Chaye Sarah: Sim Not Yadcha on the Text--How to Not Teach Chumash

Parshas Chayei Sarah contains two famously difficult passages that, curiously, receive wildly different treatment in traditional education.

The first is “sim-na yadcha tachas yerechi,” Avraham’s instruction to Eliezer to take a solemn oath.

The second is the midrashic claim that Rivka was three years old when she married Yitzchak.

Both can make an educator pause.

But only one of them — Rivka’s age — has historically been elevated in some circles into a mandatory ontology, a dogma that must be taught literally even when it distorts the narrative and contradicts basic educational responsibility.

Why did that happen?

And why did “tachas yerech,” which is far more awkward on the surface, never receive this ontological treatment?

And what does Rivka herself teach us about how to answer both questions?

1. “Tachas Yerech”: The Symbol Everyone Knows Is Symbolic

When Avraham asks Eliezer to place his hand tachas yerech, the Torah uses a euphemism — the same way it uses euphemisms throughout Chumash for matters of embodied life.

Chazal follow suit.

Rashi explains the act in covenantal terms: an oath taken upon the symbol of the bris — the brit being the only mitzvah-object Avraham possessed.

But no rebbe in cheder ever insisted that this was literal anatomy.

No one framed it as a test of emunah.

No one pressed children to envision it or defend it.

Why?

Because everyone understood instinctively what Chazal understood:

• The Torah is speaking in symbol.
• The location is covenantal, not anatomical.
• The point is brit, not biology.
• And, following Pesachim 3a, euphemism is an ideal educational modality for certain topics.

In other words:

This was never turned into ontology because it never served a sociological purpose.

2. “Rivka Was Three”: When a Midrash Becomes a Boundary Line

By contrast, the midrash claiming Rivka was three — which is not pshat, not unanimous in Chazal, and not demanded by the storyline — was elevated in some educational subcultures into a doctrinal identity marker.

A badge of fidelity.

Rabbi Marc Angel has written sharply about this: how some mechanchim framed it as an issue of emunah rather than as a midrashic calculation that was never meant to override the moral, psychological, and narrative reality the Torah is describing.

The tragedy of that approach is twofold:

 

(1) It violates Pesachim 3a.

The Gemara tells us to avoid explicit discussion of things that can embarrass or confuse, and to follow the Torah’s path of euphemism.

Yet here, educators did the opposite:

• *They euphemized “tachas yerech,”
• but literalized the midrash that makes the relationship incomprehensible,
• and insisted children accept it as “simple pshat.”

 

(2) It violates Rivka’s dignity — precisely what the text works to protect.

The Torah goes out of its way to present Rivka as:

• mature,
• morally discerning,
• spiritually independent,
• capable of choosing to leave her home,
• able to pass a rigorous test of chesed,
• and immediately recognizing Yitzchak’s spiritual greatness.

Nothing in the narrative reads like the story of a toddler.

Everything reads like the story of a young woman whose purity, courage, and agency shine in contrast to the broken environment around her.

Turning that story into a tale about a three-year-old is not piety.

It is a form of narrative malpractice that erases the very virtue the Torah is praising.

3. The Paradox: Why One Was Euphemized and the Other Literalized

 

Here is the critical insight:

The literalization of the Rivka-midrach was never driven by fidelity to the Torah.

It was driven by a cultural impulse:

• To defend midrash at all costs,
• To treat every drasha as ontology,
• To draw boundary lines between “us” and “them,”
• And to cultivate a form of emunah that confuses genre, category, and pedagogic responsibility.

 

“Tachas yerech” is symbolic.

“Rivka was 3” is also symbolic — a number derived via a midrashic derash for homiletic purposes.

But only one of them was enlisted into a culture war, so only one became a forbidden topic to question.

In truth, neither are literal.

Both are symbols, handled differently because of sociology, not Torah.

4. And Then Rivka Herself Teaches Us the Correct Mehalech

When Rivka first appears, the Torah does something rare.

It slows down.

It describes her deeds with care.

It lets us watch her:

• exercise judgment,
• act with strength,
• display generosity,
• withstand pressure,
• and make a profound choice with full intentionality.

The Torah presents Rivka as a paradigm of moral maturity in a corrupt household.

If mechanchim today want to know how to teach Bereishis responsibly, Rivka offers the model:

See people as the Torah sees them — not as a strained midrashic arithmetic sees them.

Teach covenantal meaning, not biological awkwardness.

Protect dignity, not distort it.

Use euphemism where the Torah uses euphemism.

Use ontology where the Torah uses ontology — not where culture does.

Rivka’s greatness lies in her ability to rise above a family that could not see her clearly.

Our task is not to repeat that failure.

Our task is to teach her story the way the Torah actually tells it: with dignity, nuance, and truth.

 

The Torah speaks in symbols; educational malpractice happens when we turn symbols into dogma. 

Rivka’s story reminds us that our job is to preserve dignity, not sacrifice it to misapplied piety.

 

Vayera: Haran Always Votes for Haman

With the terrifying spectre of an open Hamasplainer having been elected to what some call the third most powerful office in the world — placing 2025 New Yorkers almost on a similar moral plane as 1933 Germans and 2006 Gazans — there is one uncomfortable question that remains: with so many “MOT’s” having not only voted for the mayor-elect but having campaigned for him under their hijacked mutation of “Judaism”, how to relate to those erstwhile brethren and sistren? 

Does one try to be “mekarev” them?  Are they “tinokos shenishbu” even though they have not only adopted a political creed so openly hostile to Judaism but they have treasonously grafted “Jewish” on it as if putting a kippah, tallis, tefillin on a pig and then giving it a birs before administering chassidishe shchita?

Or—do we view them as the 20% viewed the 80% prior to the three days of Makkas Choshech who freely and without coercion decided that their future lay in Egypt — and, while they may not have died en masse literally like the midrashim propose, they may have simply been dead to the other 20% by virtue [signal] of their decision to opt out?

The contrast between Avraham’s ostensible fierce advocacy in this week’s parsha for Sodom contrasts starkly with his silence as his brother Haran suffers the fate meant for him 2 parshos ago.  I would like to suggest that Haran is a prototype for the 80%— and by extension for the 2025 Jewish Mamdani voter; this time—the Haran came to its logical conclusion and voted for Haman, and did so openly and proudly under the banner of a “Judaism” kidnaped and abused into a gross mutation of the host.

What is uncanny about Avraham in Vayera is not that he advocates so fiercely for Sodom — it is that he doesn’t advocate for his own brother.  Avraham pleads for an entire civilization that is already morally cremated, yet he lets Haran burn — and does not even attempt a plea bargain with Nimrod, or a habeas motion before G-d.  People stumble on this because they assume both categories — Sodom and Haran — should be grouped together as “wicked people who have sunk too far.”  But Sodom gets a lawyer.  Haran does not.  Why?  Because Sodom is a defendant — an actual named party in the case.  Haran is not.  Haran refuses to be a party of record.  And Torah is making a clinical distinction, not an emotional one.

Haran never chose a conviction; he tried to ride the verdict.  His sin was not licentiousness.  His sin was opportunism.  Terach at least “narc’d” in the open — that is morally repugnant, but at least it is an explicit allegiance.  Haran instead engineered a moral equivalence between Abraham and Nimrod — and then assumed that whichever side won would claim him as a shareholder.  That is performative neutrality — which is its own form of treason.  In modern psychological terms: he wanted the schar of Pinchas without actually picking up a spear.  And Avraham must have known his brother’s pattern — this was not naïve uncertainty, this was a betting slip.

So Avraham advocating for Sodom is not rachmanus al ha’achzarim.  It is strict scrutiny of the strict-scrutiny case.  Avraham is effectively saying: if You are about to administer a Midas HaDin verdict of irreversible civilizational liquidation — then that verdict must be subjected to a Midas HaDin standard that leaves not only no reasonable doubt — but no doubt whatsoever.  And that is why Abraham is not merely permitted to defend Sodom — he is commanded to.  He becomes, functionally, their court-appointed attorney — zealously representing a client the Court itself has assigned him.

In that light, Bruriah’s yitamu chata’im fits Abraham perfectly — until the moment the choteh becomes itam ha’chotim — where the sinner and the sin collapse into one undifferentiated object, and the attempt at rehabilitation becomes categorically incoherent.  That is Haran.  And that is why Haran is the conceptual ancestor of Haman.  Haman is the perfected form of Haran’s instinct: the opportunist who will vote annihilation if annihilation is the current that secures his imagined insider status.  Haran is not the man who doubted.  Haran is the man who had no convictions — and therefore ended up defaulting to the power structure that promised him the highest psychological yield.  In our age — this is the category to fear most.  Because the Harans always end up voting for the Hamans — even when they themselves will get burned in the process.

When a person publicly uses “as a Jew” as the rhetorical justification for a political stance that structurally endangers Jews, they are no longer speaking as the tzibbur — they are speaking only as themselves. == This is the distinction Avraham makes in the furnace scene — Haran stands near the Jews, but not as one of them.  Avraham’s Eruvin 19a rescue boundary demonstrates that the decisive category is covenantal anchoring, not the degree of sin. He rescues the wicked, the compromised, even the morally confused — every sinner except those who erased their covenant identity. 

So how do we relate to those who publicly claim that their Judaism is the very basis for endorsing a political platform that materially endangers Jews?

This is the time to call it out for what it is.  A betrayal so complete that even Avraham Avinu would not allow himself to recognize the perps — except as he “recognized” his brother.

Therefore: Zohran voters who used Judaism as a justification for their votes…

… are worse than Hamas.  Because you have introduced and catalyzed the metastasis of their intersectional oncogene into several of our internal ecosystems for your own benefit and self-validation in the vehicle of virtue signaling.

…are all porshim and acherim; Zimrim, Momaderim, and Moomers all in one.

…have no right to speak on behalf of us, and morally and spritually have no rights to even ask for access to communal resources.  They can get that from the Soroses and the Qataris, if they don’t already.

…have no rights to ask for any kid of spiritual comfort from tribal brethren and sistren whom they betrayed.  In case one should try to protest about this move on their counterparts — this was done after the 2018 Pittsburgh massacre when Franklin Foerskin yemach shmo made this threat to Jewish Trump voters in the pages of the Altlantic.  And then year a later cancelled his own already thin credibility by making excuses for the perps of the Jersey City atrocity.  So he was never speaking out of communal concern: it was all about politics and virute signaling.

…aren’t even to be represented as the reshaim at the seder.   Which makes perfect logical sense because Zohran voters types have likely already made their own mutated versions with oranges — and other artifacts that are analogous to spiritual tumors — on their Seder plates.

… are lower than afar va’efer — because that is what they would rather reduce their coreligionists to rather than admit that their intersectional peor-gressive worldview is a load of Greta Garbage.  

…are the paradigm of the response of the mesis/mediach confirming an adoption of the mutato-Mamonidean code of wokearei emunah: kach hi chovasenu, kach yafeh lanu.

…Unity?  UNITY?  (Sorry, Jim Mora).   Unity for Zohran voters is under the banner of a universalism which would erase Judaism — an epistocide, which — as the “poor Gaza” mantras over the last two yeara have proven — would justify Judeocide, even if it took them along with it, because—like the idol worshipers who took out their idols from their bosoms to kiss them and died when their innards burst — Zohran voters are all ready to die Al Chilul Hashem if it leads to the end of Judaism. (Glenn Greenwald and Ben Cohen ym”shm meet regularly with Tucker Carlson, so Zohran voters shouldn’t pretend they’re above talking to “right wing MAGA fascists” if it will help in furthering the above mentioned epistocide.)

Even Bruriah would not have us pray for them — and they would not want us to pray for them either, as they would assume the G-d we pray to must be Zionist, while they go say Kaddish for dead Hamas terrorists.

Zohran voters are they/them.  

Zohran voters are not us.

When Haran votes for Haman, Haran votes himself out. 

That is exactly what happened this past Tuesday.

Lech Lecha — Gnot Your Daddy

Lech Lecha isn’t just the start of Jewish history; it’s the moment human history fractures.  When God tells Avraham, “Go forth from your land, your birthplace, and your father’s house,” He creates not merely a nation but a new kind of being. From that command onward, Israel is destined to live the paradox of בָּדָד יִשְׁכֹּן וּבַגּוֹיִם לֹא יִתְחַשָּׁב — “a people that dwells alone, not reckoned among the nations.”  That verse describes more than isolation; it names the ontology of Jewish existence. The Jewish story refuses to dissolve into anyone else’s, and that defiance still drives the world crazy.

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The Ontology That Offends

Both ideological poles stumble on the same rock.

The hard right resents a people that insists on equality without conversion — Jews who say, “We’ll stand beside you, not beneath you.” Hence the fury of Christian nationalists from Nick Fuentes to Tucker Carlson, who see Zionism as arrogance rather than survival.

The hard left, meanwhile, despises a people that cannot melt into intersectional universalism. Jewish particularism — a nation defined by covenant and boundary — is a fatal contradiction in a creed that preaches salvation through sameness.

Both sides rage at the same thing: the refusal to be absorbed. The right wants the Jew to kneel; the left wants the Jew to melt. Neither can abide a people who are apart without being against.

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Two Temptations: Shevna and Zimri

Every generation breeds its Shevnas and Zimris.

Shevna, Isaiah’s court scholar, was “great in Torah” yet drunk on prestige. He led a “peace camp” urging surrender to Assyria while carving his own tomb like a Pharaoh. His sin wasn’t ignorance but vanity — intellect unmoored from covenant. Modern heirs preach that if Jews only apologize more, modernize more, soften more, the world will finally love them.

Zimri, in Parashat Balak, made rebellion into spectacle. Dragging a Midianite princess before Moshe, he tried to turn desecration into doctrine — sin as statement. Today’s versions wield body, identity, and protest as sacraments of self.

Shevna’s is the power-paganism of intellect; Zimri’s, of flesh. One worships influence, the other impulse. Both mistake self-expression for transcendence — and both end up consumed by the very fires they light.

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Avraham’s Bounded Chesed

Avraham, by contrast, practiced chesed — kindness with borders. He prayed for Sodom but didn’t move there; he rescued Lot but refused the king of Sodom’s spoils. His compassion was fierce but disciplined.

The Talmud imagines him at the gates of Gehinnom, rescuing all but those who “cast off the covenant.” That unsettling image captures Judaism’s moral realism: love that sanctifies, not love that erases.

Our culture confuses empathy with endorsement, compassion with collapse. Avraham’s mercy says otherwise: without moral geometry, kindness curdles into cruelty.

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The Horseshoe

Look at the political map and you’ll see the ends curving toward each other like a horseshoe. The far right and the far left, supposedly enemies, are united by their fury at Jewish distinctness.

The right dreams of a Christianized order; the left, of borderless utopia. Each demands redemption through erasure. And at the gap where the ends should meet stands Israel — the unerasable reminder that moral limits exist.

Judaism is the world’s cosmic contraceptive. It prevents humanity from reproducing its idolatries unchecked. Every empire that seeks to flatten difference — Rome, Moscow, Silicon Valley — eventually collides with the Jewish fact: there is one God, but many nations; one morality, not one monoculture.

Antisemitism is never really about Jews. It’s rebellion against accountability — the hatred of limit itself.

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Lech Lecha — Still Walking

Lech Lecha remains the command to walk away — from flattery, from fashion, from the ideologies that promise acceptance at the price of integrity. To “go to yourself” means to find the self measured by covenant, not by crowd.

Avraham is av hamon goyim — father of many nations — because he first learned to be no one’s son but God’s. The nations still want his ethics without his ontology, his compassion without his covenant. But the source cannot be severed from the spring.

So the command still echoes:

Walk away from the idols of the age.

Walk toward the promise that being different is the highest form of solidarity.

“הֶן עָם לְבָדָד יִשְׁכֹּן וּבַגּוֹיִם לֹא יִתְחַשָּׁב.”

A people that dwells alone, not reckoned among the nations.

Not lonely. Just eternal.

Bereishis: We WERE Here First

The Torah famously opens not with the first mitzvah given to Israel but with a cosmic declaration:

“כֹּחַ מַעֲשָׂיו הִגִּיד לְעַמּוֹ, לָתֵת לָהֶם נַחֲלַת גּוֹיִם” (Psalms 111:6)

“He declared the power of His works to His people, to give them the inheritance of nations.”

Rashi famously explains on Genesis 1:1 that the Torah begins with this declaration so that if the nations accuse Israel of being “thieves” for taking the land of Canaan, the response is clear: the land belongs to God, who created it and gave it to whom He pleased. At one point He gave it to the Canaanites; then He took it from them and gave it to Israel. Crucially, this answer is not aimed at the nations of the world but at Israel itself — “koach ma’asav higid le’amo.” 

The point is to prevent moral self-doubt.

This becomes more pointed later in the text. On Genesis 12:6, Rashi comments:

“והכנעני אז בארץ — היה הולך וכובש את ארץ ישראל מזרעו של שם.”

“And the Canaanite was then in the land — he was in the process of conquering the Land of Israel from the descendants of Shem.”

Here the moral and historical frame is flipped on its head: the Canaanites are not the natives; they are the occupiers. The divine promise to Abraham is not conquest ex nihilo but restoration: the return of ancestral territory to its rightful heirs.

A number of modern rabbinic thinkers have stressed that Rashi’s opening comment is directed inward. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and Shlomo Goren all emphasized that the pasuk is not hasbara for the United Nations. It is a theological anchor meant to prevent Jews from apologizing for possessing their own land.

Rashi on Genesis 12:6 adds a second layer. By noting that the Canaanite was already in the act of conquering the land from Shem’s descendants, the Torah presents Israel’s arrival centuries later not as an imperial act but as a rectification of a previous usurpation. This is more than a narrative flourish. It is a fundamental reframing of moral legitimacy: the Jews are not the conquerors but the heirs returning home.

This reading has had a long afterlife. In the modern period, three broad streams — religious Zionist, academic, and secular nationalist — all converged on this verse, each in its own register.

Religious Zionist thinkers such as Goren, Tzvi Yehuda Kook, Shlomo Aviner, and Yoel Bin-Nun have repeatedly cited Rashi on Genesis 12:6 to underline the moral asymmetry of the Jewish return. Aviner even borrowed halakhic language, likening Israel’s modern return to the Land to hashavat aveidah — the mitzvah of returning lost property. “This is not conquest,” he said, “but returning what was stolen from us.”

Academic biblical scholars — notably Yehezkel Kaufmann, Yair Zakovitch, Moshe Weinfeld, Israel Finkelstein, and Shmuel Ahituv — interpret the phrase “והכנעני אז בארץ” as a deliberate ideological marker. It frames the Canaanites as latecomers, not natives, and casts Israel’s conquest as the rectification of an earlier wrong. Even from a strictly historical-critical perspective, the verse is an anti-occupier polemic embedded in the biblical text.

Early secular Zionist leaders embraced this logic as well. David Ben-Gurion explicitly cited Genesis 12:6 in speeches from the 1930s through the early years of statehood: “We are not conquerors. We are returning to our ancient homeland. Others conquered it after us, but it was never truly theirs.” Berl Katznelson and A. D. Gordon likewise used “return” and “restoration” language rather than “conquest.” Ze’ev Jabotinsky, from the opposite end of the political spectrum, said essentially the same thing: “This land is ours — not because we conquered it, but because it was ours and was taken from us.”

For roughly the first half of the 20th century, this restorationist frame was a shared national narrative that transcended religious-secular divides.

By the late 20th century, however, this framing had largely disappeared from mainstream Israeli discourse. Historians and legal scholars have identified several reasons:

Secularization of political language: Post-1948 leaders like Moshe Sharett preferred legalistic and civic nationalism to biblical language. The restoration claim, associated with Genesis and covenant, was seen as too religious and “unmodern.”

Temporal narrowing: After 1948 and especially after 1967, the world framed the conflict around contemporary events — wars, armistice lines, occupation — not 3,000-year-old claims. Israel responded within that narrowed frame, letting the ancient narrative fade from view.

Legal pragmatism: In diplomatic and legal forums, appeals to Bronze Age ownership have no standing. Israeli legal teams emphasized Mandate history, defensive war, and sovereignty — pragmatic arguments that sidelined theological or historical rhetoric.

Ideological polarization: After 1967, biblical language became coded as belonging to the Religious Zionist right (e.g., Tzvi Yehuda Kook, Gush Emunim). Secular centrists recoiled from using language that now felt sectarian, even though the same verses had been invoked by Ben-Gurion a generation earlier.

The result was a kind of rhetorical amnesia: what had once been a powerful shared national narrative — “you were never the original owners” — was no longer part of the mainstream conversation. Internationally, the debate flattened into symmetrical claims: “ours” versus “ours,” as though both peoples stood on identical moral footing.

Here lies the irony. Moshe Sharett and the early diplomatic establishment deliberately avoided biblical language out of a desire to sound pragmatic and modern. But in doing so, they abandoned the single most powerful asymmetric claim available: that Jewish presence in the land is not merely a competing claim but a prior claim, rooted in both sacred text and national memory.

Had they followed the logic of the first Rashi — “Koach ma’asav higid le’amo” — they might have realized that this was never primarily a foreign-policy argument. It was a narrative for themselves: a way of framing their own return without apology or embarrassment. A people that stops telling its own story leaves the stage for others to tell it for them.

Two Rashis — one on Genesis 1:1 and one on 12:6 — contain a remarkably sophisticated land claim. The first teaches that Jewish moral confidence comes from knowing that possession of the land is not theft but divine allocation. The second reframes history: Canaanite occupation was itself an act of conquest, and Israel’s later arrival was an act of restoration.

For centuries this was understood as theological argument. In the early Zionist period, it was secularized into a national-historical narrative that unified religious and secular leaders alike. But in the post-1948 era, that language was gradually abandoned in favor of pragmatic, legal, and security-based rhetoric — a shift that unintentionally weakened Israel’s moral narrative on the world stage.

The irony is striking: the first Rashi, so often read as a religious apologetic, may in fact have been the strongest secular rhetorical asset early Zionism ever had. By ceasing to use it, the movement inadvertently flattened its own claim. The result was not modern sophistication but a self-imposed amnesia — one that reduced a 3,000-year story to a mere border dispute.

Perhaps it is time to listen again to Rashi’s opening line, not as prophecy, but as political clarity:

“כח מעשיו הגיד לְעַמּוֹ”

The point was never to convince the nations.

It was to remind ourselves who was here first.