Sh’ma, b’ni, musar avicha, v’al titosh torat imecha.
Listen, my child, to the instruction of your father, and do not abandon the Torah of your mother.
Proverbs 1:5
This month, we are completing the four-year cycle of our trimester system as we study the third section of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) - K’tuvim or Writings. To best understand how K’tuvim is put together, we might best take a step back and look at the whole Hebrew Bible. One way to look at the Bible is not as an intentionally written series of texts, but rather as a collection of “the best (religious) literature of the Biblical period”.
The process by which the Bible came to be the book that we know today is called “canonization”. At various times, certain books, or groups of books, were accepted into the canon of the Bible - some because of their eternal message, some because their message was meaningful in that time, and some because it would be inconceivable to the Biblical audience for these books not to be included. The Torah was canonized (into roughly its present form) during our exile in Babylon, after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE. Ezra the Scribe returned from exile and proclaimed that we would have a public reading of the Torah each year at Sukkot. Next came the books of the Prophets, brought together, it is believed, when Antiochus and the Syrian-Greeks would not let us study the Torah. The scholars of the time associated passages from prophetic works with each Torah portion. The period of the prophets runs from Joshua (just after the death of Moses at the end of the Torah) to the end of the exile in Babylon.
The last section - the Writings - is neither a chronological account nor even a coherent collection. We might call also call it “Biblical Miscellany”.
- The first book - T’hillim - Psalms is probably a collection of the best known and loved 150 liturgical poems from the worship in the Temple in Jerusalem.
- The next book Mishlei - Proverbs is often attributed to King Solomon (as many of the Psalms are attributed to his father, King David) and consists mostly of fatherly advice.
- The book of Iyov or Job is a meditation on a problem that still concerns us today - why do bad things happen to good people? The book takes place in the mythic land of Uz and is probably meant to be understood as a parable, not as historical.
- Shir haShirim - the Song of Songs, is also said to be written by King Solomon. This book of beautiful love poetry is one of the most quoted of Biblical texts and the Rabbis attempted to understand it as a metaphor for the loving relationship between God and Israel.
- The book of Ruth (Rut) takes place in the period of the Judges and tells the story of the first convert to Judaism and eventual ancestress of King David.
- Eicha is the almost onomatopoeic Hebrew name of the book of Lamentations - a series of dirges mourning the destruction of the first Temple.
- The third book attributed to King Solomon is Kohelet or Ecclesiastes, sometimes seen as the jaded musings of a former intellectual, but which I view more as an instruction that wisdom must be acquired by living and learning, not by appropriating someone else’s experience.
- The book of Esther is the most widely known - the basis of our holiday of Purim, where we read it each year, and it is set sometime after the return from the first exile.
- Daniel tells the story of an Israelite child raised in exile in the Babylonian court and later in the Persian court as a tale of how we can hold on to our Judaism in exile.
- Ezra-Nechemiah is most like the Book of Kings in the previous section, in that it is a fairly straightforward retelling of the end of the first exile and the establishment of Jewish sovereignty under the Persian empire.
- Finally, the book of Chronicles - Divrei haYamim - is a retelling of all of Jewish history, from the first human being to the anointed king (or mashiach) Cyrus of Perisia who fulfills the prophecy by allowing us to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.
Each book has its own style and its own message. Open your Bible and study with us through May, as we explore the many different voices and answers that our tradition provides to questions we still ask today.
Rabbi Abraham
The answer to the question you may be asking in April -
Why does Rabbi Abraham have so much less hair?
On April 1st, at the rabbinic convention in Chicago, Rabbi Abraham will be joining more than 36 of his colleagues who are shaving their heads to promote awareness about childhood cancers and to raise money for research through St. Baldricks. Rabbis Phyllis and Michael Sommer lost their son, Sam, to cancer in December. Before he died, Phyllis and fellow rabbi Rebecca Schorr decided that one thing they could do to help kids in Sam’s situation was to get 36 rabbis together to raise money and awareness.
If you are interested in contributing, you can go to http://www.stbaldricks.org/participants/mypage/661199/2014 or to stbaldricks.org and search for Rabbi Abraham.
