Tanach Thoughts

May this post be in merit of Dror Yisrael ben Rut Miriam (דרור ישראל בן רות מרים) for a successful operation tomorrow and a speedy recovery. "Torat Chaim". "Torat Netzach". Terms that sometimes seem too abstract for my taste. Not everything always seems relevant to our lives, and yet, everything is Torah and therefore everything is the core of life and the essence of infinity. These terms hit hard with the war in Israel, with regards to the parshas we're reading now. Suddenly, every parsha seems to be speaking volumes about dilemmas - moral, practical, halachic, spiritual - we all seem to be facing. For example, Avraham not stopping to think twice before leading his small battalion against a quadruple-sized army to save his close relative Lot - Lots of Israelis did just that during the first few weeks of the war. They dropped everything and marched to war to save their brothers. And how about Yishmael's arc? Yitzchak and Yishmael can only get along when Yish...

 Sometimes I wonder why we read through David's sins in smooth fashion, accepting and moving on, while when certain rabbis - or even non-rabbis - nowadays sin in similar ways, their lives are basically over. Is it because the media causes great hype? Is it because of (somewhat radical) movements such as MeToo? Many believe there was hype over the David and Bat Sheva story way back when it happened, too. But it seemed that people managed to move past that. And there were other sins as well - but ultimately, David came out alright, for the most part. By the way, I'm reminded of a story I heard from one of the rabbis in my yeshiva: One of his sons once went out on a date with a girl from a certain " kavnik " midrasha  and somehow they got to talking about this particular story. The girl announced that of course there was no way that David sinned. That's a very popular view that appears in the gemara, but it's actually the minority view in the gemara. The guy poin...

 A quick thought I had last night, before getting on to part 2 of the Barak/Devorah posts: I've been troubled in recent months as I realized that I was moving away from my old comfort zone of favoring both P'shat and Drash in understanding Tanach, and moving towards almost an entirely P'shat mentality, grounded in archeological findings and word etymologies, among other things. I was bothered by this because it felt like I was beginning to see the aRDeS part of PaRDeS (P'shat, Remez, Drash and Sod) as meaningless, which I know it's not. But in a sense, it felt like I no longer saw any point in these aspects. Well, I'm still making my through this forest, but I wanted to share a thought I had last night: I was listening to a class on the story of Palti ben Laish and Michal. The question is an oldy: How could Palti marry a married woman (it doesn't say that David divorced Michal) and how could David take back Michal, after all, a man cannot take back his wife ...