Classically Abby - January 12, 2023


Faith Talk： When Your Family DOESN'T Get Along

Topics
family strife in the Torah
Hosted by
Abby Shapiro
Mentioned
Torah Jacob Joseph Isaac Ephraim Abraham Ishmael Canaan Rachel Bilhah
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Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

130.52

Word count

959

Sentence count

68

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we look at the Torah portion "He Lived" from the Book of Genesis. We see family strife, sibling rivalries, marriages, and the relationships between them. These are all built into the structure of the Torah, and are a part of the world we live in.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So our faith talk for today is going to be around the Torah portion, which is called
00:00:06.400 in English, He Lived.
00:00:07.960 In Hebrew, it's Parshat Vayechi.
00:00:11.380 This is the last Parshat of Bereshit, of Genesis. 0.99
00:00:16.520 And I personally love Genesis.
00:00:18.820 I love our forefathers.
00:00:20.500 I love Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.
00:00:22.720 I love our foremothers.
00:00:23.760 I love all of the stories because the characters and the people in the Bible are just so real.
00:00:33.640 Nobody's perfect.
00:00:34.800 They are all real human beings who make real mistakes, who deal with real tragedies and
00:00:40.240 real struggles, just like we do.
00:00:43.040 And they're there for us to learn lessons.
00:00:46.400 They're not supposed to be people that we look up to and say like, well, they were perfect
00:00:50.140 and I'll never reach that.
00:00:51.360 We're supposed to look up to our ancestors, to the people who created our faith, who were
00:00:57.720 there at the beginning and everything, to see how we can learn from them and grow.
00:01:05.900 So in this Parshat, in this Torah portion, Jacob is dying and he calls Joseph to him and he has
00:01:14.900 him bring Manasseh and Ephraim, Manasseh and Ephraim in Hebrew, and he gives them a blessing.
00:01:23.320 But if you remember, he crosses his hands or at least puts his right hand on the younger
00:01:30.680 sibling and his left hand on the older sibling.
00:01:33.040 So he gives the firstborn blessing to the younger sibling, which is a repeat of what happened 0.88
00:01:40.200 with him, where Isaac gave the younger brother, Jacob, the firstborn blessing.
00:01:49.080 And after that happens, he kind of gives the 12 tribes their stories of like what's going
00:02:01.500 to happen to them and what they hold, what their futures hold.
00:02:07.380 Um, so following that, Jacob dies, he's brought to Israel to be buried and to Canaan at the 0.85
00:02:16.680 time.
00:02:18.040 And the, uh, brothers come to Joseph and they say, please forgive us for what we did.
00:02:24.540 Please don't hold it against us.
00:02:25.880 If you remember, the brother sold Joseph basically into slavery and then he ended up rising the
00:02:31.040 ranks in Egypt.
00:02:31.960 And Joseph says, of course, I'll forgive you.
00:02:34.160 And then Joseph himself dies.
00:02:37.040 Uh, and that's the end of the first book of the Torah.
00:02:42.580 What's so interesting about the Torah and Genesis is the sibling, the sibling rivalries, the marriages,
00:02:51.700 the relationships with the children and between them.
00:02:54.440 Um, we see so much family strife, right?
00:02:58.860 We've got Esau and, and Isaac.
00:03:03.320 We've got Jacob and, um, and then his story with Rachel and Leah, right?
00:03:10.760 That's the, the marriages that he has to deal with.
00:03:13.480 And then Bilhah and Zilpah as well.
00:03:15.400 They're, they're handmaids. 1.00
00:03:17.080 We have, you know, Ishmael and Isaac.
00:03:21.920 Like we, we have, or rather it's Esau and Jacob, excuse me from before.
00:03:29.020 But what's so interesting about it is that so much of the story of the Torah shows family
00:03:36.360 strife and that it's simply built into the structure of the world.
00:03:42.280 The way that these families, even from the very beginning are built, are built to have
00:03:50.400 these, these family struggles.
00:03:55.380 Siblings are, are not getting along.
00:03:59.440 Younger children get firstborn rights. 0.97
00:04:02.440 Uh, marriages are not going smoothly.
00:04:05.420 And uncle relationships don't work out well either.
00:04:11.600 There's quite a bit of struggle that's built into and baked into the Torah.
00:04:18.780 And as people who are traditional and who look to marriage as such an important part of our lives,
00:04:24.540 we might think when things are stressful between spouses or when things are stressful within families,
00:04:32.760 you know, parent to child, that we're doing something wrong or that we're failing
00:04:40.520 or that this isn't a godly, a godly way of approaching our, our families.
00:04:48.380 But if you look to the Torah, you'll see that that's not the case.
00:04:57.420 If you're struggling with that, it doesn't make you a worse Christian or a worse Jew.
00:05:03.040 It just means you are going through the same things our forefathers did.
00:05:07.380 And you also have to navigate it.
00:05:09.660 And luckily you have a blueprint for kind of how to do it or what not to do.
00:05:16.040 The people in the Torah are just that.
00:05:17.820 They're just people.
00:05:20.220 They aren't any more than we are or any less.
00:05:23.600 Now, of course, in some ways they are more, but they're also just humans.
00:05:29.260 And yet we learn from them and look up to them because they did amazing things
00:05:32.780 despite also going through trials and tribulations and making mistakes.
00:05:37.780 It's important for us to know that God understands your familial struggles
00:05:42.620 because he created the world in this way from the very beginning.
00:05:47.820 Families are not supposed to be perfect.
00:05:51.740 We can strive for goodness.
00:05:54.860 We can strive for perfection.
00:05:57.720 And I put that in quotes.
00:05:59.500 But even from the very beginning, that wasn't, that wasn't the way things were built.
00:06:03.420 People don't always get along.
00:06:08.000 People don't always make the choices we would hope they would.
00:06:12.640 And that is part of being alive, is navigating these relationships that are so absolutely important.
00:06:21.440 But it doesn't make it worse.
00:06:25.420 It doesn't make you a bad person to have those struggles in your life.
00:06:32.000 It just makes you part of the way that God created the world.
00:06:40.160 So you're not alone.
00:06:42.820 And I don't even mean from the sense of you're not alone because there are other people you know who are going through it.
00:06:47.460 Like, I mean it in the sense of you are not alone because God built this in, like, he baked it into our world.
00:06:55.300 He baked it into the way things work.
00:06:59.220 So it's up to us to work through that.
00:07:01.740 But it's also up to us to understand that it's okay when we're going through it.
00:07:05.320 Thank you.