{"id":3113,"date":"2019-02-27T02:49:06","date_gmt":"2019-02-27T02:49:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcmangel.net\/?page_id=3113"},"modified":"2019-02-27T02:49:06","modified_gmt":"2019-02-27T02:49:06","slug":"ki-tissa-5779","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/?page_id=3113","title":{"rendered":"Ki Tissa (5779)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Drash Cards for Ki Tissa (5779)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Marc Mangel<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 I saw the movie The 10 Commandments<\/em> when I was about 8\nyears old with my family and remember two things about it clearly. First, it\nwas a matinee, but a long movie, so we went in when it was light out but left\nthe theater when it was dark. That was cool. Second, the scene in which God\npasses by Moses, who is hidden in the cleft of the rock (Ch 33, v 22,23) was  also something very cool \u2013 thank you Cecille\nB. deMille.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 I decided that nearly 60\nyears later, it is time to make more sense of the verses about this and for\ntoday\u2019s drash settled on v 22: \u201cYou will see my back, but face will not be\nvisible\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Robert Alter writes\n\u201cVolumes of theology have been spun out of these enigmatic words\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 No volumes here but\nhere\u2019s one comment from Chatam Sofer:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            \u201cYou will see my back\u201d: Only long after an event has\ntaken place do we understand some of God\u2019s hand in the evidence. Only in the\nend do we have a chance of understanding the purpose of any act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            \u201cBut my face will not be visible\u201d: At the time an event\noccurs, we cannot know the reason for God\u2019s actions.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 If for Moses, only a\nglimpse of the Divine is possible, what should we expect?  That we can drive ourselves crazy trying to\nunderstand why something is happening and still never figure it out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 I think that there is a\ncorollary here: before we try something we cannot know whether it will work or\nnot.  Indeed, history shows that the\ngroup of people who are most consistently wrong are those who say \u201cit cannot be\ndone\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 This is where I could\nmention the wood-cutter Israel ben Eliezer who had\nan idea about making Judaism accessible to everyone \u2013 not just those with great\nTorah and Talmud knowledge.  People said\n\u201cimpossible\u201d.  We more commonly call him\nthe Baal Shem Tov and affected every branch of Judasim<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Or I could mention a 40ish year old  Menachem\nMendel Schneerson who met a young woman on the subway station and borrowed\nIsaac Asimov\u2019s Foundation Trilogy<\/em>\nfrom here [explain briefly about the book]. When he returned the book to her,\nhe said something like \u201cI am going to be that man [Hari Seldon]\u201d by which he\nmeant sending young rabbis and their wives throughtou the world to remote\nplaces, sometimes with few Jews, to increase Jewish knowledge, understanding\nand observance. One of those young rabbis will be right here at KT on March 4\n(today\u2019s commercial). We now call him the Lubavitcher Rebbe (or sometimes, just\nthe Rebbe).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 But the Torah applies to\nall of us, not just rabbis, so instead, I will mention Sidney Farber.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Born 1903 in Buffalo to a Jewish family of 14 children<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Went to SUNY Buffalo. \nCould not go to med school in the US because of quotas on Jews, so spent\na year at the medical schools in Heidelberg and Freiberg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Did so well there that he entered Harvard as a second\nyear student graduating in 1927<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Joined Harvard med school as instructor in Pathology at\nHarvard Medical School. Rose through the ranks becoming Professor of Pathology\nand Chair of the Staff at Children\u2019s Hospital \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            In 1947, he came up with the idea that chemicals (in this\nfirst instance folic acid) could be used to treat and possibly cure  cancers (in this case childhood acute\nlymphoblastic leukemia).  People scoffed\nat him saying that there was no future in using chemicals to treat cancer.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Today Sidney Farber is known as the father of\nchemotherapy for cancer.  He is\nimmortalized at SUNY Buffalo in Farber Hall and in the famous Dana-Farber\nCancer Institute in Boston.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Did Sidney Farber know\nabout today\u2019s verse and its corollary? I do not know.  But we should be very thankful that he\nrefused to believe that something could not be done just people other people\nsaid so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 And I will end with\nanother scientist, Richard Feynman who became a bit of a cult figure during the\nChallenger <\/em>hearings (tell the story\nof the o-ring). According to his sister Joan, Feynman once said \u201cYou shouldn\u2019t\nnot do something just because everyone says its impossible\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Drash Cards for Ki Tissa (5779) by Marc Mangel \u2022 I saw the movie The 10 Commandments when I was about 8 years old with my family and remember two things about it clearly. First, it was a matinee, but a long movie, so we went in when it was light out but left the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":51,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"full-width-page.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-3113","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3113"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3114,"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3113\/revisions\/3114"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/51"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}