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Shabbat starts on Friday at 5:38pm and ends on Saturday at 6:36pm. The weekly Torah portion is Shoftim.
Mincha continues at 1pm at A-P GF/459 Collins Mon & Wed, and Thu 1.45pm at L1 Capital using the WhatsApp group to confirm numbers.
Weekly sushi & shiur continues on Wed at 1.10pm (after mincha) at A-P GF/459 Collins – and via zoom. Current topic: law of neighbours. Details here and on the WhatsApp group.
Thought of the Week with thanks to Geoff Bloch.
Many of our left-leaning elites, who genuinely perceive themselves to be our moral guardians, consider “compassion” to be society’s highest moral virtue. The Torah does not. This week’s Torah reading mandates: “Justice, justice shalt thou pursue.”
There is no equivalent overarching commandment to be compassionate. To the contrary, in the portion of Kedoshim, compassion is pushed aside: “Do not favour the poor in judgment – in righteousness shall you judge your fellow.” If the highest moral virtue were compassion, we would be commanded to favour the poor in judgment. But the Torah tells us that justice must always trump compassion.
Justice and compassion are often confused. They shouldn’t be because, on a closer analysis according to Dennis Prager, they are, in fact, almost polar opposites. Justice is absolute whereas compassion is relative and discretionary. You can be equally just to everyone; you cannot be equally compassionate. If you’re compassionate to one person, you must, by definition, be less compassionate (or relatively cruel) to another.
This is a principle which many politicians, sadly including our own, simply do not understand. Consequently, they perpetrate great evil by misplacing their compassion. For example, Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong profess compassion for Gazan civilians, conveniently ignoring the fact that their plight is caused by Hamas, not by Israel. Joining fellow capricious political leaders of the Left in Britain, France and Canada, they sanction Israelis and Israeli politicians and impose unjust, immoral foreign policy which rewards Hamas’ barbarity.
Even worse, theirs is a faux compassion, as they profess no compassion for genuinely starving masses elsewhere. Could it be that their compassion, exclusively for Gazans, is a fig leaf barely concealing a deeper hostility and malevolence toward Israel?
The Torah was thousands of years ahead of us in understanding human nature. Man has a strong inclination to pursue his own subjective ends, ignoring where the justice, in any given situation, lies.