[MS: Israel is under attack tonight by 400 missiles from Iran. Israel and the Jews of the world will fight back.
Before the Iran attack, this essay appeared in the Jerusalem Post:
"Jews need to arm themselves – with knowledge.
Understanding Judaism as a force for good throughout history, in Israel and the Diaspora, should be a source of great satisfaction and inspiration.
The answer to antisemitism is pro-semitism. Loud and proud.
Jews need to arm themselves – with knowledge. How many Jews have read Jewish history and are familiar with one of the most important stories of all time? Jewish history dates back 3,000 years and includes contact with the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Roman, and British empires."
DR. Paul Soken, Jerusalem Post see link https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-796587
[MS: Emphasis and editing added.]
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MS: Revised and posted as Iran missiles attack Israel during the night on April 13, 2024. The attack failed.]
From Daniel Gordis, Israel from the Inside, the image is from Israeli TV this morning:
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[MS: As the Jews face the Oct 7th war against Hamas and the IDF fights to rescue the hostages after Day 191, what are we to make of the tradition of Parshat HaShavua that instructs us to read, perhaps in some frustration, details of ritual impurity?
Must we skip it and find something else to read within our ancient/to modern civilization? Not necessarily.
After all, as Alter always explains, Jews are an historic people as well as as the People of the Book. There really was a King David and an empire of King Solomon. We read about the times of the Kings and the Prophets in this week’s Haftorah from II Kings concerning Elisha the Prophet. The Haftorah helps us interpret the Parsha and keep our Jewish Civilization intact and pulsing with life, despite the Jew hating, wars of terror and the slander about the Bible.
Alter and Rabbi Sacks - like so many Bible readers over generations - find a path. What looks - at first - like a remote forgettable Parsha, comes alive. That is our Jewish civilization - and our power.
On slander of our People: Rabbi Sacks explains Shakespeare’s story of Othello. Iago, the villain lies, uses lashon hara, and brings on murder and death. But: in a moral society, justice outlasts the crimes and reestablishes morality, facts and truth.
"It is a play entirely about the evil of slander and suspicion, and portrays literally what the Sages said figuratively:
'Evil speech kills three people: the one who says it, the one who listens to it, and the one about whom it is said.'...
Shakespeare’s tragedy makes it painfully clear how much evil speech lives in the dark corners of suspicion. Had the others known what Iago was saying to stir up fear and distrust, the facts might have become known and the tragedy averted. As it was, he was able to mislead the various characters, playing on their emotional weaknesses, distrust and envy, getting each to believe the worst about one another. It ends in serial bloodshed and disaster.
Hence the poetic justice Jewish tradition attributes to one of the least poetic of biblical passages, the laws relating to skin diseases and mildew. The slanderer spreads his lies in private, but his evil is exposed in public. " [MS: Emphasis and editing added]
[MS: Alter is the unique master and teacher of how the Bible delivers its messages, its “literary style”. Those messages are both religious and a history of Jewish civilization.
We must, Alter urges over a lifetime of scholarship, read the Bible in context of its own Hebrew storytelling (just as Shakespeare used story-telling) but also within a history that is real and continues right now in 2024.
The Jewish people in Israel and globally are slandered by Hamas/Iran (the Amalek of 2024). They slander us with murderous propaganda about "genocide" by the Jews in order to endanger Jews' lives. Moreover, they slander our moral superiority, demeaning our ancient to modern civilization, represented by the real Hebrew Bible, that Alter presents to worldwide acclaim.
Former allies are taken in by slander against Jews and our civilization.
They will not admit that they fell for lies and deceived themselves. Indeed, they boast of their idealism. Today they deceive others and attempt more murders of Jews and destruction of a mighty, moral and unique civilization.
However, the Jews, find in the Bible and in the history of the Jews, from ancient-to-modern times, examples of moral courage and fighting spirit. King David's reign, for example (among many others), dates from 1000BC. Over generations, Israel with its allies confronts Amaleck's evil slander with its Hebrew Bible, its Traditions ( like parshat hashavua) and by military strength and moral convictions of Israel and all Jews.
That military strength - though often undervalued before 1948 - is rooted in Israel’s formative history. The Haftorah of the Parsha concerns Elisha the prophet vs power of Jewish Kings, ie, military power and moral power.
"The compiler who put Kings together for posterity above all sought to provide an account of the nation’s history and an explanation of why that history took the course it finally did. The artful crafting of narrative was not one of his conscious aims. The deep-seated storytelling impulse, however, that drives so much biblical narrative manifests itself in this book as well ... " (page 431 in Alter's Volume, Prophets, Introduction to Kings.)
[MS: Alter explores the Bibles literary styles and its religious messages in his Introduction to Prophets and his Introduction to Kings. Alter's 28 Introductions and his Notes are essential to his translations and deserve wider reading. See on Sefaria the Robert Alter Collection of MS Sheets]
On Amazon, Alter's entire book The Hebrew Bible is available for about $75, a remarkable way to access his translations, with Alter's Introductions and Notes.]
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[MS: Revised after the Iran attack - April 15, 2024]