Random thoughts

I had a thought about the Rabbinic notion of building fences around the Torah. I thought about Aabaah (Eve), in Genesis 3, in which she tells the snake that Shema had told her and Aadaam not to touch the Tree of Knowledge. We know, of course, that Shema said no such thing. Aabaah was, in effect, building a fence around the Tree and misrepresenting it as God's own words, just as Rabbinic Jews have been doing for centuries vis-a-vis the Torah. (And once the snake saw that Aabaah was prepared to misrepresent and, in effect, falsify Shema's words, the snake knew that he could persuade her to sin and defy Shema.) 

Last month my wife & I went to a wedding near Beit Shemesh. When they sang "If I forget you Jerusalem..." during the chupah, I said quietly to myself (and to Shema, of course!), "I acknowledge and testify that Aargareezem is the Holy Place chosen by God, not the Temple Mount in Jerusalem."

Also last month My wife & I went to the Old City of Jerusalem. My wife had to pay a shiva call & then we went to see the Light festival. While my wife was paying her shiva call, I sat with my laptop in a quiet corner in the Jewish Quarter and checked my email, did some work, etc. My wife had suggested that I could go down to the Western Wall but then dropped the idea when she realized, I think, that I have no desire to visit that place, certainly not to pray there. It really means nothing to me. Later we walked past the gigantic Hurva synagogue. What a monument and testimony it is to the Jewish penchant for grandiose buildings! Where did we ever get that idea? Certainly not from the Torah!

No plastered house can match the thrill

of a simple tent on a northern hill.