This week's Torah portion is Parashat Chayei Sarah ("The Life of Sarah," Genesis 23:1–25:18). This shows reasoning going on. Thinking, Feeling
Key Events in the Portion
Sarah's Death and Eulogy: Sarah dies at the age of 127 in Kiriath-arba (Hebron) in the land of Canaan. Abraham comes to mourn, weep, and deliver a eulogy for her.
Purchase of Machpelah: Abraham negotiates with Ephron the Hittite to purchase the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron for 400 silver shekels to use as a burial site for Sarah. This marks the first legal land purchase by the Israelites in Canaan.
A Wife for Isaac: Abraham sends his senior servant (traditionally identified as Eliezer) back to his homeland in Aram-naharaim / Charan to find a righteous wife for his son Isaac. The servant meets Rebekah (Rivka) at a well, and she agrees to return with him to marry Isaac.
Abraham's Later Years and Legacy: After Sarah, Abraham marries Keturah and has more children, sending them eastward. Abraham dies at age 175 and is buried next to Sarah in the Cave of Machpelah by his sons Isaac and Ishmael.
Isaac is the patriarch of the Jews and Ishmael of the Muslims.
In reading Torah, every Jew scattered on Earth are on the same page, reading together. This happens every year. The beginning of the year has now passed by and we are reading the portion with Abram and Sarai, who has just died. Sarah was also Abram's niece. I have pictured her as being younger than Abram for this very reason. At the end of each page are the opinions of understanding and the names given for it, like RASHI, as one.
Abraham’s reaction to Sarah’s death in this week’s Torah portion
After hearing about her death, “Abraham came to eulogize Sarah and to weep for her” (Bereishit 23:2). Notice that there are two components of his response:
a eulogy (hesped)
and weeping (bechi).
Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, of England
Joseph Ber Soloveitchik was born on February 27, 1903, in Pruzhany, Imperial Russia (later Poland, now Belarus). He came from a rabbinical dynasty dating back some 200 years: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, whom Rabbi Sacks identifies as a paradigm, the model for a Jewish thinker who focused both on therational and the emotional (Ha’azinu 5779),
distinguishes between weeping, which is an emotional response of “spontaneous, overwhelming and uncontrollable grief,” and
the eulogy, which is “rooted in logical judgement” and serves as a clear analysis of the disastrous event and its consequences” (Out of the Whirlwind, p. 31).
This type of scientific reasoning all comes from Antonio Damasio, whose work helped shift the way we view the relationship between intellect and emotion and also serves as a paradigm to help us better understand an important part of Rabbi Sacks’ legacy.
Based on various philosophical traditions, there is a common conception that rationality is a totally divorced process from emotional experience.
Antonio Damasio (Portuguese: António Damásio; born 25 February 1944) is a Portuguese neuroscientist. He is currently the David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, as well as Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, at the University of Southern California, and, additionally, an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. He was previously the chair of neurology at the University of Iowa for 20 years
Damasio heads the Brain and Creativity Institute, and has authored several books. One of the most renowned neuroscientists of his generation, Damasio's research in neuroscience has shown that emotions play a central role in social cognition and decision-making
Damasio argues that this dichotomy between thinking and feeling is false. In studying patients who incurred lesions to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex, Damasio noticed that the patients were able to reason perfectly but were unable to feel emotion.
Yet, even though they were able to rationally analyze choices, they were unable to come to conclusive decisions.
Damasio outlines his neuroscientific research in his book Descartes’ Error, where he contends that our brains make decisions by integrating both emotional and rational components.Our thinking requires feeling. Those who voted had made a decision based on both rational thinking and emotional thinking. They had to put that together to have a decision
Senate Floor : Winning both chambers positions Democrats to cripple President Donald Trump’s agenda and to reshape the U.S.-Israel relationship, empowering their growing effort to restrict arms sales and to pressure Israel’s government to make wartime concessions. A Democratic Congress could also try to restrain any Trump efforts to continue the war against Iran that he launched with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in February.
American voters voted in the Democrats (Left Party) in both the House and the Senate. Israel has felt backing from the Right only, the Republicans led by Donald Trump. It looks like a bad future for Israel since the US was it's only friend in this world.
Since October 7th, when Israel had been attacked unmercifully, they, the attacked, bloodied and killed, have been accused of Genocide at their reaction to such an attack. And the world is going along with this belief. Hit the Jewish country!!!
This Jewish country had been holding a music Festival on it's last day of a Jewish Festival, Succot, The event I am referring to is the Supernova Sukkot Gathering (often simply called the Nova Music Festival), which took place in Israel on October 6–7, 2023. I believe this was the first time anyone held such an occasion on the last day of Succot. The people were not orthodox, but enjoyed showing their feelings in this manner.
The Organizer: Produced by an Israeli electronic music promoter group known as Nova (or Tribe of Nova).
The European/International Connection: Supernova was produced as the official Israeli parallel and pre-festival edition of Universo Paralello, a highly famous, long-running psychedelic trance festival originally founded in Bahia, Brazil. (While heavily linked to the global and European psytrance community, its sister festival roots trace to South America).
Dancers from many other countries came to Israel for this. A trance festival is a large-scale electronic dance music gathering focused primarily or exclusively on trance and its subgenres. It seems to me that they may have been in a musical trance. A few were held hostage.
Musical Style: Trance music usually features driving 4/4 beats at tempos between 130 and 150 BPM, layered melodies, long emotional build-ups, and soaring drops.
Set Lengths: Unlike mainstream festivals where DJs play short 60-minute slots, trance DJs often perform extended sets that last several hours.
Atmosphere: These events emphasize a hypnotic, euphoric, and deeply immersive atmosphere designed to help dancers enter a "flow state".It was all outside in the beautiful Israeli weather.
This was the October 7th, 2023, and Hamas and other militant groups mounted an attack on southern Israel, killing nearly 1,200 people and taking about 240 hostage.
This was the state they were in when suddenly attacked, attacked by their neighbors, Palestinians who had earlier been in their homes cleaning them, fixing them, etc, making friends with them...and then the men came charging as if on pychedelic drugs, crazed, knifing people, stabbing them, killing them, enraged and out of their minds. What they did to children and babies and others was to leave people who lived with the PTSD of unbearable effects.
Israel, under the burden of guilt and shock, swiftly launched a bombardment and total siege of Gaza that has already killed nearly 27,000 people and is still ongoing months later, wreaking destruction with an intensity never before seen in modern times.
This fury was felt by the government, the IDF, who saw such horror and will always be affected by what they saw and smelled, the smell of blood and gore and death.
Israeli fatalities in their homes on border shown
Total Palestinian Fatalities in Gaza: Over 74,000 to 77,000+ Palestinians have been reported killed in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023, according to figures from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, Al Jazeera, and Wikipedia tracking up to October/November 2026. (Health ministry figures typically do not distinguish between civilians and combatants). Israel knows that Palestinians always give inflated numbers and these come right from Gaza and al Jaszeera, a Palestinian newspaper very very slanted. They are elated if they can put the blame on Mame-dear---Israel and make her look really bad. This is their new way of fighting.
Yasser Arafat, also popularly known by his kunya Abu Ammar, was a Palestinian political leader. He was chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from 1969 to 2004, President of Palestine from 1989 to 2004 and President of the Palestinian Authority from 1994 to 2004.
I felt the fury. I wasn't even there and I was so furious. Israel has been fighting Palestinians ever since the mid 60s and Yasser Arafat's attacks in 1969. Yasser Arafat is known for leading guerrilla and militant campaigns against Israel through the political and military movements he headed, as well as being linked—either directly or via affiliated factions—to several major operations and conflicts:
Early Fatah Guerrilla Raids: As co-founder and leader of Fatah, Arafat directed early cross-border guerrilla operations and sabotage against Israeli water networks and military positions starting in the mid-1960s (such as the December 1964 operation near the Aylabun tunnel).
The Munich Olympic Massacre (1972): While Arafat did not issue direct orders that could be formally traced back to the PLO main leadership, the Black September organization—widely regarded as a front or splinter group linked to Fatah—stormed the Israeli team's quarters at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, murdering 11 Israeli athletes.
According to official records maintained by the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the IDF, approximately 19,040 Israeli security personnel (including IDF soldiers, police officers, and intelligence agents) have been killed in service since the mid-1960s. All of Israel has bomb shelters for people to enter when the sirens go off for warning. Israel does all it can to keep people alive and safe.
Just at a point where they thought there could be some hope of unity and caring.....this happened. How would you have responded? Those young, innocent leftists have little idea of the long haul it has been fighting such a people who have tried so many tricks on Israel before this; and this was like the last straw-and the most horrid one.
John W. Spencer is a retired U.S. Army Major, California State Guard Colonel, and the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point's Modern War Institute
John Spencer is a military officer who is defending Israel in this vicious attack of committed genocide against the Palestinians. John W. Spencer is a retired United States Army officer, researcher of urban warfare, and author. He currently serves as the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, codirector of the Urban Warfare Project, and host of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast at West Point. He is a founding member of the International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare.
When Hamas terrorists invaded Israel on Oct. 7, they murdered civilians on a massive scale. This included the barbaric killing of children and babies, at times decapitating them or burning them alive in front of the children’s own parents. How do we know this? Because the terrorists filmed it on their body cameras and other devices to show the world. The video clips reveal that they were proud of their savagery, often laughing and celebrating as they raped and murdered. That is, until they realized that the world might be squeamish about hearing about these atrocities and would turn against them.
So, within hours of the Oct. 7 massacre, they launched a propaganda campaign to cover up their crimes. The storyline was effectively turned on its head: Israel and the victims of the October 7 attack were immediately recast as the primary perpetrators of violence, even though the Israeli army did not enter Gaza for weeks after Oct. 7.
Spencer praised Israel's ratio of civilian casualties in Gaza as "historically low for modern warfare," citing IDF claims that 50-60% of Gazans killed were civilians and previous estimates of 80-90% of casualties in modern conflicts being civilians. Spencer's claims were echoed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Gen. David A. Deptula, Dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies at the U.S. Air Force Academy.
Professor Michael Spagat of the University of London wrote in August 2025 that the statistics Spencer cites, and his conclusions, are both false.
In December 2023, Spencer asserted that Israeli attacks on Gaza were "proportional, very discriminate, very precise". His comments were criticized by Wes J Bryant, a former JTAC in the United States Air Force who coordinated airstrikes against ISIS. He said IDF's deliberate and continued targeting within densely populated refugee camps showed its campaign was neither discriminate nor precise.
In a January 2024 Newsweek article, Spencer argued of the 2023 Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip that Israel "has taken more measures to avoid needless civilian harm than virtually any other nation that's fought an urban war". He states that the IDF issued warnings in northern Gaza to notify civilians to evacuate before attacks began; that the IDF calls and texts nearby civilians before an attack; and that the IDF employs "roof knocking," using a small, non-destructive munition on the roof of a structure to create a noise and warn civilians to flee before attacking it—and that these are practices that no military has ever implemented before.
In the March 2024 article, Spencer stated that the Israeli military has created a "new standard" consisting of a multitude of precautionary measures it has implemented during its invasion of the Gaza Strip, including giving them days or weeks to evacuate.
In February 2024, a foreign policy advisor of Benjamin Netanyahu paraphrased Spencer as having said that "Israel sets the gold standard in terms of preserving civilian lives". Spencer said the following month in a Newsweek article that "Israel has not created a gold standard in civilian harm mitigation in war. That [would imply] there is a standard in civilian casualties in war that is acceptable or not acceptable". Spencer further asserted that the IDF was "taking unique precautions [...] to protect the innocent", claimed that "Israel's critics [... did not] mention the efforts of the IDF to minimize civilian casualties", and opined that Israel set a "remarkable, historic new standard" in terms of civilian safety in war zones.
In December 2024, John Spencer co-authored an opinion piece with Arsen Ostrovsky in Newsweek criticizing Amnesty International's characterization of Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide, which they described as "no less than a blood libel. The article originally stated:
To demonstrate just how utterly ludicrous Amnesty's accusation of genocide is, one only needs to see that, according to the CIA World Factbook, the population in Gaza has actually increased 2 percent in the last year. This is the very opposite of seeking to destroy, in whole or in part or in any way, a group of people.
In October 2025, Newsweek removed this sentence, issuing a statement that read:
This article previously stated the CIA World FactBook claims the Gaza's population increased in 2024. That statement has been removed.
"Let us set the record straight. The charge that Israel is committing
genocide has no basis in fact. Just read the conclusions reached by
the urban warfare specialist John Spencer, who has studied the
war in Gaza at length.
The genocide charge against Israel is a cover-up,
carefully built to bury what Hamas did on Oct. 7
and what it still intends to do.
After Oct. 7, Israel attacked Gaza to uproot the terrorist infrastructure
and bring home those brutally kidnapped by Hamas. Spencer
determined that there is no evidence of genocidal intent on the part
of Israel, nor are there indications of a campaign of extermination
against the people of Gaza.
Quite the contrary: Israel provided massive truckloads of food to Gaza, sent polio vaccines to administer to Gazan children, and warned the population
through leaflets and phone calls to move into safe zones to avoid
civilian casualties. In fact, the figures show that the Gazan population had actually
grown in size since the war began.
What about the death toll? The number quoted around the world, now more than
73,000, comes from Gaza’s Health Ministry, which is run by Hamas.
That count makes no distinction between civilians and fighters. Every
Hamas gunman killed in battle is listed right alongside everyone else. In fact, John Spencer has argued that civilian casualty figures in the Gaza conflict
are lower than critics claim and represent a relatively low civilian-to-
combatant death ratio compared to historical urban warfare. Yes, the death of every innocent person is a tragedy. But innocent
people die in every war, and this is a war Hamas started on Oct. 7.
Nevertheless, like most conspiracy theories, the genocide charge
keeps spreading. Mass Murder, rape, sexual mutilation, babies burned alive. These were some of the barbaric acts perpetrated by Hamas terrorists when they invaded Israel from Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023. Yet it is the victims of this attack, the Israelis, who are being accused of committing genocide. How can this be?
The answer is quite simple. It is part of a strategic cover-up by Hamas to divert attention away from their genocidal crimes.
Much of the media and world institutions have been complicit in
spreading this lie about Israel, including the latest recipient of the
Nobel Peace Prize.
Navanetham Pillay is a South African jurist who served as the high commissioner for human rights of the United Nations from 2008 to 2014. Pillay was the first non-white female judge of the High Court of South Africa.
Nobel Peace Prize, Navi Pillay, who was head of a United Nations
commission that accused Israel of genocide. Thankfully, some media outlets have called out the sham of awarding a “peace” prize to someone
endorsing this modern-day blood libel. The Free Press branded it:
“The Death of the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Let us set the record straight. The charge that Israel is committing genocide has no basis in fact. Just read the conclusions reached by the urban warfare specialist John Spencer, who has studied the war in Gaza at length.
After Oct. 7, Israel attacked Gaza to uproot the terrorist infrastructure and bring home those brutally kidnapped by Hamas. Spencer determined that there is no evidence of genocidal intent on the part of Israel, nor are there indications of a campaign of extermination against the people of Gaza. Quite the contrary: Israel provided massive truckloads of food to Gaza, sent polio vaccines to administer to Gazan children, and warned the population through leaflets and phone calls to move into safe zones to avoid civilian casualties. In fact, the figures show that the Gazan population had actually grown in size since the war began.
What about the death toll? The number quoted around the world, now more than 73,000, comes from Gaza’s Health Ministry, which is run by Hamas. That count makes no distinction between civilians and fighters. Every Hamas gunman killed in battle is listed right alongside everyone else. In fact, John Spencer has argued that civilian casualty figures in the Gaza conflict are lower than critics claim and represent a relatively low civilian-to-combatant death ratio compared to historical urban warfare. Yes, the death of every innocent person is a tragedy. But innocent people die in every war, and this is a war Hamas started on Oct. 7.
Nevertheless, like most conspiracy theories, the genocide charge keeps spreading.
The lies about Israel are a strategic cover-up of crimes committed against Israel, not by it.
Why the Lie Won’t Die
So why does this falsehood still have legs? Is it simply a resurgence of antisemitism? Is it a political tool utilized to sow discord? Or is it an attempt to undermine Israel’s legitimacy as a sovereign nation?
All of these explanations contain some truth. But they miss something fundamental: The lies about Israel are part of a strategic cover-up, not of crimes committed by Israel but against it.
In fact, the accusation that Israel has committed genocide is not only a lie to conceal the terrorists’ crimes — it is also a crucial part of a broader campaign to shift attention away from the stated desire of terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah to destroy Israel and replace it with an Islamist state.
