Hi all!
Wisdom Seeker, you asked how I'm doing. This
http://www.christianforums.com/t92756 is how I'm doing!
Well, we certainly felt this morning's 5.0, centered-on-the-northern-tip-of-the-Dead-Sea earthquake here at my downtown Jerusalem office! I was sitting here at my desk by the windows when the whole building (walls, floors, ceilings, etc.) began to shake. I first thought that it might be very strong wind & then a bomb but it was too prolonged (10+ seconds) for the wind & I heard no boom-boom. We all then realized that it was an earthquake. The radio news picked it up right away & all 3 local TV channels came on with special broadcasts. Wendy phoned & said they felt it on Mt. Scopus. Everyone & everything seems to be fine, thank God.
So...how are all of you doing?
This past Saturday we (Jews all over the world) read Exodus 13:17-17:16 and Judges 4:4-5:31.
Deborah (who features very prominently in the reading from Judges) literally means "bee". Our Sages say that this is not to her credit & in fact, that it is a kind of rebuke/reprimand to her to be so named. What did she do that deserved rebuke? In Judges 5:6-7, Deborah sings about our oppression at the hands of the King Jabin and Sisera:
In the days of Shamgar the son of Anath, in the days of Jael, the highways were unoccupied, and the travellers walked through byways. [The inhabitants of] the villages ceased, they ceased in Israel, until that I Deborah arose, that I arose a mother in Israel.
"until that
I Deborah arose, that
I arose a mother in Israel"? Our Sages say that God reproached Deborah here for tooting her own horn and placing undue emphasis on herself instead of attributing our deliverance, and her role in it, to God and to God alone. For this, she was stuck with the name Deborah "bee".
There is one parallel to this. Hulda (the prophetess, see II Kings 22:14-20 and II Chronicles 34:22-28 ) literally means "weasel" or "rat". Why was this holy woman stuck with such a name? Also as a rebuke/reprimand. In II Kings 22:15 and II Chronicles 34:23, she tells the men whom King Josiah has sent to her, to ask if the Torah scroll they found in the Temple (which our Sages say was the original Torah scroll written by Moses himself, see Deuteronomy 31:24-26) was the real McCoy:
Tell the man that sent you to me...
Our Sages say that God reproached her for referring to the righteous and holy King Josiah ("And like unto him was there no king before him, that turned to the Lord with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his might, according to all the Torah of Moses; neither after him arose there any like him") merely as, "the
man" as she would refer to any commoner or ordinary man. For this bit of
lese-majeste, for this slight to such a holy man, she was stuck with the name Hulda "weasel/rat".
The reading from Judges is one of my favorites, for lots of reasons. Deborah's Song is, I think, among the most poetically beautiful & evocative passages in the entire Tanakh. I love the imagery of Judges 5:20.
They fought from heaven, the stars in their courses fought against Sisera.
The very next verse, 5:21, describes how the Kishon River swept Sisea's army away:
The brook Kishon swept them away, that ancient brook, the brook Kishon.
The Kishon brook/river/stream (
http://www.kishon.org.il/english.htm) rises near Jenin and drains over 1,100 square kilometers before emptying into Haifa Bay, between Haifa and the new/biblical city of Acre. It used to be quite beautiful (see
http://www.kishon.org.il/time.htm). I say "used to" because, sadly, since the late 1930's, much of its lower reaches are polluted (
http://www.kishon.org.il/pollution.htm) to death (literally!), due to a large industrial area (which Saddam the Wicked lobbed a few SCUDs at in 1991) near its mouth. There, the Kishon is more of a filthy sewer than a river/brook/stream.
I find this so sad, that here, we have taken this Land that God gave us ("a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths, springing forth in valleys and hills..." Deuteronomy 8:7) and poisoned parts of it and turned them into obscenities, into blights. Surely God will call us to account for this! Was it for this that He entrusted this Land to our care?
There is one other passage in the Tanakh, in which death and the Kishon are associated, I Kings 18:40.
And Elijah said unto them: 'Take the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape.' And they took them; and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon, and slew them there.
(The association of the Kishon with death persists in the New Testament as well. A large part of its drainage basin includes the Esdraelon Valley, site of Revelation 16:16's Armageddon.)
And unfortunately, the Kishon is no less deadly today than it was to Sisera's army & the priests of Baal. There is a long-running controversy in Israel about a group of Navy frogmen & commandos who charge that they got cancer from being forced to train in the contaminated Kishon (see
http://web.israelinsider.com/bin/en...ho=Article^l2219&enZone=Security&enVersion=0&); several of these ex-frogmen/commandos have since died. Hopefully, the efforts of the Environment Ministry's Kishon River Authority (see the links above) will bear fruit and the Kishon will no longer be associated with death and will once again become the living river that it was in the near past.
Be well!
ssv
