One of my favorite novels is Chayim Potok's, The Chosen. I am not going to give you the whole story, but the story, briefly, centers around an orthodox Jewish boy, and a Chassidic Jewish boy. The Chassidic boy's father has not spoken to him in years. That is a metaphor for the perceived silence that we, as Jews, describe as the end of the days of the prophets.

It is a great book, and if you want the video "Cliff's Notes" version, you can always rent the movie and spend an hour and a half with it.

The other boy in the story, the orthodox boy, Danny, wants to become a psychiatrist, so he begins to study Freud all by himself. Danny is frustrated with Freud’s technical vocabulary until he realizes he has to study Freud just like he studies the Torah and the Talmud, with the equivalent of a commentary at hand. That was an incredibly important thing for me to hear. At the time I was in college, and slowly wending my way, book by book, through the Hebrew Bible for the first time. I was using the Soncino Commentary, which was new back in the 1950's,

If speakers never tell you how personally connected they are to the subject, even when confronted unambiguously about it, that is the mark of someone who is hiding something. So, in the spirit of full disclosure, let me tell you that this sermon is all about why every congregant of Congregation Etz Chayim should own a Jewish Bible, with commentary. We are pushing one version, the New Jewish Study Bible. And the congregation does make a coupla bucks per book. Not much, but that way we don't lose anything but the volunteer time of putting this together, and if we sell enough, we will put some of these Bibles in our Library, and possibly replace those fifteen Torah books that have disappeared from our Torah cart. Now, if you chose to buy your book on-line from companies that do not pay sales tax to help fund our county, or any county, and who undercut our local book-sellers and drive them out of business, go ahead. A buck is a buck, and a book is a book. Better to have a Bible and use it, than not.

So, Danny, the Orthodox Freud student, needed commentaries to understand Freud. Because, even though a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, sometimes, says Freud, it stands for something we would not want to put a match to, unless, of course, the match is not just a match.

Does this sound confusing? Of course. Which is why, in order to understand how words mean, and what their contexts are, and what practices and beliefs flow from them, we need to read what others say, and how they evaluate, what has been written in the Sacred Text of Siggy, or of Moses.

And commentary changes over time. If you only read what Jung or Adler wrote about Freud, you would be reading commentary that is a century old. Much science has happened since then. Reading old commentaries have value, but reading modern ones have more immediate practical value, for they show where all the errors have been made in the past, and they apply the latest science and technology, as well as the latest philosophical nuances and discoveries, to the issues.

Hence that is why we are touting the New Jewish Study Bible. It has modern commentaries and introductions, as well as charts and tables and essays and a wonderful index to help us all along. I hope the comments I read to you out of it indicated how useful its insights might be, and how in tune with many of your questions it is.

I owned several Bibles before this book came out, but I made sure to get this one, too, because of its terse, modern commentary. I can always learn more about my people's saga. I learned some new things just preparing to read its comments to you last night and this morning. For example, I have known for some time that Avraham lived to the ripe old literary age of 175, but I learned that his life breaks neatly into three segments: 75 years before he travels to Cana'an, and 75 years after Isaac is born. And the middle 25 years, his wandering with G0d before Isaac, take up most of his story in Genesis. That is a typical example of Biblical parallelism. I should have figured it out myself. I didn't, and I learned from this new commentary.

How much have you learned about our people's saga? We all have a good American acquaintance with Greek and Roman Mythology, and Christian symbolism in our head. So, to be fair to ourselves, we also need modern Jewish interpretations of our own saga.

An aside: you may have noticed that I call the Bible our SAGA. That is, it is the lessons we have learned by doing—doing well and doing poorly—that arose during the thousand years between the days of Abraham, and the restoration of the Judean State in the days of the Persian Empire . Those were the formative years of our people, when kings, prophets, priests, and the people they led and misled learned what ethical monotheism meant. One of the things we had to learn was how big G0d is. You may think that monotheism came full-blown into Abraham's head, but, in fact, all that wandering around, from Abraham's homeland in Babylon, to Cana'an, to Egypt, and back, and then into exile in Assyria and Babylon, and finally back, led us to understand what it really means that the wh0le of the w0rld is the w0rk of 0ne G0d. Modern scholars try to demonstrate, by identifying when each level of the text was written and where, how that concept grew.

Modern scholars also rely on the excavated writings of our people and those of others in the Middle East, whose languages were very close to ours, and whose laws, customs, and beliefs, in many ways, were also close to ours, but in so many were very different.

Knowing the historical accuracy of the Bible's saga is critical in making a modern Jew modern. Otherwise, what most of us live with is a swamp of medieval urban legends about what the text meant.

I want to change gears a little here, and say that every year, active members of our congregation, people well-educated in liberal arts, and in Jewish terminology, who have even been to Israel , ask me a variation of this question. See if you know the answer. Here's the question: Where in the Torah is the Book of Isaiah? Answer: it is not in the Torah. Parts of it are excerpted for use as Haftarot. TheBook of Isaiah as a whole is in the second part of our Bible, the part called the Prophetic Books. We abbreviate that part of the Bible with the letter N, as in Nancy , for the word N'vi'im, which means Prophets. Eliyahu haNavi means Elijah the Prophet. We will sing that song at the end of Yom Kippur, during the Havdalah service. You can see it on page 150. Navi is a prophet, and N'vi'im are prophets, plural. The Book of Samuel, which was this morning's Haftarah, is also in the N'vi'im, the prophets. And the reading from Nehemiah at the beginning of the Torah service is from the third part of the Hebrew Bible, called Scriptures, or K'tuvim, writings. Together, the T for Torah, the N for N'vi'im, and the K for K'tuvim make the acronym TaNaKh, our word for the Bible. Every year we teach this information to the parents in our Kindergarten class, and then again to the parents in our Bar/t Mitzvah family class. Why? So that they can "teach them diligently to their children," if they have children at home, and so that they can be informed Jews for their own sake.

Have you ever gotten past your ability to help your kids with their homework in math and science? I have. Most of the High School math I learned I don't use very often, and so beyond basic algebra I use for getting around in the world, I would not be able to help them without relearning it myself. And with science, well, my science classes are so obsolete now as to render most of what I learned then of no use to them, at least not at the level of technical language and equations they need.

But that did not hit until my kids got to High School. Until then I could help them just fine. Now, maybe you can decode Hebrew letters, and maybe you cannot, but you can read English, and you can find out for yourself what they are learning about the TaNaKh, the Hebrew Bible, and make a point of being an asset in their learning, instead of a bystander.

Now, what if you have a Bible in your house? Do you need another one? Well, it depends. If you have a TaNaKh with commentary, then no, not really. If you do not have a TaNaKh with commentary, then yes, you do. Why? If you only have a Bible with Christian commentary, you do. But if you have a TaNaKh with Jewish commentary, only buy a new one if you want to read new comments from a modern perspective.

But first, to study Freud or the News or the Bible, we need commentary. Without commentary, the text will bewilder you, disappoint you, make you mad, and a whole lot of other things. It will just stand there, starkly uncommented upon, reminding you of yet another thing about Judaism with which you are unfamiliar, or with which you disagree. A modern commentary will inform you as to the historical and contextual meaning of the Bible, and will give you a modern appraisal of which Jews do these things today, in what way, and why, and why not. In short, when you read a Bible without commentary, you are reading it in a vacuum, alone, with your worst nightmares. When you read it with a commentary that has been written for someone like you in mind, you are reading it with a friend you can trust, who will make you feel less like an ignorant sinner and more like an interested, and self-educating adult.

Now, if you already have a Christian Bible, even with a modern commentary, do you need The Jewish Study Bible? Let's face it: most of us who took Western Civ course in College were required to buy a Christian Bible. Only at Brandeis University in the US is a Hebrew Bible used. If that is what you have, do you need another one?

Yes, you do, if you want to be as educated a Jew as you are an educated American. If you only have an Old Testament, which is usually attached to a New Testament, then all you have is a Christian story, which comes through in every comment, as well as in the structure of the text itself. As one of my Christian friends admitted, he did not care much for the Old Testament growing up, because it was not relevant to his life. No one he know was doing the things it says to do, and, in any case, Christians had "moved on" from the religion of the Old Testament.

Do not take this as any comment about the worth of Christian scholarship, or of Christianity. It is just that Christians have a different punch line for every set-up in our TaNaKh.

The "Old" Testament and TaNaKh are not the same, not even in name. "Old" Testament implies a Covenant, a Testament, which is no longer in force. The name Old Testament means the Old Deal, which, as we know, has been replaced by the New Deal. Any insurance claims submitted to the Old Deal company are no longer collectible. Only claims submitted to the New Deal company are collectible. That is what "Old Testament" means.

Additionally, the Old Testament is not in Jewish order. That is, the TaNaKh is ordered by the categories I told you about: Torah, Prophets, Writings. The Old Testament mixes those books up, but puts all the Prophets at the end, so that the end of Malachi will lead to the beginning of Matthew. That is, Malachi's promise of sending Elijah on G0d's great and awesome Day is followed by the birth and mikveh of Jesus. What? You did not think of Jesus in a mikveh, a Jewish ritual bath? That is because baptismos is the Greek word used for mikveh. The Old Testament is translated from the Greek version of our Bible, and the Hebrew Bible is translated fromguess which language! And guess how our Bible ends? With II Chronicles, where King Cyrus of Persia calls an end to the Babylonian exile, and says, "Any Jew who wants to go up to Judah and build the Temple , Go Up!" Go up in Hebrew is vaya"al, meaning, "Make Aliyah!" That is a whole different story.

There are more differences, major and minor. Suffice it to say that if you know who Minerva, Poseidon, and Zeus were, and what Achilles and Hektor and Romulus did, you should also be able to say who Isaiah and Hezekiah and Deborah and Ezra were and what they did. That is, if your self-image is one of being an educated, modern, Jew, you should know. At least, know how to look these things up, and be motivated to do so.

Much of this information exists on the Internet. Not all of it does. Most of the commentary on the Internet is orthodox. There is some Liberal commentary, but do you know how to find it? In any case, last time I looked, Jews were still buying books. Buy this one, too. And buy it in hardback. Paperback is for books you don't need to last through many readings.

Being an informed Jew is a matter of knowing how to evaluate the saga being presented to us. Today's Torah portion and Haftarah both dealt with bringing a child into a world full of mistrust and evil, and how hard it is to raise a child committed to dedicating their life towards that which is good, At least, those are some of the reasons these sections were chosen. But they are still very disturbing stories, and you might wonder why our congregation doesn't read something different on these days.

As we move toward redoing our High Holy Day Machzorim, we will entertain notions such as these. But what would you replace these stories with? Where would you get ideas of where to look? You could leave it all up the RABBI, of course. But that would not be the response of adults who have a hand in their own Judaism and in our communal Judaism. If we decide to leave these readings in the Machzor, what commentary would you want to put with it? Where would you look for these answers?

Being an informed Jew, and understanding other informed Jews, is a matter of understanding the symbols and metaphors that were first smelted in the Bible. Understanding them begins with having a commentary you can trust. Don't read Freud by yourself. Don't read the Bible by yourself. Start with a friendly commentary, so you'll know when Isaiah is only smoking a cigar without any Freudian agendas.

Then, if things go well, move on to checking out one of the discussion groups we have. Either Thursdays at noon , with the stories of King David in II Samuel, or Saturday mornings for an hour, from 9-10, with the Torah portion of the week (which is another thing you will not find in an Old Testament: where Jews break up the weekly readings).

Or, if you saw the Adult Education brochure, you'll see that I will be teaching the history of Solomon, Jeremiah, and Esther. What they had in common is that Solomon built the Temple , Jeremiah was both a priest and prophet who saw the Temple destroyed, and Esther's rule, according to some commentators, paved the way for the Temple to be rebuilt. Though Esther's role in that is speculative, the movies I will show you about Solomon, Jeremiah, and Esther will reveal a lot about us as modern Jews, even though we are looking at the sacrificial and monarchic and dynastic past.

I want to leave you with a double quote and a commercial. The quote is from the post-Biblical book called Pirkey Avot, "Selections from the (Founding) Fathers (of Rabbinic Judaism). Chapter 1, Mishnah 6, says, "Rabbi Yehoshua ben PerachYah used to say: 'Appoint a teacher for yourself ("Aseh l'cha Rav), and acquire a study partner (q'neh l'cha chaver)."

In truth, a New Jewish Study Bible is a little bit of both: it is part teacher, and part study partner. Still, you have joined a congregation, so you have made me, lucky for you, into your teacher. That is a job I readily leap at. Call me anytime with your questions. Meet me for coffee. This is not an idle threat. I love coffee almost as much as I love to explore your questions with you. Please pull me out of email and immerse me in words of Torah.

And stop by one of our adult discussions of the Bible. Be brave. Poke your head into a passel of your peers. You won't be judged for showing up as a rookie at our adult education sessions. You will only be rewarded for your curiosity and commitment.

And now, a last word from our sponsor:

See the movies! Buy the Book!