This week, in the Parsha of Naso, we have two somewhat strange laws back to back: the law of the sotah - the wife suspected by her husband of committing adultery, and the law of the nazir (nazarite in English, sort of). The former, which certainly raises many problems from a feminist perspective, tells us that when a husband suspects his wife of having been unfaithful, he accuses her, in the Temple, of the crime, and she is forced to either confess or undergo a trial, in which she drinks a concoction which, if she is guilty, will cause her terrible and permanent injury.

In this week's parsha we read about a variety of skin diseases which render the sufferer impure. There is a similar category of diseases which appear in houses - some sort of mold or discoloring in the stones. Although the precise details of all of these afflictions (there is a category in clothing as well) are somewhat unclear to us today, there is a very interesting dynamic that takes place when a smitten stone or stones are discovered in the wall of a home.

I recently saw Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", and was just blown away. Actually, in my case, he was preaching to the converted, as I have long believed that global warming is real (hey, I'm old enough to remember what a real winter is supposed to feel like, and believe me, this is not it).  Al's presentation was powerful, compelling, and, essentially irrefutable - though I know there are some dunderheads out there who are, unbelievably, pretending to refute it.

In this week's portion, Shemot, the Jewish people are enslaved and oppressed in Egypt, and Moshe begins the process of freeing them. At a critical stage in the narrative, at the burning bush in the desert, where God first reveals Himself to Moshe, He explains His plan: "Go and gather the elders of Israel and tell them: 'the Lord, the God of their fathers has appeared to me; the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, has spoken, saying...I will take you up out of the affliction of Egypt to the land of the Canaanite...to a land flowing with milk and honey'...

At the beginning of the portion of the week, Yaakov is described as having grown old; his eyesight is poor, he is bedridden, and he is preparing for his death and burial in the Land of Canaan. His son Yosef comes to see him, bringing with him his two sons, Ephraim and Menashe. Yaakov greets them while sitting up on his death-bed, and delivers the first of an extended series of death-bed speeches.

We are now in the book of Devarim (Deuteronomy), and, as we move along towards the Torah's closing portions, we see a lot of material relating to the impending entry into the Land of Israel and the subsequent battles which will take place with the Canaanites. This week's parsha, Eikev, has an interesting little imaginary conversation which takes place between Moshe and the Jewish people: