The Difference: Christians, Muslims, and Jews

I posted this to Facebook and it was well received, so ...

Something interesting that my dad pointed out to me.

Christians are more than happy to kill other Christians who don't practice the faith the way that they do. (Look at Ireland.) 

Muslims are definitely more than happy to kill other Muslims who don't practice the faith the way they do. (Sunnis vs. Shi'ites, Hamas's religious leanings vs. moderate Muslims, etc.) 

And Jews? Well, when it comes to Jews and other Jews who don't practice or live the way they do, they complain a lot, they treat each other poorly a lot of the time, they tell them they're "not Jewish" or that they're "too Jewish." But you know what they don't do? They don't kill each other en masse.

It just. Doesn't. Happen.

Why?

Jews value life, above all. The life that we live in this world is the most important for Jews. We don't worry about the afterlife, what's coming, what's not coming. We live in the here and now, so we cherish life more than anything.

And that's the difference.

Note: My dad was raised in a Christian household. Not a crazy bible-thumping one, but a moderate one, and he raised us with one rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That helped guide me to Judaism.)

Where Have I Been?

IDF in the shuk handing out brochures from the Homefront 

Command about what to do in the instance of an attack [Nov. 21].

It's been more than a week since I updated the blog with substance about how exactly I'm doing. Since I blogged, there were days without sleep, more sirens in Jerusalem, a heightened attack by Hamas, a ceasefire, a calm in my life, an aron (closet) delivery, an utter annoyance with men, Thanksgiving, an amazing Shabbat in Ra'anana, and lots of sleep.

That's a week in a nutshell.

I meant all week to sit down and write how I was feeling, what I was thinking, what life in a "war" zone really feels like, but I was far too busy documenting it on Facebook for the sake of others, for the world to see how absolutely biased and ridiculous 99 percent of the news that goes out really is. Just today I had some guy try to tell me that Hamas dragging Gaza citizens through the street in a bloody display of retribution for supposed "spying for Israel" was fake and not real news. Google it. You'll find dozens, if not hundreds, of sources and images. It happened. Believe it didn't, but those are the kind of thugs that are running Gaza. And I pity the citizens of Gaza who are either brainwashed, suffering Stockholm Syndrome, or too scared to breathe a word of fleeing to a safer place like, oh, I don't know, Israel. The truth is, Muslim, Christian, or Jew, Israel is the safest place for anyone in the Middle East these days.

Sirens last week again in Jerusalem had me leaving some cooking in the oven, running out of my apartment in my frilly, girly apron, to the miklat (bomb shelter) across from my apartment. It was still padlocked up, so a neighbor with a crowbar hit the scene and an Israeli managed to get it open. After breaking a second lock downstairs, and after the sirens had subsided, we entered the miklat to discover a blast from the past in the form of an old office with tons of office equipment. It's rumored that some guy was using it as his office space, and there were other rumors it was rented out as a music school at some point. Chances are both are true, which just makes me laugh. This is how poorly prepared and ready Jerusalem is for an air strike -- this is how completely unlikely we thought the situation was.

After days of rockets and fear, rain swept the country. B"H.

When the ceasefire talks seemed like they were honest and serious, there were lots of mixed emotions from Israelis, myself included. Although I needed the break -- the 24/6 news cycle was creating a culture of no sleep and emotional exhaustion -- I was also willing to go months without sleep to ensure that once and for all Israel would stop allowing Hamas to terrorize Israel and Israelis, that Israel would wave its mighty fist of justice and truth and smash its enemies while showing the world its sincere commitment to human rights and life.

But it didn't happen. The ceasefire came, life has gone back to normal, and I'm finally sleeping. With one eye on Twitter and Facebook at all times, I'm waiting to see what will happen with Hezbollah in the north. When it comes to terrorism and the pursuit of murdering Jews and Israelis and destroying the state, Hezbollah wins. And they haven't even gotten started yet.

At last, it resembles a real apartment. Video forthcoming (maybe)!

Beyond war, of course, there is normal life. I went to a Thanksgiving event at Hineni on Thursday night with an e-friend turned real friend, which was a blast and a half. I'd share some pictures with you, but unfortunately the photographer for the night has failed to post them yet. Although I didn't eat much, my funds went to a good cause for those impacted by the conflict, and I got lots of my favorite Thanksgiving goodies on Friday night for "Shabbat Hodu" -- that's sort of like Indian Shabbat. I was elated and surprised when my friends in Ra'anana put together Gluten-Free Green Bean Casserole for me. It felt like home, it felt like Thanksgiving, for the first time in years. My apartment has finally been filled appropriately with an aron (closet) and a table, so I am not living 24/7 on my bed. I have an oven and plenty of cooking items, so my kitchen is finally feeling like a real place to cook and bake and ease my mind on long days again.

Tonight I made Gluten-Free Oven-Baked Fish & Chips. 

Tilapia + Potato + Seasonings/Corn Meal = Roughly 23 shekels ($6)

Homecooked Meal = Priceless

And dating? Well, that world has continued to perplex me. Men who don't know what they want or can't see what's right in front of them seem to appear at my doorstep, which leaves me nowhere. I haven't had much luck with any of the guys I've encountered on JWed (formerly Frumster), and I just got one match on Saw You at Sinai that I'm contemplating. Meeting people in real life always seems to go well, until the point-blank shoot-down after what appears to be flirtations. I'm either horribly out of practice, or men have become women with their uncertainties, mixed signals, and inability to conjure an honest thought.

So that's life right now in Israel. I'm still happy as a clam here, and I can't imagine any other life for myself. I start ulpan -- intensive Hebrew language learning like I did back in Vermont -- in mid-January, and I'm incredibly eager to make it happen. I hold my own well here, arguing with the bank and bad delivery drivers over the phone without a second thought, but I want fluency and confidence, to fill the gaps, to be able to function fully in Hebrew. Everything's fallen into place with the greatest of ease, and every day that I breathe a little here in Jerusalem is another day I'm sure that I've made the best decision for me.

With that being said, when are you guys coming to visit already!?

Obama and Israel

Okay. I can't help it, I have to say something. It will, however, be brief, as I know a firestorm is on its way in the comments section (right? right).

Obama is not out to destroy the Jewish State of Israel. He's not secretly uniting with all the Muslim powers to destroy the Jewish State of Israel. Have you ever heard of presidential choreography? Does it seem at all strange to you that this whole building in East Jerusalem thing came out of -- literally -- nowhere?

It's choreography. It's superficial. It's part of the game of being in bed with Israel, stam.

You can't be too tight with Israel, you can't be too against Israel (unless you're, you know, Iran). If the U.S. is super tight with Israel and Israel decides to take preemptive action and blow something in Iran up, the U.S. -- by association -- is screwed. So what does the U.S. do? It builds roadblocks (pardon the expression) in its relationship with Israel; it stays close, but not too close.

It's easy to come to an independent state's rescue. It's not easy to participate in its preemptive action against another sovereign nation. Right? Right.

This is my philosophy. Call me nuts, call me a collaborator, call me whatever you want. This kind of political choreography has always existed. You get close with some nations in order to screw them over, you have a faux falling out with another so that you don't get associated with their bullshit. It's choreography, it's superficial, that's it. The U.S. is famous for this stuff. Why are people in such a huff about this?

I'm really pro-Israel. I would pick up and move there tomorrow if Tuvia was down with it. I feel safe there, I feel at home there, I feel whole and complete there. I believe in a solution that allows Palestinians to live NOT under the thumb of Hamas and other militant organizations that plainly and flatly DO NOT even consider "peace" an option. I also believe in a solution that -- first and foremost -- allows Israel to continue to exist, as it does, as a sovereign and NECESSARY nation with its land and its freedom. Israel, to be sure, has every right in the world to defend itself, preemptively or postemptively.

I do, however, believe that peace in the Middle East will come at the cost of a huge and catastrophic event that I can't even begin to describe. It will happen, because it is only after catastrophe that we understand human life and its value in peace. It sucks, but that's how I have always seen the situation.

As someone said recently at a Shabbat dinner, "I am not optimistic, but I am hopeful."

I went Waltzing with Bashir.

I'm writing this post on Saturday, August 9, 2009. It's 12:30 in the evening, or morning rather, and I find it difficult to go to bed without writing this. Of course, the language pledge still has about four or five days to go, and this is technically outside the bounds of what I should (read: should) be doing, but I don't think that I can really give it my all in Hebrew. I've discovered that speaking in Hebrew and even writing in Hebrew is like poetry with every word. Of course, my poetry isn't graceful or punctuated properly, but the sound of Hebrew is like honey on the tongue. It's the language of my neshama, the language of my family.

Tonight we watched, as a group, as part of the Middlebury Film Festival, "Waltz With Bashir." The showing was open to the public and a lot of people from the other Language Schools came. There were English subtitles (as I write this I'm thinking in Hebrew, it's bizarre), which made the movie breathable. I don't know how many of you have seen the movie, but it's been acclaimed since it's release last year (I think, and am too tired to look it up on the internet right now), even being nominated for an Oscar. For the longest time I didn't know what the movie was about, and I didn't take the time to look it up. I assumed it was about one of the many battles Israel has waged in the fight for life. By life, I mean the right to exist, the right to live in a land where, so far, we've paid a heavy price to live. I didn't know, precisely, that the movie was about a conflict with Lebanon, a conflict that left a generation of Israelis locked inside the cage of their own bodies, minds, and hearts.

It's interesting, because my roommate here is from Lebanon. I'm a convert to Judaism with a deep and unshakable connection to Israel because I know, in my heart of hearts, that I stood at Sinai all those years ago for the b'rit. There have been many conversations here, some peppered with English because the Hebrew was too hard to muster in a flurry about Gaza, the West Bank, Palestinians, the right for everyone to live, in one way or another, somewhere. It's been hard, and it's been complicated, and I think tonight made things all the more complicated and frustrated. M'tuskelet.

The film (true) told about the soldiers of the IDF during the 1982 Lebanon war. It told of the soldiers who, 20 years after the fact, had mostly crawled inside themselves, memories being something locked in the chambers of the mind. Some experienced this more than others, and the story's main character had all but repressed every memory of the conflict except one. By the end of the film, he's pieced together everything and the images that come pouring out are earth-shattering, horrid, traumatizing. And the film ends with not the caricatures and animation of the rest of the film, but with real moving pictures post-massacre in Sabra and Shatila. The gist of the situation was that Israeli soldiers sat idly by as Christian Philangists massacred anywhere between 300 and 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese people ... including women and children and the elderly. Some men had crosses hatched into their bodies by the Lebanese Forces Christian group. The IDF sat on the outskirts as a stronghold, thinking that the LFC was inside clearing out civilians before they took down terrorists or something of that sort. The soldiers saw what was really happening, informed someone who informed someone else and after two days of this, the IDF sent off the Christians.

The film, important in that it depicts an event that is horrifying to consider even today, is also important in another, different way, because it depicts what so many people are unwilling to talk about after incidents of severe trauma: memory. I think about Poland after World War II and the absolute neglect to reflect on the war and its casualties at the hands of peasants. I think about how even today some countries are unwilling to have a conversation about the Shoah. The church itself took some time to consider the events of the Shoah. I think about the soldiers that return from war in Afghanistan and Iraq and how shell-shocked they are, how they crawl inside themselves like soldiers did in post-Vietnam America. Are we servicing them correctly? Repression is the way out after traumatic events, but where does it get us? If we can't learn from our mistakes immediately, then we are bound to repeat them immediately. If we take 20 or 30 years to reflect on our misdeeds, missteps and the horrors that we've experienced, that's 20 or 30 years in which we can repeat or allow events to be repeated. The cycle is one that will inevitably repeat itself time and time again without question. It's an unhealthy and dangerous cycle. If we refuse to discuss, we refuse to resolve, we refuse to promise "never again" about all things heinous and wrong.

On the other hand (from perhaps a completely incomparable side), I think about my father. His parents died separately when he was just a kid. His mom when he was 8 and his dad when he was 10 or so. To this day my father claims to have no memories of them. Small things, like a scent or something. But no concrete memories. I'll admit that I don't remember a lot from when I was 8 or 10, but I remember enough to know that my father could remember more than he does. But the trauma of losing your parents (his mom to cancer and his father to a sudden heart attack) at such a young age is shell-shocking. The body and the brain don't know what to do with the memories and the emotions, so they get shoved into the corners and forgotten about. How can I help him remember? Should he remember? I think it's important. I think it's necessary. An entire life he's lived with those memories somewhere, affecting everything he's done and said and felt. I just think that he doesn't know it or accept it.

But I'm no psychologist.

My feelings about the movie are so mixed. On the one hand I'm devastated that Israel stood idly by and let the Christian Philangists commit such horrible acts of slaughtery. On the other hand I'm just confused. I can't blame the soldiers because in Israel they are merely soldiers -- men and women off the street. It's not voluntary and they're not all heros and body builders. The movie proved one thing: The Isreali soldier is weak, afraid, and imperfect. In essence, they're human.

And as history has proved, humans do some pretty flippin' stupid things sometimes. All the time. If we're not at war with ourselves we're at war with each other. Wars of words that turn into wars with bombs and guns.

The dynamic here is interesting. There are four students here with strong ties to the Palestinians. There are a lot of Jews. And there are a handful of Christians. What a film to show such a group, eh?

I've run out of words for this post, though. I'm not sure what the point was or if there was one, or if I just needed to write something to someone in the ether. My jaw aches from being clinched all night, and I don't know if I'll be able to sleep. The amount of work that needs to be done in the next four or five days is infinitesimal and I need to be focused. Right now my brain is a mess of thoughts and images. Mostly the images. There were a lot of comparisons made between what the people did in South Lebanon to what the Nazis did to the Jews in the film. I don't think that the IDF was comparable to the Nazis, but I also don't think we can pit numbers of dead against numbers of dead. The actions are what need to be weighed. I'm disappointed in Israel, so soon after the Shoah and with the generations in Lebanon then being the children of survivors. I can't say I always understand what Israel does in the fight to live, especially in this instance. And those images. So vivid for me 27 years after the fact. I can't imagine what those images must be like for the IDF soldiers who entered the area after the massacre. The smells. The sounds of wailing women. The death.

Every night when I go to sleep, I ask G-d to help me understand. Understand what? Just to understand. Specifics are unnecessary. I once had a vision that I would do amazing and earth-moving things. I felt that there was something important and blessed that I was to do. I didn't know what, and I still don't know what. So every night, still, I pray, and I ask to understand.  That's all. And every night, there's something new on my mind. Something I don't understand. I don't expect the answer, I suppose I don't even need the answer. After all, who am I?

Ani rotzah l'hevin, b'vakashah.

So you want to boycott Israel?

This video, brought to my attention by the lovely Aliza , is pretty hilarious. I know it looks long, but just watch it. Seriously.

A brief interlude for a kvetch

Listen, have your opinions about Israel and Hamas and the "Zionist conspiracy" or whatever, but don't spam my photos on Flickr with your pro-Hamas, down-with-Israel "Nazi Zionist" crap propoganda, mmk? Thanks.

It's amazing how ugly the world is getting, isn't it? Synagogues set ablaze, warning sirens in Jerusalem, people who you maybe thought were friends spewing anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiments in your face. I'm not trying to be extreme, but it echoes of another time. It reminds me of a poem I wrote, and the line that history repeats, repeats, repeats. Maybe I'll post it here sometime. It's one of my slam poems, about being Jewish, about the world we live in, and how we have a tendency to recycle our emotions. They don't get worse or better, they don't get different, they just get reused.

Anyhow, here's the screenshot of the guy who decided to spam comment my photos with a bunch of "free Palestine" crap. Too bad the guy doesn't know his history.