THE BRAVE NEW LAND

Well, last week I ended on a bit of a downer with what most of the news outlets around the world referred to as, “What the Israelis ‘called’ a terrorist attack,” intimating that it was somehow a… what?... maybe an errant m-80 packed with ball bearings that some hoodlum kid blew up, killing and maiming civilians at a bus stop, just for kicks? So, when I was trying to finish the blog, right before I left for the weekend to Jerusalem (of all places), I couldn’t really finish it properly. I just had to go with the flow a bit. Actually, looking back at it, the flow that I had to go with ‘was’ really what the blog was about after all. You know... the difficulty in understanding the idea that if God controlled everything, down to the minutia of time and matter, how could things like this (or God forbid even worse) happen? Maybe more on that later; but, that was last week and this is not, so… For Shabbat, as I indicated previously, we were in Jerusalem. We were, as usual, so ridiculously fort...

Based on our extensive reading and pondering of the pervasive mass of pixilated light that is contained within this blog (alone), the universe (great and small) from the Big Bang onward has pretty much zero, that is ‘efes in Hebrew,’ chance to have begun without a, for lack of a more PC term, Creator. From this blog alone, we also know, without a doubt that based on the MIT physicist Dr. Gerald Schroeder’s collective works, such as ‘Genesis and the Big Bang’ and ‘The Science of God,’ the Bible (the original or nowadays, the ‘Classic Hebrew Edition’) mirrors the absolute facts of the known universe and its nefarious beginnings to the way any known and respected science (especially physics and I don’t mean meta…) describe them; and I might add, in a way that is so uncannily matched that it will send chills (for better or worse) up and down the collective spine of humanity; that is, when we finally get down off of our oh-so-righteous and ego-driven high-horses and pay attention finally to...

First of all, while writing this I became feverish and am now spinning out words that may be truth or may be just reality; so, here we go... While thinking about life in this week of undoing, I could not find the path to tie together the parsha of the week, Tzav (Leviticus 6-8), but Purim, whose energy is written throughout the land from a time long ago, was whizzing around inside my head. With some trepidation, I found, that there’s just too much confusion to choose from, to much to process, and too much to organize and end with the total of a sum. You see, returning from Rome, I was gripped with a melancholy that wouldn’t subside, no matter how hard I tried. It may have begun, while there, in the land of Esau, when we had a night to remember with Yafet and the Irish, whom did not want us to go, but to stay and to slip to the dark side of seventy, a place where the chaos of Purim dwells. We were so tired from the day of uncircumcised giants in plaster and stone, from the painted ceili...

When in Rome, do it your own way. I know; it is supposed to be ‘do like the Romans’ but, let me take a second to explain. It all goes back a few thousand years when Jacob was encouraged by his mother, Rebecca (who was given certain information by God in a dream), to dress up like Esau and step into his slightly older brothers long red hairdo in order to receive the proper blessing. Now, I say the proper blessing, because, in the end, he did receive the proper blessing. Jacob’s was the spiritual, intellectual blessing. Esau received, in the end, the proper blessing as well. He received the blessing for wealth and for power in the world. It was Isaac that seemed to be confused and wanted to reward cunning, prowess, and just general manliness, with the wrong blessing. Rebecca knew, as do pretty much all females (sorry guys...), the right thing to do in this situation. Esau went on to become Edom, then became Rome through Antipater (King Herod’s dad) and King Herod himself, who invited the...