This Shabbat coincides with the seventh day of Hanukkah and therefore, because it is Hanukkah, two Torah scrolls are taken from the ark to be read. The first reading is the weekly parasha, Miketz, which almost always coincides with Hanukkah, is Genesis 41:1 to 44:17. This is the second parasha of the Joseph novella that takes up the last 14 chapters of Genesis.
In this parasha, Pharaoh has two weird dreams and summons Joseph from prison to interpret them. Joseph tells Pharaoh that there will be seven years of bountiful harvests followed by seven years of famine, and that he should store the surplus grain in Ben Carson’s granaries so there will be food to eat during the coming famine. Pharaoh appoints Joseph Prime Minister; the seven years of prosperity come and go, and the famine has arrived. Jacob sends his remaining sons, sans Benjamin, to Egypt to buy grain. Joseph recognizes his half-brothers but they don’t recognize him. He seizes and imprisons Simeon — the rabbinic commentary is that Simeon in last week’s parasha had urged his brothers to kill Joseph, but instead Joseph is “only” sold into slavery. On a second visit by his brothers to buy grain, he seizes and jails his full brother Benjamin on trumped up charges.
The second Torah reading consists is Numbers 7:48 to 53. As Hanukkah commemorates the rededication of the Temple after its desecration by the Greco-Syrians, we read about the dedication of the portable sanctuary the Israelites erected in the desert. The reading is for the seventh day of the dedication, corresponding to the seventh day of Hanukkah.
The Haftarah for the Shabbat of Hanukkah is Zechariah 2:14 to 4:7. The Book of Zechariah likely dates from the 530’s BCE, after the Persian Emperor Cyrus had authorized the Jews exiled in Babylon to return to Judea and to rebuild the Temple that the Babylonians had destroyed 50 years earlier. In urging his fellow returning exiles to rebuild the Temple, Zechariah, in chapter 4, envisions the future Temple’s golden Menorah all ablaze. This Menorah is featured prominently on the Arch of Titus.
I would like, however, to discuss the Haftarah that is nominally assigned to Parasha Miketz but is almost never read in the synagogue, because, as I said earlier, Parasha Miketz almost always falls on the Shabbat of Hanukkah when the “special” Haftarah from Zechariah is read. This reading is found at I Kings 3:15 to 4:1. This is the famous story of the two prostitutes who came before King Solomon. The first prostitute told the king the two women lived in the same house, and they both gave birth three days apart. During the night, the other woman’s baby died, so she took the first woman’s baby as she laid asleep and replaced the child with the dead baby. The second woman insisted to the king that the living baby was hers, and the dead child’s was the first woman’s. The king brought out a sword and announced he was going to slice the living baby in two, and give half to each woman. The real mother cried out, “Please, give her the living child, don’t kill him,” but the other told the king to slice the baby in two. King Solomon understood which woman was the baby’s mother and gave the child to the woman who was willing to surrender her child rather than to see him killed.
This famous Bible story reminds me of the opening lines of the book of Baba Metzia [literally, “Middle Gate”] from the Babylonian Talmud:
Two [enter the rabbinical court] holding onto a garment. This one says “I found it” and the other says “I found it.” This one says, “All of it is mine” and the other says “All of it is mine.” This one shall swear [under oath] that he does not have in it less than half, and the other shall swear [under oath] that he does not have in it less than half, and they shall divide it in half.
I picture the Talmudic sage holding a pair of scissors (which did exist in the Roman Empire), like Solomon with his sword, ready to cut the garment in half, rendering it worthless, although what is meant is that the rabbi must order the garment sold and divide the proceeds of the sale between the two claimants. What follows is 235 pages (Baba Metzia ends on page 119a, but the Talmud is the only book I know in which the front and back of a page is considered one page) in which the rabbis, over several centuries, argued back and forth over civil law, including damages, contracts, buying and selling, interest, loans, bailments, and employer-employee obligations. In Judaism, the employer’s obligation to pay workers and contractors, promptly and in full, is both a religious and a moral obligation. From Deuteronomy 24: 14-15:
You shall not abuse a needy and destitute laborer, whether a fellow countryman or a stranger in one of the communities of your land. You must pay him his wages on the same day, before the sun sets, for he is needy and urgently depends on it; else he will cry to the Lord against you and you will incur guilt.
In Baba Metzia, page 83a, our sages illustrated how important it was for an employer to pay his workers promptly and in full:
Rabbah bar Bar Hanan hired certain porters to move a barrel of wine that he owned, but in doing so they broke the barrel, losing the wine. When the workers could not pay for the wine, he seized their garments. They came before Rav and told him what Rabbah bar Bar Hanan had done. Rav said to him, “Give them their garments.” He [Rabbah bar Bar Hanan] asked him, “Is this the law?” Rav answered “Yes, so that “you may walk in the way of the good, and keep to the paths of the righteous [Proverbs 2:20].”
He gave them their garments back [but refused to pay their wages]. They returned to Rav and said to him, “We are poor, we have worked all day, and we are hungry, and we have nothing.” Rav then said to Rabbah bar Bar Hanan, “Go and give them their wages.” He responded, “Is this the law?” Rav answered, “Yes, and keep to the paths of the righteous.”
Donald Trump has named David Friedman to be the ambassador to Israel. Trump has known Friedman, a bankruptcy attorney, since at least 2001, and, according to the New York Times, “Mr. Friedman represented Mr. Trump’s personal interests in the bankruptcies of the casinos in 2004, 2009 and 2014.” These bankruptcies freed Mr. Trump from having to pay contractors and employees. David Friedman is an Orthodox Jew, highly observant, and the son of an Orthodox rabbi, and I am sure he knows Baba Metzia far better than I do. Using bankruptcy to avoid paying people who have worked for you may be legal under American law, but it violates the Jewish law set forth in Baba Metzia, and is just plain unethical and immoral. What would Rav have said?
But back to Baba Metzia, which is typical of the Talmud in that the accounts of the rabbinical debates from so long ago occasionally stray from the topic at hand, as the rabbis tell their favorite stories, and offer us deep teachings on how we should behave towards our fellow human beings. This from Baba Metzia pages 58b to 59a:
Mishnah: Just as there is ona'ah [fraud, price gouging, and other shady business behavior] in buying and selling, so too there is ona’ah in words. One may not say to a shop owner “How much is this object?” if one does not wish to buy it. If someone was a repentant sinner, one may not say to him “Remember your earlier deeds.” If one is the child of converts, one may not say to him “Remember the deeds of your parents.” For it is said [Exodus 22:20] “You shall not wrong a stranger, neither shall you oppress him.”
Gemara: . . . Rabbi Yohanan said in the name of Rabbi Simon ben Yochai. Verbal ona’ah is a greater sin than monetary ona’ah, for concerning one [verbal ona’ah] it was said [Leviticus 25:17] “and you shall fear your God” but concerning the other [monetary ona’ah] it was not said [Leviticus 25:14] “and you shall fear your God.” Rabbi Elazar says: “This applies to the victim’s person, the other just to his money.” Rabbi Shmuel bar Nahmani said: “This [money] can be restored, but that cannot be restored.”
A tanna [anonymous sage] taught before Rabbi Nachman bar Yitzhak “Anyone who shames another by whitening the face of his fellow in public, it is as if he has shed blood.” He replied to him, “You speak well, for we see in him that the redness goes out of his face and whiteness comes.” . . .
For Rabbi Hanina said . . . “All who descend to Gehinnom [hell] will ascend, except for three who descend but will never ascend. And they are these: Someone who has sex with a married woman, someone who shames another in public, and someone who calls another a bad name.” But isn’t calling a person by a bad name the same as shaming? Even though he is used to being called by this bad name.
Rabbah bar bar Hana said in the name of Rabbi Yohanan: “It is better for a man to have sex with a woman married to another than to put his fellow to shame in public.” .. . . And Mar Zutra bar Toviyyah said in the name of Rav, and some say it was Rav Hana bar Bizna who said in the name of Rabbi Simon Hasida, and some say it was Rabbi Yohanan who said in the name of Rabbi Simon ben Yochai: “It is better for a man to cast himself into a fiery furnace than to put his fellow to shame in public.”
David Friedman has said that Jews who support J-Street are worse than Jews who collaborated with the Nazis to round up their fellow Jews. This despicable statement from Trump’s choice to be ambassador to Israel is very insulting to me and to other Jews who seek a peaceful solution in the Middle East. My Jewish ancestors left Europe in the 1800’s, but I can imagine how the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors feel. Again, David Friedman is outwardly a very religious man, and, like many right wing Christian fundamentalists, he wears his religion on his sleeve, and surely he knows the lines I have quoted from Baba Metzia. But, in crudely insulting his fellow human beings in the worst possible way, he has shown his contempt both for the Jewish ethics he claims to hold dear, and for the basic bounds of human decency. He is unfit to be ambassador.
Shabbat Shalom, Happy 6th, 7th and 8th days of Hanukkah, and Happy New Year. I fear we are in for a rough 2017.