Studying Breshit – who is obligated to have children?

This coming Tuesday night we of course complete the Torah and begin the Torah again, and on Shabbat we read Parshat Breshit.  As they say in show business, everything old is new again.  What show did that first appear in?  Does anybody know?

Studying Breshit is at the same time easy and challenging.  Plenty of good provocative material, but what can one say that hasn’t already been said?  Inspired by Beth Sirull’s mention of making a list of reading material in preparing for a drash, here’s what I’m reading as I study Breshit.

• Martin Buber — On the Bible (in translation of course). In particular his chpater on The Tree of Knowledge
• Asher Ben-Zion Buchman — Bedibur Echod: Thoughts on the unity of the weekly sidrah by
• Bill Moyers — Genesis: A Living Conversation
• Elliot Dorff — Knowing God:Jewish Journeys to the Unknowable (just the section on Creation pp. 61-66)

Of course I always check Sefer HaHinuch (The Book of Education) for mitzvot in the parshah. Always a good place to start; there is one mitzvah in Parshat Breshit; to “be fruitful and multiply”.  Right off the bat we are confronted with distinctions between men and women.  According to the author, quoting a R. Meir of Dvinsk “It is not unlikely that the Torah freed the woman from the religious obligation to “be fruitful and multiply” and imposed it only on the man, because… the woman endangers her life in pregnancy and childbirth [and hence it could not be made her religious duty]”  On the other hand, he says “But only for the preservation of the species did HaShem so form her nature that her yearning to have children is stronger than the man’s.

Here’s a good opportunity to wrestle with the Torah and with the tradition that interprets it.  IF we were to say that childbirth is no longer dangerous (true in many countries of the “developed world”), THEN we could say that there is no reason to exempt women from this obligation.  Of course, we could always go with the undeniable fact that it is women who bear the major role of pregnancy, childbirth, and even to this day, child-raising.  So how could this mitzvah not apply equally to both men and women?

Getting Ready for Israel

I had been blogging about my preparations for the Israel bike ride on a separate blog, but I’ve consolidated the two sites into this one.  You can read what I’ve been doing so far on cyclingforgoodness.

As of now I’ve raised almost $1900.  So I’ve got about $1700 to go in order to make the $3600 fund-raising minimum. Equally important, I’m in the final push of training before we leave Tuesday night November 4. Thanks to my friend David Sherman, I’ve got a bicycle trainer in the family room.  Except for hill work, the trainer is great, because there is no coasting and no forward motion.  I don’t know what the conversion rate would be, but a solid hour on the trainer has got to be equal to a couple hours of riding out on the street.  Last night I did a solid hour after Shabbes, and I hope to exceed that this afternoon.

I’ll be blogging about our trip and the ride everywhere in Israel where I can get Internet access.  The ride ends in Eilat, and the next day they have added a trip to Petra, so we’re really excited about that as well.  Carol in particular, with her love of archeology, has been wanting to go to Petra for the longest time.

Want to donate to the ride?  Go here