(((We))) name each of the books of the Torah by the first significant words in the Hebrew text. What you goyim call “Deuteronomy,” we call “Devarim” because, like the French, Jews have a different word for everything. Devarim means “words,” taken from the first line, which translates as, “These are the words of Moses…” Like Fidel Castro, once Moses got on a roll, the Jews hoped that everyone had gotten to pee first, ‘cuz they were going to be there a while. And though not spelled out explicitly, wandering off during that oration to find something more interesting to do would probably have started the old smiting shit, since unlike Castro, Moses wasn’t big on long-term imprisonment of people whom he felt had slighted him. Just smiting, with an occasional side order of stoning. So everyone was stuck there while Moses rattled on. And on. And on.
At its essence, Devarim is a collection of three of Chairman Moses’s speeches. And that’s all Devarim is, just a lot of rambling and reminiscing, no new content. No daughter fucking, no spearing of Jews banging Midianites, no bloody battles, no miracles, just Moses imitating Bernie Sanders. Nothing to advance the story, just a lengthy recap. So… boring.
The sedra for this week, Eikev, presages the Festivus ritual of The Airing of Grievances- “Here’s all of the ways you’ve disappointed me.”And trust me, Moses goes on about this at great length. But of all the Grievances, my favorite part is Moses bitching about the Graves of Lust, which isn’t nearly as interesting as the name implies.
To understand the Graves of Lust, we need to consider manna. We’ve all heard of manna, but no-one has the foggiest idea of what it is. It first appeared about a month and a half after the Jews bolted out of Egypt. The food they had brought with them, which featured the always-delicious matzoh, started to run out, and Jews being genetically programmed to whine, started whining. “I’M HUNGRY! FEED ME! GO MAKE ME A SAMMICH!” Just to shut up their whiny Jew-mouths, Yahweh sent down a rain of manna for them to eat. Understand that the root of “manna” is the Hebrew phrase, “WTF is that?” And indeed, it’s variously described as being like flakes, like coriander seeds, and like bdellium. Not that anyone knows what bdellium is, but still. In any event, Yahweh told Moses to tell the Jews, “Don’t ask questions, pick it up, eat it, and stop whining!” And he further told them, “This is nutritionally complete, fortified with iron, niacin, thiamine, and vitamins B12 and C. And lots of antioxidants! Don’t eat anything else, this is as free as government cheese.” Interestingly, the stuff miraculously fell from the sky, carried no economic cost, and couldn’t be sold for profit. Cage-free, no GMOs, all organic. This may be the origin of the Jewish affinity for Progressivism.
Now let me inundate you with Manna Trivia, just so if you’re ever on Jeopardy, you can say, “Miracle Foods for $100, Alex.” Besides the imprecision on its appearance, manna is described as tasting sweet and having a perfumed aroma. It would fall daily to be picked up, but the greedy Jews were warned not to gather more than a day’s worth. Of course, most of them didn’t listen, scooped up all they could, and found out that after a day, it went rancid and wormy. Pro Tip: next time, listen to Yahweh, OK?
More trivia: because Yahweh forbade picking shit up on the Sabbath, on Friday you could grab two days worth to tide you over and it wouldn’t go bad until Sunday. Miracles of Convenience.
Yet more trivia: Goyim couldn’t eat manna. When they tried to gather it, the manna magically turned into a mixture of Teflon and oil, so it would slip through their dirty goyish paws. JEWS ONLY.
Best trivia of all: manna contained only the purest of nutritional whatever. And what this meant was that if you followed Yahweh’s Manna Diet, you didn’t shit. I am not shitting you, that’s really what the rabbis teach. YOU STOP SHITTING WHEN YOU EAT MANNA. That will likely be the Final Jeopardy question: “When you eat this, you stop shitting.” “What is manna?”
After you win a pile on the show, remember, you owe me 10%.
Back to the story. Moses had said, “We’re going to eat manna. We’re going to eat manna so much. We’re going to eat manna when we’re wandering, we’re going to eat manna when we’re stopped. We’re going to eat manna so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of eating manna, you’re going to come to me and go ‘Please, please, we can’t eat manna anymore.’ You’ve heard this one. You’ll say ‘Please, Moses, we beg you sir, we don’t want to eat manna anymore. It’s too much. It’s not fair to everybody else.’ And I’m going to say ‘I’m sorry, but we’re going to keep eating manna, eating manna, eating manna, We’re going to make Israel great again.” And he was right, the Jews did bitch to him about the rather monotonous diet. “In Egypt, we had meat, we had bread, we had falafel, we had hayse arbis, this manna shit is getting old.” Moses finally got sick of the bitching and he went to bitch at Yahweh about it. “Will you PLEASE get those fucking Jews off my back?” Yahweh, never known for tolerance or a sense of humor, responded, “Tell ya what, I’ll sent a bunch of birds your way, so me-damn many birds that those whiners will be vomiting bird meat out their nostrils!” And Yahweh, being the sort of god who does what he says, did what he said. The Jews went crazy with joy and started munching away on quail.
Now Yahweh had previously told the whiners Jews that manna was perfect, it was all they needed, and to just eat that. So despite the fact that he had fucked with their heads by sending them delicious birds to eat, he decided to punish them by, yeah, you guessed it, smiting them with a plague. He killed off thousands of potential future KFC customers by using this little trick. When they dropped the birds and went back to manna, the plague stopped. And because Hitler Yahweh had killed a bunch of Jews there, the area where all the birds were eaten and the plague hit was thereafter called “Graves of Lust.” No sex, just the munchies.
Yahweh is nothing if not consistent.
Well, busy day yesterday. And long night last night. I crawled upstairs in the wee hours, but SP and jesse.in.mb were still drinking. I think they decided to take a pause when the sun came up. So they’re gonna be useless all day and I’m going to have to make my own sammiches. And links.
