Category: Jews

(((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.

 

I’m on something of a travel jag for work (this time to the wilds of coastal MA and RI), so can’t devote time to educating the goyim this week. So as a sop and apology, here’s alcohol-fueled sex. And a place for you anti-semeets to drop comments. I’ll make it up to you with a Least Loved Bible Tale next week, m’kay? This time from Genesis 19.

Lot and his two daughters left Zoar and settled in the mountains, for he was afraid to stay in Zoar. He and his two daughters lived in a cave. One day the older daughter said to the younger, “Our father is old, and there is no man around here to bang. Let’s get him drunk and fuck the living bejeesus out of him. We’ll get pregnant, so what could possibly go wrong?”

That night they got their father to drink wine, and the older daughter went in and banged him hard. He was totally in blackout mode, so I suppose this was rape. Not that he minded.

The next day the older daughter said to the younger, “Last night I fucked Daddy. Let’s get him to drink wine again tonight, and you go in and take your turn with Daddy Dick.” So they got Lot drunk again, and the younger daughter took sloppy seconds. Again he was completely out of it, but nutted anyway.

So both of Lot’s daughters became pregnant by their father. The older daughter had a son, and she named him Moab; he is the father of the Moabites, which explains why they look like the McPoyles. The younger daughter also had a son, and she named him Ben-Ammi; he is the father of the somewhat retarded Ammonites (from the Semitic word for “extra toes”).

I’ll Jew the hell out of you next week, promise.

 

I will admit to a deep love of all things American. Whether it’s music, food, art, or literature, I love and favor the styles and practitioners of distinctly  American art forms and styles. At our best, we don’t just appropriate, we blend and extend, we incorporate the experience of a country and culture that uniquely takes in and assimilates the best and strongest and produces alloys of vibrancy and depth. Only America could produce a Duke Ellington or a Mark Twain or a Grant Wood.

Part of the American literary alloy is the remarkable blossoming of Jewish literary art in the 20th century and the manner in which it helped shaped our common culture, rather than confining itself to a Ghetto incomprehensible to outsiders as was the case for Jewish letters in Europe or the Middle East. As usual, I’m going to be a bit self-indulgent and talk about my favorite American Jewish (lack of hyphen deliberate) writer, who would probably count as my favorite fiction writer, period. And although there’s much love for (((literati))) like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, not to mention Ayn Rand (whom I think is highly overrated), in my mind, the quintessential American Jew writer was Bernard Malamud. Malamud did not have the prolific output of a Roth or Bellow, nor the ostentatious profundity of Rand, but what he crafted was perfectly cut and polished literary gems, where every word carried impact and meaning.

There was no contrived uplift or optimism in his work- Malamud explored the dark side of personal struggle, the difficulty of transformation, the futility of escape. Perhaps that’s why his work is becoming increasingly unfamiliar in this increasingly unserious century. And perhaps his oeuvre will be rediscovered a hundred years from now with astonishment that it was allowed to languish. I can only hope.

Malamud’s best known novels, The Fixer and The Natural were certainly brilliant and deserve the fame that they achieved. I should note that if you saw the execrable movie version of the latter, you have no idea of what the novel was about, and you need to read it- in true Hollywood style, the thrust of the book, “you can never redeem yourself” transmuted to “you can always redeem yourself,” and the wonderful surrealism of the novel is totally lost.

But in my mind, his very best novel was the semi-autobiographical and fairly obscure A New Life, whose nominal plot involves a young man with an almost stereotypical New York background moving to Oregon to take an academic position at the fictional Cascadia College, a thinly-disguised version of Oregon State. The protagonist, Sy Levin, discards (or tries to) the baggage of his life in an attempt at freedom- and that is really what the book is about, liberty and personal transformation. It is not a “Jewish” novel in any sense beyond the ethnicity of Levin- his Jewishness is incidental, not integral. And escape and transformation happen, but in ways that the protagonist (and the reader) might not expect. The ending is at once ambiguous and hopeful. This theme of transformation and liberty, to me, elevates it beyond its genre and into the ranks of great American novels. Part of the reason it spoke to me was that I first read it in my 20s, when I was an instructor at a very goyish western university, shortly after escaping the East Coast and in the process of my own transformation. I felt very much like I *was* Sy Levin; nonetheless, coming back to it later in life, the novel had lost none of its punch or power, and I was able to see things in it that had escaped me as a younger man.

Many novelists are shitty short-story writers and vice versa; Malamud was superb at both. His most famous collection of short stories, The Magic Barrel, won the National Book Award in 1959, sandwiched between John Cheever’s Wapshot Chronicles and Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus. But again, for me, there was better: Idiots First, from 1963. Undeservedly obscure, not even meriting its own Wikipedia entry.

So, let me throw two samples out there which, to me, perfectly encapsulate Malamud’s brilliance and prose style. First, a short excerpt from A New Life, highlighting Malamud’s craftsman approach and delightfully bitter humor:

And a link to a short story which is more typical Malamud in theme, surrealism, and insightful depression, The Jewbird. Take ten minutes to read it, then go slit your wrists.

Boring Torah sedrah this week. Nothing remarkable in the Middle East (other than Palestinians driving like elderly Florida Jews). No prominent Member of the Tribe doing something stupid on a newsworthy level. My brain is fried from work and trying to get an actual paying article finished. SP vetoed my idea about Best Christian Baby recipes. So… I got nothin’.

If you want something serious, Eddie wrote a mini-book in Afternoon Links. Me, all I wanna do is have some fun. So before I start pounding alcoholic beverages with the estimable SP, I have some assorted pix to toss out, all stolen from various spots on the Web. Feel free to caption any of them if it strikes your fancy.

I would have thought this tasteless, but my dog actually has one of these outfits, a Hanukkah present from Grand Moff Serious Man.

Jeremiah Wright, call for you on Line 3.

This was a scene from my last visit out to see jesse, Playa, Los Doyers, and Mad Scientist. And once I was there…

This is seriously how SP envisioned me when we first met. Joke’s on her, I guess:

And this made my day:

But my motives are clearly ulterior:

Several different things are all trying to occupy my brain simultaneously, so this will be more-or-less a group of free associations, (((links))) as it were.

First off, this is the sort of thing that could happen to any of (((us))).

Remember the story a few weeks back about Jews being excluded from the Chicago LGBT march because they had the temerity to put a Star of David (who was bi) on their banner? In a follow up, the reporter who broke the story has been demoted. It’s always delightful when the Left doesn’t even make a de minimus attempt to disguise their bigotry.

Ironically, Israel is basically a leftist country. And when there’s a leftist, you can bet your mezuzah that there’s a plan to sink taxpayer money into a choo-choo.

What was the best Hitler movie of all time? Of course, if you’re an internet freak, there’s nothing as useful as Der Untergang. If you’re a fan of classic comedy, there’s nothing like The Producers, the original, please, none of that Matthew Broderick remake shit. If you’re doing bong hits and need a midnight movie, you have no choice: They Saved Hitler’s Brain, which is Ed Wood-level bad and therefore unintentionally hilarious (which is the best kind of hilarious). Margin for Error is a bit unfair because it only has Hitler’s voice, but how can you resist Milton Berle playing a straight role? Whenever I see Uncle Miltie, this story haunts me. And I was delighted with a recommendation from Grand Moff Serious Man, the satirical German language film Look Who’s Back (SP was less delighted with it, but to be fair, my German is better than hers). Of course, no “Greatest Hitler Film” list is complete without the brilliant satire The Great Dictator, which I’m sure Progressives are repackaging for maximal Trump Derangement purposes.

But without question, the choice for the Old Man With Candy has to be a short with Hitler played by a Jew:

Gather ’round kids, because this week’s sedrah is Chukat. And harking back to last week’s mention of the Documentary Hypothesis*, this one clearly shows the Frankenstein stitches of an editing portmanteau. Basically, it’s an incredibly tedious Priestly document which suddenly lurches to fragments of Jahwist and Elohist. That said, we can divide this into two parts: pointless ritual, followed by the usual Pissed Off Yahweh.

Trigger Warning: Tedium Ahead

Chukat is mostly concerned with the Law of the Red Cow. The Law of the Red Cow is the recipe for creating the Water of Lustration. Aren’t you glad I told you? Now down to specifics.

Step One is “get a red cow.” But not just any Red Cow, because Yahweh is picky. This has to be a perfect cow, a virgin (basically), never yoked, without blemish. There is of course extensive rabbinical debate over what “unblemished” means (which raises tedium to a new level). Here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia:

Rabbi Eliezer ruled that… the Red Cow (פָרָה‎, parah) prescribed in Numbers 19:2 had to be two years old. But the Sages ruled that… the Red Cow could be three or four years old. Rabbi Meir ruled that the Red Cow could be even five years old, but they did not wait with an older cow, as it might in the meantime grow some black hairs and thus become invalid.

Rabbi Eliezer ruled that a Red Cow that was pregnant was nonetheless valid, but the Sages ruled it invalid. Rabbi Eliezer ruled that the Red Cow could not be purchased from Gentiles, but the Sages ruled that such cow could be valid. If the horns or the hoofs of the Red Cow were black, they were chopped off, and the Red Cow was then valid. The cow’s eye, teeth, and tongue could cause no invalidity. And a dwarf-like cow was nonetheless valid. If the Red Cow had a sebaceous cyst and they cut it off, Rabbi Judah ruled the cow invalid, but Rabbi Simeon ruled it invalid only if no red hair grew in its place.

A Red Cow born by a caesarean section, the hire of a harlot, or the price of a dog was invalid. Rabbi Eliezer ruled it valid, for Deuteronomy 23:19 states, “You shall not bring the hire of a harlot or the price of a dog into the house of the Lord your God,” and the Red Cow was not brought into the Temple. The Mishnah taught that all blemishes that caused consecrated animals to be invalid as sacrifices also caused the Red Cow to be invalid. If one had ridden on the cow, leaned on it, hung on its tail, crossed a river with its help, doubled up its leading rope, or put one’s cloak on it, the cow was invalid. But if one had only fastened it by its leading rope or made for it a sandal to prevent it from slipping, or spread one’s cloak on it because of flies, it remained valid. The general rule was that wherever one did something for its own sake, the cow remained valid; but if one did something for the sake of another purpose, it invalidated the cow. If a bird rested on the cow, it remained valid. If a bull mounted it, it became invalid; but Rabbi Judah ruled that if people brought the bull to mate with the cow, the cow became invalid, but if the bull did so on its own, the cow remained valid.

If a cow had two black or white hairs growing within one follicle, it was invalid. Rabbi Judah said even within one hollow. If the hairs grew within two adjacent follicles, the cow was invalid. Rabbi Akiva ruled that even if there were four or even five non-red hairs, if they were dispersed, they could be plucked out. Rabbi Eliezer ruled that even as many as 50 such hairs could be plucked. But Rabbi Joshua ben Bathyra ruled that even if it had only one non-red hair on its head and one on its tail, it was invalid. If the cow had two hairs in one follicle with their roots black and their tips red or with their roots red and their tips black, Rabbi Meir taught that what was visible determined validity; but the Sages ruled that validity followed the root.

Rav Judah reported in Samuel’s name an account of the rarity of completely Red Cows: When they asked Rabbi Eliezer how far the honor due parents extended, Rabbi Eliezer told of a non-Jew from Ashkelon named Dama son of Nethinah. The Sages offered Dama a profit of 600,000 gold denarii (or Rav Kahana said 800,000 denarii) in exchange for jewels that he had that the Sages could use in the ephod, but as the key to the jewels lay under Dama’s father’s pillow, Dama declined the offer so as not to trouble his father. The next year, God rewarded Dama by causing a Red Cow to be born in his herd. When the Sages went to buy it, Dama told them that he knew that he could ask for all the money in the world and they would pay it, but he asked for only the money that he had lost in honoring his father.

This is the shit rabbis do to pass the time.

Step Two is “kill the cow.” But of course, it has to be done a certain way by a certain person in a certain place. Because Yahweh is really, really picky. The priest must take the cow outside of the camp (for desert folk) or the city (for city folk), slit its throat with the right hand, catch some blood with the left hand, then sprinkle it seven times in the direction of the Tabernacle.

Step Three is “burn the cow.” But that doesn’t mean barbecue. Oh no, the cow has to be burned thoroughly, in a fire that also burns hyssop, cedar, and crimson wool. If you don’t get all that in with the cow, Yahweh is going to get a rage-boner and there’s going to be some divine fireworks of the unpleasant sort.

Step Four is to mix the ashes with some water to form Water of Lustration. And WoL is handy shit, useful for all sorts of ritual purifications starting with…

Step Five, wherein the guy who killed the cow and the guy who burned the cow now have to be purified. This involves washing their clothes, dipping hyssop into the WoL and sprinkling it around, waiting until sunset, waving a dead chicken over their heads, and having them don fezzes and drive around in tiny cars. Or something like that.

Once you have WoL on hand, you’ll find that all sorts of ritual purifications become easier. Touch a dead guy, WoL will clean you (it takes a week, but that beats being impure forever). Someone dies in a tent, yep, WoL will make that tent useful again. Each time, the key is to dip hyssop into the WoL and start sprinkling it around. I’m sure you’ll need a Prop 65 warning and an MSDS to make this legal, but a resourceful Jew is a blessed Jew. The whole corpse-contamination thing is incredibly complex, but WoL is in the middle of all of it. By the way, here’s a rather recherche passage from the Talmud regarding corpse taboos:

Ulla said: According to the law of the Torah the skin of a man is clean, but for what reason did they say it was unclean? As a precautionary measure lest a man make rugs out of the skin of his father and mother.

Insert lampshade joke here.

OK, I could go on in great detail about corpses and purification, but frankly, this shit’s putting me to sleep. I hope you get the point which is that there IS no point.

From here, the story lurches to desert-wandering action. Mostly, it’s Jews running into other tribes and killing them, which seems to have pleased Yahweh. The sedrah is just a tribe-by-tribe account of how they got killed and basic stats. But there is one significant story in there as well, and naturally, it’s all about Yahweh being a major asshole yet again, and the Jews being whiny bitches.

The whiny bitches were getting thirsty. “Mommy, bring me a drink of water!” or something like that. Moses and Aaron, both being mindful of the necessity of distributing goodies to remain in power in Middle Eastern cultures, went to Yahweh and said, “We gotta come up with some water or these Jews are going to be a major painus in the anus.”

Yahweh responded, “See that rock over yonder? The big gray one? Yeah that one. Grab your walking stick, go over to it, and tell it to give you water. And make sure the Jews are watching so they know that it’s Another Yahweh Miracle.”

So with the restive Jews following them, Moses and Aaron walked over to the rock. Moses hollered, “OK, y’all want water?”

The Jews responded, “Yes!”

Moses yelled, “I CAN’T HEAR YOOOOUUU!”

The Jews screamed, “YESSSSSSS!”

Then Moses and Aaron turned to the rock at hit it with the walking stick. Water gushed forth in impressive quantities. Yay, a miracle! Except… this pissed off Yahweh because he hadn’t said anything about using a stick, he had just mentioned the yelling part. Like I said Yahweh is picky. And when a picky asshole isn’t satisfied, assholery is inevitable. The first thing Yahweh did was tell Moses and Aaron, “Forget entering The Promised Land, you disobeyed me.” Then he said to Aaron, “OK, you’re through as High Priest. Turn over your robes, breastplates, and employee ID to Eleazer, your son. Maybe HE won’t be such a useless fuck-up.” So Aaron gave them to Moses to pass along, then died. When Yahweh fires you, your severance is death, and he will not wish you all the best in your future endeavors.

Moses was looking a bit nervous at this point, but Yahweh said, “No worries. I’m going to kill you, just not quite yet. I have a few jobs for you to do first.” As you might expect, the “jobs” involved killing a bunch of other tribes. And as usual, Yahweh decided to plague the Jews, this time with serpents. And not just ordinary serpents- these were Fire Serpents. The verses are unclear on how many Jews he offed that way, but I would not be surprised if it were 12,900. And again as usual, he instructed Moses on how to do the extermination, by putting a Nehushtan on the top of his stick (the stick that started all this trouble) and having anyone bitten by a Fire Serpent be cured by looking at the bronze. I guess if you were blind, you were shit out of luck.

I’ll leave this as a cliffhanger. You know Moses is going to die, the question will be where and how…

 

*I am still not yet convinced of the Fragmentary Hypothesis, not that it really matters.

We’re in the long break between (((holidays))), so you’re getting another bible story, though I’ll keep it short this time.

Before delving into this week’s story, though, I want to mention the Documentary Hypothesis, with which most of you are undoubtedly familiar (if you’re not, here’s a delightful book which explains it). Basically, the DH explains that the bible is actually a composite of four different books, woven together by an editor or editors around 500 BCE. The books are referred to as J, E, P, and D, with the P book representing the interests of the priest class and concerned mostly with details of ritual.

On to the story. This week’s sedrah is called Korach, named after a fellow who was unhappy with Moses and his clan running things during the 40 Year March, but didn’t get the Hollywood treatment of Dathan. Anyway, you’ll recall last week’s bit on the spies who checked out Canaan, Yahweh getting sand in his metaphorical vagina, and lots of smiting of the Jews. Following these unfortunate incidents, Yahweh had Moses build a refugee camp with about the permanence of contemporary ones in the area. There, the Jews had to sit and wait right outside of Canaan until the 40 years were finished and most of the adults were dead. As you can imagine, this did not sit well with the Jews, who kept demanding from the back seat, “ARE WE THERE YET?”

Korach was a bit of a malcontent. By the rules of inheritance, he should have been the High Priest, but for some strange and mysterious reason, he was bypassed so that Moses could install his brother Aaron in that position. This may seem vaguely familiar to anyone who is familiar with Chicago. Korach, like many Chicagoans, wondered who put Moses in charge; “I didn’t vote for him, did you?” Taking matters into his own hands, he rounded up 250 of his crew and confronted Moses. “Who the fuck made YOU king, Moshe Baby? Where’s MY cut? Whycome Aaron is getting the sweet ride that ought to be mine?”Moses responded, “Hey, you’re so fucking smart, go light your incense burners at Yahweh and ask him what’s what.” You see, only Real Priests were allowed to do that, and given the patronage aspects here, this would not include Korach et al.

This lese majeste did not exactly please Yahweh, who as you recall was something of a thin-skinned homicidal asshole. Yahweh thundered, “Everybody stand back, unauthorized incense, it’s clobberin’ time!” Moses, now emboldened, declared, “If these folks who did not respect muh authoritah are right, they’ll die of old age. But with Yahweh around, I bet something’s going to happen like, oh, the Earth swallowing them up.” Good guess, Moses, that’s exactly what happened. Korach and his leaders got swallowed up. Funny coincidence.

 

You’d think, that being done, Yahweh was through. Heh, you don’t know Yahweh. The rest of the rebels then got hit with Holy Cleansing Fire, because really, once you start killing, it’s hard to know when to stop. Much like eating potato chips.

The Jews, having had a night to think about this, gathered around and said, “This seems a bit excessive, eh? Killing 250 people because of some incense?” Not the thing to say when Yahweh is on a killing spree. Yahweh, being the kind of god he was, naturally started a plague. Yahweh loved plagues, it was sort of a hobby with him. But like good citizens, Aaron and Moses figured out that if everyone got plagued, there wouldn’t be anyone left to pay graft make holy sacrifices. So they lit their incense and jumped between Yahweh and the remaining Jews. Holy incense, you see, apparently acts on Yahweh the way Green Kryptonite works on Superman. The plague was stopped, but of course, too bad for the 15,000 Jews who had already been snuffed. Ah well, them’s the breaks.

Now, just to prove to the remaining Jews that they had better not fuck with Moses and Aaron again, Yahweh did a couple minor miracles involving walking sticks and almond trees. I don’t know about you, but if I just saw the earth swallow some rebel leaders, the rest of the rebels get instantly burned up, and a sudden massive plague, some cheap walking stick to almond tree transformation would not be the thing that convinces me. But somehow, it did the trick for the Jews.

Yahweh then told Aaron and Moses that they wouldn’t have to work on farms and ranches, that everyone else had to pay them 10% off the top. That was the setup and the Jews had to shut up and like it. Everyone toiled, the priests took their cut. Just like Chicago.

And that was really the point of the story, to make the Jews fearful if they didn’t pay protection make holy sacrifices to the priests. And circling back to the Documentary Hypothesis, you know who wrote THIS part of the bible. Yep, it’s part of the P narrative. Huh, funny coincidence, that.

One charming Jew custom is the reading of the equivalent of a chapter of the Torah each Sabbath. Because those damn Jews have a different word for EVERYTHING, the Torah is divided into “sedrot” rather than chapters. And to confuse the goyim further, we also call them “parshiyot.” We are simultaneously crafty and redundant.

This week’s sedrah (that’s the singular form, you uncircumcised heathen) is a rather scattered and eventful portion from the book of Bamidbar (“in the desert”), which if your penis is intact, you might call “Numbers.” This is beside the point, but then again, I said the story was scattered.

The first part of the story starts when Moses sends a band of spies on an advance scouting mission to Canaan (later called Judah, then Israel, then Palestine, then Israel again, whatever). After 40 days, the spies came back and said, “Holy shit, this ain’t gonna be easy. The people already there are fucking ENORMOUS and totes badass. But check out the fruit!” They showed Moses some big grape clusters (overcropping already being a custom, the AOC laws being many millennia in the future) and a pomegranate. “The grapes look nice,” Moses observed, “but what kind of cheap shit is this, only bringing me one pomegranate?” Moses was a charmer. But hey, they had some figs, too, which helps keep a Jew nice and regular.

Jews being who they are, they started whining, “Those guys living there are badass, we’re fucked! Shit, we coulda stayed in Egypt! Let’s vote to go back!” Two of the spies demurred, arguing, “Look at the fruit! LOOK AT THE FRUIT!” which seemed as good an argument as any. To be fair, they did point out, “Remember the secret weapon: Yahweh,” which to them was an unassailable argument. The rest of the people thought the argument was eminently assailable as were the two optimistic spies, so prepared to stone them. This pissed off Yahweh, of course, because after doing all the plague stuff, he kinda expected to be a bit more respected.

Yahweh and Moses had a sidebar. “Look, Moses, enough is enough. These Jews dissed me, and that’s royally pissing me off. I think it’s time for some smiting.” Now here’s the diff between Jews and goyim- we’ll argue. “Submission” is not the translation of “Jew.” Moses countered, “Look, Yahweh baby, you do that and all those goyim around us will laugh in your face. ‘Stupid Yahweh couldn’t even get those Jews from Egypt to Canaan without them all dying. HAH-hah!’ Is that really what you want?” Yahweh thought that was a pretty good argument, so he said, “OK, we’ll compromise. These people wussed, then doubted me and my power, so fuck ’em. We’ll wander around for the next 40 years or so until all the adults are dead, THEN we can go into Canaan and kick asses. No-one’s gonna laugh at Yahweh then, huh?” Moses was a bit more polite than I would have been, so didn’t ask the obvious question: “Umm, why not just smite the Canaanites, then we can just waltz in?” Apparently, this was too obvious.

For some reason, all of this impressed the Jews. They said, “My bad” to Yahweh, and unlike politicians when they say, “I take full responsibility,” they actually DID take full responsibility. I can’t figure out this sudden change in attitude, but I guess that’s why I’m not religious.

After detailing the booty that the priests would get to extirpate the sin of Doubt (funny coincidence, that), the story lurches to something which should sound familiar to anyone reading the news out of the Middle East today. Some people walking around the desert for a Saturday stroll saw a guy picking up sticks. As any reasonable Middle Easterner would do, they grabbed the guy and hauled him in front of Moses. “Dude was out there picking up sticks. You’re Yahweh’s BFF, tell us what to do- and you know what we want!” Moses, ever deferential, said, “Let me check with The Big Guy, back to you shortly.” Very shortly, as it turns out. Yahweh, who always comes across as somewhat insecure in these stories, said, “Hey, I told you not to pick shit up on Saturday. So… kill him. That’s the only reasonable response.”

This made the people very happy, so they took the guy outside, set him up, got the rocks handy, then cast the first stone. And the second. And the third… well, you get the idea. I think the usual phrase is, “closed casket funeral.” ISIS does have a long tradition.

I love happy endings.