Rabbi Claude's Scribbles

Shavuot I: A Gathering of One   Genesis 12 .1 The LORD said to Abram, “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. It started off with a single person who received a command from Gd in Harran, south-western Syria. Hitherto this verse, we know the following salient facts about Abram from the written Torah: Genesis 11:26 When Terah had lived 70 years, he begot Abram, Nahor, and Haran. Genesis 11:27-28 Now this is the line of Terah: Terah begot Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran begot Lot. (28) Haran died in the lifetime of his father Terah, in his native land, Ur of the Chaldeans. Genesis 11:29 ... the name of Abram’s wife being Sarai... Genesis 11:30 Now Sarai was barren, she had no child. Genesis 11:31 Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot the son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and they set out together from Ur of the Chaldeans for the land of Canaan; but when they ha

I'm a relative newcomer to our world. I wasn't around when the majority of the 20th Century's history was being played out. I missed out on the exciting development of the 'white heat' of technology in the 1960s, the initial excitement that greeted the introduction of Rock and Roll to this country (although this wasn't to everybody's taste) and the feverish explosion of Beatlemania onto an unsuspecting British public. I also avoided having to endure the vile anti-Semitism of Mosley and his Blackshirts in the 1930s, live through the smog of the 1950s and find myself conscripted to far and remote locations. Oh, and I didn't live through either of the two world wars, which I am quite thankful for. It's therefore difficult for me to fully appreciate the significance of today, the 75th anniversary of the war I didn't live through. I got to experience the stub-end of the decade, from the candlelit-three-day-week through Thatcherism, to the Cool