In this week's Parshat Toldot, the Torah recounts how the Philistines filled with earth the wells that Avraham's servants had dug (Genesis 26:15). In a region where water was essential to life, the decision seems almost incomprehensible. The wells could have served the Philistines themselves. Instead, they made them useless.

The Radak (Rabbi David Kimchi, 1160-1235) explains that after Avraham's death, the Philistines feared that his son might one day become powerful enough to reclaim the wells. They therefore chose to block them, even at the cost of depriving themselves of the water.

Their attitude, according to the Radak, amounted to: Better that neither of us have it.

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In August 1776, as British forces prepared to seize New York City, the spiritual leader of Manhattan's only synagogue faced a difficult choice.

He could remain in the city and continue serving his congregation under British rule or abandon his home and join the growing number of Americans fleeing the advancing enemy.

Gershom Mendes Seixas, a 31-year-old Jewish clergyman, chose the latter.

Before leaving, he delivered an emotional farewell sermon at Congregation Shearith Israel, warning that it might be the last service held in the synagogue for some time. According to a historical account, his words were so moving that members of the congregation wept.

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On November 2, 1917, Britain's foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, signed a letter that would help change the course of Jewish history.

Just 67 words long, the declaration expressed British support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in the Land of Israel, helping to lay the diplomatic groundwork for the eventual rebirth of Jewish sovereignty.

Yet 109 years later, the Balfour Declaration's significance is being obscured by an increasingly familiar accusation: that Zionism was a European colonial enterprise imposed on the Middle East.

But that is patently false.

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On June 8, 1967, during the Six-Day War, IDF Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren entered the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron, sounded the shofar and opened a Torah scroll. After 19 years in which Jews had been barred from the site by the Jordanian occupation, he read the passage from this week's Parsha describing Avraham's purchase of the very place where he stood.

Why did he choose the account of a burial plot to mark the Jewish return to one of our holiest sites?

The answer begins much earlier in Avraham's life.

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Five new candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America won House seats Tuesday. Together with reelected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., that brings the number of DSA-backed members in the next House of Representatives as of this writing to at least seven.

This marks a significant expansion for a movement whose official program calls for abolishing the Senate, bringing the nation's largest corporations under public ownership, and replacing the president and Supreme Court with institutions subordinate to Congress.

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