Inside Parsha

Some people are born lovely. They are kind and caring, compassionate and considerate. It’s a combination of nature and nurture, no doubt, and it is eminently unfair. The rest of humanity, who find themselves struggling with an inner beast, obsessively self-absorbed and far less thoughtful of others, can only curse their misfortune. We live in a ruthless world; one in which the good get gooder, and the bad, get badder. A counter-intuitive midrash informs us that Avraham, our wonderfully hospitable great-grandfather, would make it his business feeding ravenous guests he found roaming the Middle Eastern deserts. When concluding their meal he would encourage them to bless the Creator for their food. In the absence of their acquiescence, he would demand the exorbitant sum due – prices on par with the General Store in Timbuctoo. Without fail, the compromised guest would begrudgingly make the said blessing, preferring the small cost to their pride over the larger bill to their back

We all recall the white-bearded G-d of our childhood. For each of us, G-d had a particular image; a great policeman in the sky, a Rabbi writ large or a superhero. As adults we come to appreciate G-d as a transcendent being, the sum total of everything, He as a part of us, and we as a part of Him – and of course, the fact that He is no male. As a child, G-d’s invisibility is an exciting magic trick, an enormous figure concealed by a Harry Potteresque cloak. As adults, we appreciate G-d’s invisibility as a product of His being unchained by time and space, His abode in the realm of the conceptual. And, along with the transition in thinking, we denigrate our former selves. We bemoan the teachers, texts and tunes that provided us with that immature frame. We lament that we did not start kinder with an appreciation of what we now know. But I’m not so sure about that. If we examine the Torah superficially, G-d in fact does appear quite ‘white-bearded’. He has a large arm (Exodus 14:3

Once upon a time, I believed in the Rule of Law. That in a democracy, it was a stable fidelity to law that reigned supreme, while partisan politics simply sold newspapers. Maybe it was more of a hope than a belief. Whatever it was, it lulled me into a sense of security and confidence, that the system we had engineered was reliable and safe. The Kavanaugh saga has dashed this hope. A fascinating question emerged – an essentially intellectual question – as to how allegations of misconduct and the nebulous notion of public confidence should impact on the election of a senior judge. The answer, evidenced in a Senate vote which divided along party lines, was “it depends on your pre-existing political views.” When it comes to values in general society, the Torah charges the Jewish people to influence humanity towards observance of the Noahide laws. A most interesting caveat on their observance is made by Maimonides in his magnum opus where he writes that the observance of these

An odd statement of our Sages. “When the luminaries are eclipsed, it is an unfavourable omen for the world” (Rashi’s commentary on Genesis 1:14). It's odd because eclipses are predictable phenomenon. And they didn’t become predictable yesterday, we have records of their being predicted as far back as 700 BCE. This statement of our Sages was thus not made in pithy ignorance of astronomical patterns, as some might jump to assume. Which multiplies the peculiarity of the statement. In making sense of the notion, one needs to acclimatise to another idea. Strange, but digestible. It is relates to the influence that time and planetary movements have over human conduct. I for example, am a Cancerian being. I don’t ever check horoscopes, but they do intrigue me – and I have plenty of patience for those who do find them meaningful. Reading into the previous sentence, you may think of me as unsure, fence-sitting or wishy-washy in my attitude towards horoscopes. That couldn’t be furthe