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2 - MACHON MEIR
MACHON MEIR - http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:PcMxtmtBrHsJ:www.seliyahu.org.il/parasha/par5763/epar63002.rtf+etymology+of+bereshit+definition&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=9&gl=us
Message for Today: “Light' can only connote a saint.”
Creation's purpose is derived from the first verse in the Torah: “In the beginning [bereshit] G-d created the heavens and the earth.” Rashi retranslates the word “bereshit” so the verse means: “For the sake of 'Reshit' [the first one], G-d created the heavens and the earth,” and he explains:
“ 'Reshit' can only refer to Torah, which was called 'the start of G-d's pathways' (Proverbs 8:22). 'Reshit' can only refer to Israel, who were called, 'the first of G-d's produce' (Jeremiah 2:3).”
Likewise, the Talmud teaches (Yoma 38b):
“The world would have been created even for the sake of one saint alone, as it says, 'G-d saw that the light was good' (Genesis 1:4). 'Good' can only connote a saint, as it says, 'Consider the saint, for he is good' (Isaiah 3:10)…. Even for the sake of one saint, the world endures, as it says, 'A saint is the world's foundation' (Proverbs 10:25).”
Indeed, the world and all it contains were created and endure by virtue of the Jewish People - and even by virtue of a single Jewish saint (Rambam's preface to the Mishnah). We can explain this by a parable. All of creation can be compared to a large, ancient tree, whose whole purpose is to produce sweet fruit. While each fruit is small in quantity compared to the large tree, it is enormous in quality, for within each fruit is stored away the concentrated essence of everything in the tree, and the fruit represents the tree's purpose and future. In the same way, the Jewish People are small in quantity but enormous in quality. Israel are the world's sweet fruit, by which means G-d's glory is revealed in the world, and they tell G-d's praise: “I created this people for Myself that they should tell My praise” (Isaiah 43:21).
Today, despite infinite attempts by Israel's enemies to extinguish the flame of Israel, the Jewish People live and endure, and they are on the rise. Their light is getting more and more powerful. The further we march along the ascending path towards complete redemption, the more Israel's light and goodness become clear. Ultimately, that light and goodness, and Israel's blessed influence on the entire world, will be revealed for all to see.
“The earth was without form and empty, and there was darkness on the face of the depths; G-d said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light” (Genesis 1:2-3). Light can only connote a saint, and “Your people Israel are all saints” (Isaiah 60:21).
Harav Dov Bigon
Don't try to educate your spouse.
Rabbi Shlomo Aviner
Don't try to educate your spouse. This applies both to husbands and wives. This is not why you got married. I am not anti-education. It is a great mitzvah to teach your fellowman, an enormous mitzvah, the supreme mitzvah. Yet a couple get married in order to be friends. That's something different. Let's say I am an elementary school pupil. I have friends and I have a teacher. My teacher or yeshiva rebbe is there to teach me. I approach the rebbe and I say, “Rebbe! Please teach me! I bow my head and listen to his words, and I get educated.
As far as my classmates, however, I never appointed them to be my teachers. A friend is a friend. It is something different. Sometimes one's friend can be one's teacher as well, and that is very nice. Such, in fact, is Rambam's explanation of Avot 1:6, which states literally, “Make yourself a teacher.” Rambam understands this to mean that one should relate to one's friend as to a teacher. Yet it is my own decision to relate to him that way. It involves great humility. It does not say, however, “Acquire yourself a disciple.” That is unsavory. (Rabbi Ovadiah MiBartenura, Ibid.).
When you got married, you were not acquiring yourself a disciple. Rather, you acquired yourself a friend. If your friend says to you, “I am your disciple,” then teach him. That is very nice, but don't you take the initiative to teach him.
Perhaps, you say, your spouse is actually interested, but embarrassed to ask? Don't worry. He is not embarrassed. If you are unsure, ask him: “Do you want me to teach you? Do you want to talk about it?” Yet don't intrude on his world and don't start preaching to him. People have hard lives. They move around outside, in a world where people criticize, show hostility and make remarks. At home, people are not interested in opening a second front, neither do they need any more prosecuting attorneys to attack them. At home what they need is a lawyer.
You are your spouse's lawyer, and the vice versa, obviously. Day and night, you must fulfill Avot 1:6: “Judge everyone favorably.” Try to see the positive side of things.
If your spouse wishes you to serve as a representative of the State Prosecutor's Office, well and good, but only on condition that he wishes this. Ask him, but don't force him. It ruins the relationship.
After all, there are laws applying to rebuke. You don't just rebuke your fellow man any time you feel like it. There are conditions that must be met. The main condition is this: “Just as it is a mitzvah to give advice that will be listened to, so is it a mitzvah not to give advice that will be ignored” (Yevamot 65).
Will your words be listened to? Is your spouse waiting to hear them? Is he psychologically ready? The fact that he is your spouse does not give you the right to say whatever comes into your head, to rebuke him, to educate him, to give him a piece of your mind, to lay down the law. Do this! Do that!
Leave him be! Let him find his own way as he sees fit. Sometimes forcing instruction on someone constitutes a form of violence. Who asked you to do it?
You might say: “This isn't just any old person. It's my spouse! And one's spouse is like one's own self.” All the more reason for you to leave him alone. Anyone else can cut off contact, slam the door or go elsewhere, but with one's spouse, that is not possible. A husband and wife live together.
If so, then who is going to teach your spouse? Don't worry about that. The world is full of teachers! You, first and foremost, must be a friend.
The Status of Women
Rabbi Ya'akov HaLevi Filber
Today's arousal towards improving the status of women, which is right and fair per se, has brought with it various attempts to blur the differences between men and women. There are groups that wave the flag of equality between the sexes while ignoring and denying the natural, inherent differences between them. Already from the moment that the human race was created, the Torah told that the creation of man was different from the creation of other beings. All creatures were created male and female, and even so, the Torah does not mention this fact except in the case of man. Regarding all other creatures the Torah states generally: “Let the earth bring forth particular species of living creatures” (Genesis 1:24). For other creatures, gender duality has no function other than survival of the species, with male and female being partners together in ensuring that their species endure down through the generations.
Such is not the case with man, however. In his case, the Torah informs us in elaborate detail about the creation of the human race, not just after it was created, but beforehand as well, starting with the counsel taken beforehand. As Rashi comments regarding the words, “Let us make man” (Genesis 1:26), G-d “consulted His heavenly counsel.” Despite the angels' opposition to man's creation, G-d ultimately created him all the same. Yet already from the very fact that counsel was sought, we derive that there was something problematic about man's being created, so much so that even after his creation was decided upon, he was not created like other beings. Our sages focused on this difference:
“It says, 'G-d created man in His image' (Genesis 1:27), but it also says, 'Male and female He created them' (Ibid.). What, in fact, happened? At first G-d considered creating man and woman separately, but in the end He created them as one” (Ketuvot 8).
How then did the one become two? The Midrash responds:
“ 'One of his ribs' (Genesis 2:21): When G-d created Adam, he created him with two faces, and then He divided man into two” (Bereshit Rabbah 8:1). Another version reads:
“Adam and his wife were created together, as it says, 'Male and female He created them' (Genesis 1:27). G-d removed Eve from Adam and prepared her and brought her back to him, as it says, 'G-d took one of his ribs.'”
Why did G-d need to create Adam with two faces looking in opposite directions, and then to split them into two beings? Why didn't He create them as two separate beings to begin with, like all other creatures? This mode of creation is explained by Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook in his book Ein Aya (Berachot Ch. 9, 191):
Two forces operate in every person - emotion and intellect. Emotion is the force of creativity and imagination and it governs one's aesthetic sensibilities, whereas the intellect is that cold force that observes phenomena and penetrates them through judicious calculations. The two constitute within man a complete network that man needs. Thus, man is composed of these two forces. The first is that song that stems from man's emotion and from the power of his imagination, and the second is the intellectual outlook stemming from his judgmental ability. The two forces exist in both men and women.
Even so, there is a difference between them. In men, the intellectual side is stronger than the emotional and creative side, whereas in women, emotion and esthetics are more developed, and constitute the dominant force. (Even if the intellectual side is generally stronger in man than the emotional side, that does not mean that men are smarter than women. It is true that a man whose intellectual capacities are fifty percent developed, while his emotional capacities are forty percent developed, will be more intellectual in relative terms, but he definitely will be less intellectual than a woman whose emotional side is eighty percent developed and whose intellectual side is seventy percent developed.)
This division between the sexes is all for the best, because when different forces are blurred together, one force will deter or disturb the completeness of the other. By contrast, when each force operates separately and independently, each then achieves its full potential. The goal is that each force, having developed uniquely to its fullest, should later have a positive influence on the other force.
According to this approach, the difference between a man and a woman is not just in their physical makeup or in the biological differences between them. Rather, already at the onset of the creation of mankind, men and women were set apart by their psychological makeup. Our sages expressed this difference by their reference to “two faces.” This duality of creation facilitates one's having the full range of emotions without logic and intellect disturbing their development. By the same token, one can fully develop one's intellectual powers without his emotions disturbing him. It is precisely through providing both genders with equal opportunities to develop fully their unique aspect, rather than by blurring them together, that human society can function more efficiently. This way, the partnership between the two genders will not cause unnecessary tension or competition, but will make the world a better, more pleasant place.
For the Sabbath Table: Beloved Companions
Rabbi Azriel Ariel
The Torah assigns different names to women, and correspondingly, to men. It calls the woman “Isha,” and her husband “Ish.” It calls her “Chava,” Eve, and her husband Adam. At the end of Parashat Bereshit we deal with “benot haAdam” (6:2), Adam's daughters, and their relationship to “bnei haelokim,” the sons of G-d. These names changes are not random. It would seem that the change in names expresses different contents that fill the marital relationship - companionship, parenthood and sexuality.
The reason given for Eve's creation is companionship: “It is not good for man to be alone. I will make him a compatible helper” (Genesis 2:18). Being isolated and alone is “not good.” It involves no giving, no benefiting others. The companionship between man and wife is an expression of the value of the goodness within the marital bond. The practical fulfillment of this is the mutual assistance, the help that the wife gives her husband, paralleling his own giving to her. The content of this connection finds expression even in the names of the two spouses: Ish and Isha. The woman is called “Isha” “because she was taken from the Ish” (Genesis 2:23). Ish and Isha are two declensions of the same noun, expressing the unity of the two spouses as components in a single marital unit. Likewise alluded to is the name of G-d, who looms over them as they build their home. The yod of Ish with the hei of Isha together make up G-d's name.
The relationship later on in the parashah changes, following the sin of the Garden of Eden. The woman is no longer called “Isha” but “Chava,” Eve. She is no longer represented as her husband's wife, but as “the mother of all life” (Genesis 3:20). Moreover, she must devote her life to raising up the living beings who emerge from her. “I will greatly increase your anguish and your pregnancy. In anguish you will give birth to children” (3:16). So too with her husband. His name is not “Ish” but Adam, after the soil [adama] from which he was fashioned. At the center of the marital connection stands parenthood. Adam, with his name, expresses his past roots, while Eve expresses by her name future continuity.
It is not hard to imagine that the change is tied to the sin of eating from the Tree of Knowledge. It is this sin which aroused the base aspect of the marital relationship, the selfish, physical perspective of sexuality. This aspect lowers companionship from its pristine, elevated level, and threatens to transform it from a relationship of mutual giving to one of mutual taking, from a relationship embedded in the world of the spirit, sanctifying the physical, to one chiefly embedded in the physical world. The means of rectifying this corruption lies in placing parenthood at the center of the relationship. The shared obligation to raise the children, the devotion of each spouse to his role in caring for them, fashion anew the spiritual dimension of the marital relationship. Eve devotes herself to pregnancy and birth, while Adam labors by the sweat of his brow to support the children he has brought into the world.
As time passed, however, mankind did not easily accept the demand to place the marital relationship on high moral ground. The downward pull grew stronger. Lemech married two women and divided up the labor between them: Ada was for pregnancy and birth, while Tzila was for the physical relationship. In Lemech's case, parenthood could not exalt the marital relationship above the base dimension of sexuality. Indeed, while Ada bore children who engaged in building up civilization on the economic and cultural front, that same “bad apple” born to Tzila, Tuval Cain, was the “maker of all copper and iron implements” (Genesis 4:22), the inventor of weapons of death and murder.
The deterioration continued. “The sons of G-d saw that the daughters of man were good, and they took for themselves whichever women they chose” (6:2). No more husband and wife, no more Adam and Eve, but only sons and daughters. The language here does not express any covenant of matrimony.
From this low point a ray of light shone forth from mankind, from which they would slowly begin to march towards rectification, moral family lives, parenthood, even companionship: “Noah found favor in G-d's eyes” (6:8).
In our own generation, we see the results of technological progress: Effective contraceptives, and advanced means of impregnation together facilitate a separation between the marital relationship and parenthood. Such devices as epidurals free the woman from the curse of painful childbirth. Technology liberates the father from the curse of working “by the sweat of his brow.” There is thus a grave danger of mankind moving towards licensiousness. A great challenge thus faces us, of returning to the companionship which existed in Eden before the sin. This is the deeper meaning of the blessing recited under the wedding canopy: “Give abundant joy to these loved companions, even as You gladdened Your creation of old in the Garden of Eden.”
HhHhHhHhHhHhHhHhHhHhH
3 - NYCI (Block)