In Basel I founded the Jewish state

In Basel I founded the Jewish state,
Herzl wrote in his diary
after the first Zionist congress,
adding in fifty years
it shall certainly come to pass.
And so it did.
Fifty years later the United Nations
voted to recognize the existence
of a Jewish homeland
in Eretz Yisrael through public law
as Herzl had insisted and foretold.
It is now seventy-eight years
since the State of Israel
proclaimed its independence,
yet the United Nations now works
to trammel Israel’s thriving
by twisting public law into lies
that heathens of all stripes have amplified
and turned into travesty.
The Jewish question,
as people like to frame it,
remains unsolved.

Born two years before Israel,
I first encountered Hebrew letters
in nursery school.
By grade three I had learned to sing
Abraham’s get up and go.
Soon thereafter I graduated
to the great confrontation
between God and the man God informed
his wife would bear him a son
but the city where sojourned his nephew
would be destroyed.
Abraham plucked up his courage,
pleaded with God on the city’s behalf
and worked Him down to save it
if ten just men could be found therein.
But ten just men could not be found;
the city went up in flames
and burned to brimstone.
The Jews applaud Abraham
for his courage to ask God to weigh
the plight of the collateral innocent
when fixing the punishment
of unredeemable evil;
but they never sympathize with God
Who time and again has to destroy
to keep Creation alive.
Maybe they think God never cries.
Maybe they should think He does.
Maybe then they will see
the Jewish question
is only a question
for the descendants 
of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The Middle East

The Middle East.
A name. A joke. A cause.
A place on a map carved into states
like sliced short ribs
about which people can argue
the right and wrong ways
to do the slicing,
unaware that the story has nothing to do
with butcher technique
and much to do with deserts and camels,
orchards and honour, tribe and sex,
the whole lot chaperoned by gods,
some wise, some foolish
like their prophets
and the people who follow them.
The Hebrew God talks a lot
but the people He directs talk back
and certainly more than one.
The Muslim God says little
and only through His prophet,
who liked to keep a monopoly
on things as do the rulers
who follow in his ways.
Little wonder the thrashings
in the tents at night
are followed by murder in the morning.
Throw in some drugs and books
about colonialism
and orientalism
and you wind up with western women
pining for hijacked airplanes
and murdered Jews.

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Yes, the IDF is sitting in a little over half of Gaza. It used to be seventy percent, but US pressure trying to make its lunatic Board of Peace work forced the IDF to retreat a bit. To help Trump’s crazy plan which he claimed was going to bring peace to Israel for the first time in two thousand years, Israel for the first time has allowed foreign troops on its soil. But Hamas has not disarmed, has no intention of disarming, is up to its old tricks running a reign of terror in Gaza and rebranding itself in Judea and Samaria. Even the IDSF (Israel Defense and Security Forum) has long stated that the IDF cannot be in Gaza without Jewish settlement there, but only a few days ago Netanyahu forbade some Jews from conducting Elul prayers in the part of Gaza the IDF controls. Verily, peace, peace when there is no peace is as true today as when Jeremiah first warned over two thousand years ago.

Yes, the IDF now sits in southern Lebanon and its engineers are busy destroying Hezbollah outposts, making the latter’s shelling of Israeli northern communities difficult indeed. The Lebanese government, conducting talks with Israel under American auspices, keeps repeating its worn-out mantra that Israel must withdraw, UNIFIL must return, and the Lebanese army be permitted to disarm Hezbollah, which so far it has refused to do. If the Lebanese government were serious, it would send in its army to crush Hezbollah and assert its own sovereignty, but everybody knows this will not happen. Only the IDF can crush Hezbollah. The negotiations are a pure front to enable Trump’s ambassador to Turkiye of Lebanese descent and envoy to Lebanon and Syria to continue to run interference for Erdogan and add his voice to the chorus of Israel’s critics on behalf of the vile antisemitic president of Turkiye. The IDF also sits atop some of Syria’s Golan Heights, ensuring that no direct menace to Israeli northern communities comes from that rebranded jihadist country. But the threat remains, as it has since the state of Israel was proclaimed, regardless of who rules that hapless Syrian nation. More endless diplomatic negotiations are recommended by Israel’s American ally, pushed under the guise of deconfliction, which only allows the problem to fester instead of calling Israel’s enemies to pony up for peace. True peace. Not the phoney kind that exists between Jordan and Israel or Egypt and Israel. Peace, peace when there is no peace all over again.

Which brings us to the growing new threat that comes to Israel precisely from Egypt and Jordan. From the Sinai peninsula drones carry weapons into the Israeli Negev, recouped by Bedouins who channel them to Palestinians or Israeli Arabs bent on nefarious activities against Israeli citizens. To this one must add the tremendous increase in Arab crime in Israel, whose extortion rackets reach even into Israeli state enterprises in addition to the terrorism these perpetrators practise on their own Arab communities. What can this unchecked crime do but corrode Israeli society from within? And where is Egypt in all this, signatory to a peace deal with Israel that forbids its oversized military presence in the Sinai peninsula which does nothing but prevent Muslims in Gaza from leaving the Strip?

But the real and most dangerous existential threat to Israel, these other fronts notwithstanding, comes from the Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria, whose criminal hold is a direct result of the Oslo Accords which the PLO signed with Israel and proceeded to break as soon as the ink was dried. Much is made in the West about so-called “settler violence”, but the vastly greater violence comes from Palestinians who eagerly murder Israelis whenever they can on either side of the so-called Green Line. Weapons, many emanating from Iran, are smuggled in via Jordan. The IDF has had to devote considerable military personnel to prevent recent attacks, confiscate weapons and break up terrorist cells, but the situation continues to be problematic and cannot be otherwise as the Palestinian Authority continues to inculcate Jew hatred and violence against Israel in its population. As does Jordan, one ought to remember. Just the other day an Israeli soldier driving through a Palestinian village stopped at a well-known store to purchase a pack of cigarettes and was knifed by a sixteen-year-old Palestinian youth who had had a fight with his father. Muslim law directs one to respect one’s father, but killing a Jew is lauded and rewarded. The incident speaks volumes about the ongoing situation in the entire area of Judea and Samaria which can only continue to fester - there is no other word for it - and provide Israel’s critics in the EU and the Anglosphere with material to continue to criticize the only modern democracy in the Middle East and threaten it with sanctions on behalf of a gang of murderers millions strong.

All of which is to say that the real threat to Israeli citizens comes not from Iran but from the Palestinians, from the pathetic excuse of Palestinian society running from top to bottom which continues to regard the Jewish state as an entity to be annihilated. This refusal to come to any peaceful agreement with Zionism, with the Jews who returned to their ancestral homeland after two thousand years of exile, reclaimed the land and built up civic institutions resulting in their re-established state in 1948, has lasted now for over a century. It predates Palestinian nationalism. It is rooted in Muslim supremacism. It is carried forth on a banner of lies and intimidation going back to Ottoman days, refurbished under Muslim riots, murder and pillage during the British Mandate - 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936-9, 1947-8 - continued thereafter under fedayeen and reborn and rebranded under the PLO since 1964, supported by the Arab League and the rest of the Muslim states in what is known as the Middle East. Britain colluded with it as the EU does today, joined by Canada, Australia, and now a significant swath of American elites. And it will not end until Israel puts an end to it, because no one else will do that. If Israelis do not realize that after October 7, then the situation is truly hopeless.

The world-wide explosion of antisemitism, all the more shocking in western democracies, cannot be answered with better hasbara because contemporary western societies have shed all interest in truth and history. What is needed instead is to remove the source of the conflict so that all the Palestinian supporters in western societies will be deprived of their cause. Put simply, Palestine will no longer exist, not as a watermelon banner, nor as a sliver of territory on which people who call themselves Palestinians sit. Israel, in short, must conquer Gaza, Judea and Samaria, therein proclaim Israeli sovereignty and expel the Muslims who live there because the latter will never accommodate themselves to living peacefully with Jews, side by side, state by state. It is not the prettiest of solutions, but it is the only realistic one, given that the so-called world community refuses to call the Palestinians to account.

One more little piece of proof. I read today that support for Hamas has dipped in the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority not because the population disapproves of what Hamas did on October 7, but because it did not win. In fact, the Palestinian population in Areas A and B would vote for someone they believe will be more effectively intransigent with respect to living in peace with Israel. Clearly, the Palestinians are so heavily invested in their falsely declared naqba, which they falsely attribute to Israel, that they can only envisage another more deadly one. It is time Israel put an end to this “situation”. It is time Israel too stopped deluding itself that a negotiated peace is achievable, that neighbours who kept the doors to Palestine shut while Jews were being murdered in Europe are going to open them to Jews who managed to return home. Zionism is indeed the enemy, which is why the morons marching throughout the West in the name of anti-Zionism are also responsible for marching Palestinians to their doom.

Netanyahu, to his credit, steered Israel’s ship of state to its current position, which is much more secure in military terms than it was on and prior to October 7. He did that under pressure from the Biden administration that was hostile to Israel even as it offered some military protection. His government, working in tandem with the Trump administration, succeeded in bringing many of the hostages home. Iran has been weakened. Nonetheless, he too played his part in the casual comedy, as Yeats once put it for the Irish one. He too overemphasized the Iran bogeyman while ignoring the daily, weekly, yearly Palestinian threat which meant Israeli casualties in Israeli cities year after year. He too believed in the “conceptzia”, that Hebrew term which meant that Israel could manage the situation with the Palestinians in Gaza, Judea and Samaria; and he clearly still believes it. As do the vast majority of his compatriots, which is why I do not hold him responsible for the October 7 disaster. The astounding feature of the current elections is that the Israeli public still subscribes to that outlook as well, for many are willing to vote for the leader of another party who was himself one of the architects of that policy and still subscribes to it, albeit in its present version. Incredibly, the few voices who keep warning the Israeli public that the Oslo Accords must be jettisoned and Israeli sovereignty extended to Gaza, Judea and Samaria do not command a large following. Nor is that question part of the electoral debate. Israelis seem to think they can keep muddling through, while I keep remembering the fate of Or Eshkar, who was stabbed to death in March 2023 on a Tel Aviv corner I traversed six times a day for six weeks on one of my visits to Israel.

‘No more Or Eshkars’ should be the electoral war cry of Israeli politicians. No more Oslo Accords. No Palestinian state and no Palestinians in the land of Israel. Lucky are the Arab citizens who currently live in the State of Israel, though they too should be put on notice when their political party leaders have the gall to ask the EU to monitor Israeli elections. Perhaps they should ask the EU to monitor Egyptian elections, or Jordanian ones, or Saudi Arabian or Qatari elections should they occur. And to make it perfectly clear to Muslim Arabs all over the Middle East and to the scurrilous Muslim nations beyond the Middle East’s borders that Israel means business, Israel should demolish the Al-Aqsa mosque which the Palestinian and Jordanian Muslims have falsely claimed is in danger for over a century. There, Israel could say, for once you were not lying, even if it was your lies that brought this about. The Muslims have Mecca and Medina, and that should suffice them, just as Hagia Sophia delights the Turks. In for a penny, in for a pound, after all, meaning Israel must decide if it is willing to incur further western displeasure in order to protect its citizens from neighbours who are much more deadly. Ireland will not like it. Britain will not like it. Nor will Norway or the Netherlands. Spain will scream. France will pontificate. Greeks will assault vacationing Israelis. But as the foreign minister of Spain once quipped, few of them have nuclear weapons. Eventually the world will calm down. Israel, like Canada, is not without its resources when under attack. Maybe the West would prefer to do without Israeli medical innovations, smart phone technology, military defense systems or drip irrigation because a Palestinian death culture is more worthy of being indulged, though without a Palestinian presence on Israeli territory there would not be much to criticize and cavil. The world today is a very big place, and if Israel has to cut its ties for a century with the West to which Jews have been long attached, as it has had to do with most of the Muslim swath of the planet, so be it. Vietnam, I am told, makes excellent coffee. After all, why be fastened to a dying animal - Yeats again - when Jeremiah is still waiting?

One more note, since there is a linked issue which the elections in Israel have raised, but which also is not debated head on. That is the issue of haredi enlistment in the army. When I say it has not been challenged head on, I mean the main political parties whose leaders aspire to the premiership are not willing to engage the haredi establishment in a debate on its own terms. The haredi rabbis like to claim that Torah study is equivalent to army service because Torah study kept Judaism alive throughout the period of exile. Aside from the fact that the Torah itself did not shrink from commanding the Israelites to go to war when necessary even as it enjoined them to inscribe the words of the Torah on their hearts and remember it in their minds - King David himself went to battle with the ark in the midst of his army - we have to remember that throughout the exilic period Jews were exposed to wholesale slaughter. The ravages of the First Crusade in the Rheinland, the expulsion and expropriation of Spanish Jewry, the Holocaust and the Gulag, the expulsion of 850,00 Jews from the Muslim Arab states all occurred to Jews who studied Torah. Torah study preserved Judaism, but not all Jews; just as military prowess and technological genius protects the Jewish state, but not all its citizens. It behooves all Jews, however observant, to protect the state - and the land - which alone today offers guarantees that Jews are not to be trifled with, just as it behooves all Jews to see to it that the state does not get derailed by the niceties and intricacies of diplomacy which exposes its inhabitants to murder and intimidation. How often do I read that after October 7 most Israelis no longer believe in the two-state solution, but no political leader aside from Smotrich or Ben-Gvir can stand up and say the Oslo Accords are finished and Israel is annexing Gaza, Judea and Samaria? Why does the Israeli public not demand that? Beyond left and right. Beyond the blocs. Beyond the imaginary coalition and opposition. In the Book of Maccabees it is said that God did not give the nation for the sake of the land but the land for the sake of the nation. So too the Torah. All of it - the land, the nation, the Torah - are part of the Jewish inheritance. Together it is called Zionism. Let’s see the Zionist parties talk about it. And diaspora Jews affirm it.

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If you live long enough

If you live long enough
everyone betrays you -
your country,
your friends,
your children, 
you’ve even betrayed yourself -
and you find yourself
on the runway to the grave
more alone than when you first
arrived on the scene.
You walk along streets
you are tired of walking,
take buses from one stop to another
to buy groceries from necessity.
Now and then you see
little dramas that once made you smile -
breadcrumbs of the human race
whose story leaves you indifferent.
Only numbers do not disappoint,
and stars with their silver beauty,
and geology heedless of malice.
What is left?
Words and time.

We live in dark times

We live in dark times.
The grocery shelves are stacked
but we live in dark times.
The elites are mindless, their children worse,
their hands not yet sullied by Jewish blood
but well on their way back to history
their grandfathers fought to outlaw.
The shame spreads like the plague
though the people refuse to see it
until the corpses pile up
which the electric vehicles
will have to avoid or roll over.
But there will be no escape.
Jewish rockets will rain down
on the play-acting company
of the western world,
and all shall be laid waste,
For as they sow so shall they reap.

Bereshit bara (In the beginning)

Bereshit bara. In the beginning.
In the beginning there was nothing
and in the end there will be nothing,
and in between beginning and end
there is also nothing
though people think there is something
other than onomatopoeia
as happiness.
The living should bury the dead
and forget about love.
The living should also bury the killers
who would turn the living into dust
before their time.
The living should remember 
because that is who they are,
an hourglass of regret
and some felicity.

How easily the death instinct
rushes to the surface,
as if there is no time
to recollect those moments
of happiness,
no time to fill
the restaurants of boredom and resentment
with promise,
for what is happiness
but the promise of happiness
and what is the promise
but recollection putting things right?
I love flowers, she said,
Id love to have the whole place
swimming with roses.
Who would not?
To life, to life, we toast.
As for Proust and his alter ego,
I imagine him happy in bed
with his writing materials,
and his driver,
and Celeste bringing him breakfast.

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The professorate furnishes the theory and the rationale. Their students spread out into the worlds of communication, the literary and entertainment world, the civil service and the NGOs, and spread the denunciations and accusations under the specious cover of international law, human rights, settler colonialism and any other ideology which mobilizes the do-gooder sympathy of citizens for the supposed downtrodden. Jews are banned from sports competitions, music festivals, and publishing houses and when not banned, denounced. The authorities do nothing but issue platitudes, all the while offering support for a non-existent Palestinian state on behalf of people who have rejected every attempt at creating one that involves recognizing Israel as the Jewish state. These same elites neither condemn nor punish the perpetrators of violence and discrimination against Jews, while paying lip service to the idea that such manifestations are unacceptable. At the same time, they denounce Israeli actions taken to defend its citizens, adding to the pile of lies that circulate with respect to what goes on between Israel and the Palestinians, ignoring the constant Palestinian breach of the Oslo Accords since they were signed. Indeed, the governments of Western Europe, the Anglosphere, and a significant part of the American political establishment all collude in denouncing Israel, recognizing a Palestinian state which does not exist, and advocating boycotts of Israeli goods as part of a concerted effort to squeeze the Jewish state until it collapses. If you read how Nazis organized the extermination of six million Jews the playbook would be familiar.

But all this comes not from self-declared Nazis, but from self-proclaimed progressive camps working on behalf of what these anti-semites see as a noble aim. Such was how the members of Czarist Russian revolutionary left-wing parties also cloaked their assault on the powers that be of their day and wound up liquidating Jews in Siberian prison camps once they seized power. They are joined in all this by the over one billion Muslims who inhabit the planet, whose religion and history have inculcated them with, and accustomed them to, domination over infidel Jews. The Muslim street believes this and so do nearly all Muslim governments far beyond the Middle East with no territorial conflicts with Israel other than the fact that it is a Jewish state. Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkiye are but a few of the ringleaders of this world-wide Ummah, financing and abetting the millions of individual Muslims who have immigrated to the West bringing Muslim Jew hatred with them. And lest we forget, there are also the Muslim countries in the Middle East itself, like Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, who speak always with forked tongue and consider fanning the flames of antisemitism under the guise of support for Palestinian brothers totally compatible with peace treaties signed and projected.

When the Nazis undertook their program of extermination they made sure to enlist Jewish organizations under their control in a web of deception that ultimately led to Jewish annihilation. When the Stalinists sought to liquidate the Jews, they too worked hard to make sure the Jews contributed to their elimination through show trials and public confessions. The upshot was that the Jews, defenceless because they could not believe that what was happening to them was possible, that human beings could do this to other human beings, went to their deaths without organizing resistance until it was too late. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943 stands out as a belated and last-ditch stand to retrieve Jewish honour. What shall we say of today’s Jews with all that we know of the twentieth-century horrors that befell our compatriots? Shall we once again be lulled by the lies which our enemies, authorities and citizenry combined, spin so that we will be deceived about the true nature of the threat that confronts us? Or shall we learn from the past and arm ourselves to carry the battle to our enemies before they have succeeded in getting their hands on the levers of power to crush us with impunity?

Yes, we have Israel, the Jewish state. And yes, Israel is not defenceless. But it is under attack and so are we. Every Jew is a Zionist and every decent person in the world should be one too. If you are Jewish by birth but not a Zionist, you are not a Jew who is worth the word’s three letters. Together, the Jews of the diaspora and the Jews of Israel are engaged in the same battle. Israel has to defend the Jewish homeland and the diaspora Jews have to do so as well. An attack on Israel is an attack on Jews, as we see in the streets of the countries of the Western world where Jews live. The Catholic Church and the Protestant Churches have abandoned us. The musical bands and the homosexuals have abandoned us. The courts and the political elites have abandoned us. Calls to murder us stream from every pore of the society. Mayors involve themselves in foreign policy, denouncing Israel and cutting ties between cities that twinned with Israeli cities. Jews, Israelis, Zionists are attacked and harassed in cafes and restaurants. The writing is on the wall and it is time to arm ourselves.

Israel has to put an end to the Palestinian question and warn governments that actions to punish it for doing so will be taken as declarations of war. So will attacks on diaspora Jews. In exchange, diaspora Jews have to arm themselves and carry the battle to our enemies wherever they may be, making it clear to them that they will pay for any and every attack on Jews or Israel. How that would work should not be beyond the imagination of Jewish community leaders once they understand that throwing money and letter writing at the problem is not the way to go. It did not work in the twentieth century and it will not work now. Never again is more than a slogan. If we do not understand that, never again, which already is happening, will have turned out to be the greatest deception we have wreaked upon ourselves.

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Why?

Why don’t the Palestinians
do themselves and us a favour
and kill themselves?
I know it’s a shortcut to martyrdom,
but isn’t it time they spared a thought
for their neighbours,
let alone their supporters world-wide
who mobilize their daily energy
on behalf of that well-watched movie
called Murder in the Middle East?
And if they won’t, O Lord,
why don’t You send a plague
as You did to the ancient Egyptians
and let Your exterminating angel
wipe them off the face of the earth,
given that Your people still refuse
to rise up and rid themselves
of this generation’s Amalek?
And while You are doing that, O Lord,
why not also send down Your fire
to destroy the heathen mosque and dome
that sit atop Your beloved city,
then bid me rebuild Your temple
and anoint me CEO,
that I may name the clergy
who shall officiate at its service
and lay down the rules of succession
in this the third Jewish commonwealth?
I would ask for more, O Lord,
did I not know,
courtesy of a clown or voice workshop
I attended years ago,
that why is the one question
a young boy asks that has no answer.
But not so prayer,
as my grandmother knew
when she cursed out Nasser at my wedding
and wished him dead of cancer
with a lump in his throat.
I wish no less
for all the enemies of Zion.

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It is the task of the living

It is the task of the living
to keep faith with those who sleep in the dust.
But we have not kept faith.
We have allowed liars and snakes
to sweet talk and slither in the garden.
We have made pacts with murderers
whom people we call allies protected,
trusted in princes not to be trusted,
forgot covenants for the sake of peace
that is no peace and will be no peace.
Even the goat sent to Azazel
knew his atonement was worthless.
When the attack came the slaughter was great,
so crazed beyond belief no one believed,
but the body parts and photos remained
along with the rusted cars
and the corpses of those who ran
to defend the broken covenant.
Others soon followed, adding to the names
of those who now sleep in the dust
yet still we have not kept faith,
still not driven out the heathens
who turn the good land to wasteland.
Verily, I say unto you:
if once again you do not cleanse the land,
the Lord of Hosts Himself will no longer
keep faith with those who sleep in the dust.



 My life is wormwood

My life is wormwood
Rebekah thought to herself
when she overheard her first-born son’s threat
to kill his brother once his father died.
I am vexed and weary, she told Isaac,
because Esau has married out of our family;
pray you send our youngest Jacob
back to the old country to find a wife.
Because Isaac so loved his wife
he did as she did ask,
thinking it better to send the blessing
whence it came.
Rebekah calculated otherwise:
Jacob’s sojourn back east would be short
but long enough to leach revenge
from his brother’s heart.
She was right about the leaching,
but wrong about the sojourn.
Jacob took twenty years to return
and by then the blessing was in shambles.

My life too is wormwood
I think to myself.
Jew hatred has exploded
in the modern West
like the First Crusade in the Rhineland.
Foxes and lions, donkeys and brays
all pillory the Jewish state,
rage to kill it and kill the blessing
they are too stupid to embrace
and which we can send nowhere else
because now we are once again home.
To whom shall I turn with my request
to rid the land of our enemies
and send them back east forever?
To the government?
The people who elect the government?
The commissars of Jewish etiquette?
No Isaac loves me as he loved his wife,
and the blessing is still in shambles.

I feel much the same way writing another piece on Israel and the Middle East. How many times can one repeat oneself, after all, even when events have proved me to be right time and time again, yet still no one listens? Nor am I alone. The scribblers are all busy at work and the host of actors who keep the Palestine question alive and well with their various takes do so shamelessly. Even more surprisingly, so many Jews themselves do not seem to have learned the lesson that the whole business is one big charade in which the many actors - Palestinians, Arab Muslim elites, Muslims and Muslim leaders beyond the Middle East itself, western governments, western university professors in the social sciences and humanities along with their students who have graduated from the campus to the streets and from there to jobs in media and government, even in corporate life, Israelis still clinging to the shibboleths of left and right, diaspora Jews bemoaning antisemitism - cannot bear to put an end to the farce which seems to have no solution. Only it does.

The Palestinians could simply say enough to their self-imposed misery and declare for peace with their Israeli neighbours. They could but they won’t because their culture of resistance demanding the end of Israel has so penetrated the sexual and emotional core of their being that they cannot escape the mantra of the nakba they relentlessly pursue, caress and cherish. Locked into a death be not proud trance both religious and secular, they and their malicious patrons will continue to the bitter end. It remains therefore to the Israelis to put an end to this horrible drama once and for all by conquering what remains of the bits of land which Israel conceded to the Palestinians in spite of its military victories and expelling the Palestinians therefrom. In short, there is no solution to this mess other than Israel’s army conquering all of Gaza, Judea and Samaria once again, destroying the PLO in all its variants and seeing to it that the Palestinians leave. Where will they go? people will ask. Listen to me carefully, Sophie: anywhere in the wide wide world they can find a place, as surely they will. Of course, the clamour and denunciation of Israel and the Jews will at once reach a very high decibel, but no matter. Countries willing to go to war on behalf of the Palestinians will think four times before doing anything but condemn and slander the Jewish state, lest they too become the equivalent of the open-air latrine into which Gaza has now turned. With Israel sovereign from the river to the sea as it should be, the world will turn its attention to other matters, not least of which will be the medical and technological innovations Israel’s ingenious citizens keep producing, and which the same countries that sanction its leaders and denounce its policies have no compunction using.

As for the Jews themselves, they will simply have to admit the sorry realization that there is no other solution to their ongoing conundrum other than to rid their country of a people who refuse to live peacefully with them. No country can tolerate in its midst a population that refuses to abide by its laws and seeks its liquidation. Such a situation is a recipe for endless strife and ultimate dissolution and destruction. It is already enough that Israeli Arabs march in the streets of Tel Aviv to celebrate Nakba Day, while some move on to murder Jews at random, as happened only a few days ago. To have Palestinians from Judea and Samaria arming themselves constantly and crossing into Israel to murder Jews any time they succeed is intolerable. All Israel lacks is the will to stop this lethal circus and leaders who will champion this option. The solution is as old as the Bible itself. Moses warned the Israelites of old of what would happen should they tolerate idol-worshippers amongst them, and the Palestinians are idol-worshippers par excellence, not even stopping at child sacrifice. Indeed, they have infected the West with their idolatry via the entire ideological nexus of genocide, international law, ethnic cleansing, human rights and settler violence which the morally corrupt morons invoke to berate and hammer Israel. So vast and omnipresent has this nexus of lies become that the only adequate response is to give its proponents what they want. Or as our parents would have said: You want a nakba? I’ll give you a nakba. And if you want to upgrade it to genocide that can be done too, the word itself having become totally debased in the lexicon of Palestinian victimhood.

Listen to me carefully, Sophie. The Palestine question has become a death trap for everyone involved. The stink from the open-air toilets in Hamas-controlled Gaza has already made its way into the chancelleries of western powers, undermining the way of life of that thin slice of the globe which once managed to create a society that had freedom built into it. Unfortunately, even its elites misread how that society works and misreading it, misgovern it. So doing, they are also spreading wrong ideas throughout the population, making for a lethal cocktail. To put it bluntly, modern society is a complex society, institutionally diverse, where difference is rampant and welcome. But that creates problems and requires discrimination. In a way we are held together by our problems, not by our morals, but that does not mean anything goes. It means people have to think, to study and to learn, to know history as well as technology. We all have to be smarter than we ever were and psychologically astute. Slogans and memes are not enough. Indeed, the last thing we need are men and women without qualities, or antisemites. The last thing we need are more Palestinians. If anything, we need more Jews. But they too need to be smarter. And more resolute.

As I watch the looming Israeli electoral landscape nowhere do I see an outline of just such a solution to Israel’s security from any of the major contenders. Yes, there are Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, dismissed as usual as outliers beyond the pale of acceptable discourse. But when it comes to the motley group of aspirants to run the country, I see no one but those who long advocated simply mowing the grass as the way to defend it; and though Netanyahu steered Israel through a very trying time with much skill, he too has reached the time to retire with grace and leave a legacy that the country can improve on by finishing the job. But there’s the rub. For it was not only the Israeli leadership that had long argued they could manage the Palestinians once it became clear that Oslo was not going to work - even though they doubled down with the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza - but the entire population who bought that illicit bag of goods in exchange for espresso shops as good as any you could find in Europe or America. So what if they had a few knife stabbings and car rammings now and then? Other countries have traffic accidents, don’t they? It will be okay, it will be okay, people said, and carried on. Until October 7. But even though people now say no longer, meaning no longer is peace with the Palestinians in the cards, poll after poll does not indicate any political change is coming. And then of course, there is still the problem of haredi enlistment in the army, foreshadowing an Israeli version of kulturkampf. It used to be, in the old days, that Jews would only go to battle with the ark and the Torah it contained. Today the ultra-orthodox rabbis, both Sephardi and Ashkenazi, betray that practice and the prayers that celebrate it. Instead, their pockets full of state coffers, they follow the exilic tradition of turning godliness and goodliness into courtly wealth and power. Oy vavoy, Sophie, things are going to end badly. Listen to me. Listen to me carefully. I have not even mentioned the hammerlock on political power the legal guild is reluctant to relinquish.

And what about diaspora Jews, who need to stop writing letters to governments and voting for the best of a bad lot and wondering how they can improve the world because they still think tikkun olam is what the Ethics of the Fathers is all about? How about organizing Jewish militias that will take the battle to our enemies, make them pay tit for tat for the harm they inflict on us, force governments to do something serious to protect Jews and punish the offenders, Muslims and socialists united, who act as though it is permanent open hunting season on the Jews? And why not when European governments want to haul Israeli ministers before the courts for crimes when the latter arrest and simply deport the gangsters who tried to run the Gaza blockade? Those impostors should have been thrown in jail for what they did and their governments have had to negotiate their release and pay for it. Instead Ben-Gvir forced them to listen to the Israeli anthem with their hands tied and their behinds in the air like good Muslims at prayer. Hardly rape and torture, but what lies will the antisemites not promote when their compatriots haul Jews out of parades marking European liberation from Nazi rule, as they recently did in Italy? It’s the Zios, they will say, to whom they object, but every Jew is a Zionist; it comes with the inheritance. Like Italy to the Italians, or Ireland to the Irish, even when expatriates, even unto the fifth or tenth generation. Only misguided Jews think otherwise.

The world is clearly askew, as it often is. Once again, strangely, we live in dark times. But Israel by all comparative accounts is thriving, and if it will only put an end to this endless predicament and noxious issue called Palestine, it shall once again do the world a favour which the world is unable to appreciate. Listen to me carefully, Sophie. I shall not speak again.

But the Jews do not get that. And they do not get it because even at Sinai they were ambiguous about the covenant onto which they had signed. The incident of the golden calf was a sin of enormous proportions, which means it was a traumatic event that has scarred Jewish history ever since. Until Jews confront it, see how they reproduce it in every generation even as they recite in the Passover Haggadah how in every generation our enemies rise up against us but God delivers us from them, they will not assume responsibility for their actions. They will bemoan, they will criticize, they will try to find a way out of the dilemma of Jew hatred which travels from one part of the globe to another; they will even try to seduce their enemies into making peace with them and pretend they have allies when they do not. They will do all that but they will not do the one thing that would cut the gordian knot and allow the Jews who have returned to their ancestral homeland to live in peace every man and woman under their fig tree and not be afraid when they wander about this spectacular land as if it were the open air synagogue it truly is. And if they do not confront the trauma it is because they do not read and re-read the Bible, many of them consigning it to the dustbin of history as religious dogma which would constrain the desires modernity has now placed within their reach, including the sentiment that the wolf shall lie down with the lamb in the paradisal version of utopia they assign to history and apply today to their conundrum with Palestinians.

But the Hebrew Bible is proof enough of the disaster that befalls a people when they hearken not to the voice of God that speaks through the Law He gave down at Sinai and which Moses fleshed out in four of his five books and especially in the Book of Leviticus. Indeed, Leviticus is the one book people, modern people, are glad to skip over because it is replete with laws governing the relationship between men and women and between humans and God. Pages and pages of sacrifices in all their picky detail interspersed with pages and pages of rules for how we treat our bodies. Boring, they say, and understandably, because modern men and women do not cherish the thought that the self is not the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong, good and evil, where everyone, after all, is entitled to his or her opinion but not pay for it. But the Lord was not fooling around when He said it was a terrible thing He was doing, taking one people out of another to take them to a land where they would then have to drive out the inhabitants in order for the difference that would make a difference He was trying to establish to take hold. That difference was truly miraculous, for it held that henceforth everyone in the Hebrew commonwealth would be equal in so far as everyone would be subject to the law. And in this sense ancient Israel did become the seedbed society of the West. Martin Luther hurled the Hebrew Bible at the Catholic Church, inaugurating a process of reform, bloodthirsty though it was, that led to political equality for people of different faiths. The founding fathers of the American Revolution also looked to the Hebrew Bible as they sought to carve out a republic that would preserve its citizens from the scourge of tyranny. As for the rule of law, it is not merely ideological hyperbole, as the marxists and all who think in their vein maintain, but a complex system of rules which requires deliberation and pleading and judgment so that people will be held accountable for their actions as the price they pay for their freedom from tyranny.

Which is the real meaning of the Book of Leviticus and all the chapters and stories that make up the Hebrew Bible for thousands of pages. Do not shed blood. Do not even eat of the blood, for the life of the flesh is in the blood. Do not lie with man as with woman, an injunction useful for homosexuals because that is exactly what they do not do, although today they would deny that, demanding the right to marry because that is what a man who lies with woman may do. Do not covet what your neighbour has, the tenth commandment wisely asks us to abjure, which again the virtue-seeking modern person would criticize in his or her quest to render everyone equal to everyone else, an impossible task given the plethora of differences which makes us all different from one another in spite of our common morphology. But goyim no less than Jews have thought they know better than God Himself and have already tried to do precisely that, not paying much attention to Marx’s dictum that atheism is the first step to communism; and the fact that communism led to totalitarianism with its untold deaths and horrors has not stopped a new generation of true believers to set their shoulders to this ungodly task. As for those who claim religion is not for them because God is a fairy-tale they do not believe in, the only rejoinder one can make is that it is not God you have to believe in; you only have to read His story. And if you are Jewish and observe the Passover or celebrate the Jewish New Year, know that you cannot sit down to the meal without inviting God to do so as well. For He is part of the family, and as everyone knows you do not choose your family.

Judaism in this sense stands alone, a light still shining brightly from atop Sinai if people will have but the sense to read the Hebrew Bible and meditate upon the text. Not only has it no connection to Islam, whose holy text contains no stories, only dogma which demands nothing but obedience and imposes itself only by the sword. It also stands in opposition to the New Testament whose apostate Jewish authors faithfully reproduced its stye, but whose central story stands in stark contrast to the central story of the Hebrew Bible. In the Passion of Christ the first-born son is indeed murdered, and not any son but the only begotten son of God Himself, thereby transgressing the first and oft-repeated injunction of the Hebrew Bible: thou shall not kill thy children. Little wonder that the now suppressed religious sensibility of the once Christian West resurfaces in its secular hostility to the only Jewish state on Earth.

It behooves Jews, therefore, to read and re-read this Bible which is their inheritance, for it contains wisdom that has informed the stories people have been telling themselves through the ages, all of them variations on a theme, that theme being how men and women are blind to their passions which, once followed, lead them into trouble, very great trouble indeed. Shakespeare knew it, as no doubt he knew his Hebrew Bible, the curses he had the Dowager Queen Margaret in Richard the Third spew forth on the upstart murderous villain as venomous as anything Moses laid out for his miscreant children of Israel. Tolstoy also knew it when he had Anna Karenina hurl herself under a train. And Robert Musil knew it when he wrote his great anti-utopian novel, A Man Without Qualities, when he had the protagonist’s father explain the dangers that awaited the law once mental illness became an admissible defence for murder. Perhaps one can understand the overly long focus on sacrifices in the three middle books of the Hebrew Bible as God’s way of telling people that if you must follow your passions, at least channel them in a way that would lead you to recognize their consequences and provide you with a path for atonement that would lead you to avoid its necessity. One more good reason for Israel to raze the Al-Aksa mosque, dismantle its neighbouring Dome of Omar to be sent to Damascus or Riyadh, and rebuild the Temple where Jews could bring their yearnings and hopes for the future.

Perhaps that too is the message of the drunken debacle at Sinai and all that followed. For every time Jews read that story they have to ask themselves the question: are we done with our ambiguity about signing onto the covenant about which we said we will do and we will listen? Are we finally ready to leave the Book of Genesis, leave the children of Jacob behind and become the children of Israel, one nation under God, sovereign in our land and ready to claim it in its entirety in accordance not only with the right conferred by war and international law, but also with the word of God Who brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, because finally we have decided to leave Egypt and never return? So may it be His will and ours, and let us say amen. Amen and amen. Amen selah.

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And Moses blessed the children of Israel as follows. God came from Sinai and shone from Seir to bring you the blessing of the law, and the law shall bind you, sons of Jacob, into the kingdom of Israel. Let Reuben multiply. Let Judah contend for his brethren and Levi teach them, poor Levi who knew not his father and mother and had no time to acknowledge son or brother. And may You, Lord, be with them, that the people may heed the Urim and Tummim and the loins of their enemies collapse in fear. Let Benjamin be God’s friend and may God dwell in his shoulder. Let Joseph enjoy again the fruits of the heaven and the deep, the fullness of the earth and its everlasting hills, and the goodwill of Him Who dwelled in the bush. And may his horns be the horns of the wild ox that gore the peoples of the earth, the thousands of Menashe and the tens of thousands of Ephraim. Let Zebulun rejoice in his going out and Issachar in his staying home, and between them let them suck the abundance of the seas and the hidden treasures of the sand. Let Gad who ravages like a lioness be bolstered; for he shall rule and execute righteousness. Let Dan like a lion’s whelp leap forth from Bashan. Let Naphtali possess the sea and the south, rich with the blessing of the Lord. Let Asher dip his foot in oil and his strength be as great as his days are long. And may Israel dwell in safety in a land of corn and wine, where God shall bathe you in His dew and shield you with His sword. For your enemies shall dwindle before you and you shall tread on their high places. And always God in His splendour shall ride the skies above you.

When he had finished blessing the children of Israel, Moses did not gather his feet beneath the bedclothes, nor did he turn to the wall and expire, but slowly and calmly arose and walked through the assembled throng. As he walked the people stood aside, forming two walls of human souls as once the sea they had crossed had formed two walls of water. Some bowed their heads as he passed. Some looked him straight in the eye as their own welled up with tears. Some tried to smile, hoping to shine on him the light he had so long shone on them. Now and then a baby cried out. Youngsters in their parents’ arms watched with their mouths open, their eyes fixed on the man and the crowd while on and on he walked, down the path they parted for him until all human cries were beyond his hearing. Into the plain of the Aravah he walked, over its stones and sand, until he came to the foot of the mountain and started to climb it. For a while the Israelites in the camp could still see him, but as he climbed he grew smaller and yet again smaller, until people could only think they saw him. Over here, someone said, and another voice answered no, over there. But it was all guesswork, for Moses had vanished into the mountain as though it had consumed him.

But the mountain had not consumed him. For Moses made it to the top and looked out on the land as the Lord had promised him. And for the last time he talked with God, Who showed him the purpose that had really consumed him. They will go there, God assured him, and inherit your blessing, as far as the sea beyond Judah’s hills, across the valley of Jericho into the southern plains, north of Gilead to Dan and the land of Naphtali. You can even see the heartlands of Menashe and Ephraim, doubly, doubly blessed in the book you left behind. When Moses had seen, he let himself down into a cleft of the mountain that no one ever discovered, and died as he had learned to live, a servant of the Lord. And the children of Israel, who this time did not await his return, mourned him for thirty days in the plains of Moab and remembered all he had done to bring them out of Egypt, remembered the signs and the wonders, the mighty hand and the great terror. But when they would be settled in the land, they would remember the book he had written; remember it, forget it, and become it.

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As for me, Moses said to the sea of faces that rippled as far as the mountain opposite, I shall not cross over and that is no great matter. For the Lord Who forbade me to go shall go with you, and He will deliver unto you the nations you shall dispossess as He delivered Sihon and Og, the Amorite kings, into your hands. And you shall do unto them all that I commanded you to do. Be strong, therefore, and courageous and fear them not, for God will not fail you or forsake you, as He has not failed or forsaken me. And Moses turned to Joshua, and before all the congregation of Israel that stood before him like a murmur of his own heart, charged Joshua also to be strong and courageous, for you shall lead them, Moses assured him, and God shall be with you as He was with me, and they shall inherit the land He has always promised. Only be not dismayed at whatever they do, Moses added as he surveyed the crowd that swayed before them like a wave of wheaten fear in the desert wind, for they are capable of much, as we both well know. But if you are steadfast, God shall be steadfast with you.

Then Moses turned to the priests and charged them to read this law to the children of Israel at the end of every seven years, at the feast of Succot, when all Israel shall gather at the place God has chosen to dwell therein. For then you shall be in the land and enjoy its fruits, but your children and your children’s children will not have heard the law as you have heard it and seen it in your desert hardships, and known as you have known the fire that consumes the fire of the burnt offering. Thus shall they learn to fear God and follow in His ways, that their days may be prolonged on the land He has given you.

As Moses finished his charge, he went with Joshua to the tent where he talked to the Lord in His glory. The people watched from a distance as the cloud of the Lord descended and wrapped them in its mystery. And out of the cloud Joshua heard God’s voice speak to His servant Moses. Behold, the voice told Moses, you are about to die, and Joshua shall lead the people you have led these many years across the Jordan. But the time shall come when they shall forsake Me. They will grow fat on the fat of the land and forget the covenant that brought them there. Then they shall worship other gods, carved by human hand and conceived by human thought, and My anger shall be kindled against them. I shall turn My face from them and they shall be afflicted by so many evils they will cry out in amazement and regret, saying: have not these evils befallen us because God is not among us? But I will not heed their cries. They shall flounder in their distress and I shall not come to their rescue, but this song shall be My witness that I have warned them and forewarned them. For I know this people, know their crooked hearts and their penchant for outsmarting even themselves, quick to give their word and quick to break it, long before I have brought them to the land I swore to them. Write down this song, therefore, and sing it to the children of Israel, that its words may echo in their ears to convict them of the temptation they will be unable to deter. But let Joshua be of strong heart and good cheer, for his work is to settle My people in the land, not save them from the sins of their settlement. And this he shall do, and your spirit shall go with him.

So Moses told Joshua when he saw how Joshua had paled at what he had heard from the midst of the cloud. Then Moses wrote this coda to his book of laws and gave it to the Levites to place in the ark of the covenant. As a witness against the children of Israel, he said, so that all should know, Joshua and the people he will lead across the Jordan. For I know, said Moses, addressing now the entire assembly of Israel, how in my lifetime you have resisted the Lord and mutinied against Him, and know you shall do so after my death. And Moses looked out on the mass of faces that did not believe his words, smiled at them, at Joshua, at God, wondered if he too completely believed the words he was about to pronounce. For what is a man who speaks a truth he abhors and what is his life whose joy is its sorrow? But this man who has done what he did and seen God in all His glory lifted up his voice once again and sang God’s song to the children of Israel who would deal corruptly with the Lord and reap the evil they will do in His sight. And this was the song.

Give ear, o earth and heavens, to my words that drop as the dew upon the herb, for they speak of the glory that began as light and the power that comforts like a rock. I proclaim the name of God, faithful and just across the arc of time, Whom corruption runs off like water that has never fallen. But not His children, who requite the Lord with mockery and oblivion, lusting after foreign gods and forgetting the stories of old, when He separated them from the peoples and settled them within their borders. For Jacob was His inheritance, a gift He gave to all the nations, plucked from the cauldron of Egypt. As a mother bird he watched over them; on His eagle wings He carried them. Alone He brought them through the wilderness; no other gods were with Him. He gave them honey from the flinty rock and they ate from the fruit of the land, curd and wine and the fat of the lamb. But abundance proved their undoing and routine their forgetting. Wealth and power became their custom and the gods of their neighbors became their friends. The rains they thought their due, the desert their misfortune, and the stories of their forefathers bedtime tales fit for children. What is a rock but the earth, they said, and what is light but a star. And so they consulted any wisdom but not the Book of the Lord. And the Lord’s wrath was kindled, for they roused Him to jealousy. I will hide my face from them, He said in His rage; I will send a vile nation to destroy them and blot out their memory from among the nations. And when their enemies, whose tongues speak venom and whose hearts burst with the poison of asps, boast that their might has done this, I will smite them too. My arrows will drink their blood and My fire will devour their flesh, for they are a no-people and their gods are no-gods. And all shall know that I am the Lord, Judge and Avenger of My people.

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Drawn from the waters I was, and maybe that’s all anybody is. I never wanted the job, told Him straight away it was not for me. But God insisted I was the man and saw to it that I became him. The hidden things are indeed His, but what is left to us? The accidents of birth, of the way your heart is twisted around itself and others’ are twisted around theirs, and of the choices you turn that into. To go, to stay. To linger, to hurry. To listen, to murmur. And no way to know if the choice is right except in the short run of a lifetime. So why do I talk to them of the days to come as if I were a bush that burns but is not consumed, I who shortly shall be consumed and my eyes closed on this people I cannot do without? What pleases me other than the simple fact that we are here to tell the tale? Here and not in the iron furnace of Egypt. And that I long to see them live long in the land and prosper, and shall long for that forever.

And again, for one last time, Moses addressed the assembly of Israel gathered outside his tent. When you cross the Jordan, he told them, taking up his speech as a traveler takes up his bag, you shall build yourself a wall of stones and plaster them with plaster and write upon them the words of this law. And you shall build an altar of unhewn stones and sacrifice your peace offerings to God upon it. And six of you shall stand upon Mount Gerizim to receive the blessing and six upon Mount Ebal to receive the curse. And when you are so placed the Levites will cry out so all of you can hear and answer. And this is what they shall cry. Cursed be the man who makes a graven image. Cursed be he who dishonours his father or mother. Cursed be he who removes his neighbour’s landmark. Cursed be he who makes the blind go astray. Cursed be he who perverts justice due the stranger, the orphan and the widow. Cursed be he who lies with his father’s wife. Cursed be he who lies with any manner of beast. Cursed be he who lies with his sister. Cursed be he who lies with his mother-in-law. Cursed be he who smites his neighbour in secret. Cursed be he who takes a bribe to kill an innocent person. Cursed be he who does not uphold all these laws. And to each of these curses you shall answer amen, you who are on Mount Gerizim as you who are on Mount Ebal, for the six tribes who stand on Mount Gerizim are no better than the six who stand on Mount Ebal. One people are you all, from Reuben to Naphtali, and to all of you belongs the choice whether to embrace this covenant or not.

Embrace it, I urge you, for to embrace it is to choose life, that you and your children and your children’s children may live long and prosper in the land you are about to enter and conquer and possess. Remember, when you stand upon those two mountaintops to contemplate the future, that you shall stand there as you stand here today, standing not alone but in the company of your forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to whom God promised this land, and in the company of their descendants, your fathers, who sojourned in Egypt and left and wandered never shoeless these forty years in the desert. Nor should you forget the generations not yet born, who shall stand on their mountaintops as you shall stand on these and have to choose as you have to choose between life and death, blessing and curse. And this is your choice.

If you listen to the voice of the Lord your God and observe His commandments which I have laid out for you this day, this day and the many days we have journeyed together, then blessings shall rain down upon you like the rains that shall fall in their seasons. Blessed shall you be in the city and in the field. Blessed the fruit of your body and the fruit of your land and kine. Blessed shall be your barns, your baskets and your kneading-troughs. Blessed shall you be when you go out and blessed shall you be when you return. And you shall rise up above the nations and vanquish your enemies, who shall set forth against you on one path but flee you along seven. And all the peoples of the earth shall see that God is with you and blesses your labours in the land He has bestowed upon you.

But if you hearken not unto God’s voice and follow not His commandments, but go and serve other gods, cursed shall you be in the city and in the field. Cursed the fruit of your body and cursed the fruit of your land and kine. Cursed shall be your barns and your baskets and your kneading-troughs. Cursed shall you be when you go out and cursed when you return. And the Lord shall sow discomfiture and rebuke amongst you. He shall smite you with pestilence and drought, with fever and mildew, with blasting and consumption. Your sky shall seem as brass and the earth beneath your feet as iron. Dust and powder will fall as rain until you are destroyed. When you go forth against your enemies, one path shall you take, but along seven shall you flee. Your carcasses shall be food to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. The Lord will smite you with the scabs and hemorrhoids and boils of Egypt that never heal. He will strike you mad and blind and your hearts shall be amazed with dismay. At noon you shall grope in darkness, a prey to robbers from whom none shall save you. You will betroth a woman, but another shall lie with her. You shall build a house, but another shall dwell in it. You shall plant a vineyard, but not enjoy its fruit. Your ox will be slaughtered before your eyes, your sheep shall be stolen and given to your enemies. Your sons and daughters shall be abducted and given to another people, and all you behold shall drive you mad. The Lord will bring you and the king you set over you into captivity, where you shall serve other gods and become a byword for derision among the nations.

All these curses shall come upon you because you did not listen to the Lord your God and keep His statutes. And the curses shall become a sign and a wonder for you and your descendants as the blessings God bestowed upon your fathers in their exodus from Egypt once were. For you disdained to serve Him in gladness and abundance, and therefore He shall bring a cruel and fierce enemy against you, a nation from the end of the earth that shall swoop down upon you like a vulture. He shall eat your corn, devour your flocks, and besiege you in all your gates. But before your high and fortified walls come down, you shall eat your own children, even the delicate and tenderhearted among you, man and woman alike. So great shall be your straits in your besieged cities you will not even share the flesh of your children with those of your offspring that remain, and a mother will eat her afterbirth. Thus shall the Lord bring the plagues of Egypt back to you and worse. And while you dwindle in number He shall rejoice, and He shall pluck you from the land and scatter you among the nations where the sole of your foot shall find no rest. Your hearts shall tremble, your eyes shall fail and your souls shall languish, for day and night you shall live in fear. In the morning you shall wish it were evening, and in the evening you shall crave the morning, and the Lord shall return you to Egypt in ships, to that land I told you you shall see no more, and there you shall again be sold into bondage, but none shall buy you.

And the foreigner shall come and see the desolation in the land, the earth as if scorched by salt and brimstone and the people that remain like sticks in a field that would not scare away the birds, and know that the anger of the Lord was let loose upon the land. And when the nations ask what provoked the Lord to such anger men will answer: because they forsook the Lord Who brought them out of Egypt and went and served other gods. Then shall you remember the blessings and the curses I set before you this day and the covenant I implored you to uphold. And you shall return to the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul. And He shall gather you from the four corners of the earth and the farthest reaches of heaven and bring you to the land you and your fathers once possessed that you may enjoy it again, even more than in days of old. And the Lord shall visit on your enemies who persecuted you all the curses He visited upon you. This shall He do if you keep the covenant you dare to renew, faithfully, steadfastly, diligently.

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If a man should urge you to leave your faith, saying God has spoken to him in dreams and prophecy, listen to him not, but put him to death. If a relative should come to entice you in secret to serve new gods, listen to him not, but put him to death, even were he your own son. And if a city has combined to serve strange gods and lure others to do so, turn it into a heap of total destruction. Be zealous in this regard, for your lives and the life of the land are at stake.

Appoint yourselves judges and officers throughout the land, and let them administer justice impartially. They shall take no bribes and favor no person. Justice shall you pursue in matters great and small, and if a matter be too difficult for a local jurisdiction, then bring the matter before the priests and judge of the High Court. As he renders judgment so shall you obey, upon pain of death. No man shall be condemned by a single witness, not even a man who would lead you astray to worship other gods. If a man bears false witness, you shall do to him as he had intended the person against whom he testified to suffer. Even the king whom you shall one day set up over you is not above the law. He shall not return you to Egypt, nor multiply his wives and gold. He shall have a copy of this book written out and he shall read it all the days of his life, so that he fears the Lord and his kingdom endures.

And what is it to fear the Lord? you may ask. And I tell you it is all of this and more. Make no cuttings in your skin. Do not sacrifice any blemished animal. Do not muzzle an ox when he treads the corn. No man that is maimed in his private parts shall enter the assembly of the Lord. You shall not mix sex with prayer, neither men nor women, and you shall not use the wages of whores or dogs in the service of the temple. Redeem your vows, but if you would not redeem them, then cease to utter them. Do not mix seeds when sowing your vineyard. Do not harness an ox and an ass together. Do not wear a wool garment mingled with linen. If you chance upon a bird’s nest, do not take the dam with the young, that your days be long and prosperous. When you build a house make a parapet for your roof, that no one may fall off. If you find a corpse in a field, take the elders from the nearest town and an unyoked heifer from their herd, and have them break the heifer’s neck in a valley that has not been cultivated. And the elders shall wash their hands over the heifer’s broken neck in the presence of the Levites and atone for the innocent blood that was shed. If a man is hanged upon a tree bury him by nightfall, for his corpse is a reproach to the Lord and defiles the land. When you enlarge your borders, set aside three more cities of refuge for men who murder by mistake, such as a man who cuts a tree and his ax falls from his hand and slays a passerby. Do not seek to consult ghosts. Do not deal with sorcerers, necromancers or diviners. Do not cause your sons and daughters to pass through the fire. Whosoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord.

And what is it to fear the law? When you go into battle fear not your enemies, even when they seem stronger than you. And when the battle draws nigh let the priest approach the people and remind them that God is with them. But before the battle the officers shall send home any man who has built a new house but not dedicated it, who has planted a vineyard but not enjoyed its fruit, who has betrothed a wife but not taken her. And if there be among you a man faint of heart, the officers shall send him home too, lest his fear infect the rest. When you besiege a city and the city submits, you shall place it in tribute to you. But when it refuses and the Lord makes you victorious, then you shall slay all the males in the city and the rest you shall take as spoil. That is the law for distant cities, but for those of the nations God has given to you as an inheritance no spoil is allowed; you shall slay every thing that breathes. And when you lay siege, do not cut down any fruit-bearing trees of the city you war against for bulwarks, for the tree of the field is not man that you should besiege it too.

A woman you capture in war and fancy you may take to wife. You shall bring her home and let her mourn for her parents a full month before you go in to her. If you then find you do not want her you shall release her, but you may not sell her for money, for you have humbled her. If a man has two wives, one he loves and one he hates, and the hated one gives him his first-born son, he must so acknowledge him and give him a double portion of all he has. If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who hearkens not to his parents though they chastise him, and they bring him to the elders of the city to recount their distress, adding he is a glutton and a drunkard, the elders shall stone him to death and all Israel shall hear and fear. If a man takes a wife and hates her and then claims she was not a virgin, the elders of the city shall make inquiry. If the man’s claims prove false, he shall pay his wife’s father a hundred shekels and keep her as his wife to the end of his days. If his claims prove true, however, the men shall take the woman to her father’s door and stone her, for she played the harlot in her father’s house. If a man is found lying with a married woman, both shall be put to death and the evil extirpated from Israel. If a man finds a betrothed virgin in the city and lies with her, both shall be stoned; the woman because she did not cry out and the man because he humbled his neighbour’s wife. But if the same thing happens in a field, only the man shall die, for one presumes the woman did cry out but there was none to save her. If a man seizes a virgin who is not betrothed and lies with her, he shall pay the woman’s father fifty shekels and she shall be his wife to the end of his days.

A man shall not take his father’s wife nor uncover his father’s nakedness. A man shall not dress in a woman’s clothes. A man shall not remove his neighbour’s landmark. A man shall not return a slave that has escaped from his master. A man shall not take a mill or upper millstone to pledge, for he thereby takes a man’s life to pledge. When you lend a man something, do not go into his house to fetch his pledge. If he is poor, sleep not with his pledge, for what can it be but his garment and how shall he sleep without it? If you hire a man, let not the sun go down upon his wages. Carry not in your pockets diverse weights and keep not in your house diverse measures, but just weights and measures shall you have at all times, that your days be long on the land the Lord has given you.

If a man divorce his wife and she remarry and her second husband die, he is not to take her back. If a man has a new wife, he is not to go to war but cheer her for a year. If his brother dies, a man shall marry his brother’s wife and the first-born of their union shall carry his dead brother’s name. But if he refuses, his brother’s wife shall, in the presence of the city elders, loosen his shoe from his foot and spit into his face, and his name shall be known as the house of he who has had his shoe loosened.

And what is justice? you may ask, Moses said. You may eat grapes in your neighbour’s vineyard, but not put them in a basket. You may pluck standing ears of corn with your hands, but not take a sickle to them. A man who kidnaps another Israelite to sell him into slavery shall be put to death. Fathers shall not be put to death for their children’s sins, nor children for their fathers’, but each shall pay for their own crimes. When you reap in a field and forget a sheaf, do not go back to fetch it. When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, do not glean more than once. What is left shall be for the widows and the orphans and the strangers you once were in Egypt. Remember Amalek, and when you are safely settled in your land, blot out their name from under heaven. There is more. There is always more. And it shall be written down. For one law breeds another, and justice asks that rules be weighed and sifted, like the barley and flax which bloom early and the wheat and spelt that ripen late. And though what is hidden belongs to God, you now have more than enough laws to keep you busy and holy.

Therefore, when you come into the land, take the first fruits of the ground and put them in a basket and bring them to the place where God shall choose to lodge His name. And you shall say to the priest who is priest at the time that this day you have come to the land the Lord swore to our forefathers He would give to us. And then before God you shall tell our story. A wandering Aramean was our father, who went down at the end of his life to Egypt and sojourned there, few in number. But his descendants waxed great and the Egyptians dealt with us harshly. We cried to God in our affliction and He heard our cries and brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and terrible signs and wonders. And now He has brought us to this land flowing with milk and honey, and so I have brought Him the first of its fruits. And you shall rejoice in all the Lord’s bounty. And in the third year, when you bring the tithe for the poor, for the Levite, for the widow and orphan and stranger, you shall again say before the Lord that you have fulfilled His commandments according to the law and beseech Him to look down from His holy dwelling and bless His people Israel and the land He has given them. For this is your covenant, blessing to blessing, vouchsafed and renewed this day and every day, the law everlasting.

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For forty years I taught you what God taught me, the laws and ordinances that were to make us a holy people. During those forty years we followed those laws as best we could. Some were easy to follow, having little to do with place. But others required we wait until we enter the land God had promised our forefathers. And some were only half put into practice, because our mettle would only be tested once we were sovereign in our own land. Now you are about to enter that land, enter it, conquer it and settle it. I will not be with you. Not that I would not have liked to be with you, but you all know that God has forbidden me to cross the Jordan and you all know why. But even had I entered with you, I would not have been much use. I am old, too old to do what the young are fit for, and soon enough I shall be called to my fathers. For that is what the old are fit for. Fear not, however, for instead of me you have the laws and the laws will keep you holy. That is why God chose you. Not for what you are or have done, not for all your grumbling and transgression to which you seem so attached, but for what you may become, for the promise He saw when Abraham one day withheld his raised arm from his son’s throat. I will have laws rule men, not their passions, God told Himself. And you are the result. You are the promise in the promised land.

As you conquer the land, therefore, make sure to destroy every place of worship where the nations you shall dispossess bend the knee to their gods. Their groves, their altars, their high places, you shall uproot and demolish, and every vestige of their idols burn to ash. For they sacrifice children to these graven images, their sons and daughters do they burn in the fire, and that is anathema to the Lord and you should abhor it. But should you show mercy to these people, saying to yourselves they know not what they do or belittling the harm a temple full of idols can do, you shall find yourselves one day having to fight and destroy them all over again. But this time the Lord shall not be with you, and your children and your children’s children shall go into the fire of battle and be consumed. And the Lord shall weep because you too have sacrificed your children to Moloch, but His tears will not stay His anger and He shall expel you from the land from which you refused to expel the gods He detests. Remember, therefore, and be ruthless, that you may live long in the land and realize its promise.

Once you have settled the land and rule it with your laws, there shall be one place where God shall choose to live, and there and only there will you bring your sacrifices, your burnt offerings and tithes and firstlings of your herds and flocks, the redemption of your firstborn and the fulfillment of your vows. All other meats you may eat within your gates as it pleases you to do and as your income may allow. But the blood you shall pour out upon the ground. Remember when you eat the flesh of living beasts there are those that are clean and those that are unclean, and of the unclean you shall not eat, not meat, fish or fowl. And of the birds you shall not eat the vulture, the glede and the falcon. Not the raven nor the hawk nor the owl of any kind. Not the pelican and cormorant, not the stork and heron, not the hoopoe and bat. Nor shall you eat of any animal that dies on its own, though you may give it to the stranger within your gates. For you are a holy people unto the Lord. And you shall not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk.

In the month of the spring you shall keep the Passover. Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread in memory of the night the Lord brought you out of Egypt. Not within your gates shall you eat of the sacrificed lamb, but in the place where God shall cause His name to dwell, on the sundown of the day you left. And you shall remember this all the days of your lives. Seven weeks from the end of the Passover you shall count, from the time the first sickle is put to the standing corn. And when they are passed you shall bring the first fruits of your harvest to the Lord, a freewill offering as the Lord has blessed you. And there where He has caused His name to dwell you and your entire household shall rejoice, and your servants, male and female, and the Levite that is within your gates, and the stranger and orphan and widow within your midst. For once you were a bondsman in Egypt and the Lord brought you out to give you His laws, the first fruits of His harvest. And you shall keep the feast of the tabernacles in the seventh month, after you have gathered your wine and your corn. Seven days shall you feast in the place God has chosen that the Lord may bless you in all the work of your hands. You and your son and your daughter, your man-servant and maid-servant, the Levite and the stranger, the widow and the orphan, all who are within your gates. And you shall be altogether joyful.

Remember the Levite has no inheritance in your land, but depends on you for his survival. Forget not the tithes you owe him each year, nor the tithe of the third year, which you shall lay up within your gates. And as you remember the Levite so remember the poor. At the end of every seven years you shall release your neighbour from his debt. Of a foreigner you may exact it, but not from your brother, for there should be no needy within your gates. For God has promised: you shall lend money, but not borrow it; and you shall rule, but not be ruled. Keep not your fist tight when your brother opens his palm. Do not release your slave with a grudge in your heart. And when you send him out, send him not empty-handed, as you would not appear before the Lord empty-handed. You too were once slaves and now you are blessed. And blessings beget blessings, even when the blessings come and go.

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Hear O Israel, you who are about to cross the Jordan and witness the fall of nations whom you have described as giants. Do not think the Lord’s fire shall devour them because you are righteous and your hearts upright. No, the Lord shall drive them out for they are wicked, and settle the land with you because so He promised your forefathers. As for you, what are you but a stiff-necked people, who provoked the Lord from the day you left Egypt and challenged Him at every turn? Remember at Horeb how you so angered Him He was ready to destroy you utterly? Forty days I had spent atop the mountain, eating no bread and drinking no water save for the word of the Lord, when the Lord bid me hurry and go down. For the people have dealt corruptly, He told me, and I hurried down with the two tables of stone in my hands. And I saw the molten calf you had made, corruption of corruptions it was, the first commandment barely given and already transgressed. And I took the two tables of stone and hurled them to the ground where they shattered before your very eyes. And I ground them into dust and cast the dust into the brook that flowed out of the mountain. Again I climbed to the top of the mountain and again I neither ate nor drank for forty days while I pleaded with the Lord not to blot out your name under heaven. For Aaron too I prayed as I prayed for you and as I prayed many a time before and since, when you complained about the manna and wailed for meat and lusted after flesh and longed for Egypt because water was scarce or the land you were supposed to conquer seemed too fierce. For forty days and nights I fell down before the Lord and begged Him to remember His promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and His greatness in bringing you out of Egypt. Overlook their sins, I begged the Lord, let not their stubbornness and their wickedness get the better of You, lest the nations of the promised land belittle Your promise and greatness and spread it about how Your people drove You so crazy they rendered You powerless when Egypt was unable to do so.

And God relented. Take another two tables of stone, He told me, and I will write on them the words as I wrote them the first time, and make an ark of acacia wood to put these two tables in when you go down. And so I did and there they are today as you can see. And the Lord bade us take up our journey and we did. And though Aaron died on the way and the earth swallowed up Datan and Aviram and their households and I separated the Levites from your midst to serve the Lord, we have come to this day where you, if not your children, have seen it all and remember. Remember the glory of the Lord and be stiff-necked no more. Circumcise the foreskins of your hearts. Fear God, love the stranger, and be just to the widow and the orphan, for so does the Lord Your God, Who looks not at the status of a man but at his heart and Who loves even you, crooked as you are and were, strangers in a strange land. And He took you out of Egypt to bring you to the land He swore to your fathers as an everlasting promise that you may become His holy people and make the land holy. For the land you shall possess is not like Egypt. Contrary to your fathers’ complaints, the land to which you go is a land that drinks the rainwater of heaven, watched over by the Lord whose statutes you shall obey. Then shall the Lord send the rains in their seasons, then shall the grass grow in the fields, and you shall gather the corn and the wine and the oil and the cattle and not go hungry. But if your hearts be deceived and you go and worship other gods, the rains shall stop, the ground shall not yield her fruit and the cattle will grow lean, and you shall quickly perish from this goodly land which you will have repaid with evil.

Understand then, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse. A blessing if you follow the commandments of the Lord; a curse if you choose to turn aside from His ways and follow other gods. And so it shall be, when the Lord brings you into the land you shall possess, that you shall set the blessing upon Mount Gerizim and the curse upon Mount Ebal, those mountains on the other side of the Jordan behind the setting sun, in the land of the Canaanites who dwell in the Aravah over against Gilgal, by the terebinths of Moreh where Abraham first came into the land.

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Your words pleased the Lord. Would that they would always fear Me thus, He said, and sent you back to your tents, but kept me near to teach me the laws and ordinances for you to follow in the land you are destined to possess. And these are the laws that you must observe and the ways in which you must walk, you and your sons and your sons’s sons all the days of your life, so that you may enjoy the fruits of the land flowing with milk and honey and your days upon it may be prosperous and many. And the voice of Moses spoke to the children of Israel in the Aravah in the mixed tones of honey and rock out of which the honey flowed.

Hear O Israel, said the voice, the Lord is our God and the Lord is One. And you shall love Him with all your heart and all your soul and all your might. And you shall bind His laws around your hearts and arms and foreheads, teach them to your children and inscribe them upon your doorposts. And when He brings you to the land He swore unto Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and you live in cities you did not build, drink wine from vineyards you did not plant and water from cisterns you did not dig, and eat of the olive trees you did not plant, remember to fear the Lord and worship only Him. Follow not the gods of your neighbours, lest you kindle God’s anger and He wipe you off the face of the earth. Do not try Him as you tried Him at Massah when you complained you were dying of thirst and He bade me strike the rock that you might drink. Remember that He brought you out of Egypt with great signs and wonders and to this land which He swore to your fathers to obey His statutes. And when your children ask you what is all this to you, remind them and teach them this simple eternal truth.

Nor should you forget to throw the nations you shall supplant in the land out of the land. When God delivers them into your hand, you shall destroy them utterly and mercilessly. Make no treaties with them. Marry not your children to theirs. Break down their altars, smash their pillars, and tear up their groves. Otherwise they shall slowly seduce you away from the Lord Your God and you shall never become the holy people He has chosen you to be. For remember, the Lord did not choose you for your might and power – indeed, you were the smallest of nations. He chose you because long ago He sealed a pact with your forefathers to start His creation anew and water the earth with a blessing as once He had watered it with mist. You are that blessing. Keep therefore His commandments as He kept His and as He will continue to keep it to friend and foe alike.

For if you do keep the covenant and hearken to these ordinances, the Lord will bless the fruit of your bodies and the fruit of your land. No male shall be sterile, no womb shall be barren, and the sicknesses of Egypt shall strike those who hate you, but not you. You shall consume the peoples whom God delivers unto you. Fear them not and pity them not, for the Lord Who did what He did unto Pharaoh is ever with you. And you shall blot out the names of the kings of Canaan and destroy their gods and burn their silver and gold, for they are an abomination unto the Lord and a snare to your wayward hearts. Remember and obey that you may multiply and prosper in the land God gave you as your inheritance.

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Listen to me, therefore, O Israel. Listen to the laws and ordinances that I have taught you and still teach you. Do not add to them, do not subtract from them, but follow them, for they are your life; they shall preserve you. Remember how God destroyed your brethren who danced with the prostitutes of Baal. Take care not to repeat their error in the land you go to possess, lest you too perish, you and your children. Instruct them rather in all that your eyes have seen and all that your ears have heard, starting with that moment at Horeb when God had me assemble you so that you might hear His words and teach them to your children. Some of you may remember, though you were young. Others heard from your parents, who surely would remember, but they are now dead. And so I tell you again how you gathered close to the mountain that burned with fire in the heart of darkness and out of the fire spoke a voice and only a voice. Ten commandments did the voice speak, which the Lord wrote on two tables of stone. Then He bid me learn the laws and ordinances that went with them, so that I might teach them to you and you might follow them in the land you shall possess. One God, He told you, you have and that God is He. You shall have no other gods and make no graven images to worship as gods. For you saw no form when the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire. Nor was it the sun or moon or any star in heaven that spoke to you that day, but Your God, the God Who gave the heavenly spheres to all the peoples of the earth, but took you out of the iron furnace of Egypt to be His people; as you are today, His inheritance that shall inherit the land.

But the Lord was angry with me for your sakes and swore that I should not cross over the Jordan, but die in this land, on this side, while you go on without me. Take heed, therefore, not to vex Him, not to break faith with Him by setting up a likeness of all that He has forbidden you. For your God you see is a jealous God, Whose fire devours those who betray Him. And He will devour you, as heaven and earth are my witnesses, if, when you come into the land and settle it and beget your children and your children beget theirs, you forget the covenant, set up graven images and do evil in the sight of the Lord. Your days on the land shall be numbered. God will scatter you among the nations where you shall serve the work of men’s hands to your hearts’ content, images of wood and stone that neither hear nor see nor eat nor smell. Then in your distress you shall turn to God and hearken to His voice, and He, being merciful, shall again remember His covenant with your forefathers and not fail you.

So think before you do all this. Ask if it is necessary for history to repeat itself. Is it not enough that God already heard your cries and remembered His covenant? Did ever God take a nation from the midst of another with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm? Has ever a people heard God speak to them from the midst of a fire and lived? Did He not do all that to bring you to this land, driving out nations greater and mightier than you, so that you may settle it in accordance with His laws? Observe therefore these commandments which I set before you this day, that things go well with you and your children and you prolong your days upon this land God has given you to the end of days.

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Remember, he told them as he sat at the foot of the mountain he would soon climb, its craggy peak like the top of Sinai where God had passed before him, remember when God had told me at Horeb we had dwelled long enough at that mountain and ordered us to go up to the hill country of the Canaanites. Go, He said, and conquer the land I have sworn to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, for it is yours and your seed’s after you, up into the Aravah and north into Lebanon as far as the great river Euphrates. And I told you that you were too many for me to carry alone – may God make you even greater – for you were a contentious lot, and I had you set captains over your tribes, captains of tens and hundreds and thousands, to be your officers and judges. And you agreed, thinking it was a wise move. I instructed your captains to be fair in judgment, to treat the great and the small alike and show fear before no man, for to render judgment is to do the work of the Lord.

And so we set off through the great wilderness until we came to Kadesh-Barnea. From there we were to launch our war of conquest of the promised land. But your officers came to me and said, let us first scout out the land that we may know which route to take. And I agreed, thinking it was a wise move. But when the twelve captains returned the report they brought addressed a different question. The promised land is a good land, they said, and showed us its fruit in proof thereof, but it is a land of giants, of fierce inhabitants and fortified cities walled all the way to heaven. They counseled against going to war and stirred up fear in their tents. God brought us out of Egypt to die at the hands of the Amorites, they murmured, as if the Lord Who did all that He did in Egypt did it because He hated you, as if He led you in cloud by day and in fire by night through that dreadful desert because He hated you, as if a father bears his son because he hates him. O how you were of little faith and deaf to my pleading to fear not the inhabitants and trust in the Lord. And the Lord was angry with you and punished you for your backsliding. Not one of the generation whom He brought out of Egypt shall enter the promised land, He decreed, save Caleb ben Jephuneh and Joshua ben Nun, who alone defended God’s word. Only Caleb and Joshua were ready to fight to possess the land without which God’s word and God’s people were but windblown sand in the desert.

And so to the desert He sent us, yes, even me, saying our children, the little ones whom you said God had turned into death’s prey, will enter the land and possess it, but we shall die in the wilderness. Only then did you repent of your sins, but it was, as always, too late. You thought you could appease God by going forth to battle, but God did not approve. Neither the foolish nor faint of heart should embark on war, He said. But again you would not listen and off you went. And returned as men fleeing bees on a warpath and suffered heavy losses. Nor was that the end of it, for we stayed at Kadesh many days. And we wandered the desert of Zin and then we skirted the lands of Edom and Moab until finally we came to the brook of Zared, but by then forty years had passed and the generation of your fathers had died out, all except for Joshua and Caleb and your servant, who will die soon enough.

Only then did God again take up the question of conquest. When Sihon, king of Heshbon, and Og, king of Bashan, refused to grant us passage, God ordered us this time to go to war. Unlike Edom and Moab, they have no claim upon you, He said, and their meanness merits no pity. So we went to battle and vanquished them and destroyed all their cities, even the women and children thereof, for so the Lord commanded, lest they remain as a snare to lead us astray. And I gave their lands of the plain and Golan and Gilead to Reuben and Gad and half the tribe of Menashe, but had them swear to join the rest of you when you cross over the Jordan and not return until all of Israel possessed the land and dwelled safely therein. And I told Joshua at the time to remember everything the Lord had done to the Midianites, for so He shall do to the rest of the Canaanites. And so you shall do and fear them not.

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After Gilead fell, land stretching all the way to Jazer now lay in Israelite hands on the eastern side of the Jordan. The leaders of the tribes of Reuben and Gad then approached Moses and asked that they be given this land to settle, for it was good land on which to raise cattle and they had a lot of cattle. But Moses was reluctant to give them the land. He was afraid that if they settled the land now they would not cross the Jordan with the rest of the Israelites, and if they did not go, the rest would lose heart and again would say, as did their now dead fathers, that the land is a land of giants and they are as grasshoppers. And the covenant will die with me here on the other side of the Jordan, he said.

But the heads of the tribes of Reuben and Gad, supported now by half of the tribe of Menashe, answered Moses, saying no, it is not so. We will build sheepfolds for our cattle and cities for our women and children, but we will go up with our brethren and not return until every man in Israel has received the inheritance you have given us. Not I, said Moses, but God. God through you, His servant, they replied, and so it shall be for all Israel through us, His servants. Moses made them swear an oath to that effect and had that oath witnessed before the princes and priests of Israel. And the princes of Reuben and Gad and half of Menashe swore. And then they went and took possession of the cities and towns and villages of the Amorites and Midianites and built new ones as well.

And though Joshua would lead the Israelites across the Jordan, it was Moses who fixed their future borders. The country you shall have, he told them again, is the land the Lord promised your forefathers, the one I shall see when I climb the mountain that looms above our camp, bounded by the great sea to the west and the salt sea to the east, from Hatzar-Enan in the north to the desert of Zin in the south by way of Gilead and Jazer and the lands sworn to Reuben and Gad and half of Menashe. And you shall divide the land as I told you among your twelve tribes according to your numbers, but the Levites and the priests shall have no land, for their land is in yours and their inheritance in God. And when you have conquered and settled the land, Moses went on, of the forty-eight cities you shall give to the Levites, six shall be cities of refuge for those who kill by mistake and not by volition. There shall the murderers flee and be judged, and should their manslaughter be proved involuntary, there shall they be safe from vengeance. And they shall remain within the walls of those cities as long as the high priest lives. And because you are all bound one to another within the covenant, three cities of refuge shall be on this side of the Jordan and three in the land of Canaan. But remember, even when murder is involuntary you shall take no comfort, for the spilling of blood defiles the land; for the life of the flesh is in the blood and the life of the land is in the flesh.

And Moses again reminded the children of Israel of the dangers that awaited them in Canaan, the conquest being the least of them. When you cross over the Jordan into the land of Canaan, he told them once more on God’s behalf, you shall drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you. You shall destroy all their masks and images and demolish all their high places. For if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, those you allow to remain shall be thorns in your eyes and pricks in your sides, and they shall harass you in the land wherein you dwell. And it shall come to pass, God promises, that as He thought to do unto them, so will He do unto you. And by now you ought to know, Moses concluded, that God does keep His promises.

And thinking of God’s promise to him, Moses sat down and waited for God to claim him. And while he waited he heard and judged the questions the children of Israel still brought to the door of his tent, questions like the rules of inheritance when a family has only daughters. And the children of Israel waited with him, in the plains of Moab, on the other side of the Jordan, near Jericho.

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A young man with a can opener smile
asked youths who were snow spraying customers
in the pizzeria where he worked
to cease and desist. They went outside,
waited until he closed up shop after dark,
then kicked and beat him and knifed him to death.
Seven youths aged thirteen to seventeen,
seven, possibly eight, against one:
this is how they celebrated
Israel Independence Day
in the city of Petah Tikvah,
gateway to hope.
They will say they did not mean to kill him.
Psychologists and social workers
will paint a picture of mental illness.
Lawyers will connect their dots
to involuntary manslaughter
and jurists will hand down sentences
thinking of rehabilitation.

In the old days these hooligans
would have fled to cities of refuge,
but it would have done them little good;
no sanctuary was given
premeditated homicide,
and three of the cities of refuge
lay east of the Jordan.
In the old days even if a corpse was found
in a field where no foul play was suspect,
the elders of the nearest city
were enjoined to bring a heifer
not yet drawn on the yoke
and break its neck in the nearest valley
itself neither plowed nor sown,
then deny any guilt or knowledge
of what had befallen the dead body,
for the land is defiled by blood,
even innocent blood,
and must be redeemed.

What then shall we say of the blood
of Yemanu Binyamin Zelka,
twenty-one years old,
viciously and intentionally shed
as the blood of over twelve hundred
compatriots was also shed
when Palestinians from Gaza
invaded the country three years back
in their sodomite frenzy
and raped and burned and killed and abducted
anyone they could find?
How shall the criminals be punished
in a land with no death penalty?
Should they not be made to pay
with the years of their lives
equivalent to the years of the life
they have irrevocably stolen
from the boyish charming Mr. Zelka,
his remaining years that would have brought him
to the biblical three score and ten?
And is their debt not also to the land
they have defiled with his blood,
as the Palestinians have long done
living in the Jewish homeland,
murdering Jews in the light of day
and calling it resistance
while Israel in exchange seeks ways
to rehabilitate them?
Should they too not be made to pay
for the wanton violence
the Bible calls hamas
which drove God to send the Flood
and today should drive Him
to send the IDF
to Gaza and Ramallah
and break the necks of every member
of the PLO,
then gather the people who remain
to the foot of the mountains
Gerizim and Ebal
as Joshua once gathered the Israelite tribes
and offer them the choice of life or death,
though life will entail
generations of payback
until they will have learned
the virtues of the useful and the good,
and the Israelites forgiven the blood
and the land redeemed?

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Balaam arose in the morning, saddled his ass, and set off on his way. But God, Whose ways are indeed inscrutable, was angry with Balaam for going, and sent an angel to stand in the path of the beast. When the ass saw the angel she stopped in her tracks. Balaam beat her with his switch this way and that. Three times did he beat her for not moving on, until at last God loosened her tongue. What have I done to you that you mistreat me so? asked the ass of her master. You have mocked me, Balaam chided her, mocked me so I would kill you had I a sword in my hand. But the ass meekly answered: have I, whom you have daily ridden, ever put you in danger? And when Balaam said no, God opened his eyes so that he could see the angel of the Lord standing in his path. And the angel told him were it not for his ass, he would have killed him by now, for the Lord was not pleased that Balaam had acceded to Balak’s request. Downright perverse he was, said the angel, and Balaam, who at this point would have eaten straw under the laughing gaze of his ass, said he was ready to return home. But the angel, used to the perverse ways of men, told Balaam to go as he had set out. Only remember, he told him, to speak only what God shall put in your mouth.

On the face of it, a strange story; when you think about it, not at all. A man does this or that, his acts a fact that men can see. But what they mean and what drives them are mysteries, and the mysteries belong to God. God told Balaam no, then He told him yes, but either way He told him Israel was a blessed people. Why then, He wanted Balaam to know, was he going to see Balak? Perhaps he really did want the silver and gold. Perhaps he was simply flattered that Balak had sent for him and couldn’t resist the chance for more. Perhaps he thought he would see for himself what had become of that Hebrew slave his forbearers had dragged down to Egypt. Perhaps he would curse them nonetheless. Yes, men were perverse, God knew, for they never knew their own hearts and did their best to keep them in the dark. And though God would tell the children of Israel to love Him with all their hearts and hold His words fast therein, on their arms and between their eyes as well, He knew they would do otherwise and so needed as much blessing as they could get, even from a charlatan.

When Balaam came to Balak, the king of Moab brought him to the top of a mountain where he built seven altars upon which he sacrificed choice bullocks while he waited for Balaam to speak. But when Balaam opened his mouth the words that came out were words of praise for Israel’s Lord and prophecy of greatness for His people. Three times did Balak bring Balaam to three different mountain tops, but each time the story was the same: Israel shall be great and strong, he shall lie down as a lion and none shall dare rouse him, for goodly are Jacob’s tents and Israel’s dwelling places. When Balak had had enough and sent Balaam packing, Balaam raised up his voice in one final song and foretold of the day when the scepter shall rise out of Israel and smite the corners of Moab, and not only Moab shall fall, but Edom too, and Amalek, and even empires of the East whose names were as yet unknown. For the ways of the Lord are inscrutable. And Balaam went home.

But the ways of the children of Israel were as predictable as ever. While Balaam was busy blessing them from the hilltops, they went a-whoring in the plains below. The daughters of Moab unveiled their charms and the Israelites were unable to resist, commingling their spirit as well as their seed in the temples of their seductresses. So great was their fornication that an Israelite prince, Zimri, son of Salu, of the tribe of Shimon, danced with the dazzling daughter of his Midianite counterpart right before Moses’s eyes. So great it was that Pinehas, son of Eleazar, son of Aaron, picked up a javelin and rammed it through both their bodies as they lay together in Zimri’s tent. Only then, the tent door flung back and the couple’s naked bodies glued to their blood embrace, did the Israelites see what they had done. Saw, and wept in shame, and desisted in sorrow. And the plague that had erupted like venereal disease gone wild was stayed. But this time twenty-four thousand souls had died.

The Midianites would have to go, Moses knew. He didn’t need God to tell him that, although God did. The Midianites would have to be slain, their cities uprooted, all traces of their cult utterly destroyed, and the Israelites would have to do it. They will have to go to war against the Midianites, Moses told them. They will be defiled by war and defiled by booty and once again Moses will have to watch as their sins beget sins; and even the death God promised him will have to wait.

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