Dvar Torah- Balak

At the end of this week's Torah portion, there is a mini-rebellion.  Some Jews "go whoring" with Moabite women, leading to idol worship (Numbers 25).  The idolatry seems to be treated as more or less treasonous and eventually, God calls for some sort of execution of the ringleaders. 

Sforno translates Numb. 25:4 (proposing the execution) as calling for execution "in the face of the sun"- that is (according to Sforno), "so that the people will see the execution of those who worshipped the idols and they will not protest ... and thus they will find atonement."

In other words, Sforno thinks that if the execution is "in the face of the sun" (presumably, in public) the public "will find atonement"- i.e., will be deterred from similar acts, and/or atone for their own failure to prevent the fiasco.  In other words Sforno is asserting that capital punishment for the idol worshippers will deter further misconduct. 

The debate over capital punishment and deterrence persists today.  It seems to me that Sforno is coming down on the pro-capital punishment side- at least where the execution is speedy and obviously justified.

Does this support capital punishment today?  Since I am generally inclined to support capital punishment, I'd like to say yes.

But on second thought... the Torah is talking about a situation* in which (1) the crime took place in public, so guilt and innocence aren't really an issue, (2) the punishment is presumably certain and swift enough so that the public remembers the crime at the time of the punishment.  I don't think these circumstances typically apply to most murders today.   Today, the most atrocious murders are usually committed in secret (thus making guilt harder to prove) and executions are so rare that murderers know that even if they get caught their chances of execution are rare.  

Of course, we could make executions easier- but how do we do that without increasing the chances of an innocent person being executed?  

All of which is a long way of saying that sometimes the wisdom of the Middle Ages might not always be so easy to apply today.  

 

*Even leaving aside the religious freedom issues inherent in capital punishment for idolatry!  

shabbos dinner
I was too busy working Friday afternoon (especially after a ridiculously long lunch w/friends) to figure out what was open Friday afternoon so I had a pretty simple dinner: some leftover rice and beans, plus a frozen spinach/onion pie that I had bought a week or two ago from the local kosher restaurant (now decertified, unfortunately- I'll still eat there but I'm not sure I feel comfy cooking anything from there) and choc blintzes for dessert.

Dvar Torah- Chukat

In this parsha, the Jews complain some more and get a Divine plague as retribution.  After this plague, Moses is directed to make a brass serpent (Numbers 21:8-9).  And after looking at the snake, the Jews are somehow cured.  What's up with this?  At first glance, it seems to be somewhere between superstitious and downright idolatrous.

Sforno tries to make sense of the matter, asserting that the brass snake is "from a material which implies 'burning' (i.e. such as brass) so that they would concentrate on the burning vapor (exhalation) of the serpent's mouth, this being akin to their iniquity and its resultant retribution, and thus they will repent."

In other words, the serpent is a kind of psychological tool; the Jews look at it, think of the snake and the vapor of the brass as somehow analogous to their sins, and then feel remorseful.  I guess you might say that after looking at the snake's mouth they are reminded of the noxious vapors that came out of their mouths.  

This passage is another matter of how our commentators take a crazy-seeming Torah passage and make sense of it.  (Of course, sometimes they do the reverse, but that's another issue...)

Dvar Torah- Korach

In his dvar torah, Shlomo Riskin (an Israel Modern Orthodox rabbi) writes that according to Hungarian Rabbi Moses Sofer, aka "Chatam Sofer" (1762-1839):

when two people argue, one (or both) of the parties involved will claim that only he has a direct pipeline to G-d; consequently only he has the only right opinion, and the other view must be totally delegitimized.  These individuals claim that they are arguing "for the sake of heaven, in the name of G-d and Torah."" Supporting his view, the Hatam Sofer reads the verse, "don't be like Korach and his company, [who argued that] G-d spoke by the hand of Moses [only] to him;" to Korah; it is forbidden for any individual to maintain that God speaks only to him, that only he knows the truth, and that there is no possibility of truth to his opponent.  Hence an illegitimate and therefore improper debate is one which seeks to delegitimize the other side, declaring that only one side has the whole truth!

 

A relative of mine, when in his "crazy baal teshuva" phase, asserted that Reform Jews, secularists, etc. were "putting themselves in the place of God."  Rabbi Ruskin reminds us that no side has the whole Divine truth.

And yet...Rabbi Sofer was one of the most aggressive traditionalists of his day, asserting that "Anything new is forbidden by the Torah."  According to the OU website, Sofer believed:

 that he represented the Jewish people of his generation. This historic sense manifested itself in many ways. For example, his son, Rabbi Shimon Sofer once asked him how he could respond to complex halachic questions so rapidly? To which the Chasam Sofer replied that in each generation G-d sends an individual to guide his people. Since most questions come to him he must be that person in this generation. Therefore, even if the rationale he gave for a ruling could be refuted, the ruling itself was correct since it was divinely directed.

 

So which of these remarks really fit Rabbi Sofer?  Or are both stories true?  

 

Dvar Torah- Shelach Lach

"we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them" (Numb. 13:33)

This week's parsha features "the sin of the spies".  Moses sends spies to scout out the Promised Land, and the spies unexpectedly urge Israel to stay away, based on the concerns quoted above.  The spies reason that because the Jews are just "grasshoppers" compared to the land's current inhabitants, they cannot possibly prevail.

I have noticed something a bit comparable day.  Twice in the past week, people I know have more or less urged the United States to bomb Iran to protect Israel from those nasty Iranians; to these acquaintances, Israel is just a bunch of grasshoppers to the Iranian giant.  

To which I respond, get a grip! Israel has 60-80 nuclear weapons

( http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/nuke/)

enough to turn Iran into a parking lot.

Israel can destroy Iran tomorrow.  Without American help.

But the right wing of American Zionism (and I suspect some Israelis as well) still think Israel is the 51st state. 

How come?  My suspicion is that in both the Torah and in 2008, dependency has been debilitating: then, Bnai Yisrael's dependence on Egypt (as slaves) and then on God, and today dependence on the United States.

If Israel is going to be a successful* country, it has to stand on its own two feet and be responsible for its own defense.  

 *By "successful" I don't mean "successful compared to Jordan or Hamastan." So don't send me those emails talking about how Israel has produced better cellphones while the Arabs have produced nothing.  That's holding Israel to too low of a standard.  I mean successful enough to kill its enemies without asking American permission. 

shabbos dinner
This was a theme dinner, based on the week's Torah portion- the Jews complaining about their desire for the "fish that we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic" (Numb. 11:5).

So I had:

flounder salad made with chopped-up flounder, mustard, and garlic (probably the best use I could think of for Dagim frozen flounder - unfortunately not saying much)
cucumbers
watermelon
General Tso's leeks- leeks baked for a while with Iron Chef sauce
boiled onions- (boiling softens them up)
and also a kind of baked rice cake (rice flour, cottage cheese, eggs - basically a not-too-successful attempt to find something to do with rice flour)
and a little cotton candy/vanilla wafers for dessert

shabbos dinner [big because of guests]

Pan fried plaintains

baked bananas

fresh blueberries

apricot/plum mix (lousy, don't eat again)

chickpeas with tomato curry mix (too spicy for guests)

vegetarian chili frito pie (nice)

corn/tomato/black bean salad (nice)

yuca (not so good, guests hated)

whole grain pasta with diced tomato (surprisingly good!) 

cottage cheese pancakes (OK) 

frozen flounder (ditto, even with heavy kung pao sauce)

cotton candy (left out too long, not so good- next time bring out at last minute)

wafers (boring) 

Dvar Torah- Behaaloscha
In this week’s parsha, Miriam criticizes Moses, apparently related to a “Cushite woman he had married” (Num. 12:1)- presumably Zipporah (the only wife of Moses mentioned in the Torah). One might think that a “Cushite” is apparently an African of some sort. But we know that Zipporah is the daughter of Jethro, a Midianite. What’s up with that?

Artscroll is surprisingly unhelpful, suggesting that it is common to “attach a derogatory epithet to a loved one in order to prevent [the evil eye, i.e.]... envy.” But the suggestion that the phrase “Cushite” is "derogatory" is either racist or makes Miriam seem like one. Artscroll’s commentator should have made it clearer which side he is on- does he really think it is "Cushite" is a "derogatory epithet"? That’s not nice. [Or does he think Miriam was (in modern terms) racist?]*

Surprisingly, the Conservative Etz Chaim is much more helpful. Etz Chaim points out that Cushan is a Midianite tribe named in Habbakuk- “hence some sages’ view that the woman is Zipporah.” Etz Chaim kills two birds with one stone here. First, it explains how a “Cushite” can be a Midianite without resorting to racism or superstition. Second, it implies the possibility that maybe the woman is not Zipporah- that Moses had a second wife, which removes the entire difficulty. Etz Chaim may lose the forest for the trees sometimes- but here it does pretty well with the trees!

But Artscroll’s insensitivity reminds me that, much as I loathe loony-left political correctness, it does combat real ills. There is honest to goodness racism, and sometimes it is simply not as blatant as calling someone an N-word. And because there is so much thinly veiled racism [and for that matter anti-Semitism] I don’t think it makes sense to limit our criticism of such behavior to the most blatant examples.

*Also, the point about envy is nonsense. What likelihood is there that readers 3300 years later will be overly envious of Zipporah’s beauty?

Dvar Torah- Naso

In this week's parsha we have the priestly blessings.  Why should the priests do the blessing?

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of Great Britian, points out: "they were dependent on the gifts of the people ... So when the Israelites prospered as a whole, the priests benefited.  They had a direct interest in the prosperity of the nation.  More than anyone else, the priests were dependent on the welfare of others.  They were able to bless the people with a full heart, because if others were favored, so too would they be."

For government to work succesfully, the leaders and the people have to have roughly similar interests.  In a despotism, this is often not the case in the short run, as we have seen in Burma.  The leaders plunder the country and huddle in the capital, while the rural masses are swept away in cyclones.   And the leadership class is just small enough than they can live well even off a very poor nation.

Democracy partially solves this problem, by requiring the leaders to be up for election and to be thrown out when the masses get poorer.  But even so the system is not foolproof. 

At the local level, this is especially so.  I lived in Washington, DC when Marion Barry was the mayor.  Barry's appeal was to the poor and stupid, and so he benefitted when the well-educated and well-off were driven into suburbia.  Not surprisingly, he adopted policies (like cutting the police force) that made the city unlivable and drove people into suburbs (actually, his policies weren't so good for the poor either- but many of them couldn't afford to move, and he paid others off with government jobs).  The only thing that saved the city was federal intervention (as well as a general trend towards urban recovery in the 1990s and early 2000s).

Even at the national level, the system is not foolproof.  Today, the Republican Party, as the party now occupying the White House, is hostage to the business cycle.  But its nominee might well win - partially for good reasons (his own distinguished record in the Senate, the Democrats' weaknesses) but also for bad ones. 

In particular, to the extent public attention is distracted to war and terrorism, Republicans benefit.  Just as the ghetto Left can "fix" elections at the local level by driving the middle class into other jurisdictions, the militarist Right can avoid the business cycle by creating its own vicious cycle: wars leading to resentment against the United States, which leads to terrorism, which leads to more wars against hostile countries, which leads to more terrorism, which leads to more wars ... a cycle that may insulate incumbents from the economy if people are scared enough.  [See, e.g. the 2002 elections, in which Bush used 9/11 to gain seats in the teeth of a recession].

The only way to break the cycle is to eliminate terrorism and militarism- not an easy thing, since the terrorism part does require some cooperation from the rest of the world.  And of course, in Israel the problem is ten times worse; in America there is at least a respectable argument that if the United States stopped playing world policeman, the terrorist problem would diminish considerably.  But in Israel, this is obviously not a plausible argument; the terrorist don't want Israel to stop meddling in their affairs, they want Israel to stop existing for the simple reason that they believe Israel is their turf. 

On that grim note, good shabbos!

Detour into politics- The case for voting Libertarian in the fall

"There are actually no disputes of that nature...with the exception of Iraq this time. Obama's not for cutting the defense budget; Obama's not for pulling troops back from our forward positions around the world, with the exception of Iraq. Obama and McCain don't actually differ, at least on paper, even on Iran, where they're arguing about whether they would talk to [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad or not -- and I think that's an important dispute. Still, at the end of the day, Obama doesn't say he would rule out the use of force. McCain certainly is committed as he said this morning to trying to increase economic pressure on Iran, which Obama has also talked about," - Bill Kristol on the small differences on paper between the foreign policies of McCain and Obama.  {from andrewsullivan.com}

 

Oh goody, 4 more years either way!