I accidentally skipped ahead last week, so here's the portion I should have written about.
Pinchas stops a plague that strikes the Israelites in the desert, when he kills a prince who fornicated openly with a Midianite woman. As a personal reward, he and his descendants are allowed to join the priesthood.
The story is complicated, morally and otherwise. The Midianites are described as idol worshippers of a particularly gruesome sort: their method of worship was to defecate publicly in front of their idol.
According to Jewish tradition, when the evil prophet Balaam failed to curse the Israelites, he found another way to undermine them, which was through immoral relations. I don't like passing judgments on other people's personal or sexual behavior, but it suffices to observe that when people behaved badly in their personal conduct, there were profound consequences for public life.
Whatever we think of Pinchas's actions, it took extraordinary measures to reverse a decline that had become so personal, and so pervasive.
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 ...
