In his great novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Czech author Milan Kundera meditates on the problem of modern times via a memorable metaphoric question: ”can a nation cross a desert of organized forgetting” and survive? No, it cannot. 

Those with some Scripture know that the metaphor is borrowed from the history of the Jewish people and the holy days of Pesach that celebrate their liberation. In the unified way of life that is Judaism, liberation and remembering are inseparable. The problem of the West is that it is in flight from its past, the Jewish root it appropriated only to despise, and thus lusts for the future, for the green light at the end of the dock, for the fantasy image, the digitalized virtual ‘reality’ not the living presence of life simple and abundant. “But the future is empty, a void” Kundera notes correctly. It does not, cannot, will not exist without a present firmly rooted in remembrance of the past, — the essence of identity. (more…)

There is a lot of good news concerning Israel, the land and people, every day: they exist by miracles of faith, effort, devotion, applied insights, holiness and the divine promise. There is a lot of bad news every day about Israel because the sovereignty of the nation is tenuous, the hostility of the world powers is relentless as expressed by the UN, organ of the “world community”; there is bad news daily because of an autocratic often anti-Jewish government about which the Talmud and Mishna warn (eg. Avot 2:3). Israel is a miracle of existence because there are many powerful enemies without and weak spirit and identity confusion in many Jews within the Land that invites attack from Amalek (cf. Exodus 17; 1 Samuel 15; Esther).

And there is bad news because even when the major media unveil some of the implacable genocidal hostility and propaganda (masked as education) of Israel’s enemies  they bury their minimal and belated revelations by not mentioning its most salient points.

This happened throughout the shoah; the lies of omission are if anything even more pronounced in recent years. (more…)

Digitally tagged, isolated, walled-in, readied for expulsion: their fight is our fight.

You may have read that the Israeli police have begun their electronic weeding out of visitors to Judea and Samaria. This is sold as expediting passage for the residents of the Jewish heartland, enabling them to avoid the lines at the checkpoints necessitated by daily Arab attempts to murder Jews.  

But the new initiative (which actually has been developing during the past two years as de facto border cross-points are built between Judea and Samaria and the 1949 armistice lines) is not about convenience but about severing these precious, simple, unassuming and God-fearing people from the rest of the world. (more…)