I came across some beautiful stories in the news this week: A 101-year-old woman set the record for the fastest 100 Meter dash for her age bracket. MIT continued developing a color changing tattoo that monitors a person\u2019s diabetes in real time. A 10-year-old boy invented a device that straps to a child\u2019s car seat and reacts if the child is overheating, notifying parents and emergency services if a child is in danger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I would guess most of you who follow the news are thinking: what is he talking about? None of these were covered by any of the news networks this week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Truth be told I got these from goodnewsnetwork.com<\/a>, a website that focuses strictly on positive news stories. In fact, earlier this week the negativity of the news forced me to shut off my car radio after a few minutes, and my wife commented that one must be careful listening to the news with children in the car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the end of our double parsha this week, we read about the laws of how society should deal with murder. To keep things brief, the punishment for manslaughter is death, and for involuntary manslaughter, where the murderer had no intention to kill, he is forced to flee to the city of refuge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Torah continues to explain that there are six cities of refuge, distributed throughout the Land. Of course, cities of refuge were placed on both sides of the Jordan, to accommodate the two tribes who requested to live on the East side of the Jordan earlier in our parsha.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How would you expect the six cities of refuge to be distributed? I would have guessed that with 9.5 tribes on the west of the Jordan, and a mere 2.5 tribes on the East, that it would be 5\/1 or 4\/2.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the Torah explicitly states that the distribution was 3 and 3.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why an even distribution? Why not have more on the western side?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rashi suggests that on the east side of the Jordan shkichei rotzchim- murder was more prevalent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the surface this may seem sensible, but these cities are not for murderers! Murderers receive the death penalty, and only accidents allow the \u201cmurderer\u201d to flee to these cities. Can Rashi really maintain that accidents were more prevalent on one side of the Jordan?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Maharal explains that shkichei rotzchim created a certain environment. Living in crime filled cities affects the mentality of the entire society. Human life becomes devalued, and the subsequent carelessness will increase the accidental murder rate. Thus more cities of refuge will be required as citizens become desensitized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When we listen each day to negative, uninspiring news, we become jaded. We are accustomed to the world we live in, and as we read the daily news, we are not phased when our expectations are met.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We find ourselves in the midst of the three weeks and at the cusp of the nine days. The Jewish Calendar cycles through various themes throughout the year, and I often find this period, culminating with Tisha B\u2019av, the most challenging of which to relate. We find it difficult to mourn the loss of a building which we can hardly imagine living with. We are all accustomed to the world we live in, with its strengths and weaknesses, and the lack of a Beit Hamikdash is normal. I suggest we each find a brief moment some time during these next couple of weeks, a moment where we put down our newspapers, turn off car radios or our phones, and simply think about the struggle. Doing so will hopefully bring us one step closer towards a world where we do not need to search goodnewsnetwork.com<\/a> to hear positive news.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I came across some beautiful stories in the news this week: A 101-year-old woman set the record for the fastest 100 Meter dash for her age bracket. MIT continued developing a color changing tattoo that monitors a person\u2019s diabetes in real time. A 10-year-old boy invented a device that straps to a child\u2019s car seat […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"saved_in_kubio":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[72,60,10,39],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/remoteshul.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/remoteshul.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/remoteshul.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/remoteshul.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/remoteshul.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/remoteshul.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":370,"href":"https:\/\/remoteshul.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369\/revisions\/370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/remoteshul.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/remoteshul.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/remoteshul.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}