Parshas Re'eh: Blessings and Life, A Winning Combination

Our Torah portion this week, Re'eh: Devarim (Deuteronomy) 11:26 - 16:17, begins with an eloquent lesson of the spiritual axiom, the blessing and the curse: We will receive blessings if we follow God's commandments as given in Torah, and we will receive curses if we do not follow God's commandments as given in Torah. Moses explains to the Jews how to apply this axiom very specifically in the Holy Land as the people will go about their daily routine and interact with each other.

Re'eh means 'see' so the first order of the day is to identify idolatry and the profiteers who promote evil, and eradicate them from the neighborhood. Then, establish places of worship and civic organizations that honor God and holiness. Moses delineates rules for temple management, religious rituals and animal sacrifice, dietary guidelines and restrictions, tithing, charity, loans, debt forgiveness, and festival observance.

Strong prohibitions against consuming animal blood appear in this portion, based on the explanation that blood is the life of the animal and so the blood must be respected. Jews are forbidden to eat a fertile chicken egg with a blood spot, which shows evidence of life, and all of our meat must be koshered to remove the blood from the flesh.

Moses returns many times to different aspects of idolatry along with brutal mandates to stop it. Absolutely no trace of it is allowed, no people, no physical structures, no symbols.

Our Haftarah this week continues with Yeshayahu (Isaiah) 54:11 - 55:5, as he pivots from dire prognostications to sharing God's vision of a redeemed Israel following Torah and the reality of the messianic era. 

The idea that blood is life captures our attention. It applies to the baby in the womb, who at 21 days gestation has a beating heart and a functional circulatory system. This fact discredits claims that the entity in the womb is not alive until it's born. Every abortion stops a beating heart, an organ that circulates blood around the body, so according to Torah every abortion kills a living human being.

Today, many people suffer from numbed spiritual sensibilities from the bombardment of lies that we see and hear all around us. We literally cannot 'see' nor can we 'hear' the truth. In this environment, how can we follow Torah mandates to eradicate idolatry after allowing it to grow so powerful? Civil and criminal laws against property damage and killing people require that we use other methods to eliminate unholiness in our midst as we trust in Isaiah's vision and promise of a redeemed world.

We take solace in the understanding that God's ways are not our ways, and God's timing is not our timing. As we fill our days with efforts to educate, save, heal and redeem we must leave the results to Heaven, and rest at night in the knowledge that our Heavenly Father will provide a pathway to restoration in His time and in His ways.

This week, I received a call from Lauren Shapiro of the TIkvah Fund, host of the Jewish Leadership Conference in New York City in December. Lauren began the call praising our long term dedication to our educational and healing work, and assured me that she is sympathetic to our mission. Her pleasant attitude never changed as she reneged on the verbal understanding of our $5,000 Bronze level sponsorship tabling opportunity at the Conference for indistinct reasons that never did address the implied reason: the Tikvah Fund cannot abide educational resources that include human development videos and fact sheets about abortion harms and the spiritual and demographic suicide of Jewish abortion in Israel. Indeed, Lauren couldn't listen to my description of our tabling items without interrupting me. I had to ask her to let me finish. We still are welcome to pay the $1,000 per person ticket price to attend the conference, and Lauren encouraged me to attend. We closed the call with pleasant goodbyes, her mission accomplished

I wasn't surprised that the JPLF was canceled. In fact, I was surprised by the initial enthusiastic welcome we received from a very nice representative from the TIkvah Fund, who clearly is not aware of the probable preponderance of abortion access supporters among the Fund directors nor of the anticipated pushback from donors and Conference attendees if we table there.

Lauren and her peers at the Tikvah Fund passed on a rare opportunity to truly encourage and support Jewish life and posterity, reflective of the Fund's mission statement, to educate exceptional young Jews and to bring the best Jewish and Zionist ideas to the world.

I have concerns that the Fund's decision to ban lifesaving information to the Jewish young adults they serve will have serious consequences. Once made aware of the destruction of human life made in God's image by torturing babies to death in the womb and then failing to protect them and their parents has dire consequences. Disregarding this threat reveals unfortunate negligence in the midst of a death culture that grows daily with programs like the Marie Stopes initiative springing up all over social media and the Internet.

Marie Stopes launches platform that will help children and teens get abortions without parents knowing

https://righttolife.org.uk/news/marie-stopes-launches-platform-that-will-help-children-and-teens-get-abortions-without-parents-knowing?

Lauren's phone number is ‭(917) 841-1040‬. Her email address is lshapiro@tikvahfund.org. If you want to express your views to her, please keep in mind our educational and healing mission. She needs educated, not eradicated. Like so many of our friends and neighbors, Lauren's intellectual conceit and misguided compassion, and perhaps an abortion history conspire with personal ambitions and professional insecurity to deny the truth, allowing her to be used by our enemies to enable the unthinkable. 

As HaShem conveys to us in Jeremiah 7:30: “For the Children of Judah have done that which is evil in My sight, saith the Lord; they have set their detestable things in the house whereon My name is called, to defile it. And they have built the high places of Topheth, which is the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and daughters in the fire which I commanded not, neither came it into my mind.”                 

Cecily Routman

May there be abundant peace from Heaven, and good life upon us and upon all Israel. Amen.

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