People who’ve been at our family’s Shabbos meals will attest that I’m not an avid practitioner of tying in currents events to some allusion in that week’s haftarah or the like especially when the connection is a bit strained (or reliant on a gematria that in order to work requires adding in the mispar hakollel the mispar katan and the milui osiyos…). These “Zohar of the week” insights as I call them often can be traced back to the Internet rather than the words of an actual sefer and although they’re long on dazzle they sometimes fall short when it comes to contributing to real spiritual growth.
But that sort of thing is very different from seeing connections between disparate events taking place in the world and mining those for potential significance. Indeed the very fact that Hashem interacts with His world by means of middah k’neged middah facilitates discovery of the meaning embedded in current events and enables us to make use of it in our lives.
A very current example: What follows swiftly on the heels of the Great Heterodox Prayer Site Hoax? Another fraud of equal magnitude involving a site just yards away — the Great Temple Mount Metal Detectors Hoax. Just days after the heterodox movements and their Jewish media allies tried creating an international uproar over the Israeli government’s cancellation of the Kosel agreement the Arabs embroiled Israel in another worldwide crisis one that hasn’t abated even with the removal of the detectors.
Walter Russell Mead writing in The American Prospect notes that “the Palestinian response is being driven by unsubstantiated paranoia about Jewish conspiracies to overturn the Temple Mount status quo.” “Overturn the Temple Mount status quo” — now where have we heard of people trying to do something like that?
