A Single Verse, A Complete Moral Vision

In the book of Leviticus, a short commandment appears: “Do not place a stumbling block before the blind.”

On the surface, it is simple: don’t trip someone who cannot see. But Jewish legal tradition has understood this verse for centuries as something far larger — a comprehensive moral principle about knowledge, power, and responsibility.

The blind person in this verse is never the one at fault. He is the vulnerable party — the one who lacks information, lacks sight, lacks the ability to protect himself. The prohibition is directed entirely at the one who can see — and chooses nonetheless to place an obstacle in his path.

Continue reading Middle East Part 1: Ancient Wisdom for a World at War -by Chaim Goldberg →

A Meeting That Left Me With Questions

I did not expect the conversation to stay with me the way it did.

I sat with Jonathan Pollard in Jerusalem — a sharp, vital man, the kind you leave with more questions than you arrived with. The meeting was genuinely enriching. And at the same time, something in it placed before me a question I cannot put down:

Not a question about what he did, or what was done to him.

An architectural question.

What does it mean to live inside two states that are not the same kind of thing?

Because Pollard did not inhabit two countries. He inhabited two systems of reality — ones that sometimes use the same words and mean entirely different things. And under pressure, for one terrible moment, the structure cracked.

Continue reading Middle East Part 3: Why the American Chassis Doesn’t Fit the Israeli Soul – by Chaim Goldberg →