Category Archives: Secondary Source

Ithika – The Value of Journeying

The Value of Journeying

The following text on Ithaca extends these themes with the idea that the journey, rather than the arriving, is part of the value. Can you think of times where the experience of the Journey is more important than arriving at the journey’s destination?

 

This poem by Constantine Cavafy is an imaginative interpretation of Odysseus’ return to Ithika after the Trojan war. (Odysseus is also known as Ulysses). Following the fall of Troy, it takes Odysseus ten years to complete his long journey back home to Ithaka. This journey is told in The Odyssey, one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. The poem is commonly dated around 700 BCE.

   Ithaca (in Greek, Ιθάκη, Ithaki) is an island in the Ionian Sea, in Greece

 

                                                   http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=74&cat=1

Nechama Leibowitz – Circles of Attachment

Nehama Leibowitz:   from Studies in Bereshit, pp.113

        “לֶךְ-לְךָ מֵאַרְצְךָ וּמִמּוֹלַדְתְּךָ וּמִבֵּית אָבִיךָ”

               “get thee out of your country, and from your birthplace, and from your father’s house…”

Commentators have remarked on the unusual order. The verse should have read, in the ordinary way:  “מבית אביך, ממולדתך ומארצך” (from your father’s house, your birthplace and from your country.”) This is the logical sequence, since a person first leaves home, then his birthplace and then his fatherland

 The commentary הכתב והקבלה (Haktav Vehakabala)* suggests that there we are referring to a spiritual rather than physical withdrawal, beginning with the periphery and ending with the inner core. The withdrawal from one’s birthplace is not such a cruel wrench as the cutting of one’s connection with one’s family. First, therefore, Abraham was bidden to sever his connection with his country, then his city and finally the most intimate bond, that of home.

*Haktav Vehakabala: Was written by Rabbi Yaakov Tzevi Mecklenburg, a German Jewish scholar of the 19th century. Rabbi Mecklenburg served as Rabbi of Koenigsburg, East Prussia for 35 years (1831-65). Haketav Vehakabbalah was first published in 1839.

Sparing the mother bird

 

The law has traditionally been explained as sparing the mother the painful sight of seeing her offspring taken away. However, it is not likely that chasing the mother away would spare her the pain, since forcible separation from her young and finding them gone later would also be painful. …What the text finds callous are the acts themselves, quite apart from any impact they may have on the mother.

Tigay Jeffrey JPS Torah commentary

Since therefore the desire of procuring good food necessitates the killing of animals, the Law enjoins that this should be done as painlessly as possible. … It is also prohibited to kill an animal with its young on the same day to prevent people from killing the two together in such a manner that the young is slain in the sight of the mother; for the suffering of animals under such circumstances is very great… and does not differ from that of man, since the love and tenderness of the mother for her young ones is not produced by reasoning but by imagination, and this faculty exists not only in man but in most living beings…The same applies to the sending away of the mother bird. The eggs which the bird sits on and the young that are in need of their mother are generally unfit for food, and when the mother is sent away she does not see the taking of her young ones, and does not feel pain. ..

(Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, III:48)

The ruling of the mother bird is not based on the Almighty’s pity for the animal. Otherwise He would have forbidden us their slaughter. The reason however for the prohibition is to teach us compassion and the avoidance of cruelty. Butchers and slaughterers become hardened to suffering by their occupation. These precepts of not slaughtering the mother and the young on the same day and sending away the mother bird are not inspired by feelings of consideration for their suffering but are decrees to inculcate humanity in us. In the same way our Sages regarded all the Torah’s precepts, negative and positive, as decrees.

( Nahmanides, Commentary on Devarim 22:6)

 

 

 

 

Form and meaning – unhewn stones

Unhewn stones: ‘whole’ or ‘peaceful’ stones, the adjective שלמות being of the same root as שלום, ‘peace’. The Altar, whose purpose is the forgiveness of sin, can only fulfill its mission when peace and brotherhood reign in Israel.

 Rabbi J.H. Hertz Commentary, p.862 (quoting Mekhilta of R. Yishmael, – a passage  in the name of R. Johanan ben Zakkai)

Form and Meaning – not using iron

Do not use iron in fashioning an alter

Rashi:

For iron is created to shorten man’s days, and the altar is created to lengthen man’s days: what shortens may not rightly be lifted up against what lengthens. (Mishna, Middot 3:4)

Rashbam,  Rashi’s grandson, offers a different interpretation. He quotes Isaiah 44:12-13:  

The craftsman in iron, with his tools, works it over charcoal, and fashions it by hammering…He forms it with scraping tools, marking it out with a compass. He gives it a human form….