ר"ע תיתד תונויצל ינויערה גוחה ,םולשו זוע
"And he sent forth the dove... but the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot...": Yehuda Bar Nahman said in the name of Rabbi Shimon: Had she found a resting place, she would not have returned. Similarly we find (Lamentations 1) "She dwells among the nations, she finds no rest." Had she found rest, they would not have returned.
The dog that guarded Abel's flock was guarding his body against the wild animals and birds, and Adam and his wife were sitting weeping and mourning him, at a loss as to what to do, since burial was unknown. A raven whose fellow died said: I will teach this man what to do. What did he do? He took the dead bird, dug in the earth, put the carcass in the hole, and buried it in front of them. Adam said: I will do the same as this raven, and he took Abel's body, dug in the earth, and buried it. And God paid the ravens a good reward in this world. What good reward did he give them? They bear their young, and see that they are white, and they flee from them, believing them to be the young of a snake. And God brings them gnats, and gives them their food, as it says: "Who will prepare provisions for the raven?." Not only that, but they cry for rain upon the land, and God heeds them, and sends rain upon the land, as it says: "He gives the beast its food, to the young ravens when they cry."
(Pirkei Derabbi Eliezer Chapter 21)
"But flesh with its life, which is blood, you shall not eat. And surely your blood of your lives will I require. At the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man." (Genesis 9: 4-6)
When the Torah was given, the children of Israel were enjoined to keep 613 commandments. The rest of mankind, on the other hand, was given seven commandments, known as the "commandments of the sons of Noah." This is how Maimonides puts it (Laws of Kings 9:1):
"Adam was commanded concerning six things: idolatry, blessing the name, bloodshed, incest and adultery, theft, laws... For Noah, [the prohibition against eating] a limb from a living animal was added, as it says, "But flesh with its life, which is blood, you shall not eat."
Of the seven commandments of the sons of Noah, we will deal here with the three that appear in the blessing God gave Noah and his sons after they left the ark and sacrificed to God: the limb of a living animal, bloodshed, and laws.
The Torah states "But flesh with its life, which is blood, you shall not eat," (Genesis 9:4). God gave permission to eat meat, but he set a limit: "the limb of living animal", which is to say that one may not pull meat off an animal before it has been killed completely. Abarbanel explains: The world had been destroyed, there was nothing to eat, there was no agriculture. Because of economic distress, permission was granted to eat meat, but man's cruelty had to be restrained, therefore he was forbidden to eat the limb of a living animal.
Emphasizing the difference between man and animal, the Torah goes on to set in detail the prohibition against bloodshed: "And at the hand of man; at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man," (Genesis 9:5). God himself will punish a person who murders someone. The double expression "at the hand of man; at the hand of every man's brother" is to be understood to mean simply: "Everyone's brother.. his brother by virtue of being a man.," (Rabbi David Tzvi Hoffman), "Because whoever kills another actually kills his brother - a person like himself," (Da'at Mikra).
The prohibition against killing another person is one of the strictest, but one should not understand from this that it is absolute: there are instances in which it is permissible to kill, and this is how Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Berlin (the Netziv) of Volozhin interprets our verse: "At the hand of every man's brother: God expounded the prohibition by saying, when is a person punished? When it is appropriate to behave fraternally. This is not the case in wartime.. because that is how the world was made." The Torah recognizes the fact that wars occur, and in time of war, different laws apply.
The Torah continues: "Whoso sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man." (Ibid. 6). Onkelos translates: Whoever sheds man's blood, his blood will be shed by order of the judges, relying on witnesses. If there are witnesses, or other acceptable evidence, society must punish the murderer in court. One of the commandments imposed on all mankind is to set up a fair system of justice. This commandment is called "laws" in the list of the seven commandments of the sons of Noah which we quoted above from the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides.
The verse goes on to explain; "For in the image of God made he man," (ibid.) We already knew that man was created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27; 5:1), but now the practical significance of this fact is explained to us, together with the various duties it imposes on us.
But to whom does the verse refer when it says that man was created in God's image? The word "man" is used to mean three different people:
1. The victim is called man: "Whoso sheds man's blood."We must therefore interpret "in the image of God made he man" as referring to all three.
1. The strict prohibition against murdering any person stems from the fact that all human beings are created in God's image.It is just as important to note what the verse does not say as what it does. It says "Whoso sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed": the murderer is to be punished; but not his family, his friends, or anyone else connected to him. There is no place for blood vengeance, whereby the victim's family kills a member of the murderer's family, and there is no place for collective punishments. The verse "..and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth" (Genesis 1:28) should be treated in the same way. Man should rule over the animals, but not over other human beings.
When Noah and his family leave the ark, they found a ruined world and a desolate environment. They have the task of rebuilding a society, an enlightened society, and God blesses them with "be fruitful and multiply," and gives them the basic, universal commandments that make it possible to deal with the main problem of every human society: that of violence.
You should know that every story you find mentioned in the Torah has some vital purpose in the Torah, whether to validate an opinion that is one of the very foundations of the Torah, or to mend some behavioral trait act so that there shall be no wrongdoing or aggression between human beings… It is a fundamental principle of the Torah that the world was a new creation, and that at first a single human individual was created , namely Adam, and that the time which elapsed from Adam until Moses our Teacher was approximately two thousand five hundred years. If this had been the only information given to them, people would have quickly become doubtful, seeing that human beings were scattered all over the entire world, and different peoples and very dissimilar languages were to be found. These doubts were eliminated by giving the genealogy of all peoples and way they branched off from one another, and mentioning the names of famous individuals, so and so, the son of so and so, and their lifespan, and informing of the place where they lived, and the reason why their languages became differentiated and they were scattered to the ends of the earth, and that they started out in one place and with a single language, which was necessarily the case, since they were all descended from one man. (The Guide of the Perplexed III:50)
"Who love their fellow men" How does this apply? It teaches us that people should love their fellow human beings and not hate them, as we find in the case of the generation of the Tower of Babel, that because they loved one another, God did not want to destroy them, but he scattered them to the four winds, but the people of Sodom, since they hated one another, God made them perish both from this world and the world to come, as it says (Genesis 13): "And the people of Sodom were evil and exceedingly sinful before the Lord". "And sinful" - this means incest and adultery; "before the Lord - this means desecration of God's name; "exceedingly" - means they sinned maliciously. The lesson is that God made them perish in this world and in the world to come. (Avot Derabbi Natan Chapter 11 Mishna 12)
…It seems to me that this decree (of the scattering of the generation of the Tower of Babel) was not a punishment, but actually a great remedial measure for the benefit of mankind. The main significance of the Tower of Babel episode does not lie at all in the attempt to build the tower, but in what is said before that: that "the whole earth" - the renewed human race after the flood - "was of one language and of one speech." After the failure of the construction, different languages arose, and hence different speech. It seems to me that the basic error, or sin, of the generation of the Tower of Babel, does not lie in the building of the city and the tower, but in the aim of maintaining by these artificial means the state of "one language and one speech" - of centralization, which in modern terminology we call totalitarianism. (From "Notes on the Weekly Reading" by the late Professor Yeshayahu Leibovich, pp. 14-15)
The book "Religious Zionism: A New Perspective" edited by Meir Rot has appeared, published by "Ne'emanei Torah V'Avoda"
The book is an anthology of articles that have been published in this broadsheet, and it is divided into ten sections: religious Zionism; education; interpretation and criticism; the authority of the Rabbis; religion and state; Judaism and morality; the status of women; religion and science; and books and people.
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