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[MS: Over 60 Sheets exploring Robert Alter's translations and literary analysis of the Bible's techniques and religious messages are in the collection on Sefaria: Robert Alter - MS Sefaria Sheets Collection, link here.
See recent Sheets on causeless hatred (Sinat Chinam) and on why translations will be inaccurate unless Notes are provided for clarity, (Alter's A Writing Life, link here)
Alter's translations are available on Kindle Amazon for a very reasonable price under $75. Alter, Robert. The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary. W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. Edits, reformatting and insertions by MS are as indicated for quotations below.]
Parshat Shelach
In several Notes on this parsha, Alter highlights military leadership - and its failures to lead with courage and determination but above all without "causeless hatred" among the tribes, especially over facts and strategy.
NOTES: Numbers BaMidbar: Shelach 13: 1- 15
3. all of them men. Rashi, followed by several modern commentators, proposes that “men” has the connotation of men of stature. In the present context, that might mean military prowess—a trait that would make the fearful majority report of the scouts all the more shameful.
4. And these are their names. These names are entirely different from the names of the tribal chieftains previously reported. Most of the names, moreover, do not appear elsewhere in the Bible. This could be an authentic ancient list of tribal military leaders, distinct from the tribal political heads.
32. a land that consumes those who dwell in it. As several medieval commentators observe, the scouts now raise the ante in their negative report. At first, they duly noted the extravagant fruitfulness of the land together with the fearful aspect of its inhabitants. Now, in their rejoinder to Caleb, they put forth an ill report (dibah) of the land itself, saying that it consumes its inhabitants. Jacob Milgrom plausibly proposes that this phrase refers to a state of repeated war in which the inhabitants of this land find themselves, at the geographical crossroads between the Near Eastern empires to the south, to the east, and to the north. ....
The multiple ethnic groups, moreover, of the land itself, indicated in the scouts’ report, reflect armed conflict among the various natives. The land flowing with milk and honey, then, is seen in these words as a kind of death trap: even if the Israelites were to succeed in obtaining a foothold and themselves became dwellers of the land, it would “consume” them through internecine and international warfare.
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Richard Landes - The Torah of October 7th - Shame and Guilt in Genesis and Palestinian Society ( link here) - pp. 3-4 & 8.
[MS: Hamas leads the Arab world in hating all infidels, especially Jews and Israel. The Jews are the cause of Arab shame because they win at war and survive.
But, there is reason to hope for change slowly, given the Arab countries within the Abraham Accords and the states like Jordan that have enduring peace agreements with Israel. Will the Saudis be next?]
"Sinat chinam is a Hebrew expression meaning gratuitous (or baseless) hatred. Mostly, Jews use it to self-criticize. ... The rabbis deeply internalized the lessons of the destruction of Jerusalem and inaugurated a massive intellectual and emotional project that fostered immense resilience in the face of those disasters." ...
"Hamas and the other supremacists make clear that the war with Israel is something of a conflict within Islam and Arab society itself, between the forces of shame-honor culture on one side and the forces of guilt-integrity culture on the other. Hamas’s diversion of nearly two decades’ worth of international aid — billions of dollars — to turn a small land with 2 million inhabitants into a military camp where the civilians serve as shields from the violence Hamas deliberately provokes, makes clear that Hamas is fighting to wipe out Arab-Muslim shame, not to free their people. ...
As the Global Imams Council has shown, and the rabbis of the Talmud before them, there is another way. Shame on those who choose to align with death."
[MS: Edits and formatting added. Richard Landes' important scholarship on jihad and his critique of Hamas' shame and deflect culture is explored by Daniel Gordis at Inside Israel, here.
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263+ Days:
Commander of Hostage Rescue - Operation Arnon
.....
Here is the link.
"Yet on the morning of October 7th, when Amir first heard of the Hamas attack in the South, there was never to him any question that he would respond. .... He said goodbye to his wife and children and headed South in his car; in his haste, his mother noted at the funeral, he left his daughters’ car seats in the back. He arrived at a staging point where he met up with his former team from Sayeret Matkal, the elite special-forces unit for which he’d been an officer. After collecting his weapon, he continued toward Kerem Shalom, a kibbutz on the border with Gaza and Egypt and the site of unimaginable slaughter. He was killed that afternoon by a Hamas ambush.
To Dr. Ido Hevroni, the lecturer for Amir’s freshman course on Western literature, the decision to risk his own life for his people was, for Amir, the most natural thing."
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Revised June 26, 2024