Rabbi’s Reflections – Saturday, December 28, 2019
Shabbat Shalom *|FNAME|*,
Next week’s memory verse is Genesis 1:27 God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them. Right now God’s creation and consequently, God Himself, are under attack. Satan knows his time is short, so he is pulling out all the stops.
Rabbi Trail: A “stop” is a button that changes the sound of an accordion or an organ. With accordions (at least back in the day) only one stop at a time could be used. With organs, any stop you pulled out would add that sound pallet to the music being made. “Pulling out all the stops” means to add all the sounds at once. It’s an expression that means the same thing as “all in” when you’re playing poker, or “hold nothing back” when you’re playing anything else. Pulling out all the stops will make a horrible noise, which is what Satan is doing right now. End RT.
Satan is attacking God by attacking the identity of God’s precious creation. Are you a little boy or a little girl? Google asks the question like this when you open a new Google account. You can click one: Male, Female, Rather not say, or Other. The first 3 I can understand, but what is “other?”
Are they saying, “Once I was a little man, but I had a farm accident and now I am a little lamb?” (Please read it in a sing-songy way that makes it rhyme.) That would be “other.” And there we going into the morass (emphasis on the second syllable) of what I call the alphabet soup of gender confusion.
We, the people of God, need to see gender confusion for what it is, an attack by Satan with the purpose of confusing people about what God made quite simple. After all, Satan is the author of confusion. He’s just proving God is right all over again.
Here, I’ll close with this verse (again) in case you missed it at the beginning. Genesis 1:27 God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them.