This post is part of a feature of critical responses to sermons by religious leaders.
I wanted to share an interesting sermon that the rabbi at Mesorah D.C. delivered this past Friday night. The rabbi doesn’t seem to post his sermons, so I am keeping him anonymous.
The rabbi began by noting that the weekly portion, which begins at Genesis 47: 28, features a peculiar layout.
Most portions start off with one of two different sorts of indentations, but this portion is not immediately accessible when one scans the Torah scroll. (More info here.)
The rabbi connected the unusual layout with what he said was a biblical statement that Jacob tried to reveal to his sons when the Messiah would arrive (it is clear from here that it is a quote from Rashi not from the bible).
Why, wondered the rabbi, did the bible record that Jacob tried to reveal the Messianic arrival date if he failed? (Obviously the easy answer is the Torah did not ever claim that; Rashi did.) He connected the attempt with a question as to why the portion, when it says Jacob lived in Egypt for 17 years, used the word “vayechi” (from which the root “chai” comes) instead of the more regular “vayeshev” to mean “he lived.” (When I asked him about all the references in Genesis 5 to people living, using the root “chai,” he said the difference was “vayeshev” is usually used when the verse specifies where the character lives.)
The rabbi then cited the Zohar, which, according to him, says that Jacob was living the best years of his life in Egypt. One wonders, though, why Jacob’s life was just getting better and better when he told Pharaoh just verses earlier in Genesis 47:9, “The years of my life are 130 years — few and evil were the days of the years of my life, and they didn’t reach the days of the years of my fathers in their travels.” It would seem to me that Jacob was probably not a very happy person at the moment.
The rabbi somehow related all this to a parable. Declaring the kugel at the bottom of the pot to be the most tasty, the rabbi said a queen would never ask to be served that part of the dish, because it was beneath her honor. The queen would instead, the rabbi speculated, ask a servant to get it for her on the sly. Evidently, this somehow relates the “hidden-ness” of the beginning of the Torah portion and the way the ability to tell his sons when he would die evaded Jacob.
This post is part of a feature of critical responses to sermons by religious leaders.
In Lon Solomon’s 12/13/09 sermon (audio, video), the lead pastor at McLean Bible errs in his analysis of the story of Noah, and offers what is unfortunately a regular feature in his otherwise thought-provoking sermons: a hateful, snide comment about rabbis. He also talks about how God told him to become lead pastor at McLean.
Though “every American child, just about, has heard of Noah and his ark,” Solomon begins, what made Noah a great man wasn’t that people know about him, nor that people have toys that look like him, but that the bible honors him as “one of the greatest men ever to live.”
Solomon mentions that Isaiah (see Isaiah 54:9 to see that this isn’t a positive reference), Peter (see here), Ezekiel (see here) and “the Lord Jesus himself” cast Noah in a positive light. Solomon also cites Hebrews 11, which he calls “the Bible’s spiritual hall of fame, the Cooperstown of the Bible.”
“There’s old Noah, big as life, and what was it that the Bible applauds Noah for above everything else? Well folks, it was for his full obedience to God.”
According to Solomon, the Bible tells us Noah had never seen rain and had no empirical proof that a flood was coming. “Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Noah obeyed God,” Solomon would have us believe. After discussing the wedding at Cana, Solomon (starting about 11:30 into the clip) adds, “What made Noah the spiritual giant that he was, what caused the Bible to applaud him and put him into the hall of fame, was his full obedience to God. What God told him to do Noah did. He did it fully, and he did it completely, and he did it without compromise.”
Indeed, the passage Solomon quotes, Hebrews 11:7, states, “By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.”
The trouble is that Solomon neglects another important Old Testament passage, Genesis 7:7 (Hebrew), “And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives with him, into the ark, because of the waters of the flood” (emphasis mine).
The medieval commentator Rashi has noted that Noah entered the ark not because he was faithful even without empirical proof of the flood, but because the waters pushed him in. “Even Noah was one of those who is short of faith,” Rashi writes, “he sometimes believes and sometimes does not believe that the flood would come. And he did not enter the ark until the waters forced him.”
Elsewhere in his sermon (19:55 ff), Solomon discusses God’s reasons for stripping Saul of his kingship and replacing him with David. “Friends, in God’s mind, partial obedience is no obedience,” he says. What then of Noah’s partial obedience? How does Solomon explain the Genesis verse that Noah actually entered the ark because of the empirical evidence that promised a watery grave if he did not shut himself up in his boat?
Of course, the Hebrews verse says Noah started building the ark out of faith — since the flood had not come yet — but that can co-exist with the OT statement that what actually drove Noah into the ark wasn’t his faith in God, but actually meteorological evidence that a flood was beginning. (The Rockwell image on the right comes to mind.)
Surely, Solomon need not respond to every biblical verse in every sermon, but starting at 14:01, he says in a different context, “Well friends, every nincompoop can get this one right. I mean even those rabbis can get this one right.” In that light, I will say, friends, every school child who has studied the Hebrew bible knows Genesis 7:7. And especially the lead pastor at a mega church, who fancies himself an expert on the Hebrew Bible, should get this one right.
Image: The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark by Jan Brueghel the Elder, 1613. Getty Museum.
