Hassagot השגות

Those who did not touch the ground (Kabin Neki'im)

Once a people sought a place to live. They came to a certain valley and were told, "you may live here so long as your feet do not touch the ground." It was on this condition that they were allowed to live in that place.



 



Having no other place to live, the people agreed to the condition. They learned how to stay above the ground and made houses for themselves that did not touch the ground. There work was in the air.  



 



Despite the strict limitation upon touching the ground, the people prospered and flourished. As time went on, the other peoples began to resent their success and hate them. The other peoples said, "you are too close to the ground." Try as they might, the people of the land could not rise any higher. They were told, "Your feet must be removed." Without their feet, they found it easier to satisfy the new condition. But the other peoples were not long satisfied. In the course of time, the people of the land lost their calves and their thighs as well as their feet.



 

Moral System and Moral People

From "The Pope on 'Love in Truth'" by Father Robert A. Sirico, Wall Street Journal, 7/10/09 ... "Caritas in Veritate is a reminder that we cannot understand ourselves as a human community if we do not understand ourselves as something more than the sum or our material parts; if we do not understand our capacity for sin; and if we do not understand the principle of communion rooted in the gratuitousness of God's grace. Simply put, to this pope's mind, there is no just or moral system without just and moral people."

H. A. Massig: This is worthy of consideration.

A beautiful thought from Rav Pam

"My rebbi, Rav Pam, used to say that when one sees a child in pain, there is an issur of haalama;
one may not avert one's gaze from a lost object. Rav Pam would say that one who chooses to focus on the lost object-in this case, a Jewish child- can merit the mitzvah at the pasuk's end:
Hasheiv teshiveim, return it to its owner.
You can give a Yiddishe kind
back to his father and mother."

Dr. David Pelcovitz, quoted in "Facing the Challenges, Focusing on the Blessings," Yisroel Besser, Mishpachah, March 25, 2009

Presidential Prerogative

    Walter Berns of the American Enterprise Institute has written an Opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Interrogations and Presidential Prerogative" (Saturday, May 23, 2009, see here) and subtitled "The Founders created an executive with substantial discretionary powers."   The piece is well worth the reading.  I quote from it here.  The italics are in the original article, but the bold face is mine:

Locke argued in the Second Treatise of Civil Government that the "first and fundamental law is the establishment of the legislative power." And so it is that the first article of the U.S. Constitution is devoted to the legislative power. There is safety in law, he said; the law is "promulgated and known to the people," and everyone without exception is subject to it.

But Locke admitted that not everything can be done by law. Or, as he said, there are many things "which the law can by no means provide for." The law cannot "foresee" events, for example, nor can it act with dispatch or with the appropriate subtlety required when dealing with foreign powers. Nor, as we know very well indeed, can a legislative body preserve secrecy.