Noach is a depressing person, and his parsha is a depressing parsha. Think about it - everybody killed in a world-wide flood, absolutely everyone. Only you, your family, and some animals survive. Depressing. The whole feel of the portion is negative, and that's how the Rabbis traditionally saw it. It's not just the the general lawlessness and immorality described in the Torah, or God's cataclysmic anger at that lawlessness, or Noach's embarassing end - he gets drunk, and has some sort of negative sexual interaction with his son Ham, for which Ham is cursed - that is so depressing.

On Thursday - Friday in the Diaspora - we will celebrate Simchat Torah, when we finish the yearly cycle of the reading of the Torah. We will read the final weekly portion, Zot Habracha, and, just as we complete the Torah, we will demonstrate the ongoing, never-ending - infinite might be the right word - nature of the Torah and our study of it, and begin again from the beginning, by reading the first part of the Torah's first portion, Bereishit. Then, on Shabbat, we will re-start the cycle officially, and read the portion of Bereishit in its entirety.

During the recent fighting between Israel and Hamas, I got a little addicted to Facebook. Along with 24/6 TV, it was very helpful in keeping up with developments, and also gave me the opportunity to help with the war effort by doing my bit to fight the good PR fight against those who would deny Israel its right to self-defense, and, actually, to exist.

This week's parsha takes us right up to the final section of the Torah. Ki Tavo begins with the words כי תבוא אל הארץ - "When you enter into the land" - and contains details about the first things the nation of Israel must do once they arrive in the land of Israel, which will happen after Moshe's death at the end of the Torah. Apparently, the very first thing they are commanded to do is this: "And it shall be, on the day that you cross over the Jordan into the land which the Lord your God is giving you, you shall erect for yourselves large stones, and plaster them over with plaster.

Parshat Shoftim contains the Torah's vision of how a Jewish state should be governed. There are provisions made for judges, law-givers, priests, a court system with rules of testimony, prophets and false prophets,  and, ostensibly at the top of the heap, a king. Kings have been in charge of counries, city-states, empires - all kinds of entities - for most of human history. We are lucky enough to live in a time when things have changed, and, in the west at least, most of us live in democracies.

In this week's parsha, Re'eh, we are told to not disfigure ourselves when mourning the death of a loved one. Apparently, it was the  custom among the ancient Canaanite people to wound themselves as part of their mourning rituals. The Torah tells us that we, as God's chosen people, a holy people, should not do this. It would seem that our being God's children should have a physical expression: it is wrong to physically damage yourself, even for the "good cause" of mourning. We should respect our bodies, as they are the bodies of God's chosen people.

This week's parsha, Eikev, is the third in the book of Devarim (Deuteronomy). It contains a section which is recited daily in the morning and evening prayers, as the second paragraph of the Shema. In the Torah, it appears a few chapters after the first paragraph of the Shema, which is in last week's parsha, Va'etchanan. In it, we have the basic statement about our belief in reward and punishment.

A theme that has been much discussed over the last weeks, especially in traditional, Orthodox circles here in Israel, is the question, What happens to all our apparently unanswered prayers? This discussion, which, of course, is not new, began with the announcement that the three kidnapped boys had, in fact, been murdered.