Recent Weekly Torah
And Reason Shall Not Prevail
“In all things, reason should prevail,” wrote William Penn. Yet in quite a few things, we have lost reason altogether.
In this week’s portion, Balak, the pagan king of the Moabites, is desperately trying to protect his commonwealth. Israel has just routed Moab’s neighbors - the Bashonites and Amorites - and Balak knows that his nation may very well be next. So he engages the services of a non-Israelite prophet, Balaam, whose task is to get the God of Israel to curse the Jewish people.
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Summarizing 15 years - and Millennia
A college friend of mine recently found me on Facebook. We hadn't spoken to each other since graduation, but I was happy to hear from him. Since we had been out of touch for so long, he began by summarizing the last 15 years of his life. In a few bullet-pointed sentences, he concisely explained how he had started a Ph.D. program, left to work in the corporate world and married and had a child. I was surprised how such a long period of time could be encapsulated so succinctly, and I did my best to describe my adulthood in a few brief sentences.
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The Sights of Freedom
Freedom is on my mind, as it should be at this time of year, but it's pretty hard to be connected to the news lately, any news, and not sense that 'freedom' has pretty much become a cliché. A word we lightly throw around when we need it, when it suits our ends, and all too often to galvanize our own rigid dogmas; it has become a weapon to protect our own spiritual and material excesses. It is happening now in Indiana and in Georgia, where freedom apparently means possessing the unfettered power to discriminate behind the veil of a dangerous interpretation of religious liberty.
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The Question of Race
It has been a particularly troubling year for race relations in America. Places like Ferguson, Missouri have become emblematic of a deep and enduring frustration among many people of color: why is it so difficult to communicate to the vast majority of whites just what it feels like to be brown or black -
What is it to be refused a taxi, or shadowed by a clerk in a high-end boutique, what is it to be pulled off the highway, or refused an apartment or a job - all for being black - White women and men have been spared, by accident of birth, from such demeaning experiences.
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