Tazria/Metzora -- The Pontiff: More Porcine than Leonine

It has been noted that this week’s parsha, Tazria-Metzora, comes right after Shemini to remind us that just as there are consequences for what we put in our mouths, there are also consequences for what comes out of our mouths. In fact, the Talmud in Pesachim 3b records how Rav rebuked a student who metaphorically referred to exhaustion by comparing it to a “tired chazir — a pig,” while accepting the more refined comparison to a “tired gedi — a kid.” The Sages teach that the Torah itself goes to great lengths to avoid even coarse language.

A well-known mussar parable builds on this theme: when one disciple recoils at the sight of a pig and says, in essence, “Uch, look at this pig,” the other gently replies, “Oh, how white are its teeth!” On the surface, this encourages seeing some good even in something repulsive. But the parable also warns against the opposite danger — using superficial refinement or “white teeth” compliments to whitewash what is fundamentally impure and dangerous.

Rabbi Jonathan Muskat — who is absolutely clear about where one should stand on the current matzav in the Middle East and does not shy away from saying so — still remains concerned enough about what comes out of our mouths that he seems to exemplify the second rabbi in that parable. In a recent piece, he forthrightly states that the Pope’s position is “morally wrong and ultimately damaging,” yet he still insists on giving the pontiff the benefit of respectful dialogue and worries that President Trump’s blunt tone does not foster the thoughtful exchange serious moral issues demand.

Instead of worrying about the tone of those confronting the Pope, Rabbi Muskat would have done better to train his eye on the deeper issue: the glaring disconnect between the Pope’s public performance of piety and the moral failure it conceals—and remember the Talmudic Roman analog that points to what this Pope really is: way more porcine than Leonine, irrespective of his Vatican station.  Way more native Chicago than adopted Rome; it seems the stockyards rubbed off on him in more ways than one. Just like the Edomite Roman pig, he stretches out his “kosher feet” in the shoes of the fisherman for all to see — publicly praying for peace, issuing platitudes about dialogue, and posturing as a moral voice — whie the silence on the slaughter of his own flock and the selective pressure against those defending Jewish and American lives — reveals what’s in his innards.

He has offered almost no named condemnations, no emergency visits, and no urgent outcry as hundreds of Christians are murdered this year in Nigeria, the Sahel, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Syria. Churches have been burned to the ground, pastors kidnapped and killed, and entire communities with centuries of faith wiped out. Yet when those fighting actual terrorists in Iran and Gaza act decisively, the rhetoric sharpens: viral messages, media interviews, coordinated appearances by American cardinals, coordinated by a certain political office in his hometown.

The Chazal compared Rome to the pig precisely because it boasts of justice and civilization while committing robbery and violence. This Pope does the same in our day: he shills for restraint toward terrorism’s sponsors in the name of “peace,” all while his own Christians bleed. In Tazria-Metzora we learn that tzara’at can afflict the body for the sins of the tongue. In our day, the greater affliction may be the polished silence and public posturing that follows when we insist on admiring the pig’s feet instead of confronting the pig itself.

It's also been said that one reason that, among the offerings brought to cure the tzaraas we find in parshas metzora, one brings cedar wood to atone for haughtiness – and hyssop to possibly atone for agonizing self-doubt that might have led to the infractions that caused the affliction. Excessive refinement in the face of this papal office’s porcine posturing is not moral sophistication — it is as injurious as the self-deprecation that led to a particular tzaraas sufferer needing atonement.   This pope needs to be called out for who and what he is.  And if President Trump did it for us and made our job easier, that’s the example we should have followed in this case – and grant him hakaras hatov for it.

Chalice Malice: Leo's Balaamic Vinegar

In an age when too many voices blur moral lines, Rabbi Jonathan Muskat’s recent piece, “When Restraint Becomes a Moral Failure,” forthrightly declares that Pope Leo XIV’s position on the current conflict is not merely mistaken but “morally wrong and ultimately damaging for the good of the world.” When an adversary repeatedly declares its intent to destroy Israel, labels America the “Great Satan,” and sustains decades of proxy terrorism, nuclear brinkmanship, and ideological war, Torah does not counsel endless restraint. It demands milchemet mitzvah—defensive war that is obligatory, not optional. Rabbi Muskat’s invocation of that category shows what is at stake.

Yet Rabbi Muskat still commits a category error that Chazal would recognize as perilous. By granting Pope Leo XIV the status of a legitimate religious authority whose “voice” merits respectful engagement—while fretting over President Trump’s “dismissive and personal” tone—the rabbi inadvertently extends a chut hasa’arah of  credibility to a figure whose actions place him firmly in the category of oyev, not even dubious ally. That misplacement risks the very merachem al ha-achzarim of Shaul Hamelech and misplaced anivus of Rav Zecharia ben Avkilus that Chazal warned led to national catastrophe.

Chazal draw sharp distinctions among potentates. There are those who, while scrutinized, function as limited allies: the Pharaohs of Yosef’s era; Koresh; Daryavesh (TB RB 3b-4a). Motivations are probed, but transaction is possible without cozy embrace. There might be a middle ground—Achashverosh—whom the Megillah treats warily; starting out as hostile as Haman, moved by reality and eventually just defaulting to indifference once the perceived Jewish threat to his throne proves illusory. 

And then there are the outright enemies: the Pharaohs of Shemot through Beshalach, Bilaam, Sichon, Og, the thirty-one kings, Nebuchadnezzar, Titus, and the rest of the nevi’im rishonim’s catalogue of destroyers. These are not interlocutors. Their “blessings” are curses with silver linings; their peace-talk masks Judeocidal intent.

President Trump belongs—generously—in the first category, and arguably exceeds it. He has moved decisively against the Islamic Republic rather than mollifying it as Obama and Biden did. He has not earned the benefit of every doubt, but he has earned far more zechut than his critics concede.  He’s been called Achashverosh, but other than hanging Haman, Achashverosh made the Jews do the defensive gruntwork.  President Trump has worked in an open alliance with Israel not only to the fury of the left but also a loud portion of the base which is humiliated by his open and repeated support for Jewish initiatives which they see as a personal betrayal.  Ax did not have that kind of backbone.

Pope Leo XIV, by contrast, has placed himself squarely among the second. A Chicago-born pontiff who met privately with Obama strategist David Axelrod just days before escalating tensions, he has offered no named condemnations of the slaughter of Christians in Nigeria, the Sahel, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Syria, or the burning of churches across those regions. Pastors kidnapped, communities wiped out—centuries of faith erased—yet silence. When Trump’s strikes target actual terrorists in Iran and Gaza, however, the rhetoric shifts. Viral messages, media interviews, American cardinals on 60 Minutes—sudden moral urgency appears. This is not Augustine or Aquinas speaking; it is Obamanian social-justice theology wearing clerical robes, a third Obama term run from the Vatican.

Even his own flock sees the pattern. A practicing Catholic, Dakota Andrade, wrote this week: “I’m a practicing Catholic. And I need to say something that’s going to make a lot of people uncomfortable… Pope Leo XIV has said almost nothing. No named condemnations. No emergency visits… Just quiet platitudes about dialogue and peace—directed at nobody in particular. But the week Trump escalated the Iran conflict… three American Cardinals appear on 60 Minutes in what felt like a coordinated response.” This is not shepherding; this is the state religion of Tuckercarlstan hiding behind a frock and skullcap.  It has far more in common with the “peace” that Bilaam peddled than with any authentic Catholic Just War tradition.

Defending the Pope’s right to “apply his religious teachings to contemporary global issues” –especially this pope--and worrying that Trump’s bluntness “does not foster… respectful dialogue” conflates kavod ha-Torah with respect for a theology has proven Judeomisic. Why grant credibility to a system whose current representative aids—by silence and selective pressure—precisely the Judeocidal enemies we face? Forty Democratic senators now seek to restrict arms to Israel even as America and Israel confront Iran and Hezbollah together. The DNC and the Vatican, in parallel, function as neo-Confederates of a sort: traitorous voices cheering, however indirectly, another Holocaust while Pius XII’s ghost nods approvingly from the wings.

Rabbi Muskat is not woke. He wants to win this war. Yet hand-wringing over tone while extending religious legitimacy to Leo XIV repeats Saul’s mercy on Amalek and R. Zechariah ben Avkilus’s fatal anivus at the time of the churban. Trump’s “vulgarity,” in context, is restrained compared to the stakes. There is no cheftza shel Torah that requires even a scintilla of deference here. The hour calls for drosh lignai: scathing public opprobrium of the kind Chazal reserved for Bilaam and his spiritual heirs–possibly even vulgar and adhominous, poetically befitting the character of Bilaam.

We can—and must—support the war effort Rabbi Muskat rightly champions. But we do so by keeping categories straight. Trump deserves the presumption of good faith his critics have forfeited. Leo XIV does not. To blur that line is not nuance; it is the diplomacy of defeat. In 2026, with Jewish lives and American interests on the line, we cannot afford another round of Saulite equivocation. 

Leo’s Communion Chalice drips with Balaamic Vinegar.  And, like Bilaam, everything about him should be nidrosh lignai.  The only question is whether it’s a mitzvah or a chovah.  Either way, he’s at war with us—and the US—in the name of “peace” and we do ourselves no favors by according any respect to his theology which is more Chicago than Rome, and all of it Orwell.

 

 

Vayeshev – Executive Function

 Vayeshev is about executive capacity: when vision outruns judgment, when authority precedes restraint, and when leadership instincts appear before the internal structures to carry them.  Yosef has to learn executive function the hard way, and eventually—according to the Gemara in Sotah, which says he conducted himself with “rabbanus”—it may literally be what nearly kills him before his brothers. 

Still: Yosef cannot suppress his dreams. They are not fantasy; they border on nevuah. The Torah never criticizes him for dreaming. But it does criticize how he handles those dreams. Like Yaakov before him—laughing silently while Esav cries over the loss of the brachos, dooming later generations—Yosef may possess truth, but lacks executive modulation. Vision without restraint becomes provocation. Not malice, not arrogance—irrational exuberance. This is his first executive failure:  knowing something true does not license saying it unfiltered.

Yosef’s second failure is subtler. Chazal describe him as mesalsel b’se’aro; not vanity per se — premature self-presentation: acting like a ruler before being one.  Enter Mrs. Potiphar—not just as a seductress, but also a stress test. Yosef is not saved by willpower. He is saved by dmus d'yukno shel aviv: an external regulator.  And the Midrash’s edge is sharp: had he believed he could “do it once” and shut her up (“Olam haba? With you? The things I do for Egypt”)—he might have rationalized himself out of eternity.

Instead, he’s falsely imprisoned, but the ten years aren’t enough, yet.  R. Shimon Shkop’s insight is surgical: the extra two years are not because Yosef asked the sar ha-mashkim to remember him—but because he asked twice: initiative turns into over-management. Yosef is almost there — and when he finally exits prison, he is transformed. He plans. He delegates. He delays. He controls information. He governs hunger, fear, and timing.  He has learned executive function.

Now contrast Yehuda, the other executive.  Yehuda does not endanger himself; he endangers everyone else: his proposal to sell Yosef succeeds—and he is blamed for that success; he goes OTD in form if not in substance by marrying a Canaanite, leading to the deaths of his first two sons, and then he compounds their gross (literally and figuratively) mistreatment of Tamar—publicly and structurally—even with Yaakov and Yitzchak, according to Midrash trying to cover for him, apparently unaware of what has happened inside Yehuda’s home.  Only when Tamar forces recognition—tzadkah mimeni—does Yehuda experience executive awakening, learning not through temptation but through consequence.

So why is it that Yosef suffers for his “rabbanus”?  Yosef’s challenge is not morality. It is power calibration.  He is outward-facing, system-oriented, globally necessary. Egypt cannot survive without him. The brothers—by contrast—are inward-facing, identity-preserving, covenantal.   The hint of reconciliation comes with Yehuda and Tamar at the end of Chapter 38—the Davidic lineage: enduring, corrected executive power.  Yosef represents competence refined by restraint; Yehuda represents authority refined by accountability. The Torah does not choose between them: it teaches the need to learn when vision becomes authority—and when authority must learn restraint.

Vayishlach - Amalek Goes To College

 If Amalek didn’t go to college, it would have had to have been invented for him.

In “Microaggression and Moral Cultures” (2014), sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning argue that American universities have shifted from a culture of dignity, in which people absorb minor insults and reserve intervention for serious cases, toward a culture of victimhood, where even accidental slights are documented, broadcast, and brought to authorities. The change doesn’t merely reflect emotional fragility; it turns grievance into moral currency. Victimhood now elevates status and grants a presumption of innocence, allowing people to punish others without assuming responsibility. As reliance on third parties for justice increases, personal agency weakens, while the power to condemn intensifies. The result is a culture that licenses retaliation so long as the retaliation is framed as resistance.

That logic now shapes campus responses to the Israel–Hamas war. The oppressor-versus-oppressed narrative gives students a moral shortcut: support the “victim” and you are righteous, oppose them and you are immoral. Under this framework, endorsing violence does not require confronting its brutality. Chants for Israel’s eradication are treated not as acts of agency, but as performances of innocence—violence becomes morally cleansed if carried out on behalf of the oppressed. The righteousness of victimhood becomes a blank check for vengeance.

This secular worldview echoes the biblical chain of Esav → Eliphaz → Timna → Amalek, laid out at the end of this weeks’ parsha. Esav sells the birthright yet claims to be robbed, demanding sympathy to authorize anger. Eliphaz is sent to kill Yaakov but instead steals his wealth, insisting he had no choice: he avoids cost while harming another, outsources moral justification to authority, and uses identity (“a wronged son”) to excuse harm. This is victimhood converted into license. Timna transforms exclusion into ethnic grievance, turning pain into ideology. Amalek inherits the grievance without the injury, attacking not to win but to erase the symbol of a supposed oppressor. Once grievance becomes virtue, erasure becomes justice.

Amalek inherits neither the grievance nor the injury, only the narrative, and converts it into a cosmic truth-claim. They attack Israel not for strategy or justice, but in the name of a moral claim they never experienced, turning a secondhand story of “injustice” into permission for erasure. The Torah’s description of Amalek targeting the exhausted and the stragglers is not merely cowardice—it is grievance deployed as purification. And here Amalek institutionalizes something new: safek becomes ikkar—the central tool by which violence is justified. If one can cast doubt on the moral worth of the other, or the legitimacy of their history, or the purity of their identity, then annihilation masquerades as justice.

Amalek, then, is the ancient version of the Campbell–Manning student archetype. They possess no firsthand injury, yet claim the highest moral entitlement through a grievance they did not suffer, using it to justify punishment without accountability. Like the student who denounces others publicly but insists they are “only defending the oppressed,” Amalek harms while insisting they merely avenge a moral wrong already decided for them by narrative, not evidence. They outsource justification (“history demands it”), avoid personal responsibility (“we are only resisting domination”), and treat violence as ethical necessity rather than choice.

Campbell and Manning warn that “moral dependence” produces not weakness but the moralization of vengeance. A generation that won’t take responsibility for a personal slight will feel absolved endorsing atrocities if they are framed as solidarity. Esav cries injustice, Eliphaz enforces grievance, Timna sanctifies resentment, and Amalek purifies through destruction. Just as victimhood culture grants innocence by identity and power by accusation, Amalek cloaks aggression in borrowed moral outrage. They do not fight to win—they fight to prove themselves righteous.

And all for 50K a year on their parents’ dime.

Toldos: No Ontology For You

Esav is shocked that he didn't get bentched.

He is made to realize that is because at age 15, he benched himself permanently and wasn't even in the game.

Esav doesn’t snap when Yaakov walks out wearing his fur coat. He snaps when he realizes Rivka was never fooled.  And then - once he understands that the person he trusted most—more than Yitzchak, more than himself—had always known he wasn’t the partner he pretended to be.  You don’t shriek a “tze’aka gedola u’mara” because you lose a blessing. You scream like that when your entire self-delusion explodes in your face and you can’t look away.

When Rivka tells Yaakov to pose as his brother, she’s not playing favorites; she’s administering the only wake-up call Yitzchak is structurally incapable of initiating. She has the prophecy—rav yaavod tza’ir—but more importantly, she has the lived knowledge of what Esav’s character actually means. Yitzchak has no idea what a man like Esav means for a woman, for a household, for the covenant. She does: the daughter of the paradigmatic practitioner of droit de signeur, Besuel - “Lord of the Virgins” - and the brother of the man who treats his own daughters like commodities.  So she knows that ontology cannot be entrusted to someone who sees relationships as tools and responsibilities as props.  And that’s on his good days.

Yaakov isn’t eager: Is my purchase of the bechora not enough?  Must I take the brachos this way? He sounds like Tamar decades later, refusing to expose Yehuda even when she is entirely in the right, because the humiliation would fracture something in the Messianic line that can’t survive a public shaming. Yaakov fears that the method will contaminate the result.   So when Yaakov later allows himself that flicker of satisfaction at Esav’s tears, it reverberates — it cancels his initial reluctance, and history takes note. Tears are never trivial in Tanach. Sometimes they’re accepted, sometimes deferred. Esav’s pain is real. But his reversal is not: he is forever denied access to the ontology, it belongs to his brother, and always at his expense.  By definition, he can never win the sibling rivalry.

But this is the tragedy of Toldos — the ruse was necessary because Yitzchak thought Esav was Zevulun to Yaakov’s Yisaschar.   Rivka knows better.  The brachos are not being stolen—they are being rescued.  The brachos — not just food security or political leverage — were the operating system of the family’s spiritual destiny.  Ontologies don’t die easily, but neither do the people who lose access to them. That’s the lesson Esav forces us to confront: not that resentment fuels violence, but that exposure fuels rage. And sometimes the most dangerous thing in the world is the moment a person realizes the story he told himself was never true,  he’ll never be able to convince himself otherwise, and his brother will remind him.

Esav has no ontology.  

And that itself is now ontology.

Chaye Sarah: Sim Not Yadcha on the Text--How to Not Teach Chumash

Parshas Chayei Sarah contains two famously difficult passages that, curiously, receive wildly different treatment in traditional education.

The first is “sim-na yadcha tachas yerechi,” Avraham’s instruction to Eliezer to take a solemn oath.

The second is the midrashic claim that Rivka was three years old when she married Yitzchak.

Both can make an educator pause.

But only one of them — Rivka’s age — has historically been elevated in some circles into a mandatory ontology, a dogma that must be taught literally even when it distorts the narrative and contradicts basic educational responsibility.

Why did that happen?

And why did “tachas yerech,” which is far more awkward on the surface, never receive this ontological treatment?

And what does Rivka herself teach us about how to answer both questions?

1. “Tachas Yerech”: The Symbol Everyone Knows Is Symbolic

When Avraham asks Eliezer to place his hand tachas yerech, the Torah uses a euphemism — the same way it uses euphemisms throughout Chumash for matters of embodied life.

Chazal follow suit.

Rashi explains the act in covenantal terms: an oath taken upon the symbol of the bris — the brit being the only mitzvah-object Avraham possessed.

But no rebbe in cheder ever insisted that this was literal anatomy.

No one framed it as a test of emunah.

No one pressed children to envision it or defend it.

Why?

Because everyone understood instinctively what Chazal understood:

• The Torah is speaking in symbol.
• The location is covenantal, not anatomical.
• The point is brit, not biology.
• And, following Pesachim 3a, euphemism is an ideal educational modality for certain topics.

In other words:

This was never turned into ontology because it never served a sociological purpose.

2. “Rivka Was Three”: When a Midrash Becomes a Boundary Line

By contrast, the midrash claiming Rivka was three — which is not pshat, not unanimous in Chazal, and not demanded by the storyline — was elevated in some educational subcultures into a doctrinal identity marker.

A badge of fidelity.

Rabbi Marc Angel has written sharply about this: how some mechanchim framed it as an issue of emunah rather than as a midrashic calculation that was never meant to override the moral, psychological, and narrative reality the Torah is describing.

The tragedy of that approach is twofold:

 

(1) It violates Pesachim 3a.

The Gemara tells us to avoid explicit discussion of things that can embarrass or confuse, and to follow the Torah’s path of euphemism.

Yet here, educators did the opposite:

• *They euphemized “tachas yerech,”
• but literalized the midrash that makes the relationship incomprehensible,
• and insisted children accept it as “simple pshat.”

 

(2) It violates Rivka’s dignity — precisely what the text works to protect.

The Torah goes out of its way to present Rivka as:

• mature,
• morally discerning,
• spiritually independent,
• capable of choosing to leave her home,
• able to pass a rigorous test of chesed,
• and immediately recognizing Yitzchak’s spiritual greatness.

Nothing in the narrative reads like the story of a toddler.

Everything reads like the story of a young woman whose purity, courage, and agency shine in contrast to the broken environment around her.

Turning that story into a tale about a three-year-old is not piety.

It is a form of narrative malpractice that erases the very virtue the Torah is praising.

3. The Paradox: Why One Was Euphemized and the Other Literalized

 

Here is the critical insight:

The literalization of the Rivka-midrach was never driven by fidelity to the Torah.

It was driven by a cultural impulse:

• To defend midrash at all costs,
• To treat every drasha as ontology,
• To draw boundary lines between “us” and “them,”
• And to cultivate a form of emunah that confuses genre, category, and pedagogic responsibility.

 

“Tachas yerech” is symbolic.

“Rivka was 3” is also symbolic — a number derived via a midrashic derash for homiletic purposes.

But only one of them was enlisted into a culture war, so only one became a forbidden topic to question.

In truth, neither are literal.

Both are symbols, handled differently because of sociology, not Torah.

4. And Then Rivka Herself Teaches Us the Correct Mehalech

When Rivka first appears, the Torah does something rare.

It slows down.

It describes her deeds with care.

It lets us watch her:

• exercise judgment,
• act with strength,
• display generosity,
• withstand pressure,
• and make a profound choice with full intentionality.

The Torah presents Rivka as a paradigm of moral maturity in a corrupt household.

If mechanchim today want to know how to teach Bereishis responsibly, Rivka offers the model:

See people as the Torah sees them — not as a strained midrashic arithmetic sees them.

Teach covenantal meaning, not biological awkwardness.

Protect dignity, not distort it.

Use euphemism where the Torah uses euphemism.

Use ontology where the Torah uses ontology — not where culture does.

Rivka’s greatness lies in her ability to rise above a family that could not see her clearly.

Our task is not to repeat that failure.

Our task is to teach her story the way the Torah actually tells it: with dignity, nuance, and truth.

 

The Torah speaks in symbols; educational malpractice happens when we turn symbols into dogma. 

Rivka’s story reminds us that our job is to preserve dignity, not sacrifice it to misapplied piety.