Parashat Sh’mot
Exodus 1:1-6:1

With this book we begin speaking about the Jewish people as a nation. Until now we have been speaking about individuals. But now the Children of Israel are called a people “`am” for the first time. So they are called by Pharaoh, by Moses, by taskmasters, by God.

And with this shift we enter, almost imperceptibly, into a change of the nature of the voice of the Biblical Narrator. From the start of the Torah, from The Beginning, we have heard a voice of a storyteller who is not God or any identifiable being. The voice is the voice of an all-knowing narrator who can tell us what God does and thinks and says, and what everyone else says or does or wants. But the narrator is not God, or Laban or Tamar, or any other character in the story. We accept this voice naturally, for it tells us of events and personae – such as Noah or Sarah – long gone.

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Parashat Vay’hi
Genesis 47:28-50:26

As Jacob, the final Patriarch, prepares to die, he begs his son Joseph to take his body out of Egypt and bury it in the ancestral cave originally purchased by Abraham. He chooses to take his place within the mythic space – historical and imaginative – that this cave signifies. (See Sparks 2011) His consciousness of this transformative choice can be detected in the way he recalls the history of the place: “It was there that they buried Abraham and Sarah, his wife; it was there that they buried Isaac and Rebecca, his wife; and it was there that I buried Leah.” (Gen. 49:31)

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