Stringing the Pearls: How to Read the Weekly Torah Portion

5. Navigating the Parshiyot

130 HOW TO READ A WEEKLY TORAH PORTION 5. Navigating the Parshiyot The fair neck of Israel is adorned by five golden necklaces on which a total of 54 pearls are strung.22 We will now consider these necklaces in turn, selecting as we go one pearl on each to hold up to the light. From a distance the necklaces all look quite similar. Collectively they and their jewels dazzle. When we looked at them up close, we see that while they all hang together quite nicely, they are different from one another. Each of the five books of the anthology that is the Humash has its own character, structure, and function. A parashah in one will look and read very different from a parashah in another. And this is true even for parshiyot within one book. In the pages that follow I want to treat each of the five books in a way that will help you read their respective parshiyot. This will entail three operations for each of the five books: 1. I will first note some basic features of the book’s content and sources and lay out the rudiments of its structure. These notes do not replace the general introductions to the books that every one of the Humashim noted above and in Part V provides. Those introductions supply, each in its own way, more detailed background , historical or otherwise, to the books. Some of them also have fuller synopses of the parshiyot. My purpose here is to flag salient issues in or about the book that will enable you to be a better reader of a parashah in that particular book. 2. For each book there will be a guide to its textual landscape parashah by parashah. This is a bullet-point listing of each 131 NAVIGATING THE PARSHIYOT parashah’s contents; it is not a detailed synopsis. The map is designed to help you see the book as a whole at one glance and thus to locate quickly the general context of each parashah. 3. Then I will select one parashah as a specimen for a guided reading. No one parashah is ever representative of the book in which it occurs, but the one I choose will have enough salient features that will be relevant for many, if not all, the other parshiyot in that book. ————— On Reading Genesis and Its 12 Parshiyot Compared to the other four books, Genesis is relatively easy to negotiate. It is less diverse in content and in form, even though it is the longest of the five. • Source-wise Genesis is preponderantly the J writer’s book with important additions of E material and interpolations from P. • Structure-wise it consists of two big units, as the guide on the accompanying pages shows: • a prologue that lays down the mythic substructure on which not only Genesis and the Pentateuch rest but the entire TANAKH. • narratives that tell stories of the three Patriarchs, the four Matriarchs, and their descendants. Each of these large sections as well as the subsections within them concludes with a genealogical list. So when you see such a list you will know you are about to transition to another part of the book. The Prologue (Chapters 1–11) The Prologue presents what the Bible understands as prehistory. It covers the first two parshiyot, B’reishit and Noah .. Most of the material is derived from the mythology of the pre-Hebraic ancient 132 HOW TO READ A WEEKLY TORAH PORTION Near East. But these are not mere transcriptions into Hebrew of stories originally written in Sumerian, Akkadian, or Ugaritic, the languages of Mesopotamia and Canaan of the second and third millennia B.C.E.; they are transmutations of that material. What had been told of contending gods created in the image of men was now recast in monotheistic terms as the will and actions of a God who transcends the world, nature, and humanity. The ideas and the language of these two parshiyot are fundamental to the biblical view of God, man, and the world, and to the values and worldview of Rabbinic Judaism and its subsequent development in the medieval and modern periods. In short, the first assumptions of what will become Torah are found in these 11 chapters. These are the things for the reader to discover. It is a pity that the annual cycle gives us only two weeks to work...