for disturbed and delinquent inner city high school kids in the mid-70's, I had two requirements of my staff. Fearless engagement was one. Teachers were asked in the face of a confrontation between two students to put their hands in their pockets and walk between the combatants. Secondly, they were asked to walk into classes without preparation. The school secretary was given the task of writing and locking up lesson plans out of sight of teachers but on-the-ready for state inspectors. I'm confident the statute of limitations is passed for my little larceny. (See, "Not Confronting the Resistance in a School for Disturbed Kids," in Michael O'Loughlin: Psychodynamic Perspectives on Working with Children, Families, and Schools (New Imago) 2014.)

Dvar Torah: Ending the Book of Genesis

hhcovitz

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Friday December 29, 2017 · 5:12 AM PST

2017/12/29 · 05:12

Just read a story about why the word death isn’t used in Scripture for Ya’akov. I thought: Maybe his kids, after receiving his cursed “blessings,” decided not to hang around for his final kvetch.

So, here goes: Do people change? Am I the bocher that Marsha married?

Yosef and Me/a tragic misalliance:

In honor of the 2705th Shabbos Marsha and I have been married

I grew up bathed in the stories, rituals and practice of Jewish life. I find, still, 70'ish years later that while many of my colleagues and friends find metaphors in Bergman, Kurosawa, Seinfeld, or When Harry Met Sally, my free-floating associations tended to arise from the Torah, Talmud and their commentaries. There grew, however, a notable difference from how my thinking was when I was young. Then, I would find great joy in the heroic stories about the patriarchs and matriarchs and Yosef and the ben Amram Boys, Moshe and Aharon. It was almost 60 years ago that I lost my way for the first time. I suggested to my teachers that since the Torah (Gen 23:2) reduces and superscripts a letter in the word ולב^כותה, as in "And Avraham came to eulogize Sarah AND TO CRY FOR HER (ולב^כותה)" perhaps reference was being made to Avraham's difficulties with feeling that resonated in his very disturbed progeny. My teachers sent me home for two weeks to consider my perfidy and to eat Mama kuchen.

Stories like Rashi: 46:28 do leave me cold ... where Rashi cites a Midrash as interpreting how Ya'akov sent Yehudah to check out the land as sending him to op[en a Yeshivah in Goshen.

Later, things got much worse. I found myself drawn to the wrong Biblical characters, like an adolescent hanging with a bad crowd. I cried for the first abused babysitter, Hagar (Yishmael's Mom), and could not contain myself in reading about Eisav who just wanted some blessing from his Father and was disliked by his Mother. I was appalled by Avraham's attempt to kill both his kids (Gen 21 & 22) and to blame it on others, frightened by the disfunctionality of (Yitzchak and Rivka's) marriages (last words of Gen 26), and frankly shocked by Ya'akov's household with its kids that would cross the eyes of an inner city social worker. I asked myself: How could you have not seen this, all these years. The answer? I was schooled in the commentaries who were Master Spinners and by design were seeking to whitewash those inside the tribal circle. Groupthink! Like a White House Press Secretary, these exegetists weaved and confabulated! Oh! Lip-service was always paid to how wonderful the Torah was to present the Heroes of Our Nation as flawed individuals but, in the end, they were the most hospitable, the best mates, the most modest and the brightest and best you could ever hope to meet in the Badlands of the Judaean Desert. I think it was Jung who would say that if you meet a Saint in the streets — or in the Arava, I suppose — don't believe it; ask his wife and kids. (Aside: Chances are Jung didn't want to us to ask his kids and Emma but that's another story.)

Fortuitously, I discovered some odd words at the close of the Yishmael story (Gen 21:17). An angel tells Hagar, terrified that her son would die of heat-stroke, not to worry for God had heard the voice of the lad. Great! But then the Writer/writer sneaks in three words באשר הוא שם … "in that he is there." Aha! God sees his creations "in that they are there" … Nu? And as I read the stories? maybe I'm, as one created in God's image, allowed to see these Heroes "as the text presents them." … I was, to say: "Free at last, dear God. Free at last."

So, it was, that I began reading the text, year after year, trying to find the character of the characters, particularly in the Book of Genesis/Breishis, as I read the text. Much like in Marbury vs. Madison, I could look back and decide that certain commentaries maybe had a way of looking at someone but it might not be the only not-unreasonable one and I might be entitled to proffer a different one, indeed. I was pretty good with the first quarter of the book dealing with Creation and the Flood. Avraham, who took up the second quarter? I had all kinds of problems with him but more with Ya'akov's family (who represent the third quarter) who as I noted were like Sharks or Jets … non-consanguineal incesters, a young girl who was just going out to visit her girlfriends when she was set upon by some local Chieftain's son, her lying brothers who genocided the girl's boyfriend's tribe, and a narcissistic dreamer, Yosef, who would take up the whole last quarter of Breishis and would consume a whole lotta family oxygen, in general.

And, so, in 1979, I began to fascinate about why the brothers were so angry with him as to be willing to bury him alive in the Desert? I looked to the two dreams he told to them:

And he said to them: Please, listen up to this dream which I have dreamt. And behold we were gathering

sheaves in the midst of the field and behold my sheaf stood up and was erect and behold your sheaves arose and bowed to my sheaf. (Gen 37:6-7)

And behold I dreamt still another dream and behold the sun and the moon and eleven stars were bowing to me. (Gen 37:9)

But, why kill him, I asked? And why do I, betimes, in my dreams resort to violence. It was during the recent election cycle that I arose dreaming of strangling a Big Man with wispy hair and a soft wool topcoat. As his breathing slowed and turned to crackles, he turned into the Pillsbury Dough-Boy. Was I dreaming of some politician? But why would I be moved to squeeze the last gasps of life out of him … Again, I digress. But why do we seek to kill? I reasoned for the Yosef case, as follows (many of these ideas appear in my 1998/2016 critique of Freud's thinking: Oedipal Paradigms in Collision).

I thought: it is quite curious that Yosef would be so brazen as to report these highly charged dreams to his brothers. The brothers, predictably (?), confront the upstartish lad with his expressed wish to dominate over them and go off, as if to be rid of their annoyance, to a distant oasis to shepherd their sheep. At his father’s behest, Yosef traipses off into the wilderness in pursuit of his brothers in order to bring back to Ya'akov information concerning the brothers’ dealings … Joe the Snitch. Scripture seems to announce Yosef’s ill-suitedness for this task by noting that he became confused and lost in the wilderness (Gen 37:14-17). The brothers, upon his arrival in camp, strip him of his coat and his embroidered cloak and throw him into a pit to permit themselves time to ponder appropriate means for disposing of the troublemaker. After some debate, the brothers decide it best not to kill this master of dreams and, by happenstance, a band of Midianites raises Yosef from the pit, selling him for twenty pieces of silver to a caravan of Ishmaelites who are travelling down to Egypt.

These initial scenes of a complex, multi-act dramatic play close in the incomplete manner to which one is inured by readings in Genesis. Reuven returns to find an empty pit, the brothers conspire to and, thereafter, convince their father that Yosef was eaten by a feral beast, Ya'akov mourns inconsolably, and Chapter 37 of Genesis comes to an abrupt closing while noting that Yosef was sold to Pharaoh’s royal butcher. While the degree of Yosef's obliviousness to the aggression implicit in his dreams is striking, the brothers’ reaction to this adolescent’s behavior is equally curious. What, we repeat, could have so seriously irked the brothers that they were willing to consider fratricide in order to dispose of their anxieties and frustration with this adolescent? Furthermore, I continue to be struck by the absence of even a whisper of condemnatory preaching in the text against these murderous and lying brothers.

As an aside, we may note that even the Biblical exegetists had problems with Yosef. Their commentaries are of a type that are never applied to other characters in Torah. Several, as we may see in Ginzberg’s compendium, note oddities in the personality of this child of privilege (1920, Vol II, p. 5): “There was something boyish about Yosef. He painted his eyes, dressed his hair carefully, and walked with a mincing step.” Another (Midrash Talpiyos) associates with Yosef a scenario of comic proportions. The author relates that when he was pursued by the wife of his employer, Potiphar, he became so sexually aroused that he ejaculated through his fingertips. And yet, we, in retrospect, can but point to the following typically childish flaws in Yosef: he was a gossip and tattle-tale; he was interested in dominating over his brothers and parents; and he was apparently oblivious to the impact that such matters might have on others.

While Thomas Mann and others have memorialized and idealized Yosef, a brief examination of his later life suggests that his characterological flaws, those perchance that motivated the curious exegeses mentioned above, did not, in fact, alter as he aged. When famine struck Canaan, motivating Ya'akov to send his sons to Egypt in order to secure provisions, Yosef mercilessly tormented his brothers. The text interestingly notes (42:9): “And Yosef remembered the dreams which he had dreamed for them; and he said to them ‘Spies you are, to see the vulnerability of the land you came.’” Yosef, without identifying himself as their brother, incarcerates them on trumped-up espionage charges. After three days, he releases all but Shim'on who would be held hostage until Yosef’s full brother (Binyamin) might be brought to Egypt from Canaan. Yosef, furthermore, arranges for their funds, those that they had utilized to purchase their grain, to be placed back in their travelling sacks yielding much confusion and feelings of guilt in the older brothers. The brothers, other than Shim'on, return to their father who balks at placing at risk his youngest and only remaining child from the now dead and still-beloved-and-preferred Rachel.

The drama resumes as the famine hardens in Canaan and after the guilt-ridden brothers plead with and offer promises to their father who seems disinterested in the fact that Shim'on is not back on the ranch; Ya'akov relents and the brothers appear, once again, before this Viceroy of Egypt, this time with Binyamin. Upon seeing his younger brother and hearing that the now ancient Ya'akov is alive, Yosef’s inclination is to cry. He restrains himself, however, for a further turn of the screw. He sends the brothers back toward Canaan with grain, with the money they presumably had already spent in purchasing that grain, and with his personal silver goblet hidden, specifically, in Binyamin’s sack; he allows them a very brief taste of freedom and then arranges to have them overtaken by the soldiers of Egypt. The brothers are interrogated on the road and, thereafter, questioned by Yosef through a translator (44:15ff). Yosef wonders how they could not have known that a man such as he would certainly divine their treachery and suggests that he will keep the offending Binyamin as his servant, allowing the remaining brothers to go in peace. It is, in fact, only after the lengthiest plea reported in the saga of Genesis — one that begs the Viceroy to understand that the loss of Binyamin would assuredly yield the death of Ya'akov — it is only at this point that Yosef abandons his ruse and, in a display of royal magnanimity, identifies himself as their long-lost brother Yosef whom, he assures them, they should no longer fear! What a guy!

We return, though, to our earlier question: What might have so seriously irked the brothers that they were willing to consider fratricide in order to dispose of their frustration with this adolescent?

We begin by reminding ourselves that homicide (both successful and attempted), incest, lying and litigiosity with the Deity all fail to be followed by any form of Divine wrath unleashed against the perpetrators of such actions in Genesis; and this is not contradicted by the treatment of Yosef’s brothers after their intended murder. What purpose, then, does this story serve? We might posit that the story of Yosef is one that preaches against the liabilities that may attend fraternal envy and parental preference, envy being one of the Seven Deadly Sins that turns up in Christendom. This, disappointingly, does not, however, comport well with our experience in reviewing the thirty seven chapters of Genesis that precede this tale; envy had already been dealt with and many times. What could there be to add, after all, to the tales of covetousness that had already been noted, those between: Kayin and Hevel; Sarah and Hagar; Ya'akov and Esav; or Rachel and Leah (Gen 29)? Envy, covetousness and rivalry can only be described as stale material at this point in the saga of the Family Genesis.

By 1981, I reasoned: Letting go of the content of Yosef’s dreams, however, and concentrating instead on the evanescent choreography of its characters, we may bear witness to three curiosities. We note first that there is a sameness in Yosef’s mode of relating with each family member; each plays the same role, each a duplicate of the other. Be it the sun, the moon or the eleven stars, each is restricted to the task of bowing down to Yosef, just as the brothers would bow to him many years later in Yosef’s palace; and the sheaves and their prostrations in the earlier dream, we clearly note, are indistinguishable, one from the next.

Secondly, we witness an absence of communication between the dreams’ faceless dancers. For instance, the celestial bodies of the later cosmological dream are individually in orbit about Yosef; each separately relates to him and to no one else. Lastly, and related to the previous two anomalies, we note a repeated inclination to view each and every situation in a self-referenced style; there is, that is, no evidence provided that Yosef was inclined to view the impact that his actions might have on another, never mind any indications that he was other than oblivious to these others’ world-views, relationships or personal senses of agency as Subjects in Their Own Right. If we had doubts concerning this matter, they were put to rest by our brief examination of his sadistic treatment of the brothers on their repeated trips to Egypt and his apparent willingness, in calculated and premeditated form, to subordinate interest in his father’s well-being to personal wishes for vengeance.

It is not, we should add, that envy fails to play a part in this scenario, either in the dreams or in the brothers’ response to these dreams. We may assume envy to be present, defensively, in the construction of such dreams and in the brothers’ responses to the actual preferential treatment that Yosef received from Ya'akov, as well as in Yosef’s insatiable demand for ever more! Yosef’s particular form of envy, however, seems to transcend the mere wish to have what another has or even the wish to be the sole possessor of those entitlements. The unilateral self-referencing nature of his envy appears to require that the others relinquish even their claims to a personal point of view or Selfhood. (Consider, some recent politicians.) These others, examined in light of the above considerations of his dreams, may not be separate or distinguishable and are permitted no intercourse with each other. It is, we might say, a form of covetousness that disallows others their very existence in forming their own identities and subjectivities. There is, one might say, to people such as Yosef only one subjectivity and that is his own. All others are Objects.

There is a general principle in Talmudic Law that suggests that when one party is pleasured or has gain and another party has no loss, there is no tort and, therefore, there can be no legal claim; for characters such as Yosef, we aver, this principle carries no weight. And, indeed, it is quite the reverse. Even when he has no gain by so-doing, such a person may take away from another just so they won't have access to this or that Good. Yosef needed it all!

Let me close with an admission: I might have wanted to kill Yosef, too.

So, this week's Parsha, has three characters ... four if you include Pharaoh. Nearing the close of our tour thru Breishis, And so I ask:

Have Ya'kov, Yosef and Yehudah changed?

Yehudah? 44:18-34 ... seems consistently like a good guy ... Like Adam on Bonanza.

Yoseph: 45:1-20 ... he was certainly generous w his gifts to F? and torturous with his machinations.

46:28 Rashi … Yitzchak went to study in the Yeshivah of Shem and Ever after Papa tried to cut his head off and Yehudah went to open a Yeshivah in Goshen … “boy, have I got a rusting infrastructure to sell!”

The Meeting: Ya'akov and Yosef: 46:30-34 (How to pass) 47:11-12. Ya'akov and Yosef sort of mirror each other.

The Meeting: Ya'akov and Pharaoh: Pharaoh tells Yosef: It's all Good: 47:7-10. Ya'akov kvetches ... I hope I do better near the end.

Yosef as Administrator and the 20% Egypt Tax Act of of the 4th Millennium BCE: 47:13-end of ויגש ....

Yosef really does the Tax Act thing ... 1/5 of everything you got unless you're part of the Priestly Oligarchy.

So, let's party! Sell off the parks ... redistribute the $ to a Priestly class. Yoseph … Donnie Boy … Golden haired children of preferential treatment.

An Uknown Medrash and Myth for Xmas Eve: Hit or Myth?

hhcovitz

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday December 24, 2017 · 2:24 AM PST

2017/12/24 · 02:24

Rumor? Either Author, ------ Doggerel or Both are ----- "Work in Progress"

Abe Isaac’s Christmas Day Patient

_{attributed to H. H. Covitz ... Xmas ‘94}

^{(from Ditties et Lettres du Abe Isaacs: Doggerel of a Psychoanalyst}

^{with too many years behind the couch and, some say, too few upon it)}

It wouldn’t be the first Christmas

Abe arose more than a’might listless

Could it be that he was Jewish

That had Old Abe both tired and bluish

Nah!

If Irv Berlin could celebrate a White morn

Why need Abe Isaacs be so very forlorn.

“Neurosis, must be! Nothing less

That has me in this frightful mess.

If I could see a patient, maybe two

I’d feel more involved, less the Jew.

A conference or meeting, maybe Grand Rounds

Would rid me of these perennial frowns

That visit me each Christmas Day

And last through the Feast of Circumcision

New Year’s Day, a week away.”

Zo!

Abe fed the dogs and when he built a fire

To warm his heart and still desire

He heard a voice from just behind

Somewhere in his office, not in his mind

He turned to make a quick inspection ...

Reality testing was his predeliction

And there he was, big, fat and furry

Santa C. and in no big hurry

Sitting in Abe’s favorite chair

Flowing beard, long white hair

“Abe. I’ve decided this morning to retire

Warm my frostbitten toes here by your fire.”

And Zo! Santa C. continued ...

“I considered chilling out in Saskatoon

And thought for a moment ... maybe Cancun.

One too warm; the other too cold

I need it just right. Like you, I’m getting old.

So I’m taking up residence in temperate climes

Your office is fine, if you don’t mind.

In exchange, I’ll share with you the truth

Of my reindeer friends and silly red suit.

I’m on the run! ...

There are those who think me a common loon

And want me ensconced in some padded room.”

And Zo! Abe agreed to tell no one

About his friend now on the run

Santa agreed to tell the history

Anamnesis full, leaving no mystery.

“I used to sell some pots, some pans” the story began

An incredible story, an incredible man.

“I’d travel about from Shtetl to Shtetl

Mein vife vas Channah, I vas called Herschel.

Mein Life vas OK. Some taking, some giving.

Fifty Kopeks a’veek, not such a bad living.

For vone mit a nomen like Herschel Levy

Maybe not enuff fur Miniver Cheevey.

But dose kepitalists are locked into visions of Gold

And vorry retirement vhen dey get old.

Vee Yiddin, vee make it on a little bit love

Mit Challah und Chicken on Shabbos

A little vood fur der stove”

“Zo! It vent on for many a year

Until problems mit Channah!

Oy! Vey es mir!”*

“Fur der keeds left home

Und Channah began to mutcher**

I saw her tru der vindow mit Leibl der butcher.

Didn’t look like aerobics, vhat I saw in mein bed

A Qvick “Zai Gezundt”*** I offered

Outa der Shtetl I did head

To get me a new life, maybe a good German name

Buy me a Prussian suit, get me some fame.

I grew der big belly und a zavtig grosse taches****

Und I chose a shayna nomen, Santa Kleine Naches⁺.

Den I bought couple reindeer, sold meine horse

Und abbreviated mein name to Santa Claus.”

“But mit’out a job, no wife, no pots, no pans

I needed to carefully voik out a ten year plan.

I couldn’t forget Channah, und der Butcher Leibl

Not mit’out chicken on mein Shabbos table,

Zo! I became a schnorer⁺⁺, collected many donations

Said I’d give them to kinder in der emoiging nations.

I had more den I could use and before very long

Some little industrialists came to voik, I paid dem mit a song

Dey called demselves elves, dey had funny little ears

Und seemed to get along mit mein friendly reindeer.

Dey didn’t vorry, mein elves, vhat vas false or true

Vedder I vas Herschel der Shaygitz⁺⁺⁺ or Santa der Jew.”

“Life vas pretty good though occasionally I got noivous

About der Tax-men. Zo I opened a seasonal delivery soivice.

But somevhere I knew inside of mein head

My noives hed to do mit Channah und Leibl in bed

And somehow to do mit mein suit dat was red

Und der odd “Ho! Ho! Ho! that I every stop said.

Zo! I decided if ever I’d retire from dis occupation

Und give up der drink, celebration und libation

I’d come to an analyst fur a gutte explanation

Zo! tell me Abe, you got an intoipretation?”

Abe knew immediately, just what to say

And was thrilled to have a patient on Christmas Day.

“Herschel, or Santa, it’s really much the same

Though sometimes there’s much to learn from a name.

For Hersch means “deer” in Yiddish as you know

And Herschel is “little deer”, a deer that must grow.

Combined with your little elves, an hallucination

Bespeaks organ envy and red fears of castration.

For reindeer are known best by their horn

Something akin to what it is that you mourn.

Embrace your gifts, your fine Yiddische soul!

Not everyone was meant for a splendid Norse Pole.

Big bellies and bottoms will offer no compensation

Nor will you feel better from either seasonal libation

Or what I must say, now, in my interpretation.”

“You tell yourself you give each child a gift,

On Christmas morn, their spirits to lift.

But if truth be told and truth be said,

You’re preoccupied with what goes on

In their parents’ bed.

You steal down the chimney while the kids are asleep,

Crack the bedroom door, just one little peep.

Hoping to learn that it was with force

That Leibl brought Channah to intercourse.

Herschel! You’re welcome to choose my office in which to retire

To warm your frostbitten toes, to hang your stockings by my fire.

But I will offer no proffer,

Can’t let you go

Before you accept the meaning of “Ho! Ho! Ho!”

For when you first said “Zai Gezundt” to Channah that night,

When through the window came that Primal Scene fright,

In truth, you wanted to say very much more ...

You had wanted to scream “Whore! Whore! Whore”.

My interpretation is near complete, just one more thought to say

Before we settle down, two Jews on Christmas day.

Mein tiere⁺⁺⁺⁺, Herschel, it takes neither psychoanalyst nor lawyer

To know that you’ve become a travelling voyeur.

But recall what male Jews say each morn first

And Socrates said it, too, in Diogenes Laertius,

Blessed are you God for not making me female

Blessed for not making me a roo or a snail.

Afterall!

Retiring here? You could have it worse.

And being a Peeping Herschel? It’s not such a curse.

That sack on your back? It could’ve been a purse.

And homophobia of that ilk

is multiculturally-speaking perverse.”

* Alas and alack

** mess around

*** in good health

**** a good and beefy buttocks

⁺ Santa, small on good fortunes

⁺⁺ a respectable beggar

⁺⁺⁺ a nonjew (mildly pejorative)

⁺⁺⁺⁺my dear

Dvar Torah (not quite) ... but notes on parental naming ... in the first 35 chapters of בראשית

hhcovitz

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday December 02, 2017 · 4:13 AM PST

2017/12/02 · 04:13

Parents get to name their children. I remember wanting to name my youngest child who was born female and hence not requiring surgical intervention to make her Jewish (see, eg, the Brazilian Film … The Year My Parents Went on Vacation) … i.e., my child who was born perfect, just as she was … I reasoned to name her Bas Yishai...בת ישי … hinting for just such an undamaged Female Moshiach. “Who says Moshiach must have been androgenized in utero?” Fortuitously my grandfather intervened … I relented but complained (going on tickling my Zaida ר׳ חיים אברהם קליין) that he was complicit in choosing my Hebrew Name … חיים צבי … which (un)fortuitously in Gematria was the same as פץ. He, in his typical way, smiled, called me by my Yiddish Name, instead, patted me on my foot-taller than his head and lovingly offered: “Name her Bas Sheva” and with my wife, I did. The following represent some notes I’ve taken on birthing and naming in Breishis. Achtung! Typos are likely many … I’d like to read a Dvar Torah on this, someday … I may have to write it, myself.

שלא נאמר "When We Begat the Begats" … Birthing and their Sequelae

(How not to name/parent in 35 easy chapters: Omnis definitatus est negatus — Maybe? (B. Spinoza))

It begins with the Curse/Adam and Chavah: (Gen 3:16) הרבה ארבה עצבונך והרונך…ואל אישך תשוקתיך והוא ימשל בך

Adam named for the dirt he comes from and returns to. Chava for passion.

[Greatly will I make your pain in childbirth as you're passionately drawn to your man who will rule over you.]

Kayin's naming? (Gen 4:1) קניתי איש את יהוה [maybe: I got my Guy from God] Hevel's naming is uncertain; maybe he's just הבל, just nothing, הבל הבלים Eccl..

Sequelae: Kayin kills Hevel and takes no responsibility (Note similarity: Kanisi and Kin'ah, maybe … homophonically, if not grammatically, connected … a tradition)

Noah: Naming unclear with Kids … Shem, Cham, Yafes

Yishmael: (Gen 16) Yishmael Named by an Angel: וקראת שמו ישמעאל כי שמע יהיה אל עניך (Gen 11…) [And you'll call him Yishmael, for God heard your suffering] And, then Avraham confirms the choice of names.

Sequelae: Yishmael is nearly killed by Father but serves him as a servile son with Eliezer. Huh?

Action: Lot's children are not named, particularly. Avraham plays the Wife/Sister game for second time and then Sarah conceives. No wonder she feared people’s mockery?

Yitzchak: ותאמר שרה צחוק עשה לי אלהים כל השומע יצחק לי (Gen 21:6) And Sarah said, God has made a mockery of me; everyone who hears this will mock me, too. Many, many uses of the root Tzchok.

Sequelae: Yitzchak, a sad clown of sorts, suffers with a Tzchok at hands of his brother and also his son, Ya'akov. Yishmael “Tzchok’s” his younger brother.

Ya'akov and Eisav: (Gen 25:22) ויתרוצצו הבנים בקרבה … אם כן למה זה אנכי [And the boys ran about themselves inside of her and she said … if it is to be thus, why should I go on?]

Aisav is named through his color (like an object). Ya'akov name by Yitzchak due to his competitiveness.

Sequelae: Yup! The Brothers fight. Rivka continues to be disgusted קצתי בחיי מפני בנות חת [I could end my life just thinking of these non-Jewish girls] and the marriage that began in the only love reported thus far festers, faulters, is foul, and ends in a disfunctional family.

Ya'akov's Kids (starting in Gen 29):

1. Re'uven born of a hated Mother שנואה היא … naming? ראה יהוה בעניי כי עתה יאהבני איש (Gen 29:32) [God understood my suffering; maybe my man will love me, now] … Sad.

Sequelae: Re'uven beds his Father's concubine, Bilhah. (who put him up to it? We don't know.) He does initially defend Yoseph at the pit but otherwise?

2. Shim'on born again of hated Mother: כי שמע יהוה כי שנואה אנכי ויתן לי גם את זה (Gen 29:33) [For God got it that I was hated and He gave me this one, too.]

Sequelae: Shim'on becomes a mass murderer.

3. Levi born to same hated Mother: עתה הפעם ילוה אישי … כי ילדתי לו שלושה בנים (Gen 29:34)

[This time will my man accompany me/be drawn to me, 'cause I gave him 3 sons

Sequelae: Levi becomes a mass murderer.

4. Finally, someone in Torah expresses gratitude, Leah (if that's not reason enough to recite her name before Rachel's in Shmoneh Esrei!): Yehudah born to same Mother, Leah, but this time in gratitude: הפעם אודה את יהוה (Gen 29:35) [This time, I'll thank God].

Sequelae: Yehudah becomes the first person in Torah to accept responsibility for wrongdoing and does it three times. Noch besser! and becomes Grandpere to the line of Dovid.

Rachel threatens suicide over her depressed/angry feelings about not having children. Ya'akov, being consistent, shows his inability to show empathy, following his Dad and Grandpa. (Gen 30:1-2)

5. Bilhah births/surrogates Dan but Rachel names: דנני אלהים וגם שמע בקולי (Gen 30:6) [God has judged/evaluated me and also listened to my voice]

6. Bilhah births/surrogates Naftali but Rachel names: נפתולי אלהים נפתלתי אם אחותי גם יכולתי (Gen 30:8) [With God, I schemed against my Sister and I prevailed.]

Not to be outdone, Leah drafts Zilpah into surrogate-service.

7. Zilpah births/surrogates Gad but Leah names: בגד (Gen 30:11) [Rebel! Rebelled! Rebellion! or "Good luck"(?)]

8. Zilpah births/surrogates Asher but Leah names: באשרי כי אשרוני בנות (Gen 30:13) [In my fotune … for daughters have seen me as fortunate.]

Sequelae: “Maybe some truffles?”

9. Yisachar's birth by Leah who purchased a Night with Jake. נתן אלהים שכרי אשר נתתי שפחתי לאישי (Gen 30:18) [God gave me my rental fee for having given my maid to my man.]

10. Zvulon's bith, by Leah, again. זבדני אלהים אותי זבד טוב הפעם יזבלני אישי כי ילדתי לו ששה בנים (Gen 30:20) [God has given me good stuff so from now on my husband will maybe bunk with me because I gave him six sons.]

11. It's a Girl! Dinah we'll call her … but nobody remembers why.

Sequelae: Intending to with Neighborhood Girls, she ends up with some hunk.

12. Rachel births Yoseph. יסף יהוה לי בן אחר …אסף אלהים חרפתי (Gen 30:23) [God gathered up my shame … may he give me another son].

Sequelae: Yoseph's life is all about power, shame and retribution.

Then Jake gets into the whole "horse trading and Trafim thing and leaves Lavan with his crew. After 20 years Lavan relents: וישכם לבן בבקר וינשק לבניו ולבנותיו ויברך אתהם וילך וישב לבן למקומו (Gen 32:1) [And Lavan got up real early and kissed his sons (?) and his daughters and blessed them; and Lavan left and returned to his place. The Esav meeting follows with Ya'akov convinced — guilty perhaps — that Eisav is his maleus maleficarum … his hammer of the evildoers that will come down on his always-conniving head and render punishments due. This is followed by the story of Dinah … arguably lying to her parents about where she was spending the night … ending in the Shim'on-Levi Genocide of the Chamor Clan. Ya'akov's response is that his sons made him stink among his neighbors. עכרתם אתי להבאישני בישב הארץ … ואני מתי מספר ונאספו עלי והכוני ונשמדתי אני וביתי (Gen 34:30) [You made me stink with the citizenry … And I? am small in numbers (of allies) and they will gang up on me and kill me and I and my tribe will be destroyed.]

Followed by "Promises, Promises."

13. The eclamptic (?) birth of Binyamin/Rachel's death: ותקרא שמו בןֿ אוני ואביו קרא לו בןימין (Gen 35:18) [And as her Soul departed as she was dying, she called him The Son of my Suffering and his father called him Binyamin … the Son of the Right Hand.]

And, more or less, the next 15 chapters are about Yoseph who gets rid of “Shame” with “Pride” and “Revenge.”.

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