Things to Think About
Random ideas about Israel and loud-mouthed antisemites
I am officially on vacation until after the Jewish holidays, but my mind is not shutting down. Here are some thoughts you might find interesting. Or not.
Two stories about “apartheid Israel”
Last week I was at an inspirational program in memory of a beloved community member who had died about a year ago after a long battle with cancer. One speaker had been a frequent hospital visitor. One day when the woman was in great pain, the hijab-wearing Arab doctor handed the visitor a copy of the Book of Psalms from the bedside table and said, “Why don’t you read to her from this book? These holy words give her the most comfort.”
Last Friday as I was walking through a shopping center, a Druze man was walking in the opposite direction toward me, singing. I could hear music playing a little bit behind him A few yards after he passed me I came upon a man with a tefillin stand; that is, he was helping men put on tefillin—prayer boxes—and say some blessings, and handing out Sabbath candles to women. On the boom box was a Jewish religious song—the very that the Druze man was singing.
Even wild animals know whose land this is…
In my neighborhood, in the weeks before Rosh Hashana several children and adults spent a lot of time practicing blowing the shofar, the ram’s horn that is an important part of the Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur services; you can hear it on this YouTube video.
Now, I live in a small city on the top of a mountain, and we have lots of wild animals. A few years ago I saw a snake about half-meter long (20 inches) on a path in my neighborhood, although the feral cats keep the snake population down. Geckos are common, inside and out. Hedgehogs are also not uncommon here.
We have larger animals as well. We have many hyrax or rock rabbits—nasty rodents that look something like groundhogs. Occasionally wild boars that live mostly in the valleys wander through as well; a couple of years ago a friend and I encountered one when we were on a dawn walk through town. And all around, including right in town, live many jackals. These are nocturnal dog-like creatures brought right into neighborhoods by the combination of lots of overgrown woodsy patches and food put out for the feral cats.
Before Rosh Hashana, children in my neighborhood were practicing to blow the shofar. Lately I’ve heard jackals mimicking the three sound of the shofar:1 tekiah (a straight sound), shevarim (three medium sounds), and teruah (traditionally nine quick blasts in short succession, but the jackal I heard wasn’t counting). The sounds weren’t exactly in the order that they are sounded during the religious service, but the pattern wasn’t like the regular jackal songs. What was interesting to me was that while the first time I heard them right outside my window, the second time they were soft, as though coming from across the valley.
So, our jackals turn out to be Jewish too, as well as Israeli?
A few miracle stories of the war
Women tankists
A friend’s son was studying at a yeshiva (a religious college) near Gaza and on October 7, the day the war began. He, with the other students, was in the synagogue for the Sabbath-Simchat Torah service. An Israeli tank appeared just as a group of about 20 Muslim terrorists approached the school. The tank’s crew consisted of women soldiers with no combat experience. The women killed all the terrorists, saved the yeshiva and its students, and then drove further north, where they saved a kibbutz.
What were women doing in a tank at that location? They were combat soldiers stationed at the Egypt-Israel border in the Sinai. Women in combat units are generally in support positions, such as my former student who was a driver. As a concession to feminists, the women in question were learning “tanking” skills, but no one ever expected them to actually see combat. The tanks were an old, out-of-date model kept around just for training the women.
But this was an unprecedented emergency, so these women were instructed to go north to see if they could be helpful. They drove north along the fence between Gaza and Israel.
One of the first places they came to was my friend’s son’s yeshiva. If they had arrived at the yeshiva five minutes later, they would have come upon a massacre, but the terrorists were still a few moments away. The commander told them to drive right over the terrorists, so they did, eliminating those they did not shoot.
One of the tanks was outfitted with a kind of weapon that the women had never seen. It took them just a few minutes to figure it out, with all its quirks, and a few moments after that to become expert in its use.
There were at least two tanks “manned” by women. They killed between 50 and 100 terrorists and saved hundreds of Israelis.
This is the first recorded incident in the world of women actually using tanks in combat. These girls, average age 20, fought for 17 hours straight. One of the women said, “We just did what we had been taught to do. It was mostly muscle memory.” For a great interview with the women, search youtube for “Israeli women tanks”. There are several in addition to this one.
Supernatural occurrences
Interrogators reported that several Hamas terrorists who were captured said that they had instructions to burn down a yeshiva (not the one in the story above). When they got there, it was in flames. They assumed another group had gotten there first, so they moved on. In fact, the yeshiva was completely untouched. There had been no fire, at least not on the temporal plane.
At another location, terrorists surrounded a synagogue with instructions to kill everyone inside, but the building was absolutely silent. They decided they were late, and everyone must have left. In fact, they came during the Silent Prayer. During the time they were outside, apparently none of the congregants even sneezed.
Other terrorists reported they saw a huge person dressed in white on the roof of a building; it looked supernatural and scared them, so they ran away.
Free publicity for an Israel-hater
Ana Kasparian, one of the loudest antisemitic mouths on the left, gave an internet rant on how terrible the Jewish people and Israelis are. She tried hard to intimidate and embarrass us by calling us terrible names. Something she needs to know about Jews: When you are called Christ Killer and Kike by the age of 6, as happens to Jewish kids living outside of Israel, or when by the age of six you’ve run for shelter or been to funerals for an uncle killed in the army or a grandma blown up on a bus, as happens to Israeli kids, a rant by a loudmouth on the internet is meaningless.
It strikes me as curious that a woman with an Armenian name is affiliated with a podcast called the Young Turks, seeing as at least 44% of Armenian Christians were massacred or starved by the Muslim Turks between 1915-1916.2 There is a perverse psychological twist with her identifying with the murderers of her ancestors. Some kind of Stockholm syndrome at work here?
A few things struck me about her rant:
She sounded very jealous. She kept repeating that we think we are the chosen people of God and therefore think we are better than everyone else. Rubbish. Judaism is very clear that there are good and bad people in all groups. This is, however, what non-Jews and religiously ignorant Jews believe “chosenness” means.
Kasparian apparently never thought to ask what Jews think being the “chosen people” means. What we believe is that we “have been given the opportunity to sense G-d’s closeness, hear His truth (directly from him), and relay his message to the world.”3 To relay that message we have been given 613 mitzvot that when we do them (positive mitzvot) or don’t do them (negative mitzvot) help bring God’s presence more clearly into the world. This will benefit all people.
Remember the Tower of Babel? Here’s Genesis 11:6-7: 4 (6) And the Lord said, “Lo! [they are] one people, and they all have one language, and this is what they have commenced to do. Now, will it not be withheld from them, all that they have planned to do? (7) Come, let us descend and confuse their language, so that one will not understand the language of his companion.” Clearly, God does not want monolithic thought because it leads to human arrogance, which we see today in the universal availability of social media. Jews do not believe God wants everyone to be Jewish; as long as they follow the Seven Laws of Noah,5 which means they create civil societies, He is happy.
Kasparian believes that chosenness is only open to Jews. While this may be true, anyone who sincerely wants to become Jewish can. Conversion, while not easy, is open to everyone. I recently read about a former 6 who converted to Judaism and is living a Torah-true life in Israel today.
She also does not apparently know that the Jewish God is not ethnocentric: unlike Islam or Christianity, we do not believe that only those following our faith are beloved by God. Judaism teaches that the God who created humans loves all His children. All will be welcomed by God in the next world if they follow the Seven Laws of Noah.
When a loudmouth proves herself unable to think…
Kasparian is positive the Jews are the most blood-thirsty people on the planet. She conveniently has ignored all the evidence, such as that it is not Jews who perform “honor killings”7 , 8on teenage girls whose skirts are too short or who come home too late in the evening; throw gays off rooftops; and massacre Christians in Nigeria and other places. Ignoring the evidence that perhaps our accusers are projecting their behavior onto us is a very particular type of stupidity.
Wishing you all a happy, healthy, peaceful year!
The Holocaust Encyclopedia, “The Armenian Genocide (1915-16): Overview.
Rosenberg, A.J., translator and editor, The Complete Tanakh, Judaica Press, 1998, electronic resource.
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