interesting tanach stuff

Shemot starts "V'elu" - "And these" - perh grounds for viewing it as joined to Bereshit. Parallels between mishkan and creation of world - in use of word melacha, references to shabbat, references to ruach Elohim/hokhmat Elohim, and in Bezalel ben Uri, because light was created first and man was created in the image of God. I mean, whatever, it doesn't mean anything, but it's interesting if you like playing those kinds of games.

Other stuff, slightly better, concerning why David and Shlomo in Kings are such yucky people, and why David is so useless in Shmuel, and why Divrei haYamim paints them much nicer - potted answer, that Kings is written whilst in exile and answering the question 'crap, what went wrong there?' it starts with Shlomo marrying Pharoah's daughter, and just gets worse from there. Shmuel is a book about the problems of kingship and illustrates that even the best king is a poo really. Divrei haYamim on the other hand is apptly written on the return from exile, and is about 'how can we build a nation when we don't have any political power but we have a temple and we're nice people.'

more politics

It's a funny thing that W is at a school which is supposed to be the leftest thing in orthodoxy - its students are supposed to care about humanity, they're supposed to be being trained as leaders to cause Jews to be examples of ethical living, they're supposed to care passionately about human rights issues (they even have prayer sessions for the Sudan) -

YET - many of the student body believe not only that Bush is the best thing for America, but that Bush is the best thing for the world -

and further, that the best thing to do with Iraq would be a systematic ethnic cleansing of all Iraqis who are potential terrorists. Now, how can this be? These boys have been fed the Holocaust-must-never-happen-again pap since they were babes in arms, and yet they sincerely believe that it's ok to kill all Iraqis who don't like America. This demonstrates not only that all that sappy Holocaust pap doesn't work worth a damn when you get down to it - it doesn't encourage anyone to be a better human being - but also that if this is the modern, enlightened Orthodox Jew, Judaism is really heading down the pan pretty fast.

I also don't understand the many, many Jews who say things like "Well, I'm basically a liberal, and I think Kerry would be better for human rights for the world in general and Americans in particular, but I think Bush is better for Israel, so I voted Bush." I don't understand how having a violent bigot, who couldn't care less about human rights, in charge of a major world power, is "good for Israel." Israel would do well if the world was generally a nicer place, and it does not seem to me that having violent bigots in charge will make the world a nicer place. And if "good for Israel" means "smashing up people who don't like Israel," this is only good in a very short-term sense.