Over the last few years, visiting the Temple Mount in Jerusalem has become much more acceptable among Orthodox Jews than it used to be. Ten, certainly twenty years ago, only a very small number of traditional Jews thought it was halachically acceptable to go up to any part of the Temple area, basically due to issues of ritual impurity. Today, visiting the area, under Rabbinic guidelines, has become quite popular in Modern Orthodox circles, while at the same time becoming a political flashpoint between Muslims and Jews on the site, and beyond.

Lately, it seems that a week doesn’t go by without my reading or hearing something about the supposed clash between Jewish and western values. One of the key elements of this conversation revolves around the claim that western values - in fact, the entire western discourse - are couched in terms of “rights”, whereas the Jewish tradition is all about “obligations”, while the notion of the rights of individuals or groups is basically non-existent in traditional Jewish thought. 

Parshat Ki Tissa contains the sin of the golden calf. The story of that sin presents a pretty simple question: if the people of Israel were so freaked out by Moshe’s failure to return on time from his receiving the Torah on Mt. Sinai, and really thought that he was not coming back, why did they not simply ask his brother, Aharon, the high priest, to take over? This would have been an orderly transfer of power to the person who had been Moshe’s number two from the very beginning of the exodus story.

It has become a cliché that we are facing a leadership crisis. In politics and statecraft, culture and religion, there seems to be a lack of great leadership. Instead, what we see is a yearning for strong, emphatic, infallible leaders, who will take care of everything for us, and who, sooner or later, let us down.

In parshat Terumah, the making of the Mishkan – the Tabernacle – in the desert, becomes the Torah’s central topic. For the next few portions, we will be taught the details of the structure and the furnishings and utensils used in it.

The treatment of the stranger, the foreigner, the immigrant, is right at the top of the list of hot issues being debated today. All over the world, migrants are being singled out as a problem, a danger, a threat, and as not deserving of the treatment we reserve for full, native citizens.

לא, אל תגיד לי מה אתה חושב,

תגיד לי מה אתה מרגיש

No, don’t tell me what you think,

Tell me what you feel

Alon Olearchik, from his song, Tell me What you Feel

The parsha of Yitro, which contains the giving of the Ten Commandments, begins with an interesting story which serves as a preface to those commandments.

As the Trump fiasco goes on, with new outrages every day, I find myself constantly wondering: How did those people vote for this buffoon? Do they not now see what a mistake they have made? Do they really want this ignorant, bullying, petty, proto-fascist to be our president? Do they not at least feel some “voter’s remorse” over this pathetic, dangerous joke they have played on America and the world?

Well, the parsha tells us about a pair of interesting cases of “buyer’s remorse”, which might teach us something about bad choices.

An interesting dynamic has emerged in the ongoing Halacha Wars. The more conservative, oppressive, establishment team (the bad guys) has been trying to undo decisions made by religious courts which are not to their liking. A while back, a Rabbi Sherman of the Rabbinate grotesquely tried to undo dozens (hundreds, even thousands, I think) of legitimate conversions done in the framework of the Israeli army and overseen by leading Religious Zionist Rabbi Druckman.

Well, the massacre in Aleppo is reaching its final bloody stages, and we all sit around doing basically nothing. The butchery of the past five years in Syria, performed by Assad and his Russian, Lebanese, and Iranian accomplices, has apparently claimed close to half a million lives, and the number is rising. I certainly recognize that there really is little the average person can actually do, but whatever that little is, it is certainly more than what has been done.