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Old 11-07-2011, 05:11 PM
7luminaries 7luminaries is offline
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On Rashi and Beresh*t (Genesis)...re: avenger, it's a good starting place...thanks for that...

My post is just background...I leave the big questions raised in the OP to the Rabbi...or to another time at least....

Here are a few things that point to Rashi's overall perspective, which is that the Torah's raison d'etre is [forgive my generalisation] to deal with humanity's raison d'etre, which is to know God and ourselves and to realise our potential in various ways, through our awareness and our actions, etc. (study, prayer, mitzvot etc).


http://www.myjewishlearning.com/hist...om/Rashi.shtml
Quote:

Rashi’s method is to state what he considers to be the plain meaning (peshat) of the text and also homiletical comments (derash) culled from the Midrash. For instance, in Rashi’s comment on the first word of Genesis, bere****, “In the beginning,” he notes that on the plain meaning this word, in the construct state (Rashi was a gifted grammarian), should be rendered as “in the beginning of,” that is, the word is connected with what follows in the verse: “In the beginning of God’s creation of the heaven and the earth, the earth was…”

But he also quotes a Midrashic comment according to which bere**** means “because of the beginning,” both the Torah and Israel being referred to in Scripture as “The beginning,” so that the verse states, homiletically, that “God has created the world because of the Torah and because of Israel;” in other words, God’s ultimate purpose in creation was for Israel to receive the Torah.

And here is a Masorti commentary...on what Rashi notes the Torah does not focus on...
http://www.byfi.org/news/?q=node/73
Quote:

Here we have an 11th century Rabbi clearly telling us NOT to look in the Torah for a precise, scientific, blow-by-blow description of the creation of the universe - "the Biblical text teaches us absolutely nothing of the order of what was created before what". The Torah, according to Rashi, is NOT a scientific text but, rather, is silent, has gaps, about some very basic elements of the creation story. One can not learn from it the details of the creation of the universe.

and another very nice one on the nature of humankind...which I think also relates to the purpose of the Torah for Jews...or, you could say, the original purpose of the Torah, which Jews

http://www.ou.org/torah/ti/5766/bere****66.htm
Quote:

At the moment of his creation, the human being is reminded of his mortality, but simultaneously he is assured that he will live again (techiyat ha’meitim). Because he is endowed, at the moment of creation, with free will, a person is capable of sin, and so Hashem graciously affords him the opportunity for forgiveness and redemption.

The human being is compounded from the dust and imbued with “breath” from G-d. Unlike every other created entity, he straddles two realms. The human being is a merging of the earthly and the Divine, the animal and the angelic, the base and the ideal, giving him the potential either to sink or to soar.

It is crucial to humanity’s fulfilling its potential that it knows what kind of potential it possesses. As Rabbi Akiva teaches in Pirkei Avot (3:18): Beloved is Man, for he was created in the Image (of G-d). It is by an additional love that he was informed that he was created in the Image (of G-d).


Man’s uniqueness stems from his having been created in the Image of G-d, but the fact that humanity has been granted access to an “Image-of-G-d-awareness” is an extra measure of human uniqueness. Does every person know this fundamental Torah concept? If not, then it is the duty of the Jewish people, who have been given the Torah, to teach and to exemplify it.

l'shalom (toward peace...)
7L

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