Ki Thetze: the other

Ki Thetze: the other

What happens when you go out? You exit, you see the ex(er)otic. The seductress, rescued from the battle by her charm and whiles.  Some one quite different from the wife back home. 

Then there is the favored child... and the other.  The child who you wish was the bechor, and the actual bechor who stands in the way, and cannot be bypassed. Like the lost item that cannot be bypasses, like the animal struggling under its burden  that cannot be bypassed. 

The torah does give a formula to eliminate the rotten kid who stands in the way of that angelic being.  Call him a ben sorrer umorer and have him stoned!  Some combinations cannot be.  Ox and donkey, wool and linen ( unless they are involved in a mitzvah like tzitzith).

The parsha ends with the ultimate other: Amalek.  Three verses. The middle verse: 

יח  אֲשֶׁר קָרְךָ בַּדֶּרֶךְ, וַיְזַנֵּב בְּךָ כָּל-הַנֶּחֱשָׁלִים אַחֲרֶיךָ--וְאַתָּה, עָיֵף וְיָגֵעַ; וְלֹא יָרֵא, אֱלֹהִים. 18 how he met thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, all that were enfeebled in thy rear, when thou wast faint and weary; and (he )feared not God. 

This translation implies that the one lacking fear was Amalek.  I think it is easier to read it as Israel being too tired  and feeble to believe.  Amalek adds to the challenge of faith. They don't believe and we are too tired to believe. 

When you go out , If you see the Buddha on he road, kill him...

Ki Thetze: Lust and Marriage

i Thetze: Lust and Marriage

This is the most passionate of parshioth. Sex, greed, war all make appearances and the corrections are prescribed. The marriages of the parsha are economic fixes for acts of passion.  The captive wife has rights.  She cannot be treated as a slave, sold to another man.  The raped or defamed woman has the right to lifetime support by her attacker or defamer.  The leverite marriage (Yibum) is a way to obtain economic support for a widow.  It is all about protecting women from starvation in a (hungry) world dominated by men.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Amalek

The commandment to remember .  
The commandment not to be a fool, not to be deceived (again).  
To understand the anger of our ancestors, to avenge the crime, to be the redeemer of the blood ( go’al hadam),
to view a nation as evil to its seed, Amalek is the seed of evil.
Don’t be like Amalek
Don’t like Amalek.
Remember
And don’t forget

last year: passion
2008: moving
2007: consequences

Shoftim: responsibility

The parsha is filled with officials.  Judges, prophets, the king, Cohanim,  The parsha ends with the eglah arufa, the ceremony of expiatiation of official guilt .Authority is dangerous. The prophet is killed if ze strays from the (exact) word of Gd, the king is deposed  if he uses his position to accumulate too much wealth.  The judges are held resposible for events that they have no knowledge of, like the unsolved murder.

The eglah arufah  (the heifer of chutzpah ?) is killed to deal with  a murder victim  and the failure to find the perpetrator ( the perp). Were the villain found and duly dealt with, there would be no need for the eglah . Thus, it is not the murder that brings the guilt upon the leaders.  Individual human behavior cannot be controlled, but the tribe can be molded by making every murder significant, either by dealing with the murderer or by hacking the eglah arufah.  

It is interesting to note that the author of Devorim, Moshe, murdered a man at the beginning of his career.  He killed the Egyptian taskmaster. In many ways he may have fit the description of the manslaughterer described in the parsha, in that Moshe did not have a long standing hatred of the man he killed and Moshe ran away for refuge.

----------------------------------

The ax has a special role in the  parsha.  There is a passage about unintentional ( negligent) homocide and the (prison) city of refuge to which the killer must flee to get protection from the blood avenger. An example of such a homocide is offered: the ax handle flies off while chopping a tree.  That same ax ( garzen) appears in the section from which we derived the prohibition of waste.  That ax is now being used to chop down a fruit tree to make a bulwark of war. Once more the ax will be involved indirectly in homocide, this time the organized homocide of war. 

The tool used to kill the eglah arufah is not specified, but Rashi quotes the Sifre and Sotah, that it was an ax. 

The ax destroys ( the living [fruit] tree) to create ( the bulwark,or the house, or the fire) and causes collateral (irreparable) damage.  The parsha raises a high bar for forethought and carefulness.


Last year


2009

2008 Witgenstein 

Re'eh:  limits

The parshah is named  Re'eh: see.  Physiologically, seeing involves the process of perceiving borders, distinctions.  This is followed by an attempt to make sense of the input.   The problem of blurring of borders is a  subtheme  the parsha.  Sometimes the boundaries are imposed by the observer. 

In the first aliyah of the parsha, there is a verse that I find very strange. 12:4 is translated : "Ye shall not do so unto the LORD your God.". The preceding paragraph described the destruction of the native idolatrous institutions. Who needs a specific instruction not to do the same the The One Gd, the national Gd of the Israelites?

I think that this is a very practical instruction. Once the forces of iconoclasm are mobilized, it is hard to limit them, to keep them from attacking our own Gd and the institutions of our people. Iconoclasm is more common among Jews, and perhaps more important for Jews, than is faith.  A Jew that doubts Gd is not  as far from Judaism as is a Jew for Jesus. 

 

The question of the line between us and them  alsoapplies to political questions.  The teachings of universal compassion conflicts with  the commandment of conquest of the land . I think that, in our day,  compassion wins.

Eikev:: Don't tread on me

Eikev:

The first mention of  the word eikev is the target for the serpent of Eden. הוּא יְשׁוּפְךָ רֹאשׁ, וְאַתָּה תְּשׁוּפֶנּוּ עָקֵב.they shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise their heel (Gen 3:15).

Eikev is the root of Yaakov (prior year), Akivah and Akavia ( ben Mehallalel).  All founders of our belief system

Eikev is the pivot of the deal between Gd and Israel, The  crux, ( displaced posteriorly),  the vulnerable point of Achilles ( and Esau?)

Eikev is the heel, the place where the body ends and the foot begins, the point in which all of the body’s weight is concentrated and where a person, normally,  digs into the land. The mitzvoth interact with gravity to acquire the land through the eikev.

The parsha often refers to walking - the wanderings in the desert, the paths of mitzvoth, remembering Gd when you walk in your own path. The eikev  - heel- is the part of  walking that represents the past, the burden of the body that needs to be carried.  The foot that stems from the heel defines direction of the path of the future..

The Gadsden flag ( N.B. two tribes of Israel Gad and Dan) is depicted.  It was (possibly) a candidate for the flag of the 13 (tribes?) colonies..  It was adopted by the Marines  ( the vanguard for conquering lands) .I am reminded of it by a Grateful Dead song with the lyrics:

   ...well I declare, have you seen the like?
Their walls are built of cannonballs, their motto is
Don't tread on me. 

 Where should I tread? How lightly?

Ve'eschana What is grace

Ve'eschana

What is grace

Moshe reports the failure of his prayer (וָאֶתְחַנַּן (3:3).  He then spends most of the chapter reviewing the covenant and exhorting that people to follow commandments.  Although Moses follow the commandments to an extent that no other person could, his prayer to enter the land is denied. What  does that mean for my prayers and yours?
 
It is interesting that when he speaks about the inhabitants of the Land, the same word is used  וְלֹא תְחָנֵּם( 7:2) .  Rashi implies that the word may be related to settling of the Land.  The word  does seem to have a connotation of the plea for acceptance.
 
The Land his tough.

Ve'eschana What is grace

Ve'eschana

What is grace

Moshe reports the failure of his prayer (וָאֶתְחַנַּן (3:3).  He then spends most of the chapter reviewing the covenant and exhorting that people to follow commandments.  Although Moses follow the commandments to an extent that no other person could, his prayer to enter the land is denied. What  does that mean for my prayers and yours?
 
It is interesting that when he speaks about the inhabitants of the Land, the same word is used  וְלֹא תְחָנֵּם( 7:2) .  Rashi implies that the word may be related to settling of the Land.  The word  does seem to have a connotation of the plea for acceptance.
 
The Land his tough.

Ve'ethchanan: re-membering

Ve'ethchanan: re-membering

 
Ve'ethchanan: and I sought grace. THe grace that Moshe sought was to be included in the people chosen to enter te Promised Land.  Moshe was the leader of the generation excluded from that entry.  Moshe's generation had the taint of the confusion that surrounded the spies, and the associated loss of confidence in Gd and in themselves.  Neither he nor they - that entire generation - could enter the Land-- they had fallen too far.  That generation had recieved (the original) 10 commandments.   They had heard the disembodied voice out of the fire.  Don't you remember?
 
The conversation that Moshe now has, asking the people ( most of whom were not there) to recall the seminal events of Sinai ... who is Moshe talking to?  Are we reading about  an interaction with that unique generation that was born in the wilderness. or is this parsha instructions for all future generations, for us? .... or both? 
 
I cannot recall Sinai.  The disembodied voice I heard was at Woodstock!
 
But I can recall the voice of my father, at the Higaditha levincha event, the Seder, telling his children about his redemption from slavery in Treblinka and his personal miraculous crossing of the Bug ( Red [with Jew blood] sea ) river.
 
This week 2 more holocaust (former) survivors in our Seattle community  were buried. ( Joe Vos and Cecilia  Etkin).    What happens to their memories? We cannot remember the holocaust and its aftermath for them, but their stories need to be transmitted ( albeit imperfectly) .
 
It is all the mem.  Remember so that you can be a member.
Mayim, mother, ema
 
Gd's voice from Sinai never stops, it reverberates forever for those who will listen for it.  To remember those 10 commandments, even with a few modifications ( shamor/zachor) is  to reassert membership in that people.  A memory? a pseudo-memory?was it all a dream? could it have been anything else? There is no way to escape the dream, one can only correct it - when you go to sleep and when you wake up.

Ve'ethchanan: Tough Love

Ve'ethchanan: Tough Love

The parsha says: Love the Lrd your Gd... or else.

It starts by telling us that Moshe, who was denied his dream of entering the land for one vague transgression, is told to  stop asking for mercy.  There will be  very limited  mercy (even for) him, he will get to see the land, but not enter it. Moshe then tells the people, repeatedly,  to be very careful in following the law. duh!

The parsha contains the ultimate summary of the law, the 10 commandments.  And the ultimate pledge of allegiance: the Shema.  It is like a national archive. 

Today is the first day of the 13th cycle of daf yomi.  The first mishneh discusses the time for the recitation of shema, the shema that is defined in the parsha. Coincidence...sure! 

It is also the 15th of Av, a day traditionally assigned for the finding of a spouse and the day I met my beloved wife. Coincidence...sure!

The shema tells us to love the Lrd. To love the Lrd that gave us the land ( and took it away, and gave it again, and took it away, and allowed the Holocaust, and gave the land ,again, to the Jews).  The Lrd that gives us life and mercy and takes away mercy and has mercy again. 

The mitzvoth are instruction how to love Gd.(?) I don't know the best way to love. Not Gd, Not my wife, not my children, not me. So I will try to follow instructions.(?)