The Bible for the Clueless But Curious

After the fiasco of eating from the tree in the Garden, things go on from bad to worse. Adam and Eve have two children: Cain and Abel. When harvest time comes, Cain and Abel bring offerings to God as a way of giving thanks. Abel offers "the first and fattest sheep of his flock," but Cain decides that's overdoing the gratitude thing, and he gives some of his poorer crops. God isn't very impressed with this, and He tells Cain so. Cain becomes depressed, and decides to take it out on Abel (God being too tough, and too far away to fight with). Cain picks a fight with Abel about which one of them God loves more, and then Cain kills Abel.

In His most innocent voice, God asks Cain: "What happened to your brother Abel?"

Violence has nothing to do with the victim. Cain commits murder because he's depressed and angry. He could think about the failures of his own life, and try to fix them, but that would take a lot of work. It's easier to blame Abel.

Blaming your problems on others is a cheap way to avoid the difficulty of change and growth. In today's society, it sometimes seems no one wants to accept responsibility for his behavior. In one particularly silly (but true) illustration of this, a woman bought a cup of coffee from McDonald's, put the cup between her legs, and drove off. When the coffee spilled and burned her, she sued McDonald's!

Not accepting responsibility is often the reason for violence in families as well. A husband comes home frustrated at the end of a difficult day. He's looking for someone to blame. Who's around to hurt? His wife and kids! Why is his frustrating day their fault? It isn't, of course, but within a few minutes of arriving home, some provocation arises, and he lets them have it.

Noah seems very odd to people, building his ark out in Kansas (or wherever he is), but that is part of the point. God wants people to ask Noah why he needs a boat in the middle of the Great Plains, so Noah could have the opportunity to warn them about God's plan to destroy the world. God hopes they will take this warning to heart and change their behavior. God doesn't want to destroy the world. He wants people to change.

When I was 18, I had a screaming fight with my dad and stormed out of the house. It was three months before I cooled down enough to go home. Early one morning, I knocked on my parents' door, and my dad opened it. "I've missed you terribly," my Dad said. "I'm so glad you've come home."

God doesn't expect us to be perfect, and He certainly takes no joy in hurting us. He expects us to take responsibility for our mistakes and to change. In this respect, God is a lot like my dad, or maybe the other way around.

When your kids make mistakes, don't be too quick to punish them. Think of ways to help them realize their mistakes and to change.

When you do have to punish your children, it's important to let them know how sad it makes you. You don't want them to think you enjoy your power over them. Hurting the people you love most is something you should do reluctantly, and only because you know you need to do it, for their good.

God says to Abram, "Go for yourself from your land, from your relatives, and from your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you, and make your name great, and you will be a blessing... all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you." (Genesis 12:1-3)

Where we live and how the people around us behave makes a big impact on how we think and behave. If people around us think powdered wigs and petticoats are stylish, we'll probably think so too. If our friends own slaves or believe in the divine right of kings, chances are we'll agree. And if people around us think religion is a joke and drugs are cool, chances are we'll agree with that too.

The first thing God tells Abram is that he had to become independent. And to become independent, he has to move away from home. (Sound familiar?)

Dr. Stanley Milgrom once did an experiment at Yale University that became very famous. Milgrom brought two people into his laboratory; let's call them Harry and Jack. (Unbeknownst to Harry, Jack was really Milgrom's partner.) Milgrom told them they would participate in an experiment to explore how punishment affects learning.

Dr Milgrom: Harry, I'm going to take Jack into this little room over here and attach an electrode to his arm. He's going to have 15 minutes to memorize a list of words. Then you'll test him on them. Every time Jack makes a mistake, you're going to give him a shock. The shock will be a little stronger each time.

The experiment continues. Jack (Milgrom's secret partner) starts screaming and pounding on the walls. The dial eventually indicates that Harry is giving Jack lethal shocks, Jack becomes totally silent. Harry is visibly upset, but goes on giving the shocks anyway, past the point where he believes he's killed Jack.

Milgrom's experiment showed it isn't necessary to be vicious, cruel, or sadistic to put people into gas chambers. You can be completely normal -- but just not independent enough to consider whether what you're being asked to do is right or wrong.

"Independence of conscience" is an important part of how Abram's descendants (i.e. Jews) define themselves.

God tells Abraham to offer Isaac as a burned sacrifice on a mountaintop. Abraham travels for three days to God's designated place (Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, where Solomon will later build the Temple). Abraham binds Isaac with rope and lays him on a rock. Just as he is about to slaughter him, an angel of God arrives to stop him. (Genesis 22:1-12)

This is one of the most important and troubling stories in the whole Bible. Why does God want Abraham to kill his son? Why does Abraham agree?

Everything we have is a gift. This is true not only of our possessions. The people we love and even our own lives don't belong to us. They are merely lent to us for our brief enjoyment. If you think everything is due you, your life will be filled with the bitterness of frustrated expectations. If you live without expectations, and see what comes your way as a gift, it's much easier to be happy. Observant Jews often write a line from Psalms in the inside cover of their books: "The world in all its fullness belongs to God. This book is in my temporary possession."

Could anything be more precious to you than your child? Imagine the following scenario. One of the cruelest actions of the Germans in the Holocaust was to make the Jews accomplices in their own destruction. In each ghetto the Germans set up a Jewish council, called the Judenrat. They would tell the council, "Tomorrow a train leaves for Auschwitz at 9:00 A.M. Get a thousand children onto that train, or your children will be on the train."

Abraham sends his servant Eliezer with instructions to find a wife for Isaac. Eliezer asks God's help to find the right person. He travels through the desert to a well, and he prays that when he asks for water, the woman God wants to be Isaac's wife will respond by offering water not only to him but to his camels as well. (Genesis 24:10 14)

When the prince falls in love with Sleeping Beauty, he doesn't know anything about her goals or character -- she's sleeping. All she knows about him is that he's charming. And then, the fairy tale says, they lived happily ever after.

People raised on fairy tales tend to believe them. But Eliezer knew marriage had to rest on something deeper. He was looking for a woman with character and goals. Here's what you should look for:

Kindness: Being kind is very different from being nice. Nice is a synonym for polite and inoffensive. Nice people don't do gross things like insult your mother or spit on your tie. Nice is an important attribute for a waiter or doorman. But kindness is a far rarer and more important trait. Someone kind cares about your good and your pleasure, not only for his own. You can't make a successful marriage with someone who isn't kind.

Loyalty: Without loyalty, marriage is impossible. Blending two people's lives into one is a frustrating challenge, and if you enter marriage leaving yourself a way out, you'll take it. Think of the commitment of marriage as being like the commitment to your hand. It isn't absolute -- if you had gangrene you might amputate your hand -- but it's certainly not a commitment you'd reconsider just because "the fun had gone out of your relationship" with your hand, or because you'd met someone whose hands you liked better.

Goals: Find someone whose goals in life match your own. Buying a house or winning a job promotion isn't a life goal. A life goal is something you'd like written on your tombstone.

Without shared life goals, marriage is impossible -- because you can't go through life with someone if you don't know where you're going. And the goal of life can't be to get married. Marriage expands who we are, and permits us to pursue our life goals more effectively; but when depressed and aimless single people get married, they become depressed and aimless married people.

In real life, Sleeping Beauty and the prince don't live happily ever after. Their marriage lasts about three years.

"What the hell, I'm going to die anyway," said Esau, "What do I care about the birthright. Take it and give me the stew." (Genesis 25:31-34)

Esau believed that since in the end we're all going to die, good and bad alike, we might as well fill our lives with intense pleasures like food, sex, and the thrill of violence. Why worry about irrelevant nonsense like spirituality, or philosophical questions like the meaning of life?

Esau was the ancestor of a nation called Edom, which tradition identifies with Rome. (Edom means red, like the color of blood or of Jacob's stew.) The Romans' idea of a great evening was to watch gladiators hack each other apart, and then top it off with a drunken orgy. Our own enjoyment of blood sports like boxing stems back to Rome. More profoundly, the influence of Roman culture encourages us to dismiss religion as wishful thinking and to believe that the goal of life is to satisfy our appetites.

"It [is] not true that there is a power in the universe, which watches over the well-being of every individual with parental care and brings all his concerns to a happy ending. Dark, unfeeling, and unloving powers determine human destiny; the system of reward and punishments, which according to religion governs the world, seems to have no existence." (Freud, "New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis")

"What is the purpose of human life? Nobody asks what is the purpose of the lives of animals... it is [a striving to eliminate] pain and discomfort, [and to] experience intense pleasure... from the satisfaction of pent-up needs which have reached great intensity, and by its very nature can only be a transitory experience." (Freud, "Civilization and its Discontents")

This is the myth of the decadent world. In the end I'm going to die anyway. So bring on the stew!

Leah immediately conceives and in quick succession gives birth to Reuven, Shimon, Levi, and Judah. When all the babies have been born, Jacob has a total of 12 sons.

A child is more special than a Rembrandt. Would you decline the chance to own a valuable masterpiece because caring for it is too much work? Or imagine you could count gold pieces from a chest, and keep them. Would you take a nap or watch television instead?

Our lives are like that chest of gold. We have a brief chance to make something special of our lives, and then the opportunity is gone.

We become confused, however, between comfort and pleasure. Comfort is the absence of pain, like falling asleep on a warm beach. Pleasure -- like marriage, wisdom, children, or helping people in need, for example -- is achieved only with effort and discomfort. The gold is there for the taking, but many people choose to take a nap or watch reruns instead.

One night, a man comes and confronts Jacob in his tent. All night the two wrestle, but neither can defeat the other. As dawn breaks, the man reveals he is an angel.

The angel blesses Jacob, saying, "From now on, your name is not 'Jacob,' but 'Israel.'"

As the sun rises, Jacob limps on, his sciatic nerve torn in the confrontation with the angel. (Genesis 32:25-33)

Jacob and Esau represent incompatible views of life. In Esau's violent, hedonistic world, there is no room for the gentle spirituality of Jacob. The angel in this story is Esau's angel. Their nightlong struggle symbolizes how through the dark night of history, Jacob and Esau will struggle to impose their stamps upon this world. It is a battle to the death, which Jacob will survive by his wits. (Jacob means "crafty." It implies the perpetual underdog, exiled, wounded, but never destroyed.)

In the end, however, the dawn of redemption will break, and the world-view of Jacob will emerge victorious. (Israel means one who has struggled and ultimately triumphed.) This story foretells that the world will ultimately renounce the violence and hedonism of Esau and turn to the values of Israel.

Pharaoh starts dreaming. He dreams that seven fat cows emerge from the River Nile. Seven thin cows follow them and eat the fat cows, leaving no trace.

Pharaoh has another dream. He dreams that seven healthy ears of grain sprout on a stalk, followed by seven thin and withered stalks. The thin stalks consume the healthy ones, and again nothing remains.

Pharaoh is unable to decipher the meaning of his dreams. He calls his wise men, and he demands that they interpret the dreams.

Now the butler remembers Joseph. He tells Pharaoh about the young Israelite who correctly interpreted his dream. Joseph is rushed from prison, bathed, shaved, and brought before Pharaoh.

"The interpretation of dreams belongs to God," says Joseph (who seems to have learned a lot of humility in prison). "God is sending you a message through your dreams. The seven fat cows are seven years of plenty. The seven skinny cows are seven years of famine. The famine will be so severe that it will leave no trace of the plenty that came before. The dream about the ears of wheat has the same meaning. The repetition of the two dreams together means that this will happen soon. Now find a wise man who will gather Egypt's grain into storehouses during the years of plenty, so when the famine comes there will be something to eat."

Pharaoh is extremely impressed by this. Without further ado, he changes Joseph's name to Zaphenath-paneah (try spelling that for the receptionist), and appoints him Prime Minister of Egypt.

Through the years of great plenty, Joseph gathers up grain and stores it. Then the years of famine begin, and people come from around the world to Egypt to buy grain. (Genesis 40:1-41:55)

Imagine a fly walking across a man's head as the man strolls down the aisle of a speeding train as the earth revolves on its axis and circles round the sun in a rapidly expanding universe. How fast is the fly traveling and in which direction? Joseph's brothers sold him as a slave to Egypt because they hated him. In Egypt, Joseph becomes Prime Minister so he can store up grain, so Jacob's family can find refuge from the famine, so they will eventually become enslaved there, so the stage will be set for the eventual exodus.

Who controls events, and in which direction do they tend? We have freedom of choice, but our choices become part of a tapestry of whose larger texture we may only dimly be aware.

Before dying, Jacob blesses his children. The strengths and weaknesses of the various children define the character of each of the 12 tribes. Together, these tribes make up the nation of Israel. In blessing his sons, Jacob also defines the relationship between the future tribes of Israel.

Here is what he tells Shimon and Levi: Cursed is your anger, because it is cruel. Though your passion for justice is praiseworthy, zeal often overwhelms your judgment. (Genesis 49:7)

Jacob doesn't curse Shimon and Levi. He curses their anger. It's a parent's responsibility to help children grow by correcting their mistakes. But when you rebuke them be careful to emphasize that you love them. It's just their behavior you don't like.

In proper measure, spice adds flavor. In excess, it mars the dish. Similarly, the influence of these zealous tribes is best diffused. When the Land of Israel is later divided among the tribes, Levi receives no portion. Instead, his tribe is scattered throughout the land -- diffusing his influence, like pepper, throughout the nation.

#1 of 5 in the Aish.com Bible For Clueless Series
Next >> The Bible for the Clueless But Curious - Exodus

If you would like to receive "Aish Weekly Update" or other features via e-mail, please enter you email address here:

Listen to audio by
Rabbi Nachum Braverman

Hear related audio on this topic