At the end of Parshas Emor, the Torah recounts the case of the megadef, the blasphemer. His background could not have been more disadvantaged: his mother, Shlomit bat Divri, was the only wanton woman in the camp; his presumed Jewish father was likely Dathan; his biological father was the Egyptian taskmaster. He was the product of rape by deception in a slave regime. He belonged to no tribe and had no real place in Klal Yisrael—an erev rav figure in all but name, structurally alienated through no fault of his own. Midrashim suggest he was primed for conflict.

Yet when he cursed Hashem, none of it mattered. Not his tragic origins, not his marginal status, not his “trauma.” The response was swift, merciless, and divinely ordered: stone him publicly – even without the usual due process involving “hasra’ah”. This is the Torah’s clearest rejection of merachem al ha’achzarim—being merciful to the cruel. One does not first inventory the offender’s disadvantages, recurse blame onto one’s own side, and launch into therapeutic self-critique. The poison must be excised first, ruthlessly.

A recent piece in these pages – Making Israel ‘Or Le’Yisrael’ Again – showcases how to commit all these errors at once. Invoking Behab—the ancient post-festival fasts—as a metaphor for a post-Yom Ha’atzmaut “national teshuvah,” the author calls for collective breast-beating over Israel’s conduct in a forced war, religious infighting, failure to condemn “wrongs done in the name of sovereignty,” and the sin of ma’asnei haShem. The goal, he writes, is to polish our image, heal the diaspora, and reclaim our role as or le’Yisrael and or la’goyim.

Chazal’s actual etiology of Behab exposes the distortion. According to the Tur (OC 492), Masechet Soferim, and Tosafos, these Monday-Thursday-Monday fasts address the risk that the prolonged kedusha and simcha of the Shalosh Regalim might spill into kalus rosh—overeating, overdrinking, inappropriate mingling, or diluted holiness amid the feasting. We either overdid the physical joy or under-guarded the spiritual boundaries. The........

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