Gil

A Decent Reading

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Today I read the fifth עלייה to פרשת בשלח. Four weeks of preparation led to a decent reading: despite tremendous performance anxiety (and morning digestive issues picking the worst time to start trouble) I only blanked on the notes for one phrase near the end of the עלייה.

And this time, there were no corrections. 😉

Looking forward to my next attempt in this experiment in leaving my comfort zone in the pursuit of a personal goal and in the service of the community.

It also helps to do something of real value in today’s world, to sing words of eternal truth to my community in a time when so many words are spoken for ill.

That’s good too.

Those Who Followed Into the Sea

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Do you think the average Egyptian really hated Hebrews, or personally supported the Pharaoh’s more extreme policies targeting them? Do you think maybe they were a little bit afraid of the Hebrews, threatened by the success of foreigners on Egyptian soil? After all, the government itself said that these foreigners were a threat!

Nevertheless, those who participated in the oppression, experienced consequences.

Do you think the average Egyptian soldier pursued the Israelites out of antisemitism? After everything they had just witnessed on account of the Israelites being mistreated, do you think they wanted the Israelites to remain in captivity? Do you think they were evil just for being loyal soldiers of the state? Do you think they maybe thought that they should just follow their orders, even if they had questions?

Nevertheless, those who followed the Israelites into the sea, experienced consequences.

…It’s been a great week personally, an anxiety-inducing week nationally and indeed globally. This is what arises in my mind on this week’s perasha.

שבת שלום

Ethnic Cleansing Is a Bad Idea

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POTUS’s plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza is a very, very bad idea.

It’s immoral, illegal, impractical, and ineffective in securing Israel.

Israeli leaders should be distancing themselves from this dumpster fire of a suggestion as emphatically as possible without triggering the petty ire of POTUS.

It’s a tough line to walk but these are the times.

We need better solutions.

יי עוז לעמו יתן
יי יברך את עמו בשלום

It Can’t Happen Here

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I was concerned about the welfare of American Jewish communities when the level of antisemitism was holding at semi-random vandalism, physical assaults, and widespread bloodlibels about Israel. The people at the top occasionally repeated some of those bloodlibels, it’s true, but at least it was clear that they weren’t going to oversee the mass disenfranchisement of Jewish citizens anytime soon. That’s just not where the previous administration was holding at any point.

While it started with mass deportations of illegal migrants, it quickly grew to rescinding the legal status of immigrants, and now the POTUS and the party are talking about building concentration camps to hold tens of thousands of prisoners and the corporatists forcibly taking over the bureaucracy of the American government via its treasury and oversight departments are talking of deporting (sorry outsourcing) American citizens to foreign countries for internment. And it hasn’t even been two weeks.

But Jewish communities are safe, you say. They became white over the decades and were accepted by the tolerant folks who want to see competent white men in charge of everything. Their rights are safe in the emerging social order in the US of A. And on top of that, many Jewish Americans voted for POTUS and party! Surely POTUS and party would not turn their backs on them.

Oy. The same corporatists, by the way, who are now grabbing hold of the American government by its administrative b@ll$ with the full mandate of POTUS and party, have also been busy promoting white nationalist propaganda, sieg heiling at presidential events, and absolving German right-wing nationalists of the weight of the millions of souls their grandparents murdered in the Holocaust. They’ve been joking about the Holocaust and then handing the mic to neonazis. And the neonazis appreciate it: they’re looking forward to the dawn of a new age where their beliefs and ideas are not anathema to American society but normalized at every level, all the way to the top of the American government.

In such a situation, when analyzed from all angles – how could I not worry for the American Jewish communities???

“It can’t happen here.”

…

Here’s to me being entirely wrong and the new reign of POTUS and party ushering in an age of prosperity for all.

May I be so very, very wrong.

Cheers! 🍻

Jerusalem Gothic

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An elderly man gets on the bus with a vase of flowers, meowing as he places the vase on the seat. Still meowing, he looks around, as if daring someone to contradict him.

I sit silently and look on. He’s not saying anything I haven’t heard before.

The Only Horizontal Society

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In a world obsessed with hierarchies and the supremacy of some people over other people, one small nation stands alone as a horizontal society. Flawed, imperfect, very much a divine work in progress over thousands of years – with a tumultuous human history of being seduced by the allure of power over others – but the only horizontal society on the planet nevertheless.

Dispersed across all borders and including citizens of every ethnicity – all equally bound and freed by the law of a covenant that no king, emperor, or dictator can break. A nation of just laws, not powerful men – a brilliant rose among the thorns of tribalism and myth.

מי כעמך ישראל

Cultivate Yourself

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Culture and values.

People talk a lot about culture and values.

Almost always from a collectivist viewpoint – almost never in regards to the personal culture, the subjective values, of the human individual.

And to a certain extent, this is understandable. Culture is something most of us experience socially, as a group; most of us never fully develop our personal cultures, language, idiom, semiotic discourse with ourselves. And it’s quite easy to assume that values are facts of nature, rather than agreed upon claims about resources, let alone the ultimately subjective claim of an object, entity, or idea’s worth, utility, or necessity. We’re conditioned to think of culture and values in terms of the collective.

And the collective has value. Don’t get me wrong – we exist as parts of social units, species, ecosystems. The collective dimension of our existence is inescapable.

But a truly meritocratic society – a truly egalitarian society – a truly horizontal society – cultivates the perfection not just of the collective but of the individual, seeks the perfection of the collective through the self-actualization of its individual members; rewards the development and the expression of the individual’s perspective, insight, culture, and values, which in turn catalyze, influence, become part of the collective discourse.

There are rising forces in the world that seek the suppression of the human individual, made in the image of our Creator, and the individual’s subordination to the culture and values of their collectives. Groups on the political right, now gaining popularity and power around the world, and groups on the political left, also gaining popularity and power around the world, are united in their opposition to the freedom and selfhood that is the birthright of all of us made in that image.

Don’t let them suppress you.

Cultivate yourself.

Develop your own culture and values.

Be free.

This. Deal.

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Meanwhile here in the Land:

“Israel is about to free 110 Palestinian prisoners, including major terror convicts, nobody knows where they are going” (h/t Times of Israel)

But hey, we’re getting three hostages back!

After over a year of reducing Gaza to rubble!

Leaving Hamas funded, armed, and in power!

This deal, bro.

This. Deal.

All I can do is pray. Learn. Try to be less reactive. Try to be more helpful. Let a little light shine through the clouds. The rest is up to the Creator.

Every Day Is Holocaust Remembrance Day

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Every day is Holocaust remembrance day.

We live in an indelibly post-Auschwitz world. There is no going back.

Auschwitz proved the depths to which man may sink if he rejects the image of God in his fellow man.

Revealed the abyss that gapes under the vaulted ceilings of modern civilizational achievement.

Demonstrated that the raucous call of blood and soil will easily drown out the thin still voice of the human soul.

Auschwitz showed us all these things and more, our worst reflection in a black mirror of entirely human horror.

Those who truly understand what Auschwitz was, can never forget what Auschwitz means. The warning its memory carries is real, tangible, and as inescapable as divine fire in our bones. It is a permanent part of our psyche and a nightmare against which we judge our waking world.

But there is more to living in a post-Auschwitz world, each and every day.

We must remember: there were many reasons the Nazis marshalled entire nation-states in their special quest to eradicate the Jewish people specifically, beyond their general quest to eliminate all possible alternatives to their ethnic monoculture. Many reasons for their obsessive hatred of us – political, economic, social, historical. Take your pick, believe them all if you like. But there stands an overarching reason, an underlying principle of the comprehensively anti-Jewish ideology they professed: regardless of where any one of us casts his or her lot, we inevitably stand together for the Difference – the alternate, the strange, the wondrous, the Ineffable – that lies at the heart of a humanity created in the image of its Creator, and that threatens the Nazi worldview, and the broken personality that seeks refuge from its brokenness in that worldview, to its very core.

This is but one of the many lessons we carry with us, post-Auschwitz: the knowledge of what it is that Nazis truly hate, in us and in the world.

This year, with the open popular resurgence of neonazism across the USA and Europe and with its embrasure by many supporters, apparatchiks, and even prominent members of the party led by POTUS, perfunctorily observing an international day of Holocaust “remembrance” feels like a cheap joke, at best (at worst, it proved to actually be an opportunity for publicly spreading anti-Jewish blood libels, as was seen in some locations).

So I invite you to take time on this day – and every day – to remember Auschwitz, remember the depths lurking under our feet as a race, but also to remember, love, promote, and protect the divine image within us all that Nazis work so very hard to destroy.

Be the Difference.

DEI Was the Smokescreen

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Restoring a meritocracy by re-allowing discrimination across federal departments, organizations, and contractors?

Hwut

🧐

For some political groups (that have now united under POTUS and his party), complaints about the allegedly anti-meritocratic nature of DEI (and before it affirmative action) were always just a smokescreen for the real problem: the advancement of non-white, non-Christian minorities in domains that previously excluded them and exploited them.

In this respect, the sum effect of the executive orders and actions from the past week is to stifle meritocracy in America, not restore it.