One of the reasons I believe Donald Trump will win the election on Tuesday is that there has been a cascade of failures by the government and the ruling party, as well as by those who claim to speak for it.
You could feel this in 2020, too, when Trump contracted COVID in the first week of October. He recovered, and nearly won the election (yes, I know he thinks he actually did win it), but one could sense it possibly slipping away in that moment.
There's just this phenomenon that ruling parties tend to fail as Election Day gets closer. It's partly a result of media scrutiny, but also seems to be the result of some kind of hidden force, perhaps society's way of telling itself to change.
I first noticed this in 2006, when I was helping Helen Zille's mayoral campaign in Cape Town. For months, Helen had argued that the city had been diverting money from emergency services to public housing as a kind of Potemkin policy.
Then, in the days before the election, a British tourist flicked a cigarette into the brush on Table Mountain and the whole dry mountainside exploded in fire. Lo and behold -- there weren't enough firefighting vehicles, due to budget cuts.
There were also blackouts -- the first of South African's infamous electricity shortages. These were caused by failures in the turbines at the nearby nuclear power plant, which the government blamed on sabotage, but they were also the result of overly aggressive affirmative action policies denuding the country of engineers. All of this fit within the opposition's critique of the government.
I remember walking home from the South African Parliament that day, looking at the orange sun barely peeking through the smoke, and thinking that events were pointing in the direction of an opposition victory. Things had to change.
And they did: the opposition went on to win the city, and has held it since.
Everything is going wrong for the Biden-Harris administration and the Kamala Harris campaign in the last week. Biden's "garbage" comment; Mark Cuban's disparaging comments about conservative women; all of it. These are signs.
I think that the country has already decided that Donald Trump will return to the Oval Office, the first to return after losing a reelection race since Grover Cleveland in 1892. You can feel the country making the collective decision.
Here in my largely-liberal part of the world, you can sense the frustration of some people. I overheard a guy yesterday lamenting the fact that the election would be decided by "non-college educated white men in Pennsylvania." Yep.
That's how it works. In a democracy, the people rule, and not the elites. The elites have a role, but it must also have boundaries. It's time for the elites to learn that -- and then, hopefully, long-overdue healing can begin in the USA.
This week'd portion begins the book of Numbers. Interestingly, the Hebrew name for the book is "In the Desert," not "Numbers." The portion, which happens to be my bar mitzvah portion, focuses almost as much on the names of the princes of each tribe as the number of soldiers it fielded. It also focuses on the configuration of the tribal camps around the central Tabernacle and the Levites.
So why "Numbers" instead of "Names" or "Places"? The numbers are, to be sure, a unique feature of the opening of this Biblical book -- but they are not the focus of the rest of the narrative. The Hebrew focuses on the place where the events in the book take place, because essentially this is the narrative of the Israelites' wanderings from Egypt to Israel, across 40 years. We move from the giving of the Torah and the construction of the Tabernacle in Exodus and Leviticus, to the final valediction of Moses in Deuteronomy -- Bamidbar is the story of wandering that happened in between.
The question of ...
This week's portion begins with the laws of the Sabbath and the Sabbatical year, and the Jubilee year that restores all land to its original (tribal) owners. It also explores laws of property and labor that will apply in the Land of Israel, and the laws of vows and inheritance.
The Israelites are presented -- not for the last time -- with the essential moral choice that they must face, and the rewards for choosing well, along with the consequences for choosing poorly.
We learn that doing good things will earn God's protection from enemies. That does not mean that victims of terror, God forbid, were sinful. But it does mean that we can respond to evil by committing ourselves to a higher path.
This week's portion describes the major sacrifices that are to be offered by the Jewish people, including those that are offered only by the priestly Kohen class, and physical requirements of the people (men) who serve in that role.
Inter alia, there are interesting commandments -- such as an injection to treat animals with respect and care, first, by letting a mother animal nurse her offspring for a week before being offered in any sacrifice; and second, by refraining from slaughtering an animal and its offspring on the same day.
The commandments regarding animals remind us of the purpose of those regarding human beings: to uphold a divine connection, through ritual.
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/111878/jewish/Rabbi-Isaac-Luria-The-Ari-Hakodosh.htm