Faith Talkļ¼ When Your Family DOESN'T Get Along
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
130.52354
Summary
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
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So our faith talk for today is going to be around the Torah portion, which is called
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This is the last Parshat of Bereshit, of Genesis.
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I love all of the stories because the characters and the people in the Bible are just so real.
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They are all real human beings who make real mistakes, who deal with real tragedies and
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They're not supposed to be people that we look up to and say like, well, they were perfect
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We're supposed to look up to our ancestors, to the people who created our faith, who were
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there at the beginning and everything, to see how we can learn from them and grow.
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So in this Parshat, in this Torah portion, Jacob is dying and he calls Joseph to him and he has
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him bring Manasseh and Ephraim, Manasseh and Ephraim in Hebrew, and he gives them a blessing.
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But if you remember, he crosses his hands or at least puts his right hand on the younger
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sibling and his left hand on the older sibling.
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So he gives the firstborn blessing to the younger sibling, which is a repeat of what happened
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with him, where Isaac gave the younger brother, Jacob, the firstborn blessing.
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And after that happens, he kind of gives the 12 tribes their stories of like what's going
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to happen to them and what they hold, what their futures hold.
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Um, so following that, Jacob dies, he's brought to Israel to be buried and to Canaan at the
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And the, uh, brothers come to Joseph and they say, please forgive us for what we did.
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If you remember, the brother sold Joseph basically into slavery and then he ended up rising the
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Uh, and that's the end of the first book of the Torah.
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What's so interesting about the Torah and Genesis is the sibling, the sibling rivalries, the marriages,
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the relationships with the children and between them.
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We've got Jacob and, um, and then his story with Rachel and Leah, right?
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That's the, the marriages that he has to deal with.
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Like we, we have, or rather it's Esau and Jacob, excuse me from before.
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But what's so interesting about it is that so much of the story of the Torah shows family
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strife and that it's simply built into the structure of the world.
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The way that these families, even from the very beginning are built, are built to have
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And uncle relationships don't work out well either.
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There's quite a bit of struggle that's built into and baked into the Torah.
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And as people who are traditional and who look to marriage as such an important part of our lives,
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we might think when things are stressful between spouses or when things are stressful within families,
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you know, parent to child, that we're doing something wrong or that we're failing
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or that this isn't a godly, a godly way of approaching our, our families.
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But if you look to the Torah, you'll see that that's not the case.
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If you're struggling with that, it doesn't make you a worse Christian or a worse Jew.
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It just means you are going through the same things our forefathers did.
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And luckily you have a blueprint for kind of how to do it or what not to do.
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Now, of course, in some ways they are more, but they're also just humans.
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And yet we learn from them and look up to them because they did amazing things
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despite also going through trials and tribulations and making mistakes.
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It's important for us to know that God understands your familial struggles
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because he created the world in this way from the very beginning.
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But even from the very beginning, that wasn't, that wasn't the way things were built.
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People don't always make the choices we would hope they would.
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And that is part of being alive, is navigating these relationships that are so absolutely important.
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It doesn't make you a bad person to have those struggles in your life.
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It just makes you part of the way that God created the world.
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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.
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Like, I mean it in the sense of you are not alone because God built this in, like, he baked it into our world.
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But it's also up to us to understand that it's okay when we're going through it.