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Monday, June 04, 2007 Shalom
everyone, I never cease to
be amazed at the tricks I play on myself to keep myself from writing
newsletters and articles. I like thinking about the things that are happening
and giving my opinion on historical events to tourists, but I'm forever
avoiding the job of writing these things down. There are
definitely two audiences to our thoughts and words. One is ourselves the
other is the readers and listeners of our thoughts. It's much easier to think
and not write or speak to anyone. It should also be easy to write our
thoughts for ourselves only. It's only difficult to write as if nobody is
going to see our words. While trying to
remember all the no news events that happened to me in Since I last
wrote, at the beginning of May, we've celebrated three festivals that I can
think of off hand. We started with
Lag B'Omer, went on to Recently I've
started going to lectures on the weekly parsha on
Sunday evenings. The last one was on the Parsha
"Be-ha-alotcha" (when you lift up) Num
8:1 – 12:16 The lecturer was
Jackie Levy who writes a piece in the Yediot
newspaper. He was talking about the part where Miriam supposedly was punished
with leprosy for talking slander against Moses. I was disappointed that he
didn't use the word "supposedly" as I have done. Nowhere in the Parsha does it say that this was the crime of Miriam and
nowhere does it say that leprosy was given by God as a punishment for talking
slander. Yet Mr. Levy and most people who read that story in the Bible come
to the same conclusion that the crime is slander and the punishment is
leprosy. In my, humble
opinion these conclusions are slander themselves. The Bible is pointing out a
trap into which we all fall all the time, namely imputing wrong reasons to
real events. This habit leads to slander and having wrong opinions about
other people that lead to wrong actions. It would be much better and wiser to
withhold explanations of human behavior than to jump to conclusions that lead
to bad actions and very often misery. I am proud to say
that I was in On Shavuot people
study Torah all night and early in the morning go to the Kotel
(the Western Wall) to pray and to celebrate the giving of the Ten
Commandments on Foods produced
with milk feature prominently on Shavuot because the Torah is compared to
Milk. As it says in Deuteronomy "And He brought us to this place and He
gave us this land a land flowing with Milk and honey". (Deut 26:9)Milk
and honey are associated with the land no less than 23 times in the Bible. When
the Bible says God is bringing us to a land of milk and honey it means He's
bringing us to a land where there is Torah. Milk and honey are a simile for
Torah. It's always a
gala occasion for me to go to the opera, even though it means two buses and
taxis and getting home at 1 in the morning. This time it was "Cosi fan Tutte"
(Everybody's doing it) at the Tel Aviv opera house. For me it this
opera tried to show that many people associate disloyalty and compassion with
women and that very often men exploit the one to encourage the other to gain favors
from women. My opinion is
that everybody, both men and women are capable of both great loyal and
disloyalty as well as great compassionate and there are many unscrupulous
individuals who are very clever at exploiting these characteristics to
achieve unholy objectives. Wishing you a
great no news day. Yours truly. |