Genesis Rabbah

There's a very lengthy chapter dealing with the preliminaries, giving every example where the two overlap.

Where the two overlap, just these two, and not with another rabbinic text, which has been a problem in the past, is that both of them also draw extensively on the rabbinic canon, books like Genesis, Genesis Rabbah, or the Talmud.

How does this study shed new light on the relationship between the Quran and the Bible? What insights are presented here regarding Qisas al-Anbiya, stories of the prophets in Islamic tradition?

All right, this is also something that spun out into a different article of mine.

When I think of intertextuality, I actually think of like the reuse of a text, you know, like word for word.

That might not be what it means for some people, but like that bothered me a lot when I was writing the book because Pirkei De-Rabbi Eliezer never does that.

It never, it's like we have, we hear about the synoptic problem in rabbinic studies where you talk about parallel passages and the two Talmuds, parallel passages between Genesis Rabbah and the Palestinian Talmud, places where it's just like it's nearly identical or you could tell it's basically the same thing.

None of that in Pirkei De-Rabbi Eliezer.

Tochacha is actually commanded in the Torah.

Bereshit Rabbah teaches love unaccompanied by Tochacha is not love.

Peace unaccompanied by Tochacha is not peace.

But unlike the word rebuke in English, Tochacha is humble.

So death is necessary and a great motivator.

And the Midrash, at the beginning of the Torah, in Bereshit Rabbah, has this fascinating idea that the Midrash writes, In Rabbi Meir's Torah, Meir's living in the second century.

But so, Ketuv, they found it was written, v'nei tov ma'od.

It says in the Torah, v'nei tov ma'od.

And the reason for this goes much deeper than simply ensuring that we have Pesach in the spring.

In Bereshit Rabbah, Chazal say in there that Esau counts by the sun while Yaakov counts by the moon.

And there's a discussion where Rabbi Levy associates Esau, the older brother, with the greater light and Yaakov, the younger brother, with the lesser light.

And Rav Nachman goes on to explain that This is a good sign for Yaakov, as the sun rules by day but not by night, and Esau's dominion belongs to this world, not the world to come.

That's what the Medrash is.

So the Medrash says in Bereshit Rabbah in 8.5, it says that when the Torah says that let us in the plural create man, that's because God, so to speak, as it were, like just as an analogy, and there's a deeper meaning of this, but we'll just explain the analogy for now, consulted with different energies when he was creating the world.

So the way it says it is that first God asked truth, Should we create man? Should we create the human being? And the truth said, no, because man is full of lies.

So truth voted not to create man.

So again, so this first perspective, we're going to start out asking the question, what is God really? Is he more loving or is he more judgmental? So the answer is that he's more loving and here are two proofs.

So proof number one is that when you read the story of creation, so there are different names of God that it uses in the Bible, in the Torah.

And there's an old tradition from another Medrash, and this Medrash is in Bereshit Rabbah in 33.3. And it says that when it uses the name of the Tetragrammaton, which is the four-letter name of God in Hebrew, that indicates God's attribute of mercy, of rachamim.

You could call that love.

The same kitrug as before Hashem created the world.

Where the Medrash and Bereshit Rabbah says, MS Omar Al Yivro.

MS, truth, said, don't create the world.

Because it's Kulei Shekeh.

As we see, that's the root of many of the worst sins in the Torah, as it says here.

So this interpretation itself comes from Genesis Rabbah 53, 11, and we'll continue trying to understand the story from the rabbinic tradition in the Well, tomorrow, B'ezra Hashem, God's help.

Halacha.

Let's now turn to the Mishnah Torah.