I discuss the weekly Torah portion with Rabbi Rabbs every Monday at 7pm PST on my live cam and on YouTube. Facebook Fan Page.
This week we study Parashat Pinchas (Numbers 25:10-30:1).
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* Who was Zimri and what noble purpose was he trying to achieve by hooking up with that Cozbi daughter of Zur?
* The modern Phineas Priesthood believe the story of Phinehas and Zimri provides divine mandate for the murder of race traitors. The Phineas Priesthood or Phineas Priests (also spelled Phinehas) is a Christian Identity movement that opposes interracial intercourse, the mixing of races, homosexuality, and abortion. It is also marked by its anti-Semitism, anti-multiculturalism, and opposition to taxation. It is not considered an organization because it is not led by a governing body, there are no gatherings, and there is no membership process. One becomes a Phineas Priest by simply adopting the beliefs of the Priesthood and acting upon those beliefs. Members of the Priesthood are often called terrorists for, among other things, planning to blow up FBI buildings, abortion clinic bombings, and bank robberies. (Wikipedia)
* The Jewish tradition has great concern about what Pinchas did. It’s not generally the Jewish way to act violently on your own initiative. Orthodox Judaism is a conformist religion. The Orthodox Jew is expected to conform to the community and to ask his rav for guidance on difficult questions. If you act on your own initiative without consulting a rav, you’re a rebel.
I’ve had people in the Orthodox community describe me as a “Pinchas.”
* The plague that Pinchas stopped through his killing of the couple consumed 24,000 people. Sometimes a well-placed killing or well-placed torture can save thousands of innocent lives.
* Are any of the orgies depicted in Torah literature gay orgies or are they all healthy heterosexual orgies? Have you ever encountered sodomy in any of the mikvas you’ve attended? Was it weird seeing great sages naked? Did that diminish their greatness in your eyes?
* According to Artscroll: “Lust is constant danger of re-emerging. The way to deal with such a danger is to make the people understand that what they think of as a tempting pleasure is in reality an enemy, a threat to their very existence.” In other words, sex addiction is a terminal disease.
* After all my nasty work, I like Pinchas received the gift of a covenant of peace. I got my tranquility through Alexander Technique, psycho-therapy, and 12-step programs.
* Dennis Prager today talks to Harvey A. Silverglate, co-founder and Chairman of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) and a regular columnist for The Boston Phoenix, about how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent. The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague. In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. The volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets. The dangers spelled out in Three Felonies a Day do not apply solely to “white collar criminals,” state and local politicians, and professionals. No social class or profession is safe from this troubling form of social control by the executive branch, and nothing less than the integrity of our constitutional democracy hangs in the balance.
* Wikipedia entry: On August 5, 2010, lawyers for Rubashkin filed a motion for new trial after having discovered, that Judge Reade was more involved in planning the 2008 immigration raid at Agriprocessors′ Postville plant than previously disclosed, claiming that “federal law and U.S. Supreme Court rulings would have required Reade to remove herself from the trial.”[29] On October 27, 2010, Judge Reade denied the motion.[30]
On January 3, 2011, lawyers for Rubashkin filed an appeal for a new trial with the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis. In the brief, four arguments for a new trial were made. According to the brief, government documents that surfaced after Rubashkin’s conviction and not made available to the defense showed that Reade was involved in the planning for the federal immigration raid of the Postville plant in May 2008, which it sees as collusion with the prosecution. Reade′s “excessive coziness” with prosecutors planning the raid raised doubts about her impartiality in the case, the brief claims, and states that as a result Reade should have recused herself, and that Rubashkin is entitled to a new trial or, at a minimum, an evidentiary hearing.[31]
Following the filing of this appeal, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and Washington Legal Foundation (WLF) filed amicus briefs supporting Rubashkin′s appeal for a new trial.[32] What has united the three groups is the involvement of the judge in the case with the prosecution, as argued by Rubashkin’s defense team, which, according to ACLU′s Iowa legal director Randall Wilson, “immediately gave the appearance of unfairness.”[33] The ACLU brief says: “Mr. Rubashkin’s conviction should be vacated and he should get his ‘day in court,’ with a tribunal that is not an arm of the prosecution. Due Process demands it. The Separation of Powers Doctrine demands it.”
* Folks, the danger is real. Don’t start off with an Alsatian. Begin with a Chihuaha and work your way up gradually.
* Have you ever tasted the sublimity of God’s kiss, like the one He gave to Moshe? There was this blonde ninth grader who taught me, a mighty 11th grader, to kiss. It was a Saturday night. Jan. 1, 1983. Sugar Bowl. She wore Lipsmacker. I love Lipsmacker. I particularly love the strawberry flavor.
* Did you ever play Seven Minutes in Heaven? I didn’t. I never even got to play Doctor. I feel like I really missed out in childhood. Perhaps that’s why I am the way I am?
* Can a Reform synagogue ever get too gay?
* Should we restore polygamy? The Jerusalem Post reports:
A new organization is trying to reinstate polygamy into mainstream Orthodox Judaism, despite it being against the contemporary norm of Jewish law, and prohibited by the state.
The idea is the brainchild of Habayit Hayehudi Hashalem (The Complete Jewish Household).
It is being promoted as the Jewish solution for the abundance of single women, the Arab demographic threat and the male predicament of seeking extramarital relations.
A small advertisement over the weekend in the broadly circulated Shabbat Beshabato, a hand-out distributed in synagogues nationwide dealing with the weekly Torah portion and contemporary issues, quoted a paragraph from senior Sephardi adjudicator Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s Yabi’a Omer treatise, in which he wrote that it is a mistake for non-Ashkenazim to follow Rabbeinu Gershom’s “stringency,” according to which it is prohibited for a man to marry more than one wife. Approximately 1,000 years ago, Rabbeinu Gershom of Mainz, Germany, issued resonating reforms on a variety of subjects pertaining to Jewish life, and those who transgressed them were liable to be socially excommunicated. Perhaps the most well-known of these prohibitions is to not to be married to more than one woman at a time, despite the fact that this was common in biblical times.
The man behind the ad, Rabbi Yehezkel Sopher, saw no legal problem in his initiative.
“This is not about secular people who abide by the rules of the state, rather religious people. Whoever wants to take another wife – the Torah does not object to it,” Sopher told The Jerusalem Post. “We work according to the Shulhan Aruch, there are rules here.”
As for Rabbeinu Gershom’s excommunication ban, even for those who would as Ashkenazim have followed it – “that has been over for hundreds of years by now,” as its end date was the end of the fifth millennium according to the Jewish year count, i.e. some 700 years ago, he said.
