There is a strange recurring theme in the Torah when it comes to sacrifices: the leftovers (noh-tar) are somehow holy, and must be either consumed by people or consumed by fire. There is something mystically and symbolically important about the sacrifices that were not finished in the main event.

The first time this word meaning “leftovers” is used, it refers to Lavan’s flock, after Jacob had removed all the spotted and speckled sheep and goats from the herd (he left them with his sons to tend). That which was left over was the flock that Jacob took aside and conducted a strange breeding experiment that generated more spotted and speckled sheep and goats.

Part 1: The Book Review

What would you think if you heard about a new fortune-telling device that is touted to predict psychological traits like depression, schizophrenia, and school achievement? What’s more, it can tell your fortune from the moment of your birth, it is completely reliable and unbiased – and it costs only £100.

Every year for Memorial Day, this photo pops up in my Facebook memories. The six men in the picture represent something that is impossible to imagine today. They are brothers who enlisted for WWII. My Grandpa Lee, the youngest in the photo (they had a 7th brother who was too young) is on the bottom right. He avoided action at the end of the war but did help with the pullout efforts in the Pacific, spending some time in Guam.

According to my Grandma, he was furious that his mother wouldn’t let him enlist earlier because of his age. His brother Troy (bottom center), got very ill and was sent home by the Red Cross and also didn’t see any “real” action. Their older sister was a “Rosie Riveter” at a plane factory in Kansas City.

Their brother Jack (top right) wasn’t as lucky and didn’t make it home. I’ve been told that one of the brothers delivered the letter of Jack’s death to their Mom. I regret not talking to my Grandpa more about it but he was a humble man who didn’t talk about it much. Even my Dad doesn’t know a lot about his Dad’s and Uncles’ time during the War.

I’ve spent most of the day working on the world’s most bomb-proof and secure chicken coop, with special attention to the framing for the peak and gable.  So far, so good.

I remember hearing some variation of “Can G-d make a rock so heavy He can’t move it?” in high school.  I don’t remember thinking much about it at the time. My earliest memory of having any clear thought about it is probably around 2010 when, as I recall, I answered it “Yes, and that rock is called ‘free will.'”

Which brings us to one thing normally recognized by contemporary philosophers as a reasonable limitation on omnipotence: G-d does not have the ability to break the rules of logic.  That’s part of how Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga responds to atheist philosopher J. L. Mackie.  In a nutshell, Mackie wonders why G-d can’t just make a perfect world with free people in it, and Plantinga replies that even omnipotence doesn’t have the power to give us freedom and force us to do the right thing at the same time.

“There are but two ways of forming an opinion in science. One is the scientific method; the other, the scholastic. One can judge from experiment, or one can blindly accept authority. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all important, and theory merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority” – Robert A. Heinlein in the short story Life-Line.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

For the last two days, actress Elie Kemper has been trending on Twitter, with the following explanation:

In 1999, actor Ellie Kemper was named the Queen of Love and Beauty at the Veiled Prophet Ball, a debutante ball held in St. Louis, Missouri, which was founded by wealthy White elites in 1878 and ’emphasized the existing power structure’, according to The Atlantic’s Scott Beauchamp

The “new normal” was supposed to be the post-pandemic reset where everyone was masked up, socially distanced, remotely working, and having fewer in real-life personal interactions. Thank G-d it isn’t working out that way. The “new normal” appears to look a lot like the “old normal” except with a twist: People are accepting the risk of being infected with the novel coronavirus.

Craig Medred, an independent reporter out of Alaska has a new piece, How fear dies, underscoring this:

Yesterday we took an Uber, here in London. I asked the driver where he was from – he said he was Iraqi. We got to chatting, because I am always interested in people. I asked how long he had been in the UK… and he had a story to tell!

A Shia Muslim, he used to live on Karbalah road in their city in Iraq, meaning “Jewish bath road”, or Mikvah road. His mother used to tell of living together with the Jews in their city, and how the Jewish neighbors helped his mother when she was pregnant with his sister.

In May of 2020, Dr. Fauci gave an interview to National Geographic in which he stated that there was no scientific evidence the coronavirus was made in a lab. He called the argument “circular.” He was quoted:

If you look a the evolution of the virus in bats and what’s out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated… Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species.