Open Letter

Can Judaism Survive a Messianic Dictatorship in Israel? What will happen to Judaism if Israeli democracy is destroyed by supremacist zealots Aerial view of Hawara village, following the February rampage there of Jews who were avenging an earlier terror attack.Credit: Ilia Yefimovich/DPA Yuval Noah Harari Jul 13, 2023 10:38 pm IDT Following Jews around the world will shortly commemorate Tisha B’Av, the fast day marking the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians and of the Second Temple by the Romans. Can Judaism survive the destruction of the Third Temple – the prosperous Israeli democracy – this time by the Jews themselves? And what would such destruction look like? Two weeks ago I went to Beit Shemesh, a predominantly religious city, to take part in a pro-democracy rally. Hundreds of people participated: religious and secular, women and men, straight people and LGBTQ people, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, and everyone in between. Opposite us, there was a counter-rally of governmen...

The child who was shot dead by soldiers at Nyanga The child is not dead the child lifts his fists against his mother who shouts Afrika! shouts the breath of freedom and the veld in the locations of the cordoned heart The child lifts his fists against his father in the march of the generations who shout Afrika! shout the breath of righteousness and blood in the streets of his embattled pride The child is not dead not at Langa nor at Nyanga not at Orlando nor at Sharpeville nor at the police station at Phillippi where he lies with a bullet through his brain The child is the dark shadow of the soldiers on guard with rifles, saracens and batons the child is present at all assemblies and law-givings the child peers through the windows of houses and into the hearts of mothers this child who just wanted to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere the child grown to a man treks through all Africa the child grown into a giant journeys through the whole world Without a pass Ingrid Jonker ...

Trauma survivors don't make appealing or attractive victims.  Children who survive trauma are beset with coping mechanisms which render them protected but ironically, also isolated from what they really crave inside:  basic acceptance, care, and approval. I did not get approval from my family of origin, and was at an age where I still sought positive attention from authority figures. But my walls were always up and I copied ugly traits from my narcissistic parents: grandiosity, arrogance, defiance. I had no insight. I was blind to how others might perceive me. But underneath the bravado,  there was so much pain that semester at the University of Texas in Austin.  My academic performance was not consistent. I was far too distracted by acting out socially and partying;  desperate to find somewhere to belong, some people to fit in with. When I applied myself I excelled. Unfortunately I performed well only sporadically.  I must have come across as cocky or rebe...

On seeing The Chosen:  "Oh my God what a beautiful film. I know I saw it in my youth but I couldn't appreciate it then as I do now. Robby Benson does an incredible job here, just miraculous. And keeps up with the old lions, Maximilian Schell and Rod Steiger. Such men!!! As actors, and as the parts they played. Unforgettable. The scene of Rod Steiger as the powerful Rebbe dancing at a wedding gave me chills. (Always makes me think of David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant.)"  Discipline applied without love is mere punishment and cruelty. And Israel, born with such hope and idealism:  I wonder what the early Zionists would think of today's far right #Israel?  At that time, there was so much horror in the world, so much carnage, but there was also great optimism and faith and good expectations for the future. Now, there is only the darkness without any light. The experiments are failing, or have failed:  the American experiment of democracy and the Israeli e...

"The few big things that matter in life are what we have to keep in mind; the rest can be quietly abandoned. And you can find those few big things anywhere, you have to keep rediscovering them in yourself so that you can be renewed. And in spite of everything you always end up with the same conviction: life is good after all, it's not God's fault that things go awry sometimes, the cause lies in ourselves. And that's what stays with me, even now, even when I'm about to be packed off to Poland with my whole family."  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "I have noticed that in every situation, even the most difficult, man generates new faculties that help him go on living. As far as that is concerned, God is merciful enough. And as for the rest: several suicides last night before the transport, with razors and so on. This morning, while I stood at the tub with a colleague, I said with great emotion something like this:  'The realms of the soul and the spi...

A blog about the entire history of my struggles with religion would turn into a book. That isn't a book i want to write. The same conflicts i always had, i still have. Not much has changed. So for my "second step" i will relate a current experience as a recapitulation of all the rest of it. i just read a definition of "recapitulation" to make sure i knew what it meant. then i read a definition of recapitulation theory. i think i understand the gist of it...the stages of embryonic development mirror the evolutionary stages that preceded. Is that correct?  i also recall a theological work which talked about how the life of Christ is the recapituation of the history of man. i must have misunderstood. that cannot possibly be, unless now is the time of the passion and death of mankind. i am depressed today and experience everyone as being critical and rejecting. which only means of course, that i am criticizing and rejecting others. if so, it is only out of the ...

For years I believed that as a child I had seen JFK in person, maybe at the airport in the neighborhood where I grew up. I held an image of him passing by, waving to the crowds; an image taken, no doubt, from old news reels and documentary footage. My parents may have contributed to this by relating a story in which JFK was mentioned. Maybe they weren't even talking to me, maybe I just overheard it...Later I found out that John F. Kennedy had been dead for a long time before I was even born (in 1964). I was genuinely confused and astounded, so deep was this false memory.  There is also a memory of a real movie which somehow got conflated with the idea of the "pound of flesh" in The Merchant of Venice...in this old film, there was what I thought was a gob of meat or flesh on a scale, and the tortured face of a man in agony who was witness to what was presumably a carnage or atrocity of some kind. I have no idea what this movie was but I am pretty sure it had no...