I was born on the 25^th Kislev, the month of dreams and the first day of Hanukkah, the day of re-dedication and victory…

About ten years ago when my son was twelve and a half, my Mom sent us a Hanukkah gift. It was a blue plastic candle-holder and small candle; one of those little items that comes in cheap colored cardboard wrapped in hard, form-fitting plastic. It was Hanukkah and my son was with me: hence my Mom’s sweet remembrance. Before supper we took out the candle and set it on our collage table by the dining room windows near our familiar Hanukkiyot and precious items like the copper plate my maternal grandparents brought back from the Promised Land in the 1960s, incised with a picture of the huge Eshkol (Bamidbar 14). 

The little candle was supposed to burn for fifteen minutes, the writing on the cardboard said, and the base would play “Maoz Tzur” for thirty minutes. “Wonderful,” we thought. How sweet and homey, like Mom Mom. (more…)

One might describe an apparition as a perceptual joke, perhaps a cruel one. Certainly it was a predatory joke when imperial Rome, after crushing three Jewish wars for independence in the desert-making process called “Pax Romana” stole the identity of the Promised Land by re-naming Judea (properly, Yehuda), “Palestina” after the sea peoples of the Mediterranean who, plundering the Nile delta and nearby coasts were called by Egyptians and Israelites “Peleshet” or Pilishtim, “trespassers” and “invaders.” The deformation of language and history in the imperial term “Palestina,” this early bit of virtual reality took on a demonic life of its own, eventually bequeathing a father dearth to the West and haunting it with a demonic ghost its cult exalted. The uprooted or vilified and discarded or degraded father becomes a nagging void, a phantom the mind cannot banish and that appears with increasing insistency over time; the more its original nature is denied, the more horrible the images grow. A large part of the demonic Gorgon within the West’s cultural confusion is the deformed and repressed Judaism and Judah within it, and with it, the degradation of the father. But the West, at least its leaders, cannot face the truth that would topple them from their godlike thrones or, rather, free them to live as humans rather than as highly wrought artifacts “of hammered gold and gold enameling…” To topple them would rid the West of its Satan obsession and all the terrors that stem from it. (more…)