Parashat Yitro: The peasant and the princess

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In parashat Yitro , we read the description of the most awesome event in human history: the giving of the Torah by God Himself. Fifty days after the people of Israel left Egypt, this incredible revelation of God’s presence took place. The Torah and commandments given at Mount Sinai reveal the deepest secret to us: how to live a complete life.

The Ten Commandments were given at Mount Sinai, 10 commandments that are the core of the Jewish nation’s covenant with God. At the end of this event, for 40 days and nights, God began to teach Moses all the commandments, laws, rules and lifestyle directives included in this covenant between God and His nation.

The 10th and final commandment of the Ten Commandments is perhaps the hardest to implement: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, his manservant, his maidservant, his ox, his donkey, or whatever belongs to your neighbor” (Exodus 20:14).

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Following a series of commandments dealing with recognizing God’s presence and the proper behavior between people comes a commandment that delves into man’s most hidden desires and wishes: “You shall not covet!” Man is commanded not to feel the feeling of desiring something that isn’t his, even if it is something very desirable.

This commandment sounds like one that only a select few would be able to implement. Even those who believe in free will and in man’s ability to control himself and his behavior still conceive of hidden urges and desires as instinctive, and therefore not subject to restraint.

SCRIBES FINISH writing a Torah scroll. (credit: DAVID COHEN/FLASH 90)

Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra was a poet, philosopher, scientist and great biblical commentator in Spain of the 12th century. In explaining the tremendous significance of this commandment, he offered a wonderful parable:

“Many people are amazed at this commandment. They ask, how is it possible for a person not to covet in his heart all beautiful things that appear desirable to him? I will now give you a parable:

“Note that a peasant of sound mind who sees a beautiful princess will not entertain any covetous thoughts… for he knows that this is an impossibility. This peasant will not think like the insane who desire to sprout wings and fly to the sky, for it is impossible to do so….

“So must every intelligent person know that a person does not attain a beautiful woman or money because of his intelligence or wisdom, but only in accordance with what God has apportioned to him…. The intelligent person will therefore neither desire nor covet. Once he knows that God has prohibited his neighbor’s wife to him, she will be more exalted in his eyes than the princess is in the eyes of the peasant. He will therefore be happy with his lot and will not allow his heart to covet and desire anything that is not his. For he knows that which God did not want to give him… He will therefore trust in his Creator – that is, that his Creator will sustain him and do what is right in His sight” (Commentary of Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra, Exodus 20:14).

Ibn Ezra’s parable is drawn from the world of class distinctions. A peasant meets a beautiful princess. Assuming he is of sound mind, he will not develop any desire for her, since he knows there is no chance for someone of his status to marry the princess. He does not desire the princess, just as he does not desire to have wings so he can fly in the sky.

The moral is just as wonderful as the parable and is relevant today as well. Our property and assets, our partners and the people we are privileged to have present in our lives, are all gifts from God. No matter how much we strive to attain something that God did not intend for us to have, we will not succeed, just as we will never grow wings.

In the commandment of “You shall not covet,” God is asking us to adopt this worldview that sees everything we have as God-given. This will lead us to not coveting something that isn’t ours.

The Torah given to us at Mount Sinai teaches us that man’s desires and urges are not disconnected from his thoughts and way of life and are the direct result of how he sees the world. ■

The writer is rabbi of the Western Wall and holy sites.

Sundance movie review: ‘The Princess’: Diana doc’s video essay approach is ‘refreshing’

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The documentary “The Princess,” which premiered at Sundance, chronicles Princess Diana from her engagement to Prince Charles through her death in 1997, using only pre-existing footage.

Princess Ball offers night of fun for dads and daughters in Tuscaloosa

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Terrance Anderson says the ultimate goal of the Princess Ball is to bring fathers closer together with their daughters.

“I believe at every age and stage, a daughter’s most influential relationship is with her father,” said Anderson, who has a 7-year-old daughter, Tinsley.

Anderson’s event planning company, JustTee, will host its second Princess Ball from 5-9 p.m. Jan. 29 at the Bryant Conference Center, 240 Paul W. Bryant Drive.

Tickets cost $50 for a daddy/daughter couple and $20 for each additional daughter. Formal attire is recommended, but Princess Ball guests are encouraged to dress to their level of comfort.

The event will include special appearances by University of Alabama elephant mascot Big Al, Disney princess characters and more.

For more information, email justteeevents@yahoo.com or go to the Justtee Events page on Facebook.

Anderson, 40, said he and Tinsley created the Princess Ball concept two years ago. The first Princess Ball was held in 2020, but the 2021 ball was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

He said that for the Princess Ball’s return, the event will adhere to Centers for Disease Control guidelines to ensure everyone’s safety.

Anderson and Tinsley will serve as hosts of the Princess Ball. He said his daughter has been very involved with organizing the event, from planning the ball’s little details to choosing the perfect dress for herself.

While the Princess Ball will be a fun event for all ages, Anderson promises that all father/daughter guests will take home lasting memories.

“I feel like a father’s influence in his daughter’s life shapes her self-esteem, her self-image, her confidence, and her opinion of men,” said Anderson, a Selma native who is a University of Alabama alumnus and now works at Bryce Hospital. “The father-daughter ball is a quality, memorable and wholesome event for fathers and daughters of all ages.”

Reach Jasmine Hollie at JHollie@gannett.com

‘The Princess’ Review: An Addictive Documentary About Princess Diana

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It’s a chronicle of Princess Diana culled entirely from television news footage and other public records. In other words, this isn’t an intimate portrait of the Princess of Wales that ”takes us closer to the subject” through an archival jamboree of home movies, eyebrow-raising long-view commentary, and investigative coups. The Diana we see in “The Princess” is the one we’ve always seen, the one we’ve been watching for 40 years, 25 of them since her death in 1997. Since we’ve never stopped watching her, “The Princess,” coming on the heels of “Spencer,” Season 4 of “The Crown,” and the short-lived musical “Diana,” may sound like one Diana document too many. Yet after all those dramatic treatments, it’s galvanizing to see the real story laid out exactly as it happened — or, more precisely, as it happened and as it was presented to the public, those being, quite often, two very different things.

That most of the world was obsessed with Diana is a story unto itself, and the why of that is incredibly complicated. Many who continue to worship her will say, quite simply, that Diana was a victim of the Royal Family and of the coldness of her marriage to Prince Charles, and that once she emerged from the morass of the monarchy, she was revealed to be not just the lovely charismatic rock star of royalty we always knew her to be but an icon of empathy — a woman who hugged AIDS sufferers when most politicians wouldn’t go near them, who used her platform to conjure a glow of hope to the citizens of the world. Yet even if you accept that Diana really was “the people’s princess,” what did it mean, in the end, that the woman who did all this, who offered that global embrace, was a princess? Can someone really be Mother Teresa and the first Kardashian at the same time?

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“The Princess” takes us back to the moment when Diana Spencer, daughter of British nobility, came into the public spotlight early in 1981, the time of her engagement to Prince Charles. The fascination of it is that we now experience the entire saga quite differently, knowing what we know (and knowing how much we didn’t know then). “The Princess,” assembled with mesmerizing fluidity by director Ed Perkins and his editors, Jinx Godfrey and Daniel Lapira, is a documentary with no narrator, and no interviews that aren’t part of the period footage. Yet there’s commentary throughout: We hear the news media’s version of events, and that’s revealing because the story, as the media presents it, keeps skewing in different ways.

Here’s Diana being pursued on the street by reporters when they first get wind of the engagement — just a girl, really, but her face is already lit up with celebrity. Here’s the cringe-worthy scene of Diana and Charles being asked, by a television interviewer, what they have in common, the two patching together an answer like petty criminals who can barely get their stories straight. Here’s the wedding, with Diana in that dress of dresses (the train as long as a train), the thronged British masses moved to ecstasy, as if this were giving them their empire back. Here are Diana and Charles on their tour of Australia, where Diana-mania first reared its head and Charles, openly sullen that she and not he was now the center of attention, responded by making tone-deaf passive-aggressive public “jokes” (“It would have been easier to have two wives, to cover both sides of the street”). Here’s Charles, even after William was born, continuing to live the life of a bachelor, playing polo and going off on his jaunts. And here’s the tabloid industry devoted to his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, culminating in their leaked love tape. Here’s Diana hobnobbing on her own, with one telling shot of Graydon Carter (who, at Vanity Fair, did more than anyone to lend our fascination with the Royals a tony credibility).

There are three distinct phases to how we took in the saga of Diana. The first was what people like to call “the fairy tale.” That’s when we looked at Charles and Diana together and thought they were a genuine romantic couple in an ingenue-who-kissed-the-frog way. Charles’ very diffidence was part of it; he was the quintessence of stodgy British entitlement, but the myth was that Diana was the one who’d melted him. I still remember watching the wedding (it felt as momentous as the moon landing), and how it seemed to symbolize a new paradigm: a return, after the counterculture, to a hunger for “traditional values.” It was a piece of transcendent showbiz that gave a liftoff to the Reagan/Thatcher ’80s.

The second phase was, of course, the soap opera. Charles, the frog who was humanized by his adoring younger wife, turned out to be a scoundrel who’d been carrying on an affair with another member of the Royal Family. The devoutness of his refusal to give up his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles was only highlighted by the revelations of Diana’s agony: her bulimia, her self-harm, the affairs she carried on in what felt like a state of desperation — the whole perception that her problems, in all their severity, were symptoms of neglect, abetted by how the Royal Family, including Charles, were jealous of the adoring gaze the media gave her. The split between Diana and the Royals was seismic, mythological: a breakdown of the Old World Order. You could say that Charles and his family represented the slow fade of the 19th century and Diana the dawn of the 21st. (Guess who was going to win that one?)

But it’s the third phase of the saga — the view we now hold — that’s the most intriguing and devastating. For it reveals, in essence, that both the earlier phases were lies. The fairy tale? There was no fairy tale. There was a projection, by the people of the world, of romantic-fairy-tale nostalgia onto two people who were playing the part as if they were in a movie (maybe one by Disney). And the soap opera? The tale of a royal love that withered through betrayal and coldness? That, in the end, was a lie as well. For the truth is that Charles and Diana had an arranged marriage, as royal marriages often had been, but this was the first royal marriage for the Age of Warhol — a media hologram that transcended reality. The truth is that Di and Charles had never loved each other, had barely known each other when they got married, and that the misery was built into this charade from the start.

Diana was only 20 the day she got married (Charles was 32), so she had a right to be innocent, but a question lingers: What did she think she was getting herself into? Long before Charles publicly betrayed her, wasn’t she essentially complicit in joining a marriage that was, at heart, a piece of national political theater? It’s hard to say what, exactly, Diana wanted, but what she got was an adoration and fame that no one, including herself, could have planned for. “The Princess” shows us how she upstaged Charles, first without trying to and then deliberately, and how the two of them used the media to play out their war. Yet it’s part of the crown-jewels-meets-tabloid karma of Diana that when we see the BBC interview she did with Martin Bashir, lashing out at her royal tormenters, she was never more charismatic, never more on point, never more Diana. The suffering became part of her mystique, and in the end it was elevated, by tragedy, into a kind of martyrdom.

The documentary shows us the army of paparazzi who attached themselves, like permanent sleazy barnacles, to Diana. And though she certainly cultivated the media glare, it would be insane to suggest that she — or anyone — thrived on this level of intrusion. It was obscene. But, of course, to say that it was “the paparazzi” or “the tabloids” who were intruding is to tell another lie. They intruded on behalf of us, the rabid consumers of all things Diana. We’re the ones who turned her into a fairy tale, we’re the ones who turned her falling apart into another fairy tale, and we’re the ones who, to this day, never ask how worshipping someone who’s sitting on top of the world might shove all of us a little further down.

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Princess Diana’s Best Fashion Moments of All Time

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Princess Diana bestowed the world with many gifts. A lifetime of activism and kindness, for one thing; her sons, Princes William and Harry, another. For those with a love of fashion, however, the late royal left behind something else entirely: a sartorial legacy the likes of which the world had never seen.

With a storied penchant for tailored designs with sharp angles, unexpected shapes, and bold, often contrasting colors and prints, the people’s princess made her mark on the industry, championing young designers in Britain, like Catherine Walker and Bruce Oldfield, all the while. While’s it’s a nearly Herculean task to try and declare any one outfit as the most iconic Princess Diana fashion moment of all time, we’ve narrowed it down to 32, scouring the photo archives for her very best looks.

From her preppy chic pedal pushers and low-top sneakers to the drama-filled, puff-sleeved wedding gown she wore down the aisle, here are Lady Di’s biggest style wins.