Kesher Talk

10 Days of Tshuvah countdown - Day 2. Today was Shabbat Shuva, the intermediary Shabbat between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Lynn has some thoughts about today's Torah portion, repentence, and forgiveness.

posted by Judith @ 10/04/2003 10:45:17 PM  

10 Days of Tshuvah countdown - Day 3. Protocols is discussing Unetaneh tokef.

More on why bad things happen to good people.

posted by Judith @ 10/03/2003 01:45:20 PM  

A pack, not a herd. Some examples of self-organizing groups doing good things without top-down bureaucracy: "a pack, not a herd," as the meme goes.

There's a news story in the reconstruction of Iraq, says a journalist, who compares it to the "unbuilding" of the WTC after the attacks. Both are managed by improvisatory, ingenious, on-site leadership - the opposite of bureaucracy.

. . . the defacto organization that sprung up from nowhere, and without anyone's actual approval, to run and lead the cleanup efforts is fascinating. The "on the fly" ingenuity that many of the engineers, construction workers and other onsite personnel display is in a word...inspiring.

A little-known example of "a pack not a herd" is the spontaneous uprising of German gentile women with Jewish husbands in Berlin, 1943. They got their husbands back too. This story has been somewhat suppressed because it rightfully implies the rest of the German population could have done more to stop Hitler than it did. (I like to think that those women learned about standing up to tyranny from their exposure to the Jewish tradition, or perhaps their attraction to Jewish men was part of a rebellious questioning attitude they already had.)

Michael Everson, a typographer in Dublin, has taken it upon himself to develop Unicode for all the world's alphabets so that they can all be represented on computer screens. He got the calligraphy bug by reading Tolkein as a child, and is now the world's leading expert in the computer encoding of scripts. Michael's informal group of coders is certainly a pack, not a herd.

posted by Judith @ 10/03/2003 10:53:56 AM  

Blog round-up. Meryl has started a Reuters biased headline watch. (Reuters makes a speciality of packing as much factual distortion about Israel into their news headlines as possible.)

Mary has gathered up the most sardonic Plame commentaries.

Grasshoppa's got his groove back. Geoff Meltzner's blog was on hiatus for awhile, but he's back with a spiffy new redesign. Welcome back, Geoff!

This is too funny to be for real.

posted by Judith @ 10/03/2003 09:21:14 AM  

10 Days of Tshuvah countdown - Day 4. The question everyone is asking this week: If God is Good, Why is the World so Bad?

Rabbi Harold Shulweis - author of many popular books about Jewish theology - also has some thoughts on the topic.

posted by Judith @ 10/02/2003 01:10:10 PM  

Clark goes gefilte fishing for Jewish votes: Newly-minted Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark is going after the Jewish vote with gusto:

On September 18, the day after his announcement in Little Rock, Ark., Clark held a late-afternoon meeting with South Florida Democrats at the Deli Den, a "kosher-style" restaurant in Hollywood, Fla., a heavily Jewish city in Broward County.

"One of his first stops was not only Florida — the only swing mega-state — but where does he pick to go? Broward, my county," crowed Mitch Ceasar, the Broward Democratic chairman, who attended the meeting at the restaurant, his father's favorite hangout.

The move looked like smart politics — and not only because of Florida's electoral heft. In order to be a viable candidate, Clark will have to build up his campaign coffers with lightning speed, and Florida, with its many wealthy Jewish retirees who play the political field, is a good place to do that.

posted by William @ 10/01/2003 04:25:44 PM  

Admit it - I was right. Like I said before, Baghdad 2003 = Prague 1990. Several people said I was being way too optimistic, but here's more evidence that Iraqis are as entrepreneurial as anyone else when they get a chance.

posted by Judith @ 10/01/2003 03:29:32 PM  

10 Days of Tshuvah countdown - Day 5. Check out this program for self-reflection and change from Keep Trying. Keep scrolling down for more thoughts on happiness and goal setting.

posted by Judith @ 10/01/2003 01:33:13 PM  

Is this the cabal you've been telling me about? President Bush met with a group of rabbis this week. JTA, Hillel, and Powerline all have accounts of the meeting from the rabbis who were there.

I'm sure MEMRI will publish some op-ed from some Egyptian newspaper using this meeting as evidence that Bush is the puppet of the Shadowy Zionist Cabal (TM) for World Domination . . . .

UPDATE: Israel wasn't all they talked about.

posted by Judith @ 10/01/2003 12:30:10 PM  

Change Management 101. Tacitus has a very good editorial on how the Iraq war was not promoted well to the US public.

Never was a good concept and good policy so poorly explained, executed with such apparent mediocrity, and subjected to such condemnation by dint of its own authors. The transformation of the Middle East -- and indeed of Arab and Islamic culture -- is the grand mission of our age, and if it is discredited from the start, then we, our children, and especially the people of that region will suffer grievously for it.

The slow turning of the American public against the Iraq war will be a slow turning against that mission. It's as if Truman, having set the nation against international communism, proceeded to thoroughly botch the opening salvos of the Cold War, thereby discrediting the idea of armed enmity with the Soviet Union and making Henry Wallace look like the voice of sensible moderation by comparison. Of course, that parallel only goes so far: the American public felt that he did botch Korea (history's vindication came much later), but it was willing to support a continuation of his fundamental policy concepts vis a vis communism for decades to come nonetheless. Why? Because that concept was endorsed by the entire mainstream of American politics. I leave it to the more knowledgeable of my readers to discuss whether that was by design or accident. Today's grand policy concept has certainly not been endorsed by the entire mainstream of American politics: it didn't happen by accident, but it should have happened by design -- or at the least, the attempt should have been made.

I'm not as pessimistic as he is about the final verdict of the American people, and I disagree that the reconstruction of Iraq is mediocre in execution. But as I wrote previously (scroll down), Bush should have been on TV every week with bullet points and progress reports, but he has left it up to pundits and bloggers to connect the dots in his various policy statements. Maybe he didn't want to use Roosevelt as an example because he was a Democrat? Who knows. Thank God for bloggers is all I can say.

UPDATE: Maybe Tony Blair can show Bush how it's done.

Imagine you are PM. And you receive this intelligence. And not just about Iraq. But about the whole murky trade in WMD. And one thing we know. Not from intelligence. But from historical fact. That Saddam's regime has not just developed but used such weapons gassing thousands of his own people. And has lied about it consistently, concealing it for years even under the noses of the UN Inspectors. And I see the terrorism and the trade in WMD growing. And I look at Saddam's country and I see its people in torment ground underfoot by his and his sons' brutality and wickedness. So what do I do? Say "I've got the intelligence but I've a hunch its wrong?" Leave Saddam in place but now with the world's democracies humiliated and him emboldened?

You see, I believe the security threat of the 21st century is not countries waging conventional war. I believe that in today's interdependent world the threat is chaos. It is fanaticism defeating reason. Suppose the terrorists repeated September 11th or worse. Suppose they got hold of a chemical or biological or nuclear dirty bomb; and if they could, they would. What then? And if it is the threat of the 21st century, Britain should be in there helping confront it, not because we are America's poodle, but because dealing with it will make Britain safer.

posted by Judith @ 9/30/2003 01:02:45 PM  

10 Days of Tshuvah countdown - Day 6. Josie, the grownups aren't doing it any better than you.

Protocols is discussing the literary qualities of selichot, the penitential piyyutim (liturgical poems using intricate alliterations, rhymes, and verse forms) we chant beginning the Saturday night before Rosh Hashanah and continuing at every morning service until Yom Kippur. (I wrote about my amazing Saturday selichot service here.)

posted by Judith @ 9/30/2003 12:33:50 AM  

Those wacky war reporters. An Australian reporter does a story about Iraqi kids getting killed and maimed playing with unexploded ordnance, and for visual effect poses the children next to dangerous missiles. From the transcript:

You want to show the children on there?
Gina Wilkinson: Yeah, that would be good. Yeah, if they don’t mind.
- (trans) You want them to stand over there to be filmed?
- (trans) Come on sweetie. What’s her name?
- Noona
- (trans) I'm worried about them.
- Sit. Sit on this.
- (trans) I'm worried about them.
- (trans) Sit on the edge.
Gina Wilkinson: Please God, don't let this thing explode now.
- ABC Camera Tape

She did several takes - You can watch the unedited tape yourself.

ABC, her employer, conceded that her behavior was "a serious error of judgement." Yup.

posted by Judith @ 9/29/2003 06:16:24 PM  

10 Days of Tshuvah countdown - Day 7. Rosh Hashanah has ended. Yom Kippur is only a week away. This is real. And you are completely unprepared.

The time of transformation is upon you. The world is once again cracking through the shell of its egg to be born. The gate between heaven and earth creaks open. The Book of Life and the Book of Death are opened once again, and your name is written in one of them.

But you don't know which one.

The ten days that follow are fraught with meaning and dread. They are days when it is perfectly clear every second that you live in the midst of a chain of ineluctable consequence, that everything you do, every prayer you utter, every intention you form, every act of compassion you perform, ripples out from the center of your being to the end of time. Anger and its terrible cost lie naked before you. Grievance gives way to forgiveness. At the same time, you become aware that you also stand at the end of a long chain of consequences. Many things are beyond your control. They are part of a process that was set in motion long ago. You find the idea of this unbearable.

Read the rest of the excerpt from Rabbi Alan Lew's new book This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared.

posted by Judith @ 9/29/2003 01:27:25 PM  

Anybody want to fisk this? I expect this to show up in my email inbox any day now: George Bush's "resume." For easy points, list all the items that actually began under the Clinton administration.

Have at it, folks. (via Andrew Northrup, whose excellent parodies of Tech Central Station - on topics like global warming and heresy - I have just come across thanks to Crooked Timber.)

UPDATE: Mega-fisking of "the resume," for your handy reference, via Snopes (scroll down), via Damian Penny)

posted by Judith @ 9/29/2003 09:56:26 AM  

Not with a bang but with a whimper. I saw a protest march in NYC this afternoon on my way home from Rosh Hashanah services.

It was 3 blocks long and took up the sidewalk on one side of the street. That was all. In New York. Signs included: "US out of Cuba" and "End the Occupation - Iraq and Palestine."

The march in London seems just as bedraggled, and protesters ambivalent:

'I'm not really against the occupation; I don't think we should pull out,' said Laura Parry, from Leeds. 'I'm here because Tony Blair sneered at us after the 15 February march. I want to show him we haven't forgotten that,' she added.

This reminds me of a friend who called me before the big march last February (was that only seven months ago?) to ask if I was going.

"To heckle, maybe," I said. "But probably not."

She was surprised I was for the war, then asked me for some more information. It became clear she had been planning to go to the protest because a group from her synagogue was going, and she had no opinion of her own at all. She was just doing what her friends were doing. (These people are in their 40s.)

When you view some news about a protest, imagine how many of the people there are like Laura Parry or my friend, and subtract them from the total.

Meanwhile, this is one of the best fiskings yet of the antiwar position(s).

(These links are courtesy of Hurry Up Harry, who instigated a "virtual counter-protest" to this week's global antiwar activities. Jeff Jarvis, Norm Geras, and Bill Herbert all contributed - go to Harry's blog and follow the links.)

Oxblog reports on protest activity in Cambridge, MA.

A Rosh Hashana cut short by terrorists, and a funeral. This is the 3rd anniversary of Intifada II, remember?

posted by Judith @ 9/28/2003 07:55:34 PM  

10 Days of Tshuvah countdown - Day 8. I am writing this ahead of time and it should post automatically on the right day. Today is the second day of Rosh Hashanah. Today we are commanded to hear the shofar:

No one had pressed the emergency buzzer, but a nurse came rushing into the hospital room. She had a worried look on her face.

“I thought I heard someone crying,” she said.

Nothing is wrong, I assured the nurse, standing at a patient’s bedside. No one is crying — it’s just the shofar. I held the ram’s horn in my hand, and didn’t know whether to feel embarrassed or proud. Embarrassed that I had disturbed a nurse on this Rosh Hashanah afternoon. Proud that the tekiahs and teruahs and shevarims I had just made on the shofar, for the patient’s sake, had sounded like a voice crying.

That’s what a shofar is supposed to sound like.

This is real. And you are completely unprepared.

A great horn sounds, calling you to remembrance, but all you can remember is how much you have forgotten. Every day for a month, you sit and try to remember who you are and where you are going. By the last week of this month, your need to know these things weighs upon you. Your prayers become urgent.

Then the great horn sounds in earnest one hundred times. The time of transformation is upon you. The world is once again cracking through the shell of its egg to be born. The gate between heaven and earth creaks open. The Book of Life and the Book of Death are opened once again, and your name is written in one of them.

But you don't know which one.

Read the rest of the excerpt from Rabbi Alan Lew's new book This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared.

Last year the first day of Rosh Hashanah also fell on Shabbat. My uncle had been dying of cancer for two months, and the extended family (most of whom are secular) had a get-together at their home in New Jersey on the Sunday, so I wasn't in shul for the shofar service. But I got back into Manhattan in time for the massive migration of Upper West Side Jews to Riverside Park for tashlich. Imagine hundreds of Jews of all ages and denominations - mini-skirts, black hats, Birkenstocks, two-piece suits - lined up along the Hudson River for blocks and blocks and blocks, schmoozing and davening, and throwing our sins into the river for the fishes to eat.

posted by Judith @ 9/28/2003 10:25:18 AM