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Judaism’s Secret Spiritual Weapon

Feb. 19 2016

In a striking talmudic passage, four rabbis offer differing opinions on the Torah’s most important principles. Three are unsurprising: “Love your neighbor,” “Hear O Israel the Lord is our God,” “Man is made in the likeness of God.” But the fourth, improbably, is taken from a verse in this week’s Torah reading: “One lamb shall you offer in the morning, and the second lamb you shall offer in the afternoon” (Exodus 29:39). Jonathan Sacks sees this as a comment on the importance Judaism places on routine and ritual:

Much of Judaism must seem to outsiders, and sometimes to insiders also, boring, prosaic, mundane, repetitive, routine, obsessed with details, and bereft for the most part of drama or inspiration. . . . It is a matter of hard work, focused attention, and daily rituals. [But that] is where all sustainable greatness comes from.

We have developed in the West a strange view of religious experience: that it’s what overwhelms you when something happens completely outside the run of normal experience. You climb a mountain and look down. You are miraculously saved from danger. You find yourself part of a vast and cheering crowd. . . . You are awed by the presence of something vast. We have all had such experiences.

But that is all they are: experiences. They linger in the memory, but they are not part of everyday life. They are not woven into the texture of our character. They do not affect what we do or achieve or become. . . . [These require] daily rituals: [thrice-daily prayer], the food we eat, the way we behave at work or in the home, the choreography of holiness which is the special contribution of the priestly dimension of Judaism, set out in this week’s reading and [then] throughout the book of Leviticus.

Read more at Rabbi Sacks

More about: Halakhah, Jewish ritual, Leviticus, Religion & Holidays, Spirituality, Torah

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic