This week's portion covers a long list of laws and ethical principles, many of them elucidated earlier in the Torah, but necessary for Moses to repeat on the eve of the people's final entry into the Land of Israel.
One of the more interesting commandments -- which hits a little different this year -- concerns a female captive in war, whom you desire. There is a whole process that a soldier must go through if he wants to marry her, designed to protect her dignity.
It's hard to read this at a time when there are female Jewish captives seized by Hamas, who are probably being enslaved and raped or "married" according to whatever the Islamic law about that is. It makes one innately recoil from the text of Deuteronomy here; how could such a practice have been conceived?
But then the thrust of the Jewish law is to protect the captive, not to satisfy the captor, and I suppose there is more that we can learn from that.
This week's show will be slightly different from the norm: we'll focus on clips and topics, rather than guests -- and that, hopefully, will mean more input from the callers (unless you are all watching football on opening weekend).
Topics:
- The state of the economy
- The fight against crime
- The midterm election fight
- The struggle for peace between Russia and Ukraine
- The airstrike on the Venezuelan drug cartel
- The attempt to sink Kennedy
- The war in Gaza
- The case against Harvard
- The Trump presidency
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This week's Torah portion includes several laws about conduct in civic and personal life, the common theme of which is boundaries -- setting bounds to what one may do at home, at work, and even in the battlefield.
One noteworthy passage concerns Amalek, the evil nation that attacked the Children of Israel as they made their Exodus from slavery to freedom. Deuteronomy 25:17-19 commands Jews to obliterate Amalek's memory.
The South African government accused Israel of genocide on the basis of a story about Amalek in the Book of Samuel, in which King Saul was commanded to wipe out the entire evil Amalekite nation.
Because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quoted this week's portion -- "Remember what Amalek did to you" (25:17), the South African government claimed he was commanding soldiers to commit genocide.
It was an absurd and malevolent misreading of the Bible and of Jewish tradition. The commandment, as observed by Jews today, is to remember the evil of Amalek and fight ...
