Re'eh -- On gods whom you have not experienced

Sorry, devoted readers (hi Mom!), I was offline for a whole week in Vermont, and so I missed posting Re’eh on (late) time.

In Re’eh, we get admonitions to follow only Adonai, our God, and not to follow any other Gods, “whom you have not experienced.” We also get some of the classic Deuteronomic admonitions to only worship and sacrifice to God at His Temple in Jerusalem, and not to sacrifice at ‘high places’ all around the land of Israel, as had been done in the past. These admonitions reflect a priestly concern during the time of King Josiah to consolidate worship at the temple, and to root out practices like sacrificing at stone pillars that bring Israelites, so the priests worried, perilously close to idolatry. (No matter that all the earliest ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob among others, are specifically recorded to have erected stone monuments at sacred places all over Canaan, and sacrificed to their God at those places. Such is no longer to be countenanced, in this Temple phase of Israelite religion.)

It’s easy to be flippant about the ulterior motives of the authors and collectors of the Torah, this oddest of collections: Well, this guy was making a power grab. This was an old ‘just so’ story about how a place came to be named what it was named. These are records of wars; these are myths that came from Babylonia; everyone tells this story of a great Flood; lots of nations had legal codes with language just like this one. What’s so special about all this, that I should read it still and think about it still and struggle still with its words, infuriating, evocative, repetitive, inexplicable, dull, ridiculous, contradictory words?

Matot and Masai

A day late and a dollar short yet again, folks. Matot and Masai were last week’s double-header parsha game, ending last night, when the rest of my family did Havdalah and I lay in a tranquilized stupor in my tempurpedic bed. Two parshas, I guess, for those pesky calendrical reasons I can’t wrap my head around; in other news, did you know Hanukkah is like, the week of Thanksgiving this year? It’s a-crazy, man. A-CRAZY.

A couple of weeks ago I complained about Balak to a Rabbi teacher of mine and he said something like “maybe you should skip the next couple of parshas for your blog, because they’re pretty tough to swallow...” But no, I am de-VO-ted to my parsha project, swallowing be damned. Anyway, I ought to know what’s in those scrolls I go to shul each week to hear read out loud in a language I don’t speak. I ought to know what I’m revering as Torah when I revere the Torah. Wait, I’m getting perilously close to having an Alanis Morrisette song stuck in my head, though given what’s been stuck in my head the last few weeks, an Alanis Morrisette song is a distinct improvement, which goes to show how very badly my brain has broken.

So: Matot and Masai.