THE SHAME OF IT ALL

Rabbi Daniel Gordis
March 7, 2008
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There were days, and they were not that long ago, when Zionism was about something different. Days when Zionists could articulate what the purpose of Jewish Statehood was, days when Israelis understood that having a state was about changing the existential condition of the Jew. Not anymore.

Hayyim Nachman Bialik, writing in 1905 shortly after the slaughter in Kishinev, understood that the very essence of Jewish existence had to change. What else could he possibly have been saying in his epic poem, "The City of Slaughter" (scroll down to the two paragraphs that begin with the lines "Descend then, to the cellars of the town"), when he describes the mass rape scene in which Jewish women are helpless victims and Jewish men are powerless to intervene? In fact, for Bialik, the villains of the scene are not the Cossacks; rape and murder are simply what Cossacks do. The problem with what happened in Kishinev, Bialik intimates with his bitter irony, rests with the Jewish men. It's bad enough that they were too weak to intervene, to defend their wives, their sisters, their mothers and their daughters, though that is clearly lamentable. But worse than that, they were too frightened to even try. And even worse than that, Bialik says, is that when the slaughter and the butchery were over, these men looked down at the broken bodies of the women that they had supposedly once loved, and instead of holding them, instead of telling them that they still loved them, instead of assuring them that they would take care of them no matter what, they gazed at these violated, half-dead women, and saw a halakhic question. "Is my wife," the Kohanim in Bialik's poem want to know, "still permitted to me?"

It makes no difference whether or not anyone in Kishinev really asked that question, or thought to. Bialik is not a journalist in this poem. He's a diagnostician, describing the human (or no longer human) condition of the Jew. And what he wants us to know is that what is wrong with the Jews is that they have come to accept their victimization as part of nature. They're no longer shocked by what is done to them, no longer infuriated by their own powerlessness. These Jewish men, their humanity too eroded by years of religious escapism and yeshiva study for them to see the broken women they should have loved as anything other than halakhic questions, aren't people anymore. Real people, Bialik suggests, simply don't stand by and watch their family members get raped and slaughtered and do nothing about it. Even if you'll get killed in the process, you try to defend the people you love. When you no longer defend your family, he intimates, you're not human, you're sick. The Jews are sick, he says, their souls eroded by passivity, by weakness, by fear. And the cure, we know not from this poem but from much of what he writes, is a Jewish homeland.

Just over forty years later, with much water under the bridge and six million Jewish men, women and children having been ushered heavenward through smokestacks across Eastern Europe while the world either conspired to assist in the murder or simply watched and pretended to be aghast, the State of Israel was about to be born. And Natan Alterman, who in some ways had replaced Bialik as the poet laureate of the Zionist movement, wanted Jews to understand what was unfolding. It wasn't just a country that they were getting; it was purpose, salvation. The Jews would not simply have a State; the Jews would be transformed.
And thus, in "The Silver Platter" (a translation one can quibble with, but the best that I've found on the web), when the whole nation assembles to receive the "unique miracle", they are assembled not at Sinai, but in their homeland. And they are awaiting not Torah, but Statehood. Independence, not religion, is what will save the Jews, Alterman is effectively saying. It's a step beyond Bialik. In Bialik's poem, the Jew in Europe is dying, but there's no clear solution. Forty years later, after the UN had voted on the Partition Plan and Israel was about to be created, Alterman believed that the solution was at hand.

Alterman clearly shares Bialik's disdain for what they both see as Judaism's religiously induced passivity. In his poem, as the people awaits its transformative moment, State replaces Torah. And if you look carefully, and compare the biblical account of the giving of the Torah at Sinai (especially Exodus 19), you'll see other differences. In the Biblical account, Moses tells the men not to approach a woman (verse 15), but here, the boy and the girl are inseparable, and virtually indistinguishable. In the Torah, the Israelites are commanded to wash their clothes (verse 10); but in the poem, the boy and the girls are caked with dirt, and they do not wash. Saving the Jews, Alterman wants to suggest, requires that you get dirty. "You prefer to stay clean?" he seems to say - "fine, but prepare to be dead." We'll come back to that.

For Alterman, like Bialik, like many of the Zionists of their day, Zionism was about changing the condition of the Jew, by changing the nature of the Jew. And for them, the nature of the Jew would be changed by moving away from the religious tradition that made us weak, that offered us a "spiritual refuge" in which we could pretend that things were not as they are, that was an opiate guaranteed to prevent the Jews' confronting the utter intolerability of their condition.

Bialik and Alterman were, of course, quite right. And dead wrong. Bialik was right that the condition of the Jew in Europe was untenable (though as he died in 1934, he never got to know exactly how right he was), and Alterman was right that new boys and new girls, caked in dirt and blood, would help redeem what was left of the Jewish people. But they were sadly wrong about the advisability of leaving Jewish religious discourse in the dust, for they failed to predict how quickly Israelis - bereft of any substantive Jewish discourse - would find themselves unable to say, or to remember, why they needed this State in the first place.

When you've lost the sense that Jewish statehood is about changing the condition of the Jew, and when you can no longer recall that independence was designed (inter alia) to end the era of hunting seasons in which the Jews are the ducks, just because they're Jews, when any semblance of a Jewish conversation is thoroughly absent from your worldview, it's hard to say much about why the Jews need a State. It's hard to say why the high cost of living here (and I don't mean financial) is worth it. How do you explain to your friends, and to yourself, why you should drive your eighteen year old son to the base where he'll be inducted, and hope and pray for three long years (or more) that he'll be OK, if you have no idea why a Jewish State matters?

When you can't articulate why you need this State, you fret. You worry mostly about what the world thinks of you, because more than anything else, you simply want to be "normal," indistinguishable, just like everyone else. So, just like the "men" in Bialik's poem, you don't allow yourself to be horrified by the fact that almost 8,000 rockets have been fired at Sederot, that life there has been transformed into hell. You don't allow yourself to remember that for years, yes seven years, kids (and old kids, sometimes in their teens) have been sleeping in their parents' rooms, making any kind of normal family life utterly impossible, elementary school kids have been wetting their beds, half the businesses are vacated, more than half the town is empty, the economy doesn't exist and everyone is scared to death, all the time.

You don't allow yourself to focus on the fact that this is exactly what Zionism was supposed to prevent. You get so used to it that you don't see that Jews sitting like ducks, simply waiting to be hit by homemade missiles while the region's most powerful army sits on the side and polishes its boots, is a bastardization of what Zionism was supposed to be.

When you can't say anything anymore about why the Jews need a state, about what Statehood was supposed to do to the condition of the Jew, you don't allow yourself to stare reality squarely in the face and to wonder what will happen when they get Grads, and then Katyushas, and hit Ashkelon and then Ashdod - until they start. And then, when they do (which they did, this week), you tell yourself that it's "not so bad." After all, in yesterday's attacks on Sederot, "only" one woman was killed. "Only" one house (not her house, but a different one) was burnt to the ground. And in the roadside bombing of an army patrol, which isn't even on the news anymore, because last night got a lot worse, they "only" killed one soldier, and "only" one soldier was in extremely critical condition. "Only" a few families forever destroyed - we're going to get worked up about that?

When a country's leadership can't express a single coherent thought about why the Jews need a State, when its Prime Minister can articulate no agenda for the Jewish State beyond the hope that it will be "a fun place to live" (and look who gleefully cites that interview), you know we're bankrupt. You're bankrupt because Bialik and Alterman were too successful. They were part of a movement that so utterly disconnected the Jews from the discourse that had nurtured them for centuries that now, aside from being a marginally Hebrew-speaking version of some benign and characterless country, we can't remember why we wanted this State to begin with. So we don't defend it, because we don't want to hurt their civilians (even though they openly target ours). We don't want to earn the world's opprobrium, because our Prime Minister loves being welcomed in foreign capitals. We don't defend ourselves because we're no longer sure that it's really worth the casualties on our side that preventing these attacks on our sovereignty would require.

So we allow ourselves to grow comfortable being sitting ducks, and find ourselves exactly where we were a century ago. Kishinev morphs into Sederot, and very few people see the irony, or the utter shame, and shamefulness, of what's transpiring here.

Almost as if he foresaw the stalemate that now has us in its grips, Alterman writes in his poem that the boy and the girl are dirty, caked with the dirt of the fields and the fire-line. Unlike the Torah, which suggests that preparation for the revelation requires that everyone wash their garments, Alterman suggests that if the Jews insist on being clean, or insist on purity, there's no hope. It's a dirty world we live in, he understands, and in this world, we have to decide how badly we want to stay alive.

But we haven't decided that we want to stay alive. We don't want Ban Ki-Moon to chastise us. We want George Bush to love us. We don't want the BBC or CNN to broadcast pictures of Palestinian children wounded or killed by Jewish soldiers. We don't want more protests like we had this week, with Israeli Arabs rioting in opposition to the minor incursion into Gaza and voicing their support for Hamas. It's all just too complicated and unpleasant; we'd much rather pretend that we live in America, that we can ignore the dormant volcano of Israel's Arabs, too.

So we sit. And civilians keep getting targeted, and keep dying. And soldiers die. And Israeli towns become ghost towns. But George Bush most supports us, so we feel better. And the charade with Abu Mazen permits us to continue hallucinating about the possibility of peace, to pretend that the Palestinians aren't simply an utterly failed people that will never make peace in our lifetimes or those of our children, so we feel even better.

Bialik would recognize us. And he would weep.

And then, at the end of the day, you're sitting in a friend's living room, a few dozen people gathered together to congratulate him on a new book contract. Everyone's happy for him. Everyone's forgotten the funerals (of the woman from Sederot, of the soldier who was killed at Kissufim, and God forbid, of the soldier whose condition wasn't terribly clear) that will soon take place. Everyone's put out of their minds the mindless abdication of sovereignty unfolding in front of our very eyes. Everyone's pretending that we live in a normal country, and that Zionism's not failing even as we prepare for the sixtieth anniversary of independence.

So he's speaking modestly about what the book is about, why he's excited about writing it, who's publishing it. There's wine, and food, and good humor all around. And then someone's phone rings, and then someone else's. And before you know it, before your friend has even had five minutes to say anything about his book, all of the Blackberry's are out, and all the cell phones are being used, because the news has reached us - it's starting again. There's been an attack at a yeshiva at the entrance to the city. We know the drill, the invariable climb in the numbers. At first, it's one dead, scores wounded. Then it's seven dead. Then eight, and lots of wounded. Some of them might die, too.

In the morning, the papers report the attack, but there's not a single mention of a response, or even a contemplated response. Of course one will come, but not yet. It will have to get worse first, because a few people killed in Sederot, and a couple of soldiers, and even eight kids from a yeshiva - well, it's sad, but just for that we're actually going to start a war?

No, probably not, at least not yet. Because to go to war (or more accurately, to respond to the war that's been unleashed against you) to defend your citizens, you'd have to be able to articulate why this country still makes any difference. You've have to be able to say something about why it was created in the first place. You'd have to have a sense of Jewish history. You'd have to have a vision for the Jews, an agenda for your country. You'd have to be able to see yourself as part of a several thousand year old conversation. You'd have to have some courage. And yes, you'd ­have to love your people more than you love your office.

There were days when this land was filled with that. There were days when we remembered, and we knew. And we fought. And even if we died in the process, we figured it was worth it, because life here was about something, for something. And so was dying here.

But those days are gone. Our Prime Minister doesn't want to defend Sederot. Or Ashkelon. He doesn't want to tell Bush that the charade with Abu Mazen is bound to explode, and that when it does, more of us will die. He just wants a country that's "fun to live in."

Well, he's a lucky guy. Because tonight, the month of Adar begins. And the Talmud tells us (see the very last words of the page) that "when Adar begins, we increase our joy." So let's be happy. Let's have some fun. Why not? It's not as if our enemies have actually won. Not yet, at least.

It almost makes you grateful that Bialik's not around to see what's happened.

THE FOLLOWING COMES FROM HONESTREPORTING.COM WHICH IS A MEDIA WATCHDOG GROUP I FOLLOW:

Special Report: Gaza - Israel Responds to Hamas's Escalation

Dear HonestReporting Subscriber,


Loss of human life in a conflict is invariably an ugly situation and one that creates intense media interest. Such is the case of Israel's military operations in Gaza that are currently making international headline news. However, the focus on Palestinian casualties ignores the context behind Israel's actions and only tells a part of the real story.

HAMAS FIRES KATYUSHAS AT ASHKELON

Sderot and the western Negev region have been under constant attack from Qassam missiles and mortars. Palestinian terrorists have deliberately set out to kill and maim innocent Israeli civilians making life unbearable for those within missile range.

Since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in mid-June 2007, over 800 rockets and over 900 mortar bombs have been fired. Since Thursday 28 February alone, over 100 rockets have been launched at southern Israel. At the time of writing, rockets continue to be fired at such a rate as to make it impossible to give completely up-to-date statistics. While many media have downplayed the effects of the Qassams, referring to them as "homemade", no such language can be employed to describe the latest Hamas escalation.


The situation has escalated in the past few days, as over 15 heavy rockets were fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza against Israel’s southern port city of Ashkelon. The 122 mm GRAD rockets are a type of standard military artillery weapon produced in the former Soviet bloc and by other states deploying non-Western arms. It is manufactured to military standards, by a conventional arms industry, and is equipped with a weapons-grade high explosive fragmentation warhead.


GRADS are also known as Katyushas - the same type of weapon fired at northern Israel by Hezbollah during the 2006 Lebanon War, possessing the same lethal capabilities.

Despite repeated Israeli warnings of an arms buildup in Gaza, the GRAD rockets were apparently smuggled into the Strip from Iran via Egypt through tunnels and the breached Rafah border fence.

The range of the rockets fired against Ashkelon is over 20 km, an upgraded capability which places about a quarter of a million Israeli civilians in constant danger of Hamas attack.


The primary responsibility of any government is to protect its citizens. Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005 with no intention of ever returning. In the face of these missile barrages, Israel is left with little choice but to take action against those who target its towns and cities.

Israel is acting in self-defense.



TERRORISTS OPERATING FROM WITHIN RESIDENTIAL AREAS

Civilian casualties on any side of a conflict are tragic. Many headlines have concentrated on the high death toll of Palestinians during the fighting, which, sadly, has included a number of civilians. However, casualty statistics only tell part of the story:


Israel never intentionally targets civilians whereas Palestinian terrorists deliberately set out to kill innocents, celebrating hits against schools and kindergartens.

The vast majority of Palestinians killed during Israeli military operations were armed terrorists or those directly involved in firing missiles into Israeli towns and cities.

Hamas has exposed the Palestinian civilian population to risk by operating within and firing missiles from built-up areas, effectively using civilians as human shields.

NO 'HOLOCAUST' IN GAZA

Media analyst Tom Gross notes a Reuters mistranslation of remarks made by Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai on February 29 which led to dramatic headlines such as The Guardian's "Israeli minister warns of Palestinian 'holocaust'."

As Gross points out: "In fact Vilnai said this morning in off-the-cuff remarks made on Israel Radio that: "The more the Qassam rocket fire [on Israeli civilians] intensifies and increases its range, the Palestinians are bringing upon themselves a bigger disaster because we will use all our might to defend ourselves."

Vilnai used the word "shoah" (meaning disaster), which Reuters mistranslated as "Holocaust," which is "HaShoah" in Hebrew. It is like confusing a "white house" with "The White House."

Irrespective of whether or not Vilnai's choice of words were ill-thought out or whether the media is to blame for the resulting furore, one fact is undeniable -


Israel is not carrying out a 'holocaust' or genocide in Gaza.

Anti-Israel propagandists have jumped on this bandwagon to repeat the false and disgusting analogy that compares Israel to the Nazis or seeks to deny the scale of the Holocaust. Unfortunately not only Hamas but also Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has described Israel's actions as "worse than the Holocaust". Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal called Israel's military operations "the real Holocaust" and accused Israel of "exaggerating the Holocaust and using it to blackmail the world."

The European Union's Working Definition of Anti-Semitism includes:


Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust; and

Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

Please be on the lookout for these false comparisons in op-eds and media articles and respond appropriately.

A FULL-SCALE INVASION?

Hamas terrorists have no qualms about targeting innocents, safe in the knowledge that the world's media is slow to condemn such acts. Israel's enemies, however, are fully aware of Israel's efforts to avoid civilian casualties. In an asymmetric battle, the Palestinians are adept at waging war through the media in order to pressurize Israel into curtailing IDF military operations.

The IDF's latest actions to defend Israeli towns and cities under rocket attack may be only the beginning before a full-scale invasion of Gaza. Please monitor your media to ensure that the full story is being told of Hamas's responsibility for the violence and Israel's responsibility to defend her citizens.

HonestReporting. com

Character Assassination by email...

High season of politics has clearly begun, judging by the e-mails, computer generated phone calls, and fundraising letters I’ve recently received. It’s déjà vu all over again (as Yogi Berra, the patron saint of malapropism put it); yet, this time there seems to be something genuinely new: on the Democratic side, we’re going to see an African American man or a white woman nominated, either of which would be unprecedented. On the Republican side, we came close to seeing a member of the Mormon Church nominated. It would appear that a new era of tolerance has descended on these United States.

That is, until you open the letters and emails and discover that the politics of race and narrow mindedness is alive and well. There you will find the tactics of hate-speech, ad-hominem attacks, and rumor-mongering. Given my “demographic”, these communications target my “fears” and imply that specific candidate(s) are “anti-Israel” and that Israel would be endangered, and the entire Jewish people placed in jeopardy, should they be elected.

For example, consider what’s been written about Barack Obama. An array of inflammatory (and alleged) specifics are laid out: Obama attended a Wahabist, pro-terrorist Muslim school as a child, that he is secretly a Muslim today, and that he is anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. “Proof” is offered: Obama purportedly was sworn into his senate seat with his hand on the Koran.

I hope you’ve heard that the above isn’t true. Even so, receiving multiple copies of these emails from congregants and friends prompts me to reiterate a message I’ve shared before: for the manifold blessings email affords us, it also enables a most virulent form of “Lashon HaRa”, evil speech. Email is particularly effective for spreading unverified rumor. What’s more, it affords almost unlimited amplification of same. And once the “big lie” is repeated often enough, it’s indistinguishable from the truth. In such an environment, defending a candidate’s character can be an opportunity to do further damage. In the wake of the rounds of email, The National Jewish Paper of record, the Forward, denounced such scurrilous and libelous communication, but printed this: "Is Barack Obama a Muslim? Almost certainly not." “Almost?” The inclusion of that qualification transforms an otherwise responsible editorial into inexcusable innuendo. Is there any basis for leaving the door open, even just a crack?

In a similar vein, other candidates have offered a half-hearted condemnation of such libelous attacks, all the while leaving open the possibility that Obama just might be the enemies’ secret weapon. Beyond the virtual libel of such accusations, it’s just plain wrong in this day and age for anyone to imply that American Jews vote monolithically as a “one-issue” community. I, for one, care deeply about Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state, but my unwavering love for Israel is but one of many concerns I have as an American Jew. Along with support of the State of Israel, my Jewish values compel concerns about poverty, education, housing, employment and health-care. I worry about how the war in Iraq continues to drain our country’s financial and spiritual reserves.

Luckily, all of the major Presidential candidates - Democrat and Republican - have been unequivocal in their support of the State of Israel. Thankfully, the idea that Jewish votes can be manipulated by fear is a thing of the past. We are fortunate to live at a time and in a place where our political choices can be founded not on fear, but on hope. We should expect our candidates to eschew the debilitating politics of fear and speak, instead, about the positive possibilities for the future.

Torah Dedication on U.S.S. Harry Truman

This came to me courtesy of Naomi Arbit. Shabbat Shalom! Rabbi David B. Cohen


TORAH DEDICATION ABOARD US NAVY VESSEL

Dear Friends,
Please enjoy the historical moment of dedication of our sacred Holocaust Torah aboard US Navy aircraft carrier Harry S.Truman. May it bring Peace on Earth and may it be a Symbol of Freedom in the World.

Source: US Navy

Photos: US Navy

http://www.navy.mil/search/photolist.asp

NORFOLK, Va. (AP) -��

�A Torah scroll rescued from Lithuania has a new home aboard the��

�United States Navy aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman.

070624-N-5345W-072 NORFOLK, Va. (June 24, 2007) -��

�USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) Commanding Officer, Capt. Herman Shelanski, left, and Michigan Senator Carl Levin (D), Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, bow their heads in prayer at the commencement of the Torah dedication ceremony in the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier's hangar bay.��

�The holy Jewish Torah in the background, one of the few scrolls from Lithuania to survive the Holocaust, was presented to Truman by the United Jewish Federation of Tidewater, and will be on loan to Truman and displayed for 41 years, or the duration of the ship's life.
The smaller Torah in the foreground, known as the Truman Torah, was presented to President Harry S. Truman by Israel's first President, Chaim Weizmann in gratitude for America's diplomatic recognition of the state of Israel in 1948. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Kristopher Wilson (RELEASED)

The carrier is one of the few U.S. Navy vessels to have its own Torah. Few ships are large enough to need one, said Sam Werbel, an organizer of a dedication ceremony attended by a crowd of 500, including some Holocaust survivors.

"This is not a ceremony alone," said Mark E. Talisman, founder and president of the Project Judaica Foundation. "It's about humanity or a lack thereof. It's about all of us understanding the dignity of human life."

Several Jewish service members celebrated the event, taking photos with the heavy 26-inch high scroll bearing the words of the Hebrew Bible.

Machinist's Mate 3 rd Class Jesse Kopelman, USS Harry S. Truman's (CVN 75) Jewish Lay Leader,
holds a holy Jewish Torah, one of the few scrolls from Lithuania to survive the Holocaust, which was presented to Truman.

About 5 percent or less of Lithuania's Jewish population survived the Holocaust.��

�No religious artifacts, other than this Torah, are thought to remain of that country's Jewish population, organizers said.

"I'm very proud of our servicemen who are serving, and I'm very proud that they saw fit to have a Torah on board the ship," said Julius Marcus of Portsmouth, who attended with his wife, Jeanne.

On May 14, 1948, President Truman was the first world leader to grant diplomatic recognition to the newly reborn State of Israel. Israel's first president, Chaim Weizmann, thanked Truman with a Torah scroll that now belongs to the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library.

That Torah was on loan to the carrier and displayed next to the Torah that was dedicated.

From "Honest Reporting" - How the Media Distorts News from the Middle East

The following comes from "Honest Reporting", a website I follow. I also write to the media outlets when I feel a particularly egregious bias is evident. David Cohen

"Today's headlines include the LA Times's "Gaza dark amid Israeli blockade" and The Guardian's "Gaza plunged into darkness as Israeli fuel blockade takes effect". Similar headlines appear in many media outlets. You could be forgiven for thinking that Israel has cut off the entire electricity supply to the Gaza Strip.

Despite ongoing Qassam attacks from the territory, Israel has not switched off the electricity. In fact, Hamas itself shut down Gaza's only power station after inviting the media to watch it do so.


The mainstream media ultimately assisted Hamas in creating the impression of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The fact is Israel has restricted fuel supplies in response to the terrorism emanating from Gaza but continues to provide the Palestinians with electricity.

The Times of London omits this vital fact altogether in a story headlined "Darkness falls on Gaza as Israel takes revenge for rocket attacks". AFP, while quoting Israeli officials, also omitted the facts leaving readers with the impression that Israel is simply denying responsibility.

While Gazans are undoubtedly suffering, the dark picture painted by the mainstream media is different from the reality. As the Israel's Foreign Ministry notes, the supply of electricity to Gaza from the Israel and the Egyptian power grids (124 Megawatts and 17 Megawatts respectively) has continued uninterrupted. These 141 Megawatts of power represents about three quarters of Gaza's electricity needs.

Israel Electric Company workers' committee chairman Miko Zarfati goes further:


"This is Palestinian spin. No one has stopped the supply of electricity to the Strip," Zarfati told Ynet. He claimed that his employees worked day and night in a power plant in Ashkelon while putting themselves in danger of being hit by Qassam rockets falling in the area.

The Gaza power plant only produces 30% of the electricity consumed in the Strip while Israel supplies the rest.

"It is simply offensive and arrogant for them to claim that there is shortage," Zarfati said....

"The situation is totally absurd. We're continuing to supply them electricity despite the (demand) overload for electricity in Israel and despite the fact that Israeli residents and Electric Company workers that are being sent to Gaza Vicinity communities are under threat from Qassam rockets," Zarfati railed.

Ha'aretz also reports that despite the blackout in Gaza City, southern and central Gaza - which receive electricity from Israel and Egypt directly - were not affected by the shutdown.

Hamas manipulation of the media is evident in an AP story that reported "Children marched through dark streets holding candles, an angry Hamas TV announcer shouted at the camera "We are being killed, we are starving!"

Once again, the mainstream media has wittingly or unwittingly fallen into the Hamas trap. By plunging Gaza into darkness, the terrorist organization has managed to shift the story away from its own responsibility for the Qassams and terror on Sderot. Instead, Israel's image is taking a beating for a perceived humanitarian crisis of Hamas's own making.

Please correct the stories from The Times and AFP by writing to letters@thetimes.co.uk and http://www.afp.com/english/afp/?pid=contact respectively.

Also write to your local media outlets if you feel that they are not giving sufficient context and information to this story. Full contact details for many media can be found on HonestReporting's website."

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same...

Much to the chagrin of some of my readers, I rarely allow my hope for the future to be weakened by the worst parts of our past. And then again, from time to time, I come across a news item that leaves me shaking my head. Here's one from a Jewish Telagraphic Agency dispatch:


Ms. magazine Refuses Pro-Israel Ad
Published: 01/10/2008


Ms. magazine rejected a pro-Israel advertisement from the American Jewish Congress. The ad highlights successful women in Israel. It shows photographs of three prominent Israelis -- Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik, Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Livni and the president of the Supreme Court, Dorit Beinish -- above the words “This is Israel.” Harriet Kurlander, the director of the AJCongress Commission for Women’s Empowerment, said in a news release that she was told when she tried to place the ad that it “would set off a firestorm” and that “there are very strong opinions” on the subject, which she believed to mean Israel. “What other conclusion can we reach except that the publishers -- and if the publishers are right, a significant number of Ms. magazine readers -- are so hostile to Israel that they do not even want to see an ad that says something positive about Israel?” AJCongress President Richard Gordon asked. Ms. magazine's executive editor, Kathy Spillar, disputes that version, telling JTA the ad showed political support for one of Israel's parties and thus violated magazine standards. "We only take mission-driven ads," Spillar said. "Because two of the women in this ad were from the same political party," that showed favoritism, and the magazine's policy is not to get involved in the domestic politics of another country. Gordon noted that the magazine in its Fall 2003 issue ran a cover story on Jordan’s Queen Noor, and the Winter 2004 issue contained an article on the Ramallah Film Festival called “Images of Palestine.” Spillar responded that "ironically" this month's issue, just coming to newsstands now, has a two-page spread profiling Livni.
Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is like expecting the bull not to charge you because you are a vegetarian.- Rabbi Harold Kushner

To Blog or not to Blog...

To Blog or not To Blog… that is the question…


They walk among us. Their eyes are heavy lidded, a consequence of having woken up at four in the morning to be first in line to buy an iPhone;” their conversation is peppered with Greek words like “Beta.”

They are (drumroll, please)…’’ “first-adopters.” They aspire to be the first on their block with the newest, most “cutting edge” technology or gadget. And for some, being on the cutting edge isn’t enough; they aspire to be on the “bleeding edge.”

Which brings me to my latest foray into the technological jungle – the creation of my very first “blog.”* My goal is two fold: first, to engage you in thinking about an issue of Jewish import; and, second, to engage you in conversation with me and other members of the Sinai community. To this second goal, the “blog” technology seems particularly focused.

So, in answer to the Shakespearean query, “To Blog or not to blog,” I shall blog, verily. Please join in the conversation; and when you do, keep in mind that when you “respond” to the blog you are sending a message to everyone who subscribes to it. It’s very efficient, but not the way to send a private message!

Below, you will find a copy of the article I wrote for the January 2008 edition of the SINAI NEWS. Please take a look and, should a thought occur, please share!

Shabbat Shalom,

DBC

________________________________________________________
According to Wikipedia, Blog is a portmanteau** of two words – web and log. Its usage word was coined by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). In the book, Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice words from Jabberwocky, saying, “Well, slithy means lithe and slimy ... You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.”

** a large traveling bag or suitcase with two compartments, hence the linguistic idea of fusing two words and their meanings into one.