This week’s Torah reading of Lekh l’kha begins with God’s famous command to Abraham to leave his homeland and his father’s house to travel to Canaan. But at the end of the previous chapter, we get the impression that the journey had begun already:

According to the Lebanese government, the explosion in its capital city on Tuesday that left over 100 dead and many more injured or homeless was caused by the accidental detonation of some 2,750 of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer often used for making bombs. (Less than one-thousandth of that amount was used by Timothy McVeigh to destroy the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.) Previously, police have discovered Hizballah warehouses in London and Germany storing many tons of the same explosive. Hussein Ibish comments: