Because I ask Klara so many questions about macrobiotics, she suggested I subscribe to the Macrobiotic Guide. Here’s how they answered a question of mine:
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Q: Why is it so important to add sea vegetables to one’s diet? Leora
A: Sea vegetables are nutrient-rich, unlike any other food I have discovered. They provide essential vitamins and minerals I cannot find in other foods I choose to incorporate into my diet. I think of them as the nerve center for my body. Without them, I feel lacking. I can fill my belly with volumes of food but without incorporating sea vegetables into my diet, my hunger will continue unabated until I provide it with those essential nutrients found in sea vegetables. (That is the purpose of “hunger.” It is the natural impulse that drives us; when rightly understood, it guides us toward the right foods, in the right quantity, at the right time.)
Without sea vegetables, I grope for foods that fill but do not satisfy. Organic foods are wonderful and vitally important – for many reasons – but even organic foods might be grown in deficient soil, yielding deficient plants.
Denudation is the natural process where minerals are carried off by wind and water from land into the sea. As a result, over millions of years of this geological process, we find a rich depository of nutrients in our oceans. For this reason, sea vegetables have become nutrient-rich unlike all other foods.
This is how sea vegetables affect me personally. This is not to say people cannot live well without them. Historically, traditional diets around the globe have provided healthful foods without the incorporation of sea vegetables. But looking around me today, traditional diets have all but vanished, and soil quality has become impoverished through poor soil/farming practices, making sea vegetables all the more important. There are medicinal values to them as well. Jeffrey Reel
A drawing by my daughter: What do you see? This week’s edition of “What do you see?” is brought to you by my daughter. My daughter’s hint is that there is a mitzvah (a good deed) going on in this illustration. So, what do you see? Who is helping whom?
A note from Jill, her art teacher: “My art professor suggested coloring books are the worst thing for a child, because they feel they can’t live up to the pre-made/adult created outline. That they come up with such interesting and wonderful things when given ‘permission’ to explore. ”
Girl with Tulip, watercolor on paper, 2009
I worked on this last week and the week before. I worked on another one in between my study of a girl with tulip and this one. This one came out brighter and less muddy. There are still pieces about it that bother me, but I’ll keep my mouth shut. Click to enlarge.
Leaving Egypt, drawing by my son, won Honorable Mention in 2006 Passover Art ContestThis week the parsha is no longer features the family stories of Abraham, Yitzchak, Yaakov and Yosef. The tone of the text changes, and the focus is on a group of people in slavery, leaving Egypt and nation-building.
Robert Alter writes in his Translation with Commentary: The Five Books of Moses:
As the long historical narrative of the Five Books of Moses moves from the patriarchs to the Hebrew nation in Egypt, it switches gears. The narrative conventions deployed, from type-scenes and thematic keywords to the treatment of dialogue, remain the same, but the angle from which events are seen and the handling of the characters are notably different. Genesis ended with death, and the distinctly Egyptian mummification, of Joseph. Exodus begins with a listing of the sons of Jacob who came down to Egypt, thus establishing a formal link with the concluding chapters of Genesis in which a more detailed list of the emigrants from Canaan is provided…Instead of the sharply etched individuals who constituted a family in all its explosive dynamics in Genesis, we now have teeming multitudes of Israelites whose spectacular prolificness introduces to the story the perspective of the whole wide world of creation announced at the beginning of Genesis: “And the sons of Israel were fruitful and swarmed and multiplied and grew very vast, and the land [הָאָרֶץ same word as in Genesis] was filled with them” (Exodus 1:7).
Nahum Sarna in Exploring Exodus explains the title:
It is called in English “Exodus,” a title derived originally from the Septuagint, the Greek translation made for the Jewish community of ancient Alexandria in Egypt. It is abbreviated from a fuller title “The Exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt,” which in turn reflects a Hebrew title current among the communities of the Land of Israel. The most widely used Hebrew name is Sefer Sh’mot (“The Book: Names”), taken from the opening Hebrew words of the book, “These are the names of the sons of Israel.”
Here’s how Sarna connects Exodus to its predecessor Genesis:
The narratives in Genesis focus upon individuals and the fortunes of a single family; they center upon the divine promises of peoplehood and national territory that are vouchsafed to them. In the Book of Exodus, the process of fulfilling those promises is set in motion…God’s commissioning of Moses at the scene of the Burning Bush directs him: “Go and assemble the elders of Israel and say to them: the Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, has appeared to me and said “I have taken note of you [Heb. paqod paqad’ti] and of what is being done to you in Egypt…'” This is a studied echo of Joseph’s dying words “God will surely take notice of you [Heb. paqod yiphqod] and bring you up from this land to the land which He promised on oath to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.”
In the previous parshiot, the ones of Breishit, we got to know the characters well. In Shmot, we still can learn from the people presented in the parsha, such as the daughter of Pharoah, but I feel more distance. Perhaps we can see the upcoming parshiot as a bridge from character portrayal to nation-building and the giving of the Torah in the middle of the Book of Shmot.
Do you find transitions hard? How do you see the change from the Book of Breishit (Genesis) to the Book of Shmot (Exodus)?
And there passed by Midianites, merchantmen; and they drew and lifted up Joseph out of the pit, and sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites for twenty shekels of silver. And they brought Joseph into Egypt.
The straightforward answer, as Rashi sees it, is that the brothers took Joseph out of the pit and sold him to the Ishmaelites and the Ishmaelites to the Midianites and the Midianites to the Egyptians.
I learned from my son, however, (it’s so wonderful when you can learn from your kids) that Rashbam (who is the grandson of Rashi; can you imagine challenging your own scholarly grandfather?) sees this differently. He suggests that the “they” who do the selling are the Midianites: “The brothers sat down to a meal at some distance from the pit, out of qualms of conscience and waited for the Ishmaelites they had seen. But before the latter arrived, others, Midianite traders passed, saw Joseph in the pit and drew him out and sold him to the Ishmaelites, presumably without the knowledge of the brothers.”
This helps explains Genesis 39:1, where Potiphar buys Joseph from the Ishmaelites. Other commentators complain that Rashi does not adequately explain this pasuk (how do the Midianites fit in? Who sold him to Egypt, Midianites or Ishmaelites?). But if the Midianites take Joseph without the brothers knowing and sells him to the Ishmaelites, then this pasuk makes sense.
Much more on this topic in Nehama Leibowitz’s New Studies in Breishit.
A much simpler question is why does the text in beginning of Miketz say “brothers of Joseph”? Rashi’s explanation is that they went down to Egypt to look for him, that he was very much on their minds (daughter of Mrs. S. said it was out of love for their brother). But if one follows Rashbam’s explanation, that the Midianites sold him and the brothers thought him dead, why does it say “brothers of Joseph”? (I don’t know).
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While we are discussing Joseph, I just want to remark on what Rabbi Levi Meier, z”l, calls “Joseph’s astonishing ability to forgive his brothers.” In his book Ancient Secrets: Using the Stories of the Bible to Improve Our Everyday Lives, Rabbi Meier talks about Fate vs. Destiny: you can have reasons to hold a grudge, you can have a terrible start in life, and you can either sulk and not move forward or you can use it as a way to learn and grow:
Joseph’s forgiving is hard to achieve, especially when you have been terribly wronged by another person. In the case of Joseph, his life could have been ruined by the actions of his brothers. However, it was not, because he did not allow that to happen… Nursing your hurt feelings, your anger, and your bitterness will not bring you to happiness. It will only make you a slave to your fate, and you may never come to know that you could have freed yourself—that you could have been the master of your destiny.
My daughter gave me a book of her drawings as a Chanukah present. I am supposed to write in the story myself.
Can you help me? Is this a queen or a princess? Who are those folks in yellow? Is that a cake in the middle? A castle? A cake of a castle? Oh, maybe it’s a chanukiah (a menorah)! And maybe some of you are better than me at understanding kids’ drawings.
Thanks and enjoy whatever holidays you are celebrating this week.
Last year: 
A much simpler question is why does the text in beginning of Miketz say “brothers of Joseph”? Rashi’s explanation is that they went down to Egypt to look for him, that he was very much on their minds (daughter of Mrs. S. said it was out of love for their brother). But if one follows Rashbam’s explanation, that the Midianites sold him and the brothers thought him dead, why does it say “brothers of Joseph”? (I don’t know).
Rabbi Meier talks about Fate vs. Destiny: you can have reasons to hold a grudge, you can have a terrible start in life, and you can either sulk and not move forward or you can use it as a way to learn and grow: