This week’s reading deals with the laws of purity and impurity, beginning with the impurity of a woman’s body after childbirth (meaning her husband, sensibly, has to give her several weeks of leeway before returning to intimate contact). It moves on to the laws of tzara’at, often mistranslated as “leprosy,” but really a kind of spiritual affliction manifested on the skin.
I’m actually writing this at the Dead Sea, the one body of water in Israel that’s completely unsuitable for immersion for purposes of purification. As I wrote in my October 6th book, “Four Seas of Israel,” it’s important to acknowledge death as part of life. Even naturally-occurring water has its limits.
Have a blessed and peaceful Sabbath, everyone.
It’s Purim time… time to get the sweet stuff baking.
This is for an apricot hamantaschen filling…
On Tuesday, I told a colleague that after several visits to UCLA's campus this week and last week, it was possible that a group of pro-Israel people would lose patience with the university and simply storm the "Palestine" encampment.
I joked that L.A. Jews weren't Ashkenazi intellectuals like me, but rather Persian Jews who fled the Iranian revolution. As one sign at the pro-Israel counter-protest Sunday at UCLA said: "My parents didn't leave Iran for this shit."
Insert compulsory condemnation of vigilantism here, but note that it was only the arrival of the vigilantes that triggered local and state law enforcement to do anything, after letting the thugs at the encampment bully people for days.
Local media are picking up the activists' mantra that police took too long to arrive at the scene of the battles overnight. No -- police were told to stand down from the moment the encampment arrived. UCLA coddled the thugs.
Jews lived through a version of 1930s Germany as the thugs, running security ...
I'm fresh from the front lines of protest -- the "encampment" at UCLA -- and I'll have a lot to say about what's going on on campuses around the nation, as a generation of radical activists is, generally, being allowed to destroy education.
Or was education destroyed already? Isn't that how we got to this point?
I'll also introduce an excerpt from my audiobook, "The Trumpian Virtues." It describes the unique characteristics that made Trump's first term successful. I will probably play a chapter every week for the next few months, if you like it.
Special guests:
- Carolyn Siegel - founder of "If You Heard What I Heard" Holocaust memoir
- Rahul Sur - pro-Israel Hindu activist, on the imposition of sharia law
Tune in: SiriusXM Patriot 125, 7-10 p.m. ET, 4-7 p.m. PT
Call in: 866-957-2874
