Changing Of The Guard
In the course of Mosesâ righteous and justified anger at the people of Israel for their idolatrous sin of the Golden Calf, he breaks the newly received Tablets of the Law. The Midrash has God Himself praising Moses for this dramatic initiative. Commentaries explain that Moses had no other choice. The Jewish people had violated their recently minted covenant. If Moses hadnât broken the Tablets, the physical manifestation of the covenant, God would have been more than correct to wipe out the newborn nation of Israel. By breaking the âcontractâ Moses in a sense was declaring that Israel isnât bound by it anymore and therefore shouldnât be liable for having violated it. Some view the breaking of the Tablets as an inevitable outcome of the Jews breaking faith with God.
In today’s letters to the editor: vaccine advice; paid sick leave; cross-border travel; the next school year; school land; nursing shortages; Statistics Canada; Chinese leadership; online voting
Simon Akam Scribe, £25
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The British Army, according to journalist Simon Akam, went into the ‘wars of choice’ in Iraq and Afghanistan convinced that it was ‘the best little army in the world’. It came out of them, he says, with its reputation diminished, both in its own estimation but also – and importantly – in the view of our American allies whom, embarrassingly, we had hubristically denigrated at the start of the Iraq operation.
There is little doubt that ultimately the British military failed badly in Iraq by ceding control of Basra, in 2007, to the sectarian Shia militias that we had hitherto been fighting.