Ancient Wisdom Today » Midrashic Tidbits http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org Ancient Wisdom Today: seeking to understand the past to make sense of the present Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:09:17 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 A Parable: The Wise and Foolish Invitees http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org/2009/03/19/a-parable-the-wise-and-foolish-invitees/ http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org/2009/03/19/a-parable-the-wise-and-foolish-invitees/#comments Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:44:08 +0000 Maer http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org/?p=380 For this parable, we are going to have the benefit of not only seeing its Hebrew but also two translations. John Hobbins was kind enough to translate the text in two posts entitled “The Parable of the Banquet in the Talmud.” In the first part, he looks at the exchange between R. Eliezer and his students culminating in a quote from Qohelet. Hobbins reminds us of the importance of taking the context of the parables into consideration as they may have never been stand-alone units.

I have my doubts about the tendency to treat parables as self-contained units. They may have been (or may never have been), once upon a time, autonomous units. But, just as is the case with the parables of the New Testament, the parables of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud do not stand on their own anymore. Relationship to context needs to be taken into full account.

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]]> http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org/2009/03/19/a-parable-the-wise-and-foolish-invitees/feed/ 1 Blessing and the Beginning of Torah http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org/2009/02/24/blessing-and-the-beginning-of-torah/ http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org/2009/02/24/blessing-and-the-beginning-of-torah/#comments Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:41:40 +0000 Maer http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org/?p=256 John Goldingay talks about blessing as one of the aspects of “God speaking” in creation. God’s speech is life-giving. He mentions something Genesis Rabbah says concerning the fact that Torah does not start with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, ‘aleph. And what does that have to do with blessing? Here is what he says,

“Thus blessing “is not simply a friendly wish” but “a bestowal of life-force… an act whereby the power-for-life monopolized by Yahweh generously is transmitted to Abraham and his descendants” (Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997], p. 165) — and here to humanity as a whole and to other living creatures. God shares power-for-life with the animal world. The prominence of the blessing theme makes for a pointed contrast with the gloomy vision of other Middle Eastern stories of the origins or the world and humanity, as well as with the troubled experience of Israel in; for instance, the exile. Genesis Rabbah 1:10 (on Gen 1:1) sees here another significance in the fact that Scripture begins with a bet, not an ‘alep, the second letter of the alphabet rather than the first, since b is the first letter of the word for blessing (whereas ‘aleph is the first letter of the word for curse). “Bless” has the first word in Scripture” (Israel’s Gospel, 54).

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