Israeli Coalition Scenarios

Kadima wins but Bibi Netanyahu becomes Prime Minister.

This is how I called it last night before I went to bed. It sounds as crazy as Victor Krum catching the golden snitch but Ireland winning the Quidditch World Cup but it is quite plausable.

It's 5:15 AM in Israel and finally all of the votes have been tabulated. Centrist Kadima won with 23% of the vote (28 seats) followed closely by Right-wing Likud with 27 seats. I had expected Likud to win but apparently not. However I wouldn't count Likud out yet. President Shimon Perez will now call on the head of the winning party, Tzipi Livni to form a coalition. I don't think she can do it. To make A coalition government one must have a combination of at least 61 seats out of 120 seats in the Knesset, meaning a combination of multiple parties. If Kadima wanted to form a coalition government with all the leftist parties they would fall 6 short, and that's implying that all of the left wing parties join them (which they won't).

Left & center 28+13+3+4+4+3 = 55
Kadima 28
Labor 13
Meretz 3
Hadash 4
United Arab List/Ta'al 4
Balad 3

They NEED the right wing parties here. Likud trails by only a seat and within the entire right wing there are 65 seats. Likud could conceivably form a pan-right coalition/phalanx without the inclusion of Kadima.

Right 27+15+11+5+3+4 =65
Likud 27
Yisrael Beitenu 15
Shas 11
United Torah Judaism 5
Jewish Home 3
National Union 4

As long as Shas doesn't whore itself out to the highest bidder as it did last time (especially as their spiritual leader pronounces his next controversial statement), Likud has Kadima in a vice grip. Likud is likely going to hold out, as is far-right wing Yisrael Beiteinu and not immediately attach themselves to coalitions. The rest of these parties will follow suit.

When Tzipi Livni tried to form a coalition government after the special Kadima Primary after disgraced Premier Ehud Olmert stepped down last year she failed miserably. And now she has even LESS supportive parties. The Arab parties have said they would boycott any coalition that included anyone who demanded a loyalty oath so there is no way any Arab party (the viable parties being Ta'al/UAL, Hadash, and Balad).

About the loyalty oath. Avigdor Lieberman, head of the third place winning Yisrael Beiteinu party has demanded that all citizens of Israel need to take a loyalty oath to Israel just as one must take a loyalty oath to become a citizen of the United States (or in any elementary school classroom's Pledge of Allegiance). If one refuses to take this oath, they will be stripped of their citizenship, right to vote, and right to run for public office but will remain as permanent residents of Israel.

Labor, once the winningest party in Israel's history (they held control from the founding of the modern state until Menachem Begin's Likud finally wrested control in the 70s) has now fallen to fourth place, and although I like their leader Ehud Barak, I don't know if he will have that much of a role in the coalition.

So there are a number of scenarios that can play out, and as long as Shas stays out of trouble it will be a right wing government. Kadima now needs to decide how much it will capitulate to the right or risk being the head of the opposition. President Peres is mandated to appoint the person he feels most likely to be able to form a coalition to do so, but Livni might be passed over for Bibi Netanyahu because Tzipi is likely to fail once again. We shall see. Whatever happens, I hope it is for the best of Israel.

Oh, and Haaretz seems to agree with my theory

DVAR TORAH S3: Rosh Hashannah 5769: The Meaning of Life is a Life of Meaning

The Meaning of Life is a Life of Meaning

Rosh Hashannah 5769

Matt Rutta

Delivered before Congregation Beth Meier on Rosh Hashannah

“Hold fast to the spirit of youth – let years to come do what they may!” Emblazoned on the mantle of the fireplace in hallowed John Jay Hall, this is the toast of the Philolexian Society, my literary society when I was an undergraduate at Columbia. It translates into Hebrew as “L’chayim!” “To life!” is a very loaded statement, as we well know from Fiddler on the Roof, “If our good fortune never comes here’s to whatever comes”, “life has a way of confusing us, blessing and bruising us, drink l’chayim to life!”

Nothing captures the complexity of life like this past week’s Torah portion: The Rabbis mandated that Nitzavim always be read the Shabbat before Rosh Hashannah. Though one of the shortest parshiot in the Torah it repeats numerous times the importance of life: God places before us life and death, blessing and curse, good and evil. Choose life!

The ultimate philosophical question is, “what is the meaning of life?” “Why are we here?” Ma Anu? Meh Chayeynu? We ask this at the very beginning of Psukei D’zimra and it will be a central piece of the Yom Kippur liturgy. I believe that the answer lies in the second chapter of Genesis. “And the Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden, to till it and tend it”, today being traditionally the 5,769^th anniversary of this event. Be God’s gardeners and shepherds to make the world a better place. Though at first glance this may seem a good idea for the meaning of life, it is only the start: I believe it is the very next verse. “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘Of every tree of the garden you are free to eat; but as for the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, you must not eat of it; for as soon as you eat of it, you shall die”. The choices of Nitzavim are here: The trees of Life, Good, Evil, and the threat of Death for partaking in any of them.

Now pay close attention because there will be a test on this: Adam and Eve had a major decision to make: Whether to eat or to not eat from the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil:

If they don’t eat they will live forever in paradise and walk with God. They will never hunger with a guarantee of food and provisions forever, never get sick, never die. They will also never learn anything, never experience feelings or emotions. Ignorance is bliss. If they ate, on the other hand, they would be exiled from paradise, banished from the obvious Presence of the Lord. Their biological clock would begin to tick as they experience mortality, sickness, painful childbirth, barrenness. They will engage in backbreaking toil to attain bread (a successful harvest, food and rain are not even a guarantee). But they would feel emotions. Pain and sorrow, yes, but also love, happiness, and satisfaction.

True to my word there is indeed a test on this, in the form of an informal poll. With a show of hands, how many of you, if in the position of Adam or Eve would NOT eat from the Tree of Knowledge? How many of you would indeed eat from the tree?

If you tell a child they can have any food in the kitchen except for the cookies. “Don’t eat the cookies,” you scold. What is the first thing he is going to go for? The cookie! That is human psychology whether you are a child or an adult with or without the ability to reason. Eating from the tree was a natural choice.

As opposed to my Christian colleagues who call this the downfall of man and Original Sin, I actually find this to be one of the most positive events in History. I am firmly convinced that God actually intended us to eat from the Tree. The catalyst of human history is one honey-tongued serpent. If God is Omnipotent and Omniscient, then He must have placed the snake in that tree. God intended us to have a free will to make the decisions whether to follow or shirk His laws and ethics and not be his drooling Garden drones. There are consequences to our actions but we have the freedom to make these decisions.

We were removed from the garden which is eternally guarded by fiery cherubs lest we eat from the tree of life and live forever. So why choose life in these four options?

By eating from the tree we have already chosen Good, Evil, and Death (as the tree has given us both knowledge and mortality). There is only one more option we have not yet tried: Life. Now God finally gives us access to something which we have been denied since our expulsion from the Garden of Eden by locked gate, fiery cherub and ever-turning sword: The Tree of Life. We choose life by holding fast to the Torah, and the wooden Torah rollers are called Etzei Chayim. which we grab onto when taking an aliyah or lifting the Torah.

Torah is ultimate knowledge, it is everlasting life. It links us to our past. Most of our liturgical additions for the High Holidays focus on life: “Zochreynu L’chayim, Melech chafetz bachayim, v’choteveinu b’sefer hachayim lemancha Elohim Chayim”, “Remember us for life, O King who desires life, and inscribe us in the Book of Life – for your sake O Living God.” Throughout the liturgy of these Ten Days of Repentance our liturgy is rife with pleas to be inscribed in the Book of Life.

Even in death there is life. If, God-forbid, someone dies we don’t focus on their death but talk about their life and when we come together to recite Kaddish there is not a single mention of death, only life, because shiva, mourning, comfort, these are all for the living.

Torah is the Family Tree of Life. It records the names and deeds of our ancestors, men and women of piety who, through our study, live forever. How will the world remember us when we are gone?

When burying their dead, the Ancient Greeks would place an obolus coin under the tongues of the deceased so they could pay the fare to Charon to ferry them across the River Acheron on their journey to Hades. Jews however are not buried with trinkets nor vested in designer suits but in a disqualified tallis and simple white shrouds, a feeling which the white robe I wear today is meant to evoke. We Jews believe that we cannot take anything with us. Our legacy is rather through our deeds. Whether good or evil this is how we will be remembered.

We were created B’tzelem Elohim, in the Image of God. But how can we take this literally if one of the basic tenets of our faith is that God is non-corporeal? The medieval commentator Nachmanides says that we were made of two Neshamot, like all other animals we are formed of the dust of the earth, thus like all other animals we are mortal, need to eat, sleep, reproduce, but also have a free will. And we are also like the celestial beings made in the Image of God we are made with an immortal soul with the ability to reason and understand and that thirsts not for water but for God. An amalgamation of the two, we can be at once dust and ashes and heavenly. Unlike angels we have a free will.

And yet, It is not in Heaven. One of the most famous stories in the Talmud, and the unofficial theme of the Conservative Movement Bava Metzia 59b quotes Nitzavim. Rabbi Eliezer, convinced that he is right on his arguments, causes supernatural occurrences at his command, the movement of a tree, the reversing of a flow of a river upstream, the collapse of the walls of the house of study, yet all are rebuffed by Rabbi Joshua and the rest of the sages as meaningless. When a Heavenly voice cries out “Rabbi Eliezer is right! He’s always right”. Rabbi Joshua responds, “It is not in heaven’, for since the Torah was removed from the realm of God when given at Sinai, we no longer pay heed to heavenly voices. It is up to us to make our own decisions whether to continue the divine work of Creation or to destroy.

Our great philosopher and codifier of Jewish law, Maimonides records that the Jews that left Egypt recited a blessing over the manna: “Hamotzi Lechem Min HaShamayim”, “Praised are You Lord our God, King of the Universe who brings forth bread from the sky”. This blessing makes sense, in the desert God cared for us and gave us ready to eat manna. This parallels the blessing we say over bread: “Hamotzi Lechem Min Haaretz”, “Praised are You Lord our God, King of the Universe who brings forth bread from the ground”. Have you ever pulled ready-to-eat bread out from the ground? No! The process is extensive getting bread from the ground to your table. We plant seeds in the ground, which with the help of sun and rain eventually cause wheat to sprout. Humans still cannot digest the wheat at this point. It needs to be gleaned and harvested, threshed, milled, mixed with water and other ingredients, kneaded, baked, all before it can be eaten. So why do we thank God for pulling bread from the ground? We do God’s work when we make bread just as we do God’s work when we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, help out someone in need, cry out against injustice. This is what it means to be made in the image of God. When Adam and Eve followed the advice of the snake and made that history-altering decision to eat from the tree, God said “now the man has become like one of us”. No longer do we eat the manna falling from the sky, but have become God’s partners in creation. So the meaning of life, my friends, is not merely to till and to tend, but to live. God wants us to eat from the tree.

May years to come bring what they may, but may this year be a year of health, love, life and peace. Shanah Tovah.

DVAR TORAH S3: Bechukotai/Lag BaOmer (Curses!)

Once I write this Dvar Torah I will be caught up. This week we read the infamous curses of the final parasha of Levitucus, known as the Tochecha, the rebuke. With filial cannibalism, and skies of lead, the curses are pretty bad. Once we exhaust our chances and continue on wayward paths, God condemns us to punishment that increases in severity sevenfold four times, 7⁴, ending up a total of 2,401 times more terrible than the initial punishment. Pretty crappy. But God will not allow us to be utterly destroyed.

A Lag BaOmer story. Shimon bar Yochai, known as the father of Jewish mysticism, has been condemned by the Romans for teaching Torah. He goes out and hides in a cave with his son for twelve years, sustained by a miraculous stream and carob tree and study the entire time. They finally emerge after the twelfth year. Rashbi finds people working a field. He is furious that people are fulfilling laborious pursuits and not studying Torah. He is so spiritually charged with rage that anything that he gazes upon is consumed in a fiery blaze (see my blogspot profile). A heavenly voice yells, "you emerged to destroy the world I created? Go back to your cave!" And so they returned to the cave for another year. They emerged to find a man carrying two omers (bundles) of grain. Upon their asking, he told them that they were in honor of the upcoming Shabbat, the mitzvahs of Shamor (negative commandments of Shabbat) and Zachor (positive commandments of shabbat).

Not only is this one source why we have two challahs on Shabbat and a good source for bonfires on Lag BaOmer, the holiday we are celebrating today, but it also could be applied to this week's Torah Portion. When they emerge from the cage they notice the neglect of Torah and through their strict interpretation of justice they destroy. God does not allow the world to work that way. Reward and Punishment was a real issue when God destroyed His world in The Flood and following it decided that a world judged strictly on justice could not exist. Instead mercy must abound. Innately, people are good. Not everyone can study Torah 24/7/365(353-385)/12 like Rashbi and son. The famous prayer of Rabbi Nechunya upon leaving the Beit Midrash is inherently flawed:

"I am thankful to You, the Lord my God, that You have placed my lot among those who dwell in the beit midrash and not with those who hang around street corners. They arise early, and I arise early. I arise early for words of Torah, and they arise early for idle matters. I toil, and they toil. I toil and receive reward, and they toil and do not receive reward. I run, and they run. I run to the life of the world to come, and they run to the pit of destruction."

This is R' Shimon bar Yochai's justice. This is not God's Justice. God will not utterly abandon us, no matter what we do. This is His promise. So we celebrate the cessation of the plague which destroyed 24,000 of Rabbi Akiva's students. We mourn but after the storm there is a rainbow (as was the incredibly strange case yesterday afternoon with an incredibly rare May rain and thunderstorm in Los Angeles). "Return us, God, to You and we will be returned, renew our days as days of old".

Shabbat Shalom and Lag BaOmer Sameach!
Chazak Chazak v'NitChazek!

DVAR TORAH S3: Behar (Shemita during Shemita)

Every seventh year we are to have a remission of debts, freedom for slaves, and a chance to give rest to our land. Thus is the law in the land of Israel. This parasha is especially appropriate this year because it happens to be the seventh year in the Sabbatical Cycle, and is therefore the Shemitta year. One is not supposed to work the land nor sell their produce. This is literally a year of Shabbat, a year off from the back-breaking labor of being a farmer. One should only provide for their own family from the produce of the field. All other years we have certain mitzvot of the field for the poor, that we must leave the edges of the field for the poor as well as the gleanings that have been left after one pass for them. But this year it is basically a free-for-all. Everything is hefker, legally ownerless. I could go into anyone's field and according to Jewish law I can take anything I want. I don't know if this is the policy of the state of Israel and I don't know if a shoter, a police officer, would arrest me for trespassing or for stealing. I do know that some of my professors at Pardes mentioned that they keep signs in front of their fruit trees this year that say that anyone who wants can pick fruit from their trees.

There have been a few interesting legal fictions created for the Shemitta Year. Last year I lamented the lack of Wikipedia article on Prozbul. Now there is indeed an article. In fact, I wrote it. I have already written on prozbul, which allows debts to be collected and not cancelled. Another legal fiction applies to the state of Israel and is similar to selling Chometz on a massively grand scale. The entire State of Israel was sold to a Druze guy in the Golan. In this way the land can still be worked by Jews because it is not legally owned by us. Hooray for loopholes. The problem is what if Muslim extremists find this guy, whose identity and location are not disclosed? I imagine it being like on Family Guy when Peter Griffin borrows the "Free Tibet" sign from a protester and then calls China, offering Tibet in exchange for all the tea in China. There probably are also loopholes making this non-transferable.

However, this now makes my school, the American Jewish University, with its main campus, Brandeis-Bardin Institute, and Camp Ramah in California the largest Jewish landowner in the world for the year. Neat.

Shabbat Shalom.

DVAR TORAH S3: Emor (Who is a Jew?)

Time to play a little bit of catch up, as I have been quiet for a few weeks due to finals. Two weeks ago (sigh) we read Emor. This parasha is full of laws that apply to the purity of the Kohen and the series of Jewish holidays, including the mitzvah of counting the Omer, a period which we are always in when this parasha is read.

The narrative at the end is interesting. A man who is halachically Jewish (his mom is an Israelite from the smallest tribe of Dan) but his father is Egyptian gets into an argument with someone. It is interesting that they refer to one man as "an Israelite man" and the other one as "the son of the Israelite woman".

We define someone as Jewish by their mother, but this is due to gentile soldiers raping our women and causing them to conceive. Would these kids be non-Jewish? Mamzerim (Halachic bastards)? The Rabbis decided that Judaism must go by Maternal Descent so that no matter what happens, the child will be considered Jewish because of the woman. Whereas there are times you may have unanswered questions about paternity, it less likely you would have questions about maternity.

However, in the time of the Torah it seems that it is through the father. This man of Dan is part of the Israelite community but is also an Egyptian due to his father, not a whole Israelite. There are certain people whom Israelite women are forbidden to marry, such as Moabite and Ammonites. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, etc, marry non-Jews and yet their kids are Jewish. We don't hear of any sort of conversion until Ruth. The position of Karaites is still that of strictly Paternal Descent(see Wikipedia)

And yet the rabbinic Tradition is presented in Mishnah Kedushin 3:12, that is one of confusion and various traditions.

There are reasons for both sides, but I argue that we should maintain the status quo of Maternal Descent. It would create a great rift amongst the Jews throughout the spectrum. Reform and Reconstructionists accept Paternal Descent. Orthodox and Conservagtive only accept Maternal Descent. The change from current Conservative policy would change thousands of years of a general halachic definition of Who's A Jew and would create a further distance between ourselves and the Orthodox. Unfortunately, people are still raped and some people otherwise don't know who is the father of their child and there still can be confusion. I therefore support Maternal Descent to be maintained as the status quo.

For further information please see here ,here, and here.

Shabbat Shalom.

DVAR TORAH S3: Kedoshim/Yom Haatzmaut (Holy Horticulture in our Homeland (with Honi))

Parashat Kedoshim - Holy Horticulture in our Homeland (with Honi)
Matt Rutta – Delivered before AJU Hillel 5/2/08
This week we read parashat Kedoshim, also known as the Holiness Code. “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am Holy!” There are over 50 mitzvot in this Parasha. Many of them have been over-analyzed and cliché: don’t put a stumbling block before the blind, love your neighbor as yourself, don’t steal, observe my laws, Harry Potter is liable to the death penalty... It goes on like this. The other mitzvot in this parasha include prohibitions of idolatry, agricultural laws, and sexual taboos. So I will discuss the subject I think you are the most interested in: agricultural laws!
A good number of the agricultural laws in this parasha apply in the land of Israel. When one can harvest, what one can harvest, the time one must wait after planting a tree before one can eat from the tree, and a promise that God is bringing us to a land flowing with milk and honey.
A story about Honi the Circlemaker who is probably best described as a mystical shaman from 2000 years ago. Besides the famous story of how he brought rain to the drought in Jerusalem, there is another story in which he has a real problem with understanding Psalm 126, which we will read tonight as Shir HaMaalot, the introduction to Birkat Hamazon: “A song of ascents, when God will return the exiled of Zion, we will be like dreamers.” The Talmud records a tale that he finds an old man preparing to plant a carob tree. He tells the man that he is foolish to plant a tree that takes 70 years to bear edible fruit, well past his lifespan. The old man acknowledges his mortality and says that he’s doing it so his future generations will have carobs to enjoy, just like his ancestors had planted for him. After Honi stopped berating the man he sat down to eat and fell asleep. Rocks concealed him and he slept for 70 years. He awoke because he saw the same old man and thought he had just taken a small nap, but then saw a gigantic tree overflowing with carobs, he asked the man if he had planted the tree and the man said that it was his grandfather who planted it 70 years ago, well before he was born, and Honi realizes he’s been asleep and dreaming for 70 years. I think the lesson Honi realized then that though the life of one person may be fleeting, the acts that we do can long outlive us. The old man had lived his lifespan, appreciating the contributions of his ancestors. Then the newly planted tree as well as Honi himself remained dormant for 70 years, which incidentally is the same amount of time that our ancestors were exiled in Babylon after the First Temple was destroyed and then we woke up from our exile. Our people were again removed for 2000 years, the song of ascents we may recite for this exile would be that we were in a nightmare. But finally we returned to the land of Israel and in 1948 we once again began to enjoy the fruit of the land.
The Haftarah this week, the ninth chapter of Amos, ends “Behold the days are coming, declares the Lord, when the plowman will meet the reaper, and the treader of grapes, him who holds the bag of seed, when the mountains shall drip wine and all the hills shall wave with grain. I will restore my people Israel. They shall rebuild ruined cities and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine; they shall till gardens and eat their fruits. And I will plant them upon their soil, nevermore to be uprooted from the soil I have given them – said the Lord your God.”
We have been restored and have begun to rebuild, with bountiful and varied produce, the new vineyards are some of the finest in the world, and we have caused the desert to bloom. It has been sixty years since statehood, there are still ten years left until we can enjoy carobs that were planted since the rebirth of the State of Israel, reishit tzmichat geulateynu, the first sprouting of our Redemption, a land which our grandparents fought for so that we could live free in a land of our own. We must continue to fight for it, and plant in it, not just trees, but the seeds of peace. And much like a strong-rooted carob tree, we will never again allow ourselves to be uprooted from the land. For if we will it, it is no dream. Shabbat Shalom.

DVAR TORAH S3: Pesach (Our holiday has an egg too, sans rabbit)

I wanted to include some words I offered at the second seder about the egg.

The egg is an underexplained part of the seder plate. We popularly know it as a symbol of spring, which is the season (and in the bible, month, Aviv) of Passover, and of rebirth. It's round shape (actually an oval, which is elliptical) which indicates the cycle of the year and of life. It is the first thing we eat during the meal as it relates to Tisha B'Av which ALWAYS falls in the calendar on the same day of the week as the first day of Passover. The holidays relate as the days of redemption and of exile and both holidays are the two most auspicious in the ultimate redemption of the Jewish people (such as strong traditions indicating the Messiah being born on Tisha B'Av and Nisan being the month of both the past and future Redemption).

But it also is a symbol of the Jewish people, according to Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz who, at his tisch at VBS a few months ago (and also written by Isaac Klein in "The Guide...", and I will add to both of them) spoke about the egg as the symbol of the Jewish people. Most foods soften as you cook them, but the egg hardens the longer it cooks. We Jews have been subjected to fire for millennia, from the time of Pharaoh to today and yet instead of weakening we have been forged through fire. We are known as an am kshei oref, the stiffnecked people. This has been detrimental when our stiffneckèdness caused us to wander the desert for 40 years. But it has also kept us Jewish. No matter what the world threw at us, we kept the course. All of these ancient civilizations who tried to destroy us are gone and we are still here. "For in every generation people try to destroy us, but the Holy One, Blessèd be He, saves us from their hands."

Gut Shabbos un Gut Yontif,
Matt

DVAR TORAH S3: Acharei Mot/HaGadol (Pesach and Yom Kippur? What a Great Shabbat!)

Interesting Torah Portion for Shabbat HaGadol, the week where the Rabbi traditionally explains the complex preparation for Passover. (Though this year as it leads immediately into the first seder and chometz is already cleaned and nullified, it is merely symbolic)

But this week's actual Torah Portion in the cycle is Acharei Mot, the reading which serves as the reading for both the morning and controversial afternoon reading for Yom Kippur, which explains the complex preparations and service of the High Priest on Yom Kippur. It mirrors the tradition that after the Destruction of the Second Temple, the home became the Temple, the kitchen the Holy of Holies due to the familial discourse, the kitchen table the altar, with the head of household standing in as the High Priest.

The psychological, spiritual, and physical preparation of the Kohen Gadol very much parallels our own preparations the week before Pesach. The success of preparation is critical. Incidentially both the sabbath prior to Yom Kippur (Shabbat Shuvah) and the sabbath prior to Pesach (Shabbat HaGadol) used to be the only two at which a rabbi would speak. If only...

A gut shabbos un a gut yontif!

DVAR TORAH S3: Metzora (Find a bad name)

Quickly on last week's Torah Portion, I have in the past I have mentioned that the word Metzora, a person affected with a impurifying skin disease of Tzuras, is possibly a contraction of Motzi Shem Ra, someone who "seeks a bad name". We are studying (or were studying at that point) something called ona'at dvarim, harming people with words. It is considered worse than killing someone or committing adultery, as examples. Rabbi Schulweis, for both Tazria and Metzora discussed this particular piece in the Talmud. To be continued when I write the contents of my Chevruta Journal where I discuss this...

Shabbat Shalom.

Bee-reavment

As I have been kashering my apartment for Passover, the building has been hitting high heats, combined with the fact that it is is the 90s outside and I am burning the stovetops after using industrial oven cleaner, so I have all of the windows open as well as the front door and the air conditioner running full blast.

About a half hour ago I saw a bee flying around my dining room table. As someone who doesn't react well to bee-stings, I decided I can't just have him flying around my apartment, but I also didn't want to hurt him (unlike mosquitos whose sole existences is to suck my blood and spread disease which I will dispatch without regret, and sometimes on Shabbat; for though it is forbidden to kill on Shabbat, because mosquitos may carry a host of deadly diseases, including West Nileand therefore Pikuach Nefesh kicks in), but the bee doesn't actually want to hurt me. So I turned off the lights, ended up crashing my leg into the coffee table which I had turned around in order to clean and so my leg started bleeding.

Anyway, I tried to direct the bee outside, spraying some scented air fresheners as bees rely heavily on their sense of smell (or so is my understanding). But instead he went into my window screen. I shut the window trying to figure out what to do with him. I got a long umbrella and tried to remove my window screen or use it to direct him to the two gaping holes that were in the window screen before I moved in. He was just running around frantically. I tried to dustbuster him and then planned on reversing it when I got outside, but he ran away from it. I accidentially crushed him with the umbrella tip after about 15 minutes, he was mortally injured at this point, so I put him out of his misery, feeling horrible about it, though needing to uphold the mitzvah against Tzar Baaleh Chayim, that you shouldn't subject animals to pain.

This is part of a trend of ways I have been feeling about living creatures as of late. I have been seriously considering vegetarianism recently. Some, such as my downstairs neighbor, may scoff at my suggestion (though he has recently dropped a ranking in the food chain, himself). I was somewhat affected by the class we did on Shechita as well as seeing a rooster sacrificed for Kapparot with my cousins before Yom Kippur.

I, in fact, have been having feelings regarding the wastefulness of our culture, how we waste food, electricity, water, fill the landfills, it's totally ridiculous. I am totally guilty of all of these things. As someone who, due to my job, goes to bar mitzvah and wedding parties beyond number I notice the sheer wastefulness of people, beyond money.

I think the way we slaughter animals is the most humane way to do it. After seeing "No Country for Old Men" I think the captive bolt pistol is just barbaric. At least in Kashrut we need to show respect for the animals (or ideally we should)

I don't know what I'm going to do regarding this. I do enjoy eating meat and don't see myself as a vegetarian. But I'm thinking of cutting back. I don't know. Time will tell. Besides, this is a poor time of the year to give up meat. What can a vegetarian eat during pesach because soy, beans, rice, seeds, and corn are all forbidden. I can't just eat flax seed for an entire week (for some reason flax is okay...)

Anyway, that's just another rant. Delayed Dvar Torah on Metzora soon... possibly...