Regime Change

Hesder yeshiva rabbis: Torah law is above IDF headline of article on Haaretz Newspaper.

Are these Rabbis openly subverting and countermanding the elected leadership of Israel?

When will Israel bomb Iran

Iran is running out of time and options. The pieces are all falling into place. Spies are being caught in Iran. The president of the USA has started warning other world leaders that Israel is poised to strike. Iran is test firing new missiles.

The question now is, will Iran pull back from the brink? or will Israel bomb Iran?

I think the dye is cast. I predict Israel will bomb Iran in the next six months.

Anyone else have a prediction?

I am interested in the fallout: What will be the counteraction by Iran? Will Israel be successful? (I don't think they will be 100% but they may not need to be) What impact will it have on the economic markets? On political alliances and power structures?

Quite a lot to contemplate.

Happy Chanukah

We celebrate the victory of fundamentalist religion over the people who instituted naked aerobics.

YAY.

Religion bad for children?

I was helping my 8 year old niece with her Religion homework: they were reading the book of Joshua.

I listened to another niece, 10 years old, recount the story she read in her Religion class: the story of Judah and Tamar.

In both cases I asked aloud: "Is this information really appropriate?"

If these stories were taught in any other class, in Reading or History or Literature, the information would be deemed entirely inappropriate. These stories would not be brought up for discussion.

Why do we change our view when the information is taught as Religion?

conversion

A lady I know took her children and left her allegedly abusive husband. She moved back to her parents home. The first thing people ask when they hear the story is, "so she's tired of being jewish?"

The lady was a convert to Judaism.

Maybe she is tired of being Jewish. After all, the local community offered her no support. The shelter for abused Jewish women told her to go home to her non-Jewish parents because there are few resources available for abused women in the orthodox jewish world. But she did not take the kids and leave her husband because she is tired of being Jewish. She is tired of being Jewish because she is tired of abuse with no recourse. She is tired of being jewish when most people never truely accepted her as Jewish. If they had, after all these years, their first question upon learning that she left her allegedly abusive husband would not be, "so she's tired of being Jewish?"

What is jew

I argued with my Dad and said, "If Hitler would have killed them as Jews then I accept them as Jews."

My Dad replied, "I will not let Hitler be the arbiter of what it means or who is Jewish."

and that makes sense.

My brother in law says that the Charedi and Dati Leumi, Orthodox Jewery in general, are to be respected for their beliefs because when they come to round us all up, they are the ones who carry on the history regardless of how flawed they are as humans.

And they are to be pitied because while I get to live how I want, they have to trade going out on a Friday night in order to preserve history so that when we get rounded up someone will know why.

I wonder what this victim mentality has created.

Twin Towers

Steel from the Twin Towers was used to create the new assault ship the USS New York.

This is a memorial to the fallen towers.

Worth thinking about what that means.