Antisemitism is Not About the Jews

 

I have friends who care for Israel but soften their criticism with “If only they had better public relations.” 

Israel has the best public relations in the world. 

They are responsible citizens of the world. Whenever there is a disaster Israel offers to send help. The Arab nations usually refuse but Israel offers. That’s the nation’s humanity, often denied. The 57 Muslim nations in the world can’t bear the thought of being helped by that one sliver of a Jewish state — because that might justify its existence. 

The Palestinians got the chance to prove themselves responsible citizens when Israel withdrew in 2005. Instead they smashed up the greenhouse industry left them and proceeded to launch attacks on Israeli civilians, prompting the embargo that has chafed them since. But whether against Jews or Christians, apparently Muslim terrorism doesn’t damage their image. Good PR?

One might also claim PR value in Israel’s remarkable contributions to medicine, science, tech, agronomy, the arts, etc.. Especially when they have had to spend so much money and human power simply to defend its existence against surrounding mortal enemies throughout their brief state life. Just last week they revealed a revolutionary method of spinal transplant —the latest of hundreds of breakthroughs Israel has shared. 

By the way, there was no outside outcry when a major Israeli science center was bombed by Hamas. But hit a Palestinian hospital openly dedicated to military use and terrorist salvation? Israel is Evil.,

Or this for PR? Even amidst an all-out attack from their genocidal enemies Israel still gives full free medical services to that enemy officers’ families. Or this: a convicted murderer serving a life sentence has a mortal brain tumour removed by an Israeli doctor. The patient may have been grateful, but when he was released in one of those imbalanced swaps — e.g., one Israeli hostage for 100 criminal Palestinians —that prisoner proceeded to plan and direct the October 7 invasion, slaughter and atrocities. Of course there was outrage when an Israeli rocket killed him.

Or this for PR: Retired British Officer Richard Kemp has called Israel the most moral army ever, for its care to minimize enemy civilian deaths. The civilian death rate is also extremely low for an urban ground war. 

        How does that translate? Israel is waging genocide and infanticide against those pathetic victim Palestinians. Israel is accused of doing what its ostensible victims are actually doing to them — while intending even worse. This is the point in Beth Stuart's inflammatory statement in her exhibition at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.

Israel saves enemy lives by advance warning of attack to enable their flight to safety. So? Israel is condemned for forced evacuations. 

Nothing can excuse Israel because what Israel is and what Israel does are irrelevant to the Jews being useful — century after century — to bear the guilt and responsibility for everything awry in the world. Why look within when you can blame them?

Israel’s success in staving off Hamas’s two-year genocidal attack is making the Jewish state even more a pariah. Its critics swell in rage and number. But we should not blame Israel for that. Attacking a scapegoat responds to the society’s needs more than the nature of the imputed villain. And when the Jews have been demonized for centuries, who better to assail when occasion arises?

For antisemitism really has nothing to do with the Jews. Indeed, you don’t need Jews to have antisemitism. Indonesia has Few Jews and Much Antisemitism. The Jews’ ill-reputation doesn’t precede them. It’s a figurative substitute for their real being. 

Antisemitism is wholly irrational. The scapegoat it provides needs no factual basis or pertinence. It’s a historical pathology that periodically takes hold and drives the community to madness. There is no logic, no foundation and certainly no positive effect in a society suddenly blaming the Jews for its ills. 

Note that the calls to end the current war are primarily directed at Israel, not at the instigator and primary continuer, Hamas. The world blames Israel for the phantom famine, the physical destruction, the civilian and especially children’s deaths. But that is all due to Hamas violating war conventions by militarizing their supposedly safe areas — schools, playgrounds, temples, hospitals — and hiding their own soldiers among their civilian population. 

Yet Israel is considered the primary transgressor — for its existential self-defence. Occasionally we get an afterthought, like “free the hostages.” And “Islamophobia” quickly follows any politician’s courageous mention of “antisemitism” — as if there were any equivalence between the historic hatred of the Jews and the current coinage intended to defuse any criticism of radical Islam. The Left media are particularly prone to this pervasive prejudice. Typically, the CBC reports Hamas casualty figures as coming from “Gaza health officials.” But Israeli stats are “not confirmed by other sources.” 

This persists despite the innumerable exposure of Palestinian lies. Remember that hospital that Israel bombed at the current war’s onset, killing 500? Of course, it was a misfired Palestinian rocket, toll around 50, but the myth and eager gullibility persist. Hamas is like Trump in cruelty, selfishness and constant lying. Canada’s submission threatens a future no better than theirs. 

Little wonder Israel is so demonized — for daring to prevent Hamas’s pledge to repeat their October 7, 2023, atrocities “throughout Israel and the West Bank.” The “genocide” label is hung on the Jewish army’s self-defence instead of on Hamas’s constitutional pledge (Article 7) to eradicate world Jewry. Israel accepted the 2-state solution in 1948. The Palestinians did not. They also rejected eight land-for-peace offers since (six by Israel), without negotiation,  insisting on a statehood that would eliminate the Jews. 

Yet the world hangs the “genocide” tag on the Jews’ selfdefense. 

The primary solution now proposed is that Israel stop the war. France, Britain and Canada (alas!) have in effect promised to reward Hamas by recognizing Palestinian statehood in the fall sitting of the UN. 

        Set aside that this would make October 7 the primary modus operandi for jihadist movements throughout the world. 

Set aside that this would — indeed already has — hardened the Hamas resolve not to make any concessions re:hostages, truce, vacating the land. Even set aside that this promise could have little positive realization because the Palestinians fall obviously short on the major requirements of a new statehood. Even then, this promise can only compel Israel to ratchet up its attacks now in hope of reducing the military and political antagonism then to be consolidated. 

There’s yet one more lesson in October 7, 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel, murdered over a thousand, kidnapped,, raped, mutilated, microwaved a baby and through it all shot their own videos to celebrate. Palestinians applauded ecstatically. 

Briefly Jews felt some rare sympathy from the world at large. Then within days — before Israel even began its response to the attack — there was an eruption of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, encampments, etc., on our campuses as well as on defaced walls,. Their slogans called for the annihilation of Israel — indeed, even of the Jews outside  (“Bring the Intifada”). 

Antisemitism has nothing to do with the Jews —except their historic targeting. What they are, what they do, how they react, nohow are they responsible for the resurrection of that historic hysteria, that global pathology — antisemitism. 

Its root? Here’s a possibility. Hitler was asked if anything he did ever disturbed his conscience. “No, conscience is something invented by the Jews,” he replied. Enough said. Our ancient forefathers refined our godhood and passed on, inter alia, the ten commandments. Reason enough to draw eternal resentment — and worse.

Canada's Trumpian Failure

  Damn. Sorry, gang. Canada can no longer regard with disdain America’s spiralling disintegration. With arguably the most ignorant, incompetent and malicious national leader anywhere ever, America is brazenly abandoning every value, law and aspiration that once made it a light unto the world. 

Tsk, we say. But we are crumbling ourselves.

No one leader prompts Canada’s current disintegration. Worse, it is a sweeping cultural failure. As in Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, even America, etc., our nation has succumbed to that centuries-old mob pathology — antisemitism. 

This is Canada now:  a nation where a Toronto teacher can tell a six-year-old girl that because she’s half-Jewish she’s only half-animal. Whatever the consequences to that teacher  — a Canadian teacher feels she can say that. 

Of course we still have the antisemitism of the yob. That’s old hat. They don’t know better. One scrawled violent lies and threats on the outside wall of a Victoria synagogue (Canada’s oldest in operation). It was repeated a day or two later.

But it’s now well beyond the yob. The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria platforms an artist’s antisemitic statement that celebrates the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel. Remember? They killed over 1,200 people, including innocents at a music festival, abducted 251, and indulged in a fury of torture, rape, infanticide and mutilation. They proudly videotaped themselves. Hamas has continued that war still, at tremendous cost human and material, still holding and abusing hostages dead and alive. 

Of course the world is appalled by that. They demand an immediate end — to Israel’s self-defence. Count our PM Carney amid that deluded mob.

That October is when we, our civilization, our humanity, finally snapped. Rationally, there was an initial indignation at that assault, even some sympathy for the Jews. But within days, even before Israel’s initial response, pro-Palestinian demonstrations erupted everywhere. We now know they had been planned well in advance and were well financed from outside (like Qatar’s extravagant funding of Middle Eastern Studies on western campuses). The Hamas atrocities seemed to have liberated, legitimized,  the antisemitic extremists from any restraints that may have contained them.

The current antisemitism is precisely that which the IHRA declared our most dangerous: anti-Zionism.  Of course, that doesn’t bar criticism of Israeli policy. Antisemitism kicks in when the accuser denies the legitimacy of the Jewish state, denies Israel’s right to defend herself, adopts prejudicial programs like BDS, holds Israel to a different standard than other nations and declares all Jews responsible for Israel’s government decisions. What other peoples face that?

Though Canada, the provinces and many universities have adopted that definition U Vic refuses. And acts accordingly.

A prof there proposed a course explicitly intended to disqualify that IHRA definition. He was exposed as supporting BDS, blaming North American Jews for Israeli policies and even having tweeted this profoundly antisemitic response to a North American Jewish leader’s declaration that because of the NY Times antisemitism he was stopping his subscription: “F$ck this Zionist pig!” Under outside pressure the instructor was persuaded to change the course to a historic study of the term, as then President Kevin Hall responded to the B’Nai Brith investigation. We might assume he suppressed his prejudice in the teaching. We might. But he remains the U’s antisemitism specialist.

I remember when university was called “higher education.” No surprise that both the artist in the current AGGV show and the exhibition’s curator are from U Vic, the latter a grad and the former the department grad advisor. Nor that that university during the summer encampments gave the Palestinian supporters a long free rein. Our campuses had no problem with the calls for the Jews’ annihilation: Free Palestine, From the River to the Sea, Bring the Intifada. U Vic even caged off the university’s convocation exercises so as not to inconvenience the anti-Israelis. Those slogans are the new lipstick on the old pig, Juden raus.

Across Canada there are reports of Jewish students harassed, professors feeling abandoned by their faculty associations, convocation speakers rousing anti-Israel heat, on a scale unseen since 1930s Germany. American campuses have been getting the press but we have the same problem — with no government intervention. Even hitherto responsible professional organizations — medical, legal, the UN, the ICCJ — have disqualified themselves by blatant antisemitism. 

That’s what boggles the mind — what groups have turned against Israel. Take “Queers for Palestine.” Please. Hamas throws its gays from rooftops. In that region only Israel protects queers, granting them respect and all citizen rights and privileges. Here even Pride parades have split over their compulsion to attack the Jews. The same for other groups now militantly anti-Israel: feminists, Christians, dissidents of whatever form, the free press, artists.

This is madness. Of course. We are caught in that old mass hysteria from the yobs on up to the PM’s office — and the UN. With everyone in between.

Of course, the antisemites take great encouragement from their many supportive Jews. Their “tikkun olam” — the Jew’s commitment to improve the world — extends to supporting the very people who are determined to destroy them. If not now, then. 

However well-meaning, these Jews are the current form of Lenin’s “useful idiots,” activists blinded by their idealism to the atrocities committed in their name. They join the non-Jews in condemning Israel for defending herself against the 75-year Palestinian campaign to destroy her. They blame Israel for the child deaths deliberately caused by Hamas weaponizing their own civilians — knowing the world will blame the Jews. 

Of course their moral indignation only encourages Hamas to continue. The blood of a Palestinian child is on the hands of their army and on the martyrdom culture that weaponizes them — and on those here who encourage that. This is no time for the heart to deactivate the head. Defending their own should not be a Jewish crime — but now it is.

So too throughout the arts. Pro-Israel artists are banned from exhibitions. Related plays not anti-Jew are stifled before production. The Giller, Canada’s foremost fiction prize, teeters because so many leading writers objected to its sponsorship by the Bank of Nova Scotia. They support Israel, you see. 

Yes, Israel. Those Jews. Our main ally in that area, the only democracy, still the heart and soul of our moral tradition. That may be why Jews are hated. As Hitler observed, they invented the conscience. More pressingly today, however, is this hard political reality. Israel is our civilization’s frontline of defence against the jihadist terrorist movement determined to establish a global caliphate under sharia law. Israel is fighting off Hamas (inter alia) so we will not have to. Yet our noblest friend is now our enemy because she presumes to defend herself. She’s Jewish.

So too our major media. The Globe and Mail, CBC, CTV — like the NY Times, Washington Post, NPR, PBS, etc — are by reflex anti-Israel. They feature the Arab lies of Israeli “apartheid,”“genocide,” inflated stats, in open bias against the Jews. They present far more Hamas spokesmen than Israeli and leave their lies unchecked. They report Hamas statistics (i.e. Gaza health officials) straight but add to Israeli figures “but that has not been confirmed by other sources.” 

And the disproved lie — remember the 500 Palestinians killed when Israel supposedly bombed a hospital at the war’s onset? — doesn’t diminish their acceptance of the next ones. All of them. Continuously. (Btw, that was a misfired Hamas missile that killed about 50) Check Honest Reporting Canada for a daily exposure of this public network of antisemitic lies. Antisemites lie like Trump.

Only the National Post has the integrity to promote the truth — and defend Israel. Fortunately, Canada’s indigenous leaders also resist the Palestinians lies and their theft of Jewish history. A delegation of chiefs visited Israel to express their support. Knowing that the Jews were there 2,000 years before the Koran launched Islam, they view Israel as their inspiring model for a people surviving centuries of oppressive occupation to revive their own language, identity and nationhood;.  

Nor is our government any relief. In Victoria the police have given up trying to control pro-Palestinian throttling of the streets. Palestinian flags and the kaffyiah — badges of Jew-killing — flourish openly from a city councillor to the legislature building. Despite having video the police haven’t caught the recent synagogue defiler. A Jewish MLA resigned in protest against the antisemitism in the BC cabinet. 

Fulfilling our dread, PM Carney has repeated the lie of Israeli “genocide” (when it’s Hamas that is constitutionally pledged to eliminate world Jewry) and then taken this absurdly contradictory position: demanding Israel stop the October 7 war (i.e., her existential self-defence) while promising to reward Hamas with Palestinian statehood in the fall sitting of the UN, with certain required conditions set not in advance but in the nebulous future. . 

Those 2-state sloganeers forget this: In 1948 Israel accepted that solution. The Arabs instead launched their — continuing — war to eliminate the Jews. There have since been eight land-for-peace offers (six by Israel), all rejected by the Palestinians, without discussion. They demand a statehood that would replace not join Israel. In short, genocide for the Palestinians is not a plight but their platform. 

After this history of genocidal violence Israel is expected to submit to a new state of Palestine?

YCarney — inter alia — seems unable to say “antisemitism” without adding “Islamophobia,” as if they were matching dangers. They are not. “Antisemitism” is a centuries-old pathology. “Islamophobia” is a current coinage intended to dismiss any charge of Islamic violence as an irrational phobia. Given global violence against the West and especially the Jews, fear of that terrorism is hardly irrational. To claim equivalence is to equate Jewish self-defence with the Palestinians’ explicit determination to eliminate the Jews. (

Cue Connie Francis: “Where the votes are.”)

Anyway, if the powerful Israel’s intention really were genocidal wouldn’t it have been accomplished long since, without such intervening loss of Jewish lives? And would there have been such a large increase in the Arab population in Gaza and the West Bank? Could Israel — such a global over-achiever in science, medicine, tech, the arts, etc. —  be so incompetent at genocide?

Instead Canada has a reflex opposition to any military or political support for Israel. It’s not just the “None is too many” shame of our historic parliament, but a rampant new sweep of antisemitism across Canada. Across our artistic, intellectual, social, political spectrum, we have a Jew problem. They live. We have to blame them for everything wrong here because they’re to blame for over there. There’s a song for that too: “Tradition.” But this fiddler is in the cesspool. 

I see no brighter future for us than what the US is committing as it abandons all its ennobling values, ideals and practice. In by reflex targeting the Jews we are no better. Nor without a severe shift in attitude, knowledge and practice can we hope for a better future.

Beth Stuart: Antisemitism at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

  Beth Stuart’s Delibels, at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, is an extremely concerning exhibition not for what it says but for what it is — artfully coded antisemitism. All the more reprehensible for its coyness.

The art pieces are enigmatic, engaging. In each, a black ledge of replicas tops a long black mesh. The objects — fabricated seeds, fruit, pizza crusts, nuts — suggest the relics of the once edible, the spectral word within the title — but now not-indelible. The nourishing solids have become transitory, passing, forgettable. Each piece poses a once-digestible solidity on a wavering base. 

What’s problematic is the full-wall text — in spectral grey — that accompanies the sculptures. Stuart interweaves Luther Burbank, the history of some berries, nuts and phrases, with three cases of supposed genocide: the Armenian, the alleged Palestinian and finally our Residential Schools. As a whole, the work may contrast the self-renewal of nature’s produce with humans’ murderousness. The Palestinian focus, a friend suggests, adds a more accurate echo to the title: libels. 

As it happens, this work precisely echoes the allegations of Jewish genocide, infanticide and illegal oppression of the Palestinians that an as yet unidentified vandal wrote on the outside wall of Congregation Emanu-el, the Victoria synagogue (the oldest operating in Canada). Police plan to charge the vandal with hate speech and incitement to violence. AGGV appears unperturbed by this entry’s blatant antisemitism.  

* * *

Of course the term “genocide” — here first used re: the Armenians — was coined in reference to the Holocaust. It means the deliberate attempt to annihilate a people. One example: the Gazans’ elected government, Hamas, is constitutionally pledged (Article 7) to eliminate WORLD Jewry. Here’s another: in 1948 Israel accepted the two-state solution but the Arabs instead launched their continuing war to eliminate the Jews. There have since been eight land-for-peace offers (six by Israel), all rejected by the Palestinians, without discussion. They demand a statehood that would replace not join Israel. 

In short, genocide for the Palestinians is not a plight but their platform. This “big lie” must have Goebbels chortling in his grave.

The Palestinian claim is also an affront to the frame of two real victims of genocide. Incidentally, a large delegation of Canada’s indigenous leaders recently visited Israel to express their support. Knowing the Jews occupied these contested lands 2,000 years before the Koran launched Islam, the Jews are their model in across centuries surviving colonial oppressors, ultimately to reclaim their land and identity. Later Stuart parallels the Canadian government waste of a million dollars supervising a protest — against ending the Kamloops burial search  — with Canada’s financial support of Israel’s self-defence. 

Stuart first mentions the Jews as a threat on the Armenian border, then by implication responsible for their population drop from 27,000 to 1,000 in Old Jerusalem. 

Then the Palestinians are Israel’s innocent victims: “I saw a social media post in November 2023 that showed someone opening an aid truck in the Gaza Strip and it was full of thousands of white shrouds. Not food or medicine.” 

Though the professor does cite her scholarly (?) source she omits the obvious cause of that Palestinian inconvenience. Just weeks earlier — on October 7— their government Hamas invaded Israel, killed over 1,200 people, mainly civilians, including innocents at a music festival, abducted 251, and indulged in a fury of torture, rape and mutilation — that they and the Gazan citizenry celebrated. They made videos of their atrocities. 

Hamas pledged to repeat that attack throughout Israel and the West Bank. Ignoring that detail, Stuart blames Israel for the aggressor Palestinians’ ensuing difficulties, like shortages of clean and desalinated water, medicine, food, etc. And their crop of shrouds.

Stuart then revives the centuries-old blood libel against the Jews: They want to kill your children! Even when they don’t need Christian blood for their matzo. 

She cites a presumably Jewish “pundit” on Israeli TV Channel 14 in an “early 2024…. clip… saying every Palestinian over the age of four years is a potential terrorist and a necessary target of war.” So her sculptures’ mesh bags are the size of a four-year-old child. That quoted statement does seem monstrous — until you recall its context.

First, to represent Israel she has chosen the right wing news, politics and satire channel that even in Israel is considered extremist. Second, she again omits the October 7 context.  A Hamas spokesman flatly stated “There are no civilians in Israel” — i.e., only targets in war. Among their many child victims was one infant whom Hamas reportedly microwaved to death in front of its parents. When Stuart attributes this monstrous “morality” to Israel, she not only blames the victim but charges him.

Third, Stuart’s allegation of extreme child abuse actually is true — but against the Palestinians. As Hamas has militarized their hospitals, schools, playgrounds, mosques — thus inviting their wartime attack — they have even more callously weaponized their own children. Their martyrdom culture encourages and rewards the very deaths of their children that they then bewail and blame upon Israel. Parents send their children to summer day camps to train as soldiers. Their schools — abetted by the UNRWA — continue to teach their children to hate and to kill the Jews. 

Golda Meir’s sad prophecy still holds: “We won’t have peace until the Arabs decide they love their own children more than they hate us.”  The West’s reflex to blame Israel for the Gaza children’s deaths only encourages that vile abuse to continue. As does Stuart.

Indeed she blames Israel for all the Palestinians’ suffering, especially the self-inflicted. Palestinians not Israelis set those forest fires (with no loss of Green Party support). Since 1948 the deaths, expulsions/departures and losses all resulted from the Palestinians’ choice of war over peaceful coexistence with the Jews.

This widespread antisemitism has a clear cause. A world with 57 Moslem states, not one a democracy, cannot tolerate the existence of one slender sliver of a Jewish state. While the October 7 savagery initially appalled the civilized world, within days — before Israel even began its response — there was an eruption of aggressive support — for Palestine! The slogans — From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, Globalize the intifada — implicitly called for the elimination of the Jewish state, the latter for Jews here too. 

Today we witness attacks upon Jews and Jewish institutions unseen since the Nazis. It’s as if the October 7 barbarity made antisemitism fashionable again. The recently unspeakable can now be yelled. And so we find the absurdity of Queers for Palestine, like Feminists, Christians, Artists, all campaigning against  Israel — their sole defender in the region — and for an ethos that does persecute and would annihilate them. Regrettably the press, many governments and many arts organizations have bought into that folly. Now add AGGV.

Only at the end does Stuart finally acknowledge the October 7 barbarism. She celebrates it! 

Early Stuart cited the invasive Himalayan blackberry which Burbank brought from Armenia, whose slaughter was cited as a historic precedent to the Jewish. Here it’s an emblem of genocide. When she finally addresses the October 7 slaughter it’s planting a new generation, like her blackberries, a hardy new crop — planted to eliminate the Jews.  “For the second spring since October 7, 2023, the blackberry hedges are blooming.” That is, more October 7s to come. The last one worked so well against the Jews.

Today’s cultural assault on the Jews is a clear revival of 1930s Germany. Here’s the compelling difference: We know what resulted then. Some then may have feared what might follow. We know what did. Yet we have willingly gone  back there, on the street and in the art gallery. If Stuart does not know better the AGGV should. Their students and their supporters deserve better than to be nourished on poison.

Numbers 13-15

At our Kolot Mayim service  this morning I had the rare privilege of presenting my reading of this week's portion of the Torah. Here it is:

(Numbers 13-15)

My deep dive into this text got stuck, of course, at the first two words: Shelach lecha. The phrase echoes Lach lecha — God’s seminal instruction to Abraham to “Go forth.”

Reb Google tells me that phrase occurs ten times in our Torah. That’s about twice as often as, say, the ban against adultery.  That could be paraphrased as “Stay home.” Of course, even a ban stated just once is still operational at every opportunity. But a 10-time commandment may merit special attention.

With Shelach Lacha God instructs Moses to “send forth” some scouts to Canaan. Both phrases are calls to advance to the promised land. The commentators contend that this going forth is not just to leave but to confront danger. The advance is not just in geography but in character, in courage. Hence the gloss in our siddur: “We don’t like leaving but God loves becoming.”

Or as my Bobba Bayleh might have advised,  Aroif foon dein tuches shoin, un gay mach foon zich eppes.  That was for our Jack. For some of you others, I’ll translate.  Arise already— and go make something of yourself. That’s the family Lach lecha. 

It could also be the essence of Judaism. It impels our tikkun olam — our duty at whatever risk to improve the world for humanity. Preferably without helping to eliminate the Jews. If not now, then. Tikun olam unites us even when we are driven apart.

Lach lecha even lies behind the very word “Israel.” Jacob earns that name by surviving that all-night rasslin match. To this day the Jew gets many a Dark Night of struggle. Inertia is no option. Nor is submission to the paralysis of fear. Of course — it’s hip to be hurt in that struggle.

It is just this deeper meaning of lach lecha that escapes Moses’s emissaries to Canaan. They go forth literally but fail that deeper thrust. They recoil from risk. 

By their report the grapes must be like watermelons if it takes two men to carry one cluster. But the people are correspondingly large — which scares off the scouts. They fear to go forth. 

They even exaggerate the danger: “They’re so big we feel and look like grasshoppers.” Why grasshoppers? Grasshoppers are locusts — jumping insects prone to infest. God used the locust plague in Egypt to support the Jews. But the Israelites forget that. They turn God’s instrument of support into feeling helpless. So they pour out their old whine: “Why oh why did we leave wonderful Egypt?” The gripes of wrath.

Only Caleb and Joshua keep the proper courage: “The Eternal is with us. Have no fear of them!” For that? The stiff-necked jerks prepare to stone them — but are stayed by the Divine smoke.

Now, consider how Moses negotiates with God here. When Abraham bargained with God he focused on the righteous people who might be saved from Sodom. Remember? What if there are 20? Ten? One? Will you take an IOU? 

Now Moses, instead of focusing on the people, focuses on God. He appeals to God’s self-respect. (That’s the divine form of our vanity.)

What did Moses say after the Golden Calf incident? If You kill the Jews, the Egyptians will say “you maliciously freed them from us, just to slaughter them yourself.” Not a good vibe.

And so again here.“If you slay this people wholesale” everyone will say “It must be because the Eternal was powerless” to bring them to his promised land. Moses asks God to dare to show the best of Himself. He returns God's lach lecha.

God rises to the occasion. Both just and magnanimous, he punishes the faithless and rewards the faithful.

By the way, that wholesale slaughter of the Jews? This is that rare point in the Bible where wholesale is worse than retail.  

But the story doesn’t end there. The stiff-necks screw up again. From the sin of despair they shift to the delusion of independence. Despite Moses’s warning the Israelite soldiers go forth in battle, “up to the mountain top.” It’s properly aspirational but against God’s instruction. They go without Moses, without the Ark, without God. So they’re destroyed. 

As God doesn’t have to punish them, the plot is paused for three demonstrations of devotion. On the edge of the Promised Land and after all these recent failings, that’s necessary. Two demands of activity surround one of rest. The first details another ritual of sacrifice. In the second, a dramatic incident reminds us that — the sabbath is something to die for — especially when you get stoned. In Biblical terms. 

Now, it has been some time since we mortally stoned someone for washing his camel on shabbos. But that period was the beginning of morality. That merry band of stiff-necks needed harsh reminders to stop making the worst of themselves —the anti- lach lecha.

The seventh day of rest was not just a holiday but a basic principle of being — beginning with God’s Creation. It defines life as a constant discipline. There are equal duties of rigour and relief, of impulse and control, of action and thought. The sabbatical of the seventh extended from that day of rest to the rules of servitude, to the organization of human debts and responsibility, even to the summer fallowing of the fields. 

There are equal duties in repose as in action. There is fertility in abstinence. Hence the old proverb, Abstinence makes the heart go fondle. (Yeah, I made that one up.) Or from another poem in our siddur: That open space is like the air between the logs that enables the logs to burn.

The third dedication we get here is —the talles! Or — the talleet, as you young whippersnappers have it. To me, talles includes alles, which is everything. Like the inviolable sabbath the talles is our distinguishing dedication. 

Symbolically, the prescribed blue evokes the sea and the sky, our origin and our aspiration. The straight lines are our brief moment in eternity. The golden collar is an ennobling yoke. The talles combines the collective flow of fabric with the individuation of the tsitsis, the fringe. Even those threads are both individual and intertwined. Like our people. In a room full of activated talleiseem we are a community of solitudes.  So also even when we wear one alone. 

What surprised me here is the purpose of the talles. It is literally prescribed to prevent following “your heart …and your eyes… and go whoring.”

That’s the Robert Alter wording. The Israelites are often warned against “whoring after false gods.” Alter elsewhere suggests that monogamy is a Biblical metaphor for monotheism. But as infidelity is a  real human temptation in its own right -- or so I have been told — I’d rather call it a parallel.

The Plaut translation is “lustful.” But the point is the same, succumbing to our lower senses. Remember, the Sinai orgy began with religious doubt. Then it dipped to idolatry — then sank into sexual anarchy. Of course, that was my favourite scene in the movie. But it was the Israelites’ lowest point. From their spiritual potential they sank into demeaning chaos. 

To ward that off, the talles gives our spirituality a sensual experience. It’s our last remnant from all those unimaginably rich multi-sensory rituals of sacrifice. 

The talles is tactile, whether it cocoons us over our head or it embraces our shoulders. The fringe entwines our fingers. Wearing it, touching it, seeing it, are a healthy sensuality. Our sensations of the talles check our temptation to run improperly loose, in the mind or in the flesh. To mistake weakness for freedom. Think anti-lunatic fringe. The talles recalls us to our strengthening dedication.

And for the talles on steroids we lay on the tefillin — an even more physical spiritual commitment — the box on our forehead, at our heart, our bound arm, by which we bind ourself to our highest address. With this sensual spirituality we dare to take risks, to aspire. We find the courage to get out to make the most of ourselves. Lach lecha. 

Which is where I came in. Thank you and good luck.