Not just of borders. Not just of roads and crossings. A blockade of breath. Of imagination. Of the heart’s ability to see beyond the next headline.

“IDF reservist killed, nine wounded by explosive in southern Lebanon amid truce… Sgt. First Class (res.) Lidor Porat, 31… an engineering vehicle rolls over a bomb…”

Even in a truce, the ground is seeded with death.

And there is not a family in Israel that escapes it. Some carry it in memory, some in fear, some in the quiet dread of a phone call that has not yet come. War has a way of flattening distance—what happens at the border reverberates in the kitchen, at the Shabbat table, in the silence before sleep.

We are living in a moment of blockade. A narrowing.

After October 7th, something closed. Not only physically, but spiritually. The space in which we could imagine differently, respond differently—it constricted. Grief did that. Trauma did that. Fear did that.

And the Torah begins this week in that exact place:

After loss, after devastation, after the unspeakable.

The Torah does not begin with healing. It begins with reality. With death that cannot be undone.

And then it asks: Now what?

How do you live after that?

How do you remain human after that?

How do you hold onto something sacred when everything inside you is screaming for something else?

There is a verse in this parashah that cuts through the noise with almost unbearable clarity:

“You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt… nor shall you do as they do in the land of Canaan…” (Leviticus 18:3)

Egypt—the place that wounded you. Canaan—the world you are entering, the norms that surround you.

Do not be like either.

Rashi says: the Torah is warning us not to adopt the practices of societies that have normalized what should never be normalized. Do not look around and say, “this is how everyone behaves,” and let that become your moral compass.

Malbim goes further. Egypt is your past. Canaan........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)