In our age of Facebook and Twitter, we know all too well how fast words can spread. When I was a kid, we played the game telephone, passing a word or phrase around the circle by whispering it into each other’s ear, knowing that by the time it went all the way around, it would probably be transformed into something completely different — that was funny!
Popularized by Harry Belafonte in one generation and by the Grateful Dead in another, the song “Man Smart (Woman Smarter)” comes to mind for me as we read Parashat Pinchas, which contains the transformative and important story of the daughters of Zelophechad.
Do you consider yourself an idolater? I ask the question in a serious manner, for one of the main aversions, according to the Torah, is the path of idolatry, a path we witness in our parasha this week, Ki Tisa, with the Golden Calf. Yet, in today’s modern world, what does it mean to be an idol worshiper? Where are we to find the idols of today that we are commanded to avoid?
Remember the movie “The Truman Show” with Jim Carrey? It’s a story about a guy who, unbeknownst to him, has been living his entire life, since birth, as the star of a major reality TV show. The producers have created an entire fake world for him to live in, hidden cameras follow his every move, his whole planned development where he lives is a movie set, his job, his wife, his friends are all actors.
I love to be out in nature: hiking, camping, exploring the woods, sitting by a rushing river, listening to the sounds of the birds and other wildlife.
There are places in the Torah where many of us moderns have a hard time relating to our ancestors and the societies in which they lived. Oppression of women, slavery, animal sacrifice, a God that intervenes and directs our lives in a forceful and immediate way, to name a few. This parasha, however, is not really one of these moments. In fact, as I read through Noach again and again this year, I couldn’t help but think how much hasn’t changed since those fateful days, in primordial time, when the first humans brought about the destruction of the Earth.
Glenn Beck is a fundamentalist-extremist. His upcoming rally, on Aug. 24, “Restoring Courage” in Jerusalem is nothing more than a media-driven, money-making, self-serving, end-of-times messianic-lunacy circus show, and that is the very last thing Jerusalem and Israel need at this moment.
The aphorism “you are what you eat” first appeared in French and then in German in the 1800s, and was then brought into English in the 1920s by nutritionist Victor Lindlahr, the inventor of the “catabolic diet.” Hippie foodies later adopted the phrase in the 1960s.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously said, “In a free society, some are guilty but all are responsible.” I have been mulling that quote over in my mind since I learned of the horrible assassination attempt on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and the cold-blooded murder of the other innocent Arizonans in Tucson. Certainly, the main person guilty is the man who pulled the trigger, and he should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But, in Heschel’s formulation, all of us are somewhat responsible for what happened, for allowing our society to sink to such a level that our media spews violent rhetoric from prominent politicians and pundits without consequence; all of us are responsible for allowing the debate about guns and gun control, something that should be so sensible, to devolve into angry, violent reactions and prevent us from making laws that can protect people from the monstrous nature of daily firearm deaths in our country; all of us are responsible for supporting violent films and video games, glorifying violence on the screen that only serves to affect our children and our psyches. If we think it doesn’t have an effect, we are sorely deluding ourselves.
I love to be out in nature: hiking, camping, exploring the woods, sitting by a rushing river, listening to the sounds of the birds and other wildlife. I am blessed, like many of us in Southern California, to live within walking distance of amazing natural surroundings — in my case, the San Gabriel Mountains.
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