Israel is a real place

Greetings.

Jewish date:  26 ’Elul 5770 (Parashath Ha’azinu).

Today’s holidays:  Ramadan (Islam), Laylat-al-Qadr (Lailat ul Qadr, Lailat-ul Qadr, Night of Power) (Islam), Twenty-Third Sunday of Ordinary Time (Roman Catholicism), Feast Day of St. Henry Louis Mencken (Church of the SubGenius).

Topic 1:  A big backlog on anti-Semitism and the Arab-Israeli War:  “Selective Outrage: Israeli Facebook Photos Spark Media Circus”, “Action Alert: CBC Drags a False Equivalence”, “EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Dramatic Reunion Ten Years After The Photo That Started It All”, “Iranian youth athlete withdraws from fight with Israel competitor” (translation:  Iran would rather force its taekwondo fighters to chicken out like wimps rather than let them lose with honor), “Lancet Editor "Responds" to HR Critique”, “Ha'aretz Journalist's Speaking Tour: Sponsored by Anti-Zionists”, “BBC Panorama Shocker: Balanced Review of Gaza Flotilla Incident”, “Incitement is not one-sided”, “Dead Jews and living trees” (some people have completely missed what the Holocaust is supposed to teach us), “The Root of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Classic Islamic View of Jews”, “The Despair of Zion” by Walter Reich, and “Egyptian minister calls on Muslims to flood J’lem” (completely forgetting that any Islamic identity of Yerushalayim is completely forged and that Muslim pilgrims there will be giving money to Jews, directly or indirectly, if they want to eat, sleep, or travel).

Topic 2:  I need to start writing about my pilot trip to Israel, my future home, and I still do not know where to start.  So let us start with something basic which at first sounds ridiculously obvious:  Israel is a real place.  Rationality requires us to try to recognize things as they are, for what they are.  The Israel I visited is not a religious fantasy of a Jewish or ecumenical utopia.  Neither is it a successor to Nazi Germany, as anti-Semites would have us believe.  In many respects, Israel is a lot like the United States, being a fully modern, Western country.  This includes the general rule of law and familiar products and technologies.

So how does Israel differ from the United States?  The most obvious (and relevant to this blog) is that while most of the West is predominantly Christian, Israel is predominantly Jewish.  There is a sizeable Muslim minority, and there are Christians, Bahá’ís, and members of other religions as well; but I stayed within areas with Jewish majorities, and this was reflected even within the secular culture.  (I do plan to go into this further as I discuss my trip.)  And while in the United States people are often not so visibly demonstrative of their religion, people who look religious are everywhere in Israel.  Even in Tel ’Aviv, the great bastion of Israeli secularism, there were some people who were visibly observant Jews, including one woman I talked with at a company at which I interviewed.  To be sure, there are enclaves, and whole neighborhoods are set up with particular religious groups in mind.  But in many places, people of different religious strains mix freely and without incident.  This includes on buses; despite what you may have heard about Ḥaredhim (sometimes derisively called “ultra-Orthodox”) holding by segregated buses, I saw plenty riding ordinary, mixed buses.

Israel is also a visibly multilingual society.  In the United States, government-issue signs (such as for traffic and street names) are usually only in English.  In Israel, they are typically in Hebrew, the international language English, and Arabic.  And while the most common language spoken on the street and found in non-governmental signs is indeed Hebrew, I also encountered a fair share of English, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, French, Yiddish, and what was probably Amharic.  One may also easily end up talking to people in languages other than Hebrew.  Someone at one synagogue did try speaking to me in Yiddish, which I do not know.  (I got a C in Yiddish in college and have made no attempts to study it since.)  Several people, upon hearing my American accent even when speaking Hebrew, switched to addressing me in English.  (I myself must admit guilt at switching too frequently from Hebrew to English when I had trouble making myself understood in Hebrew.  Hebrew is not my native language, and it requires more mental effort for me to speak or understand.  And I am under the impression that my accent is not the easiest for Israelis to understand either.)

I need to move on to other things today.  I hope to write about the Old City of Yerushalayim tomorrow.

Topic 3:  For today’s religious humor: “The transition”:

And again, if anyone knows anything about where this notion of black cats being evil comes from, please let me know.

Peace.

Aaron

We must stop the enemy from cutting down trees in their own territory!

Greetings.

Jewish date:  Jewish date:  24 ’Av 5770 (Parashath Re’eh).

Today’s holidays:  Feast Day of John Vianney (Roman Catholicism), Feast Day of St. Charles Addams (Church of the SubGenius).

Worthy cause of the day:  “Tell Mott's: get the scabs out of your applesauce!”.

Topic 1:  More anti-Semitism:  Lebanon’s unprovoked attack on Israel yesterday is covered in “Special Alert: Media Collusion in Lebanon Ambush” and “Border Clash: Confirmations on the Day After”.  One would think that the Lebanese could come up with a better excuse to attack Israeli soldiers and get five people killed than the Israelis doing border maintenance by cutting down a tree in Israeli territory.  “Shimon Peres versus the Brits” deals with just how long and how deep British anti-Semitism towards Mandatory Palestine and Israel has been; apparently the British have been stabbing Israel in the back at least far back as 1921 by violating their commitments in Mandatory Palestine by giving all of it east of the Jordan River to the emir of Mecca.  “Demonizing Israel is bad for the Palestinians” argues that media focus on alleged atrocities against stateless Arabs in Israel keeps the focus off real atrocities against “Palestinians“ in Arab countries.

Topic 2:  Also about Muslim misbehavior:  “How a Tolerant Country Can Avoid Being a Doormat for Intolerant Countries” suggests that freedom of religion should not be unconditional but should instead be conditioned on respect for the freedom of religion of others.  “Treat others as they treat you” or “tit for tat” may sound downright selfish (and like something right out of LaVeyan Satanism), but Muslims abusing freedom of religion in the West is well-documented, and self-defense is a commonly recognized moral behavior.  (Exception:  Jesus in Matthew 5:38-42 and Luke 6:27-31, the whole business of “turning the other cheek”, which at least on the surface seems to value not resisting one’s enemies, which Jesus is reported as doing to the point of allowing himself to be crucified when he easily could have escaped.)  Do note that if we are tolerant of intolerance, then the intolerant win and there is no longer any tolerance.

Topic 3:  For today’s religious humor: “We guard the gates of HELL!”:


Peace.

Aaron

The Other Bible is not another bible

Greetings.

Jewish date:  12 ’Av 5770 (Parashath Wa’ethḥannan).

Today’s holidays:  Feast Day of Bridget (Roman Catholicism), Feast Day of St. Groucho Marx (Church of the SubGenius).

Worthy causes of the day:  “Help Save Africa's Lions from Extinction - Take Action Today @ The Animal Rescue Site”, “Stand Up for the 4.9 Million Displaced Sudanese - Take Action Today @ The Hunger Site”, “Urge Congress to Help End Violence Against Women - Take Action Today @ The Hunger Site”, “ONE | Ask the Senate to deliver their promise to Haiti”, and “Why is the Obama administration listening to right-wing smear merchants?”.

Topic 1:  The Other Bible, edited by William Barnstone.  I wrote about this book over a year ago when I bought it.  This is what I wrote then:

I would like to speak a bit about one of my latest acquisitions, The Other Bible, edited by Willis Barnstone.  The Other Bible consists of religious texts which are not part of the standard Christian Bible from a variety of sources spread over something on the order of 1,500 years:  Jewish apocrypha, pseudepigrapha, mystical, and sectarian texts (including the Dead Sea Scrolls), Christian apocrypha, Gnostic texts, Mandaean texts, Manichaean texts, and even pagan texts.  The groups whose works were utilized are not a single religion, and these works thus form a rather artificial collection.  Also the Pharisaic/Orthodox Jewish contributions, listed under “Haggadah”, “Kabbalah”, and “The Zohar, the Book of Radiance (Kabbalah)”, were never intended to be taken as scripture.  As such, “The”, “Other”, and “Bible” are all rather inappropriate for reference to this collection.  In the introduction, the editor conceives of these works being part of a Judeo-Christian “greater bible” which we now have easier access to.  While I have to agree with the editor that these works are valuable for investigating the development of religious thought, I find the notion of a “greater bible” rather repugnant.  Religion is not a free-for-all with texts playthings to delight in.  To accept a book as scripture is an explicit endorsement of its content.  This is why the New Testament is not part of what Jews consider “Bible”:  they view it as a separate, detached collection and not a continuation of the Hebrew Bible.  Bundling together works from multiple religions under a single rubric to imply they are really part of a greater whole, a collection not endorsed as scripture by any single religion except maybe Bahá’ís (and that is a maybe) is an even worse mistake than bundling the Hebrew Bible together with the New Testament.

These criticisms are every bit as valid now that I have finished reading this collection.  In fact, things are even worse than I thought.  For one thing, it is not whole documents which are necessarily included, but rather sections which the editor thought were interesting.  In some cases, the documents which the editor would like to include are no longer extant, and he resorts to including descriptions of groups written by their enemies—hardly the sort of documents that would be included in a “bible” of any sort.  The choice of materials is also rather skewed.  Most of the Apocrypha, the specific collection of material absent in the Hebrew Bible but included in the Septuagint, are not included in The Other Bible, even though they are the first material one looks at when going beyond the Hebrew Bible and New Testament.  Josephus and Philo are for the most part also ignored.  Rather the emphasis is overwhelmingly on Gnosticism.  To describe Gnosticism extremely briefly, consider the notion of a theological “conspiracy theory” in which the Creator God is evil, this world is a trap for human souls, and one’s salvation is dependent not on good behavior but rather knowing the secrets of the Good God above the Creator God (gnosis).  While the Christian versions of Gnosticism almost always included Jesus as the agent of the Good God, early Christians railed against as a heresy.  It goes without saying that Gnosticism is diametrically opposed to Judaism (“metaphysical anti-Semitism” was the term Dr. Gershom Scholem used), given its denigration of the God of Israel and by extension His Torah and His people.  While I find that a lot of Christianity makes sense of a sort in the light of Gnosticism—with Christianity ending up as a sort of Gnosticism-lite—no one sane deems anything heretical as “bible”.  The Other Bible is worthwhile looking at for getting an introduction to many of the texts sampled therein.  For other purposes, the reader is advised to look elsewhere.

Topic 2:  More contemporary anti-Semitism:  “AP Goes Soft on Hardcore ISM” deals with misreporting on the International Solidarity Movement, which is dedicated to aiding terrorists by acting as human shields.  “Israelis fight terror through US court system” deals with a nonviolent way to deal with terrorism:  suing for reparations and actually winning.  “The Treatment of Jews in Arab/Islamic Countries” deals with how Jews have been treated through history by Muslims and gives sources.  “Rachel Saperstein: Five years after expulsion from Gush Katif, from Women in Green” deals with how Jews who were expelled from Gaza five years ago are doing, and it is not pretty.  Rav Boteach in “Why have Christian organizations remained silent about Mel this time, but supported him 4 years ago?” deals with the current scandal of known anti-Semite Mel Gibson.

Topic 3:  For today’s religious humor:  No Laughing Matter.  This is a site which pokes fun at the inanities of Middle Eastern politics through mock interviews.  Let’s face it:  comedians can say the unvarnished truth about anything when everyone else fears to do so.  These are the videos they have up currently:



From a different group is the highly sarcastic “(MUST SEE VIDEO) The Humanitarian Crisis of the Gaza Mall: The Horror!”:

Peace and Shabbath shalom.

Aaron