(לב) וַיִּהְי֥וּ בְנֵֽי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל בַּמִּדְבָּ֑ר וַֽיִּמְצְא֗וּ אִ֛ישׁ מְקֹשֵׁ֥שׁ עֵצִ֖ים בְּי֥וֹם הַשַּׁבָּֽת׃ (לג) וַיַּקְרִ֣יבוּ אֹת֔וֹ הַמֹּצְאִ֥ים אֹת֖וֹ מְקֹשֵׁ֣שׁ עֵצִ֑ים אֶל־מֹשֶׁה֙ וְאֶֽל־אַהֲרֹ֔ן וְאֶ֖ל כָּל־הָעֵדָֽה׃ (לד) וַיַּנִּ֥יחוּ אֹת֖וֹ בַּמִּשְׁמָ֑ר כִּ֚י לֹ֣א פֹרַ֔שׁ מַה־יֵּעָשֶׂ֖ה לֽוֹ׃ (ס) (לה) וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יְהוָה֙ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֔ה מ֥וֹת יוּמַ֖ת הָאִ֑ישׁ רָג֨וֹם אֹת֤וֹ בָֽאֲבָנִים֙ כָּל־הָ֣עֵדָ֔ה מִח֖וּץ לַֽמַּחֲנֶֽה׃
(32) Once, when the Israelites were in the wilderness, they came upon a man gathering wood on the sabbath day. (33) Those who found him as he was gathering wood brought him before Moses, Aaron, and the whole community. (34) He was placed in custody, for it had not been specified what should be done to him. (35) Then Adonai said to Moses, “The man shall be put to death: the whole community shall pelt him with stones outside the camp.”
How do we know that this man was Tzelofchod? [BT Shabbat 96b] The letters in the sequence עצים ביום have the same numerical value as the letters in the name צלפחד. [The Israelites desecrated already the first Sabbath, when some of them went out to gather manna, compare Exodus 16,27. Ed.]
"And the children of Israel were in the desert, etc.": Scripture here speaks in disparagement of Israel, that they had observed only the first Shabbath, when they desecrated the second....
What is the intent, then, of "those who found him"? We are hereby apprised that they forewarned him, specifying the forbidden labor...
(4) וימצאו, “they found;” this teaches that Moses must have appointed men especially appointed to look for lawbreakers on the Sabbath. One or more of these guards found the culprit, and the cautioned him. (Sifri)
...While the people were in the desert they experienced miracles daily, such as the descent of the manna, the protective layer of cloud, etc., miracles which testified to the fact that G’d had preceded the world in time and therefore was able to ignore the laws of nature. This man, in defiance of such knowledge violated the Sabbath which is meant to testify to our belief in G’d’s being eternal, predating the existence of any physical universe....
Another way of explaining the words: “the children of Israel were in the desert,” could be that seeing that G’d had decreed that the people would remain in the desert for a long time and there they would die and perish, the Torah came to inform us that amongst the people (even the elite, i.e. “Children of Israel”) there were some who violated such basic commandments as the Sabbath, Tzitzit, etc., so that even without the sin of the spies G’d might have decreed death in the desert for many of them. The reason such paragraphs are recorded in the Torah one after the other is to draw our attention to the reciprocal responsibility one Israelite has for the observance of G’d’s commandments by his fellow Israelite (compare Sanhedrin 27). If, nonetheless, Israelites committed such sins publicly this points to a failure of the principle of reciprocal responsibility at that time.
October 2015
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/
“From the 1890s through the first four decades of the twentieth century,” writes Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, “black criminality would become one of the most commonly cited and longest-lasting justifications for black inequality and mortality in the modern urban world.” Blacks were criminal brutes by nature, and something more than the law of civilized men was needed to protect the white public. Society must defend itself from contamination by “the crime-stained blackness of the negro,” asserted Hinton Rowan Helper, a Southern white-supremacist writer, in 1868. Blacks were “naturally intemperate,” one physician claimed in The New York Medical Journal in 1886, prone to indulging “every appetite too freely, whether for food, drink, tobacco, or sensual pleasures, and sometimes to such an extent as to appear more of a brute than human.”
Video: The Enduring Myth of Black Criminality
https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/404674/enduring-myth-of-black-criminality/
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-like-the-ideas-behind-defunding-the-police-more-than-the-slogan-itself/
...when Reuters/Ipsos queried people about “proposals to move some money currently going to police budgets into better officer training, local programs for homelessness, mental health assistance, and domestic violence,” a whopping 76 percent of people who were familiar with those proposals supported them, with only 22 percent opposed. Democrats and independents supported these proposals in huge numbers while Republicans were split, 51 percent in favor to 47 percent opposed.