Gil

Questions About the War

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So I’ve been doing some digging and I have some Questions:

– If, after 5 weeks, the remaining IRGC commanders refuse to surrender and the US is excluded from the succession process, then does that mean the USA won the war?

– If, after 5 weeks, the US has used up all or most of its interceptors against Iranian missiles and drones, what’s left to protect US allies in the Pacific and Europe from China and Russia? (Or Middle Eastern allies from local belligerents?)

– If, after 5 weeks, the US withdraws most of its assembled forces from the region but IRGC and Hezbollah missiles are still falling on Israeli citizens, will the Israeli military be able to continue effective operations in Iran and Lebanon?

– Are US Armed Forces capable of fighting and winning a sustained war on a single front (Iran), let alone two fronts (the assumed precondition for post-WW2 world order), let alone three (Middle East, Pacific, Europe)?

– As the domestic situation, the international standing, and the military capability of the USA respectively destabilizes, declines, and degrades, will Bibi’s ability to maintain a special relationship with GOP POTUS be a help or a hindrance in navigating the geopolitical waters in the years ahead?

🧐

Please note: I have not addressed the spiritual, moral, or economic costs related to any of the above. That reckoning raises its own Questions.

Tucker Targets Chabad

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Chabad is a diverse, complex, and trans-dimensional organization.

I have personally had great experiences with Chabad rabbis and families. I greatly respect their community building and social work, and I find their Torah to be very thought-provoking, even when I disagree with specific claims they may make or conclusions they may reach.

(For example, the Lubavitcher Rebbe was of the opinion that one could not fulfill an obligation to bless by concentrating and “saying” the words in one’s mind, while R Qafeh was of the opinion that not only could one do so but that this was an ideal way to handle a situation of doubt regarding obligation to bless.)

While my experience has been mostly positive with only a few counter examples, many people I know have had terrible overall experiences with Chabad. They have encountered prejudice, ignorance, and dogmatism in their interactions with Chabad rabbis and Chabadnikim in general. They find the Tanya’s statements seeming to suggest that God has parts or that Jews are essentially superior to gentiles, to be anathema. And they find the cult of personality turned messianic ideology turned idolatry, to be quite alarming. I understand the concerns of these people, and I think they need to be included in the intra-Jewish discussion of Chabad.

But Make No Mistake.

Tucker Carlson did not go after Chabad because of conflicts between foreign Chabad houses and native Sepharadi communities in South America and Western Europe, or because of philosophical criticism of the Tanya as it has been inter-generationally understood, or because he has issues with cults of personality or messianism.

To repeat: Tucker Carlson did not go after Chabad because they are a messianic movement. To be sure, as a Christian fundamentalist, Tucker believes that any messianism other than his own is idolatrous, but that’s not why he singled out Chabad.

In that exact connection, it’s worth noting that – when looking for a scapegoat for America’s involvement in this war (I literally heard a missile exploding in the background as I wrote that) – Tucker had a much riper target within Israeli society itself, the messianic ethno-nationalist ideology that, over the decades, has increasingly attracted so many right wing politicians and populists (who happen to also sit in the current government). If Tucker was truly concerned about a messianic movement in Israel dragging an unwilling USA into a foreign conflict – that’s where he’d take aim: Israeli messianists in political power coordinating a regional war with the White House.

~> Instead, Tucker Carlson targeted Chabad because they are among the most visible Jewish people across America. <~

Read that again. Slowly.

His audience is American right-wing Christians.

He is turning them against the Jewish people they can easily recognize (who put themselves out in the public eye as a matter of course) and telling them that those Jewish people – yes, the nice rabbi and rebbitzen from the Chabad house around the corner – are dangerous ideologues working with Israel to manipulate America and control the world.

This kind of propaganda is not new. We’ve seen it before. Many American Jewish people recognize it for what it is – but have not yet accepted where the train is headed (and accelerating fast). Many other American Jewish people unfortunately do not recognize the flashing signs of what’s coming and gleefully continue cheering the leopard on as it eats everyone else’s faces first.

Chabad is not perfect.

But they are precisely the targets Tucker et al choose because all American Jews are in their sights.

May Hashem guide and shield all of the holy flock in these dark times, may our cries and pleas for peace! protection! prosperity! be answered speedily, may the plans of Haman always be overturned and brought down upon his wicked head.

Purim in a War

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I am so torn between understanding the role Khameini’s regime and the IRGC, directly and via the proxy armies they fund, train, and direct, have played in not just oppressing and killing their own citizens but in repeatedly threatening my life, my wife’s life, my daughters’ lives, the lives of my friends and neighbors, Israeli and Palestinian alike, to this very day (three times in the bomb shelter during our Purim meal, yes we brought the wine each time 🥂💪✡️) –

– and I understand that there is not always a diplomatic solution to every problem of this ancient sort –

– and understanding:
how dangerous fascism is,
how incompetent and corrupt fascist governments are,
how fragile and tenuous the survival of Jewish communities is when fascism begins taking hold of the nation that hosts them,
how dangerous premillenial dominionism is for Jewish people,
how much of a warning sign it is when the fascist religious mythos evolves to the point where a war with an Islamic country is being fought to trigger Armageddon.

The only truth I can rely on in such a Purim world is the truth of ונהפוך הוא, of dramatic (and comic) reversal, of the ultimate unity of opposites, of the significance of opposing interpretations of the same data points.

And in the end,

“For the Jewish people it was light and happiness, rejoicing and honor.”

כן תהיה לנו

Happy (Shoshan) Purim 🤷 🍷

Design and the Modern Synthesis

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So in other news this weekend, I read some convincing critiques of the theory of the development of complex structures and speciation via blind selection of (even path-limited) randomly-generated possibilities. 🤷 I still think Dawkins is a great zoology writer but I’m no longer convinced the Modern Synthesis is a reasonable explanation of the biosphere. First in physics, now in biology: I’m finding that something analogous to design (read the Guide for the Perplexed before you @ me) is actually the most parsimonious explanation of the available data.

Who says we can’t change our minds. 😀

The Supermonkey

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There is so much hate in the world.

Yoda taught us about the roots of hate – and where it leads.

I try to hold empathy for those who hate – to recognize the emotional hell they inherited, refurbished, and unwittingly choose to remain trapped in.

The part of us that is a supermonkey is really so limited, so fragile, so vulnerable. So afraid. There’s so much he can’t control and so much chaos in the forest. Trauma holds fast and shapes generations. The flame that burned him once lurks in every glow. Difference, Other-ness, becomes challenging and threatening.

It is too easy to identify with the supermonkey, to believe the stories he tells himself as lies awake at night, hiding in his stone hut from the ominous booms and the enveloping darkness, nursing his wounds and forgetting to dream.

It is too easy to forget that the supermonkey is not the whole story, even when his tales leave him twisted with hate and convinced that his fate is to either rule the forest or be consumed by it.

We are more than the supermonkey.

There are other parts of us, that combine with the supermonkey to produce the full and splendid human being, you and me, with our personalities, histories, powers, and dreams.

Those other parts are rooted in levels of reality far “above” the dimensions of space and time with which we are so familiar.

With which maybe we too often over-identify.

In times like this – when things are happening big and small, when my daily struggles become dwarfed in the rising fog of war, when the supermonkey is poignantly and painfully reminded of just how like a passing cloud in the sky his earthly life is – I must admit, I find it comforting to remember who I really am, and to lean into the parts of my being that no intercontinental ballistic missile or corrupt politician or enemy of any kind can threaten.

It brings me moments of peace that I wish upon those who hate, especially who hate without even knowing the ones they hate. Their hell is the darkest and coldest, warmed only by the anger they can kindle – is it truly a paradox that they are the most deserving of love?

Prayer in War

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May the righteous Lord of war
Protect the innocent
Punish the wicked
Rescue the stranded
Heal the wounded
Avenge Your image
Profaned for so long

May our Father in the heavens
Guide the hearts and minds
Of Your children taking aim
Whisper quietly into their ears
The demand of their own souls
The call of a higher order
The wisdom of a wild peace

May the Creator of all human beings
Make us safe, make us well, make us whole
Give us relief from the burden of war
Of the heart’s shadow and fears
Of the wounds of yesterday past
Of the unanswered questions
Grant us all a moment of Your favor
That we may build from our prayers
A holy home for You here below

May it be Your will that we merit to go out in peace and to return in peace, that no wrong be suffered by our warriors or be done by their hands, and that together we rise to every challenge and opportunity with which we are presented in our long, defiant, sacred history.

===

Coda: I am with every innocent who has suffered, who is suffering, and who will suffer as humanity collectively stumbles towards redemption, guided by eternal love when we choose to accept it. I make no distinction between human and human. My enemies are only those who rise against me, and even they are only lower-dimensional projections of the distortions in my higher-dimensional relationship with my Creator.

May we know safety, justice, and peace soon.

Blessed Is the One Who Enlightens the Blind

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When I think of where You placed me
A garden, watered by mist and river
A stretch of sand and sky between salty depths
A small rock spinning around a small star
Swirling through eons of nothingness
In flowing rhythm with a stream of myriad stars
Spread out across a forgotten galactic horizon
Just one, of uncountable legions –
When I think of how You know them all,
Call to each by name –
How glad!
How grateful!
Not to be counted
With those who look up
And can not see Your wonder:

Blessed is the One who enlightens the blind.

Child of the Moon

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Oh child of the moon
Your tides are gently rising
With the shadow across your face
Your eyes glow with reflected light
Luminous pools, overflowing, then
Narrowing into shining slivers of nothing
Only for your rebirth
In a new circle of your quiet love
Distant whirling
From the center of your dance
Never touching
Your beloved
Upon
(From)
Whom you shine

Oh child of the moon
You are empty now
But your fullness
Is on the
Rise

Setting the Record Straight

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Fun fact: I am allergic to bullies and I detest religious bullies. I also have limited patience for those who evade accountability, especially in the name of winning the American culture war, and so an abusive, religious bully who evades accountability in the name of pwning the libs is basically gonna get the stick and not the carrot from me, to put it mildly.

May we all return to the proper path and abandon the false idol of ego!

But a particular divine reminder that the views I profess have enough merit to trigger religious bullies suggests to me that I should redouble my effort and be more transparent regarding them, as the proper response to spiritual impediments along my way.

So here goes. I hope the following is crystal clear:

1) I am fundamentally forward thinking. I draw my ideas from my dream of the Israelite future as it arises organically from the Israelite past: and from there I meet this moment in the Israelite present. That historical consciousness is fundamental to my understanding of myself, my people, and my creator.

2) I am not: Sepharadi, Ashkenazi, Teimani, or the product of any other exilic collective noted in the annals of Jewish history: I am a free born, free thinking Jew, charged with dual responsibility as a member of an eternal divine pact by birth and a renewed national project by choice. I am not Orthodox or Conservative or Reform or Reconstructionist or Renewal, or a member of any other ideological party or camp within our nation.

3) I am loyal to the national court of our ancestors and I follow their laws beyond the reach of any community’s custom. My customs are my own, personal adornments to my small practice of implementing the Creator’s instructions, in the context of my life, my family, my social network, my country, my region, my planet………….

4) I learn from all the sages of Israel, as I learn from the sages of all the nations, but I particularly follow the Rambam’s way. Especially in disagreeing with the Rambam – because that was the way of Rambam himself, as I was first taught it in youth and later came to know it in (relative) maturity: to follow one’s mind to the end of knowing the God of truth.

5) I have a deeply held belief in the rights to security, justice, freedom, and peace shared by all human beings. All of them. That is what I was taught as a child and that is what I learned, from some of the past century’s greatest exponents of Judaism, that the Torah promotes, and I have never been persuaded to relinquish that belief. “Maybe one day.”

And last but most important:

6) I am nobody. Nothing. No one to take seriously, to learn from, or to emulate. I am not a source of wisdom or guidance. I am not an expert in anything and I’m wrong about at least one thing every day. I share what I share with you, or with the world, not to teach you but to awaken thoughts within you, so that you may join me on this journey.

Sometimes I’ll say or write something that may seem to conflict with the above – but that is because I choose a way of expressing things obliquely, as juxtapositions and phrases meant to awaken your own thoughts in response to mine, not to disclose to you the fullness of my own thought.

There are volumes more to write on this but I think this was a good opportunity to set the record straight on some matters.

After all, I have a reputation as a dilettante to uphold. 😂

Stay Frosty, Friends

Billionaires Shouldn’t Exist

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I grew up in an extremely right-wing, hyper-capitalist environment.

(Oh, the stories I could tell from my misspent conservative youth.)

Now I’m approaching 40 and just spent five minutes on a soapbox arguing that billionaires shouldn’t exist.

🤷

(That’s what happens when you make me defend Gender Studies as not a contributing factor to societal collapse.)