Proximity Talks

Incessant stillness

Raging in a silent place

Dry, timeless, painful rage

A Very Special Welcome . . . Mat

Bibi, this doormat is suggested for your use. Please place it outside whatever room it is that you use to meet with envoys and potentates from the Golden West who come with thinly veiled threats and ponderous ultimata for the Jewish state concerning peace, borders, defence, walls, home-building, state-building, international law, and final solutions. Mr Prime Minister, make each and every one of them knows that this doormat was placed there just for them.

HEAVENLY SPOTLIGHTS: A Room with a View

One can see the most amazing things from the front window, without even having to rise from the recliner. Some use the giant, mind-numbing flatscreen tv as their window. Some prefer the rear window, and glimpses of wife-murderers and other mysteries. I'll stick with the front view. More edifying.

I haven't had a television most of my adult life, and didn't grow up with one in the family livingroom, as the centerpiece and gathering point of life in the house. This doesn't make me superior, or in any way wiser. There are more ways to be an idiot by choice than there are cable channels, and that's saying a lot. Just that Teleos-vision is more my style. The view of the sea and the sky from my window is a form of perfection, as in something complete, lacking nothing, whole in and of itself. I'd rather be attracted to the high places, the places of brightness and colour, than to those dank, spelunkian, torch-lite dungeons inhabited by television. True, by my own choice I have not plumbed the half-centimeter depths of the American sitcom, or the latest too clever British humour offering; I have never watched Albania's Got Talent! and I live without game shows. I am denied the pseudo-analytics of the polished but uneducated suits and hairdos of corporate altnewsland. The jabber-jabber of the pundit does not assail my ears.

I think I can live with this lack.

Or maybe I can live because of this lack . . .

Look! Up in the Sky! It's a Bird, it's a Plane, No, it's . . .

Magen David--Shield of David--struggling to form over Haifa on Yom Ha-Atzma'ut, Independence Day. But no, it is just light, and hardly even an imperfect Magen David. Imagination grasping at a suggestion based on a hint come out of an emotion. Mother Mary in a Marmite lid. Baba Sali in a dish of khoumous.

Yeah, something like that.

We all see what we want to see.

And some people want to see Signs from the Heavens. And miracles. And things of incorruptable, everlasting value.

Geez, some people!

THE 1942 WANSEE VILLA CONFERENCE IN BERLIN: The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem

DIE ENDLOSUNG, the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. This was the subject of the Nazi conference at Wansee Villa, Berlin, on 20 January 1942. Mass murder was the solution of choice, notwithstanding the fact that nearly one million Jews were already dead by less systematic, inefficient means than were to be used later.

I am very sorry to report that, over the past month or so, I have heard a few of my fellow Israelis wonder if Obama has already had his own version of a secret Wansee Villa conference on a final solution to what is euphemistically called the Arab-Israel problem, and increasingly, the Israel problem. And starting to sound like a cynical reworking of the infamous Jewish Question. (Which once rated a Library of Congress subject heading all its own.)

Of course I am bound to admit that only a very few have uttered this fantastic notion. Surely this statistically irrelevent count means nothing? (Not that the establishment of truth is ever a popularity contest.) This is too much to accuse even an unfriendly American president of, is it not? The idea that the permanent solution to the so-called Arab-Israel problem is, for some leaders, such as Obama, part of an attempt at removing Israel by stages from the family of nations is unthinkable, or nearly so. Isn't it?

Shall we ask Mr Biden?

Say it ain't so Joe!

חג פסח שמח HAPPY PASSOVER

Burning the hometz (chametz, khometz etc), any food with levening in it, is an ancient Biblical commandment for the Feast week of Pessakh, or Passover. Not everyone goes through this ritual, but it is amazing how many do. The spiritual significance is great: yeasty things represent arrogance and puffery, whereas humility is a requisite for approaching God in a spirit of heart-felt gratitude during the Pessakh week. Humility is the basis for honesty in all the doings of man, secular or spiritual. Honesty is a way of life for all who fear God. God is the source for life itself.

Cleansing the soul by burning bits of bread and flour: A mere tradition, an arcane ritual from the ancient dawn of Semitic spiritual awakening? Or a remarkable moment for grasping reality?

Getting Your Bearings

I do not make the mistake of equating the 2nd Lebanon War back in '06 with the lengthy conflagurations that have destroyed millions of lives and prevented anything like a normal, happy existence for a generation or more. It was not a state-against-state war, nor was it really a war so much as an anti-terrorist operation.

However, in light of the fine art of the bellicose-turn-of-phrase practiced so frequently of late by Israel fans Khassan Nasrallah, Bashir Assad, and Makhmoud Akhmadinejad, and the arming and upgrading of Hizbollah, Hamas, Syria, and Iran's nearly ready nuclear weapons programme, I'd like to explain the purpose of these little steel balls in the photo above.

The purpose of these steel balls is to rip open human flesh, unto death if possible. Which is frightening when you think of the car park in front of my building where they were found, after a rocket attack. The road infront of our apartment is a relatively quiet cul-de-sac, and a very busy playground for children for hours of every day. A little family-run convenience store guarantees a steady flow of small-change sweets-junkies. Children and Hizbollah missiles is not a good mix.

Israel imperfectly carries the war of terror to the enemy, to his firing points, to his command posts, armouries, depots and communications lines. Our self-professed enemies blindly fire into our cities. Firing unsophisticated rockets on approximate trajectories is ineffective as a killing machine, but how will this play out with the new and improved weapons now in the bully's arsenal? Think about it. Shudder, shudder, and then shudder some more.

One set of enemies attempts to rip apart our flesh, and another would divest us of our humanity, our legitimacy, and our spirit. By definition Israel can do no right. Were we to agree to destroy ourselves, the enemies of the battlefield would ridicule our suicidal weakness, while our diplomatic enemies would censure us for taking unilateral action.

Our neighbours and near-neighbours have armed themselves with advanced ballistics, into which equation we must soon add nuclear weapons and sophisticated air defense systems. We will truly miss those crude, Soviet-Stalanist Katyushas when the rhetoric ceases and a new generation of missiles land in my car park.

What to make of it all? Massive stockpiling of increasingly sophisticated weapons by virulently anti-Semitic regimes, whose intentions have been clear all along, and life goes on as if normal? I think not. Anciently, in a situation as we now face, the prophets would have been walking the Land and exhorting the people to return to Ha-Shem, to end to their wicked ways and humble themselves. Yet there is the mortgage, and the job to worry about, and people are not showing panic or fear, and the grocery stores are well-stocked, and the this, and the that. Being pulled in one direction by the trivial, the apparently necessary day to day concerns, and being pulled in another direction by an existential urgency, and the need for some deep thought.

It is not easy to get one's bearings in such an environment.