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Song of Zion: Parasha Beshalak, Haftarah Deborah [1]
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Date: 2025-02-06
Greetings folks! Welcome to A Song of Zion, our weekly check-in and virtual minyan for Jews on Daily Kos. This is an open thread, and we treat it as a safe space for Jewish folks here. Non-Jews are welcome but we ask that they listen more than speak. No squabbling, please: if you want to fight, please step outside.
This week’s Torah Parasha is Beshallak, Exodus 13: 17 through 17: 16. However, I want to discuss the Haftarah, Judges 4: 4 through 5: 31, known as Haftarah Deborah.
Donald Trump’s newly confirmed Secretary of Defense and recent Faux News propagandist Peter Hegseth, when he was not drunk or sexually assaulting women or stealing from Veterans Organizations, has opined that women serving our country in the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines or Coast Guard, are unfit to serve in combat. Sure, he pulled back a bit during his confirmation hearings, but so did all of the other hacks named to cabinet positions. I have no doubt he was lying about his post-nomination conversion to respecting women.
For Dump and the Fox host and the entire right wing propaganda machine, woman in combat, like the mid-air collision over the Potomac River, are mere examples of their DEI boogie man, where unfit people, including women, are put in positions of authority, unlike the worthy and fit Fox News propagandist.
Moreover, many say that Dump won the election because too many voters were unwilling to elect a woman as President. For a number of voters who may not quite be MAGA’s, Dump may have his problems but at least he is not a woman. But this week’s Haftarah has words to say about the narrow minded prejudice against women leading a nation and serving in combat.
The Haftarah begins by telling us that:
Deborah, wife of Lappidoth, was a prophetess, she led Israel at that time. . . . She used to sit under the Palm of Deborah . . . and the Israelites would come to her for decisions. She summoned Barak son of Abinonam, of Kadesh in Naphtali, and said to him: “The Lord, the God of Israel, has commanded: Go, march up to Mount Tabor, and take with you 10,000 men [to battle Sisera, leader of Israel’s enemy.]”
Judges 4: 1-4. There is no question who is in charge, and that is Deborah. And in addition to being the leader of the Israelites, she is also a judge. And Barak is her top general.
But Barak said to her: “If you will go with me, I will go, if not, I will not go.” “Very well, I will go with you” she answered. “However, there will be no glory for you in the course you are taking, for then the Lord will deliver Sisera into the hands of a woman.”
Judges 4: 8-10. So Deborah, leader of the Israelite nation as well as a judge, and her general Barak lead 10,000 men to battle Israel’s enemy. During the battle, Deborah shouts to her soldiers “Up! This is the day on which the Lord will deliver Sisera into your hands.” Under the leadership of Deborah and Barak, the Israelites win the battle.
Chapter 5 of Judges repeats the story but in the form of a poem jointly authored, according to Judges 5:1, by Deborah and Barak. The poem praises Deborah, the woman whom Dump and Hegseth would have laughed at as a DEI hire:
Deliverance ceased, ceased in Israel, Till you arose, O Deborah, arose O Mother in Israel.
Judges 5: 7. Judges 4 and Judges 5 both end with the story of another woman, Jael, who played a role in the immediate aftermath of the battle. She invited the retreating Sisera into her tent, gave him milk to drink, then, after Sisera fell asleep, took a tent pin and mallet and banged the tent pin into his temple so that he died. Judges 5: 24-27 in poetic form:
Most blessed of women be Jael, wife of Keber the Kenite; Most blessed of women in tents. He asked for water, she offered milk, in a princely bowl she brought him curds. Her left hand reached for the tent pin, her right hand for the workman’s hammer. She struck Sisera, crushed his head, smashed and pierced his temple. At her feet he sank, lay outstretched, at her feet he lay still, Where he sank, lay still,; where he sank, there he lay, destroyed.
While Jael’s actions may horrify us, remember the book of Judges was authored thousands of years before the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of POW’s. The author of Judges, as well as Deborah and Barak to whom authorship of the poem is attributed, applauded Jael’s murder of the enemy general. I bring this part of the story out because Jael is another woman who in a different way fights for her country.
Most Jews who are reading this diary are not Orthodox. Since the 1970’s we have recognized, albeit belatedly, that women are no different from men when it comes to the capability to be rabbis, Torah readers, and daveners (prayer leaders). DEI is nothing but a cover word for racism and sexism. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris were a billion times more qualified and temperamentally fit to be president, and Lloyd Austin was a billion times more qualified and temperamentally fit to lead our armed forces.
Shabbat Shalom.
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