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Bereishit 5768

"And Tuval Kayin's sister was Na'amah" – what a strange place to end an aliyah – "in the middle of nowhere". Is there some hidden logic in this widespread custom to end the fifth aliyah of Parashat Bereshit with these words?

We are given rules regarding how to break a passage to be read into several aliyot. We are bidden to conform to the presentation of the text when possible – the breaks between parashiyot were given to Moshe to reflect between each matter, and that is where we should break when recreating that giving of Torah by our public reading. We should not stop our reading in the middle of a story. Also, we are not to end an aliyah on a "downer", a negative note.

The story of Lemech comes as a coda to the story of Kayin. Lemech is the seventh generation from Adam down the Kayinian line. Like his progenitor, he kills a man, and seeks to invoke divine protection from human retribution. In a sense, Lemech is the climax of what was initiated by Kayin (especially according to the midrash, brought by Rashi, which identifies the "ish" killed by Lemech as Kayin himself). At the end of this ending passage, right as we are approaching the break between parashiyot, we are told that Adam fathers another son, Shet, who replaces Hevel, and then, as the last words of the parashiyah, we read: Az huchal likro' b'shem Hashem. Translated literally, it reads: Then, it was begun to call upon the name of Hashem. To "call upon the name" is an idiom repeated frequently in the Torah, and it means – to invoke the name in the context of worship.

Now, this would certainly constitute a positive, uplifting ending to the parashiyah, and that is where we should break in our reading. Only, we find that many communities have the tradition of ending the fifth aliyah in a different spot, a few lines back and before the Lemech verses: V'achot tuval kayin na'amah - . "Tuval Kayin's sister was Na'amah". On the face of it, this verse, the last in the short chronicle of Kayin's immediate progeny, has nothing to recommend it, especially with so natural and positive a breaking point only a few pesukim further on. So why break here?

Enter the Torah She'bal Peh. (Bereshit Rabbah 23:6-7; see also Rashi, Radak, Rambam (Hilchot AZ Perek 1). Understanding "huchal" not as "begun" but rather as "desecrated", "made secular", it asserts that it was at this juncture that idolatry began. Humans have been given the power to name the objects, animate and otherwise, which they encounter. But a name is more than just a convention: Hashem creates by linguistic utterance and so does man. If, as we are taught by the Ba'al Shem Tov, the name is intrinsically connected to the root of the soul, then setting the name is setting the nature of a thing. To call a name to Hashem is to "define" Him – in short, it is to set out upon the road of idolatry.

If we overlay the simple, grammatical meaning of "huchal" with the deeper implications mined by midrash, it turns out that with the beginning of the spiritual quest begins too the ever-present danger of freezing the ever-in-flux stream of being which overwhelms us, in order to get a handle on it, and clutching fast to that fragment as though it was the whole. "Az huchal" then is by no means the uplifting conclusion we took it to be at first, and it is NOT the place to end an aliyah.

Who, then, is this Na'amah, this pleasant, positive one (na'am is "yes" in Arabic), who merits closing the fifth aliyah?. She is, as identified by the Torah Sheb'al Peh, the wife of Noach. When she marries Noach, she brings with her the self-activating hubris of the Kayinian line, which finds corresponding completion, it's "ezer k'negdo", in the self-deprecating, other-recognizing humility of the Shetian line. (Note that while the human pronouncement upon the birth of Kayin was "I have created a man…", the declamation upon the birth of Shet was "G-d has given me yet another offspring…."). While Tuval-Kayin is the smith who develops his metallurgy, and provides better and more efficient weapons for perfecting his great-grandfather's craft of ending life, diving life from life, Na'amah boldly leaps the chasm which has yawned between the diverging lines of nascent humanity, echoing once more the the words from Eden – "and they shall be of one flesh". Brother makes an end and severs, but sister rejoins and unites.

Leave Israel alone –if they are not prophets, they are the descendants of prophets. For, in our custom of ending the aliyah with Na'amah, we declare that we prefer to pause and reflect on a disaster rectified than upon an epiphany pregnant with its own undoing.

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