Rabbi Claude's Scribbles

Genesis 2: (15) The Lord Gd took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden, to till it and tend it.   (16) And the Lord Gd commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you are free to eat; (17) but as for the tree of knowledge of good and bad, you must not eat of it; for as soon as you eat of it, you shall die.”             (18) The Lord Gd said, “It is not good for man to be alone; I will make a fitting helper for him.” (19) And the Lord Gd formed out of the earth all the wild beasts and all the birds of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that would be its name.   (20) And the man gave names to all the cattle and to the birds of the sky and to all the wild beasts; but for Adam no fitting helper was found. Adam, the very first human being has been freshly minted by his creator out of the dust of the ground.   His partner is not yet on the scene.   She will be formed in the next ve

The cloud took on the familiar shape of a mushroom head and for a moment, it appeared as though nature had intervened in realpolitik to create a perfect combination of trigonometry and science. What followed has led to the deaths of at least one-hundred-and-thirty-five people, along with thousands injured (at the time of writing) in Beirut, Lebanon on Tuesday, 4th August 2020. When the 'mushroom cloud' first appeared, no-one had seen its likeness.  Soon enough it would become a key moment in the history of the Twentieth Century.  Seventy to eighty thousand people were killed instantly.  This equated to thirty percent of the population of Hiroshima, on Monday morning, 6th August 1945 (seventy-five years ago today, when I'm writing this Drasha).  Many died later as a result of burns sustained and radiation poisoning. A horrific equation was created which could be written down as 'Mushrooms+Clouds=Death.' In the latter, the USA bombed Hiroshima to put an end to the ong