Jews Against Secular Jewish Nationalism

I had thought that the darkest days of my Aliyah would be what I experienced around the end of the second month, after the novelty wore off, after I had visited the kotel a few times, when the savings whittled down to scary levels, and the reality of the true challenges of language acquisition made themselves well known. However, none of that times 100 compares to my shock over the torture of teenage Jewish boys in the Duma incident and the downright bizarre comments by the Prime and cabinet ministers. American Vice-President Dick Cheney on his worst day would not order the torture of three teenage American citizens and offer the rationale that these kids threatened the very existence of the country. He’d be laughed out of office. The press wouldn’t let him get away it and neither would the average citizen. The Israeli Defense Forces must be in pretty bad shape if three teenagers threaten to conquer them. I have been observing PM BN my entire adult life and feel ashamed now to say that...

Some experienced olim calmed me down today with their assessment of Israeli politics. Yes, it's a kind of democracy as evidenced by labor governments of late that offered a Palis. state. Much of what you see on TV is staged. One guy told me that he was driving in Hebron passed some Arab school girls. Suddenly a media truck passed and the girls started screaming as if they were being chased by nearby solders, which they weren't. It was a show for the cameras. Yes, there is a free press and I was given some examples of columnists who are very critical of the PM. I asked also about the bombastic comments from Bennett. My thought is if a  gov. leader openly talks about torture that it must go on all the time. But I considered that it might just be Israeli frankness. My friend proposed it's what the public wants to hear, whereas in the US, it wouldn't be what the public wants to hear. All acceptable answers, sort of, kind of. I might be too old for aliyah. My values and expe...

I was living in America when the draft controversy began and I listened puzzled at times to my shul rav as he decried the  prospect  of drafting yeshiva bochurim. He cited gadolim who called this a threat to the continuation of Torah observance. That seemed hyperbolic to me. After all, the Religious Zionist rabbis assured us that solders can keep kosher in the army in an environment of gender segregation. So I have been living in Israel now for six months and can tell you that my shul rabbi was understating the danger. I work in Tel Aviv, ride the trains with many solders, and work with non-religious Israelis some of whom are officers in army and nearly all of whom were solders in the army. Without hesitation I tell you that the Israeli Defense Force is a religion and a brain washing machine. We shouldn't be surprised. Jews are religious people by nature and will turn whatever they are doing into a religion of some kind. The IDF is consumed with its power, might, cleverne...

Of the many culture shocks an American may experience in Israel, one of the biggest is the working of its democracy.The aliyah salespeople will carry on about Israelis and their opinions but that does not translate into a democracy. Russians are opinionated too and they suffered dictatorship under the Soviets for 70 years. As I mentioned in prior posts, Israelis do not elect their leader. They vote for parties, who gather in back rooms and form coalitions to pick a leader. There's so much power play and muscling others that one is reminded of the mafia. You wind up with a PM that likely wouldn't have received 25% of the vote. Remind you of anything? The court system operates without a constitution and without much precedent, so the Supreme Court makes it up as they go. Lower court judges are picked by panels that consist mostly of other judges. And the military and Israeli cabinet don't listen to them as they should. The court supposedly banned torture around 1997, so how n...

What are they like? I don't know as they don't talk to us. There are two apartments on my floor. I have seen the son a few times. Not a bad kid. The mother, I saw once. I have never been in their apartment in six months. Same with every other apartment in the building except for the building manager where I go to pay my monthly dues. These people don't say hello. They don't do anything. This is not uncommon for Israelis who in my experience are the most unfriendly people on the planet. Are you expecting to come here and find warmth and love in the Mideast. You'll get more love on Wall St. than you'll get here.

"Israel is not actually a democracy, it is considered an Oligarchy where you vote for parties and the parties pick the people that represent the public. The biggest winner in the party contest gets to appoint the PM, he is not elected by the general public. A hold over from British colonial rule, the Israeli government system has no constitution setting forth the law of the land. We have a supreme court (read kangaroo court) that makes up laws to suit its feelings on any given day. The court system appoints people from inside the system and is never subjected to any public oversight. Great if you are a communist society but democracies don’t function that way." Yonatan Avraham  · San Jose State University "In 1952, the  Knesset  passed the Judges Bill, which stipulates methods of appointing judges (among other things). This bill proposed that the  President  will appoint the judges, at the suggestion of the Minister of Justice, in accordance with the recommendat...

I found this on the web. returningstranger.blogspot.co.il " Things I Wish I Had Known Before Making Aliyah I came to Israel to join the army. I wanted to serve my people, my country, to dedicate myself to a higher cause, and above all to carve my own path in the world. I knew it was going to be hard, but not in a way that was tangible to me at the time. It was more just like a concept floating around in my head. I knew this would be extremely challenging only as a concept, but I couldn’t feel it viscerally in my emotions. Here are a few things that I wish I knew before hand that might help any prospective olim hadashim out there: The Language Won’t Just “Come” Everyone told me before I made Aliyah that picking up Hebrew would be a synch. They told me that even if I didn’t want to learn Hebrew, I would anyway. Such has not been in the case even in the slightest. In five of intensive months of Hebrew study (ulpan) I’ve barely been able to get to a level where I can express myself. I...

STOCKMAN'S CORNER Christmas 2015—–Why There Is No Peace On Earth David Stockman  •  December 25, 2015 "Likewise, the Shiite theocracy ensconced in Tehran was an unfortunate albatross on the Persian people, but it was no threat to America’s safety and security. The very idea that Tehran is an expansionist power bent on exporting terrorism to the rest of the world is a giant fiction and tissue of lies invented by the Washington War Party and its Bibi Netanyahu branch in order to win political support for their confrontationist policies. "That giant lie was almost single-handedly fashioned by the neocons and Bibi Netanyahu’s coterie of power-hungry henchman after the mid-1990s. Indeed, the false claim that Iran posses an “existential threat” to Israel is a product of the pure red meat domestic Israeli politics that have kept Bibi in power for much of the last two decades."

This blog has become something of a journal of thoughts and discoveries, most of them not of the happy kind. And my purpose in writing it has changed completely. Originally, the intention was to promote aliyah. Now, it's to record my own thoughts to help me to survive this place. They are for future use for if I become confused again. When you are surrounded by overbearing fools and liars, you tend to become confused. So I have learned that Israel is not what it is advertised to be. Most things aren't no shock there. And I have learned that the aliyah society and the religious zionist world live in dreams and fantasies to a large extent. Is it all a lie? I am still figuring that out. I recall the inspiration I felt at the Kenesset building. Was it all a dream? Living in a weak democracy that sometimes resembles a military dictatorship is not pleasant, but living in a country where lying comes as easily as breathing is even worse. We now have a President and a Prime Minister in ...

So what have you been told about Israel? Bookstores on every corner. Vibrant democracy. Thriving economy. People with a work home balance. People who are there when you need them. A government that cares. Rich community life. Good medical care and schools. I was told all that too. And I may be undergoing a very expensive lesson in reality to find that none of it is true. It isn't only the Duma torture incident that taught me. It's six months looking for a bookstore, trying to find someone with whom to talk politics, commuting 2.5 hours to work each way every day to battle with highly driven work obsessed hyper-critical difficult people, and struggling with a sub-par medical system. Also six months dealing with impatient, unhelpful, uncaring, rude, abrasive, arrogant Israelis - with a few exceptions. But Duma certainly helped to show me how utterly dishonest are the leaders of Israel. They want us to believe it's necessary to torture Jewish teenage boys for a month because t...

I'm new here so perhaps I'm projecting my American experience onto Israel, but in America we have a concept called innocence until guilt is proven. The idea is that police make arrests on the basis of probable cause and the courts take over from there. Police have a tendency to see guilt in everything. Some policemen will blame the ocean tide on beach sand. Judges (and in America juries) strive to be impartial and to render judgment through weighing of facts, testimony, evidence, and arguments made by prosecuting attorneys and defense attorneys. Each side has a chance to speak. Forgive me for the lesson in civics, but it's not clear to me that such mechanisms are in place in Israel so I feel that I actually need to explain the concepts. As far as I can tell outside the veil of gag orders and secrecy, the defendants in the Duma arson case have not had their day in court, another American phrase. Yet, they are being subject to something else that is banned from by the America...

Welcome home was the phrase I heard repeatedly upon my arrival in Israel. Yet, every day I ask myself, what then is a home? Is it an address? Is it the house that my grandfather built? Is it nothing but concrete and wood? What if it is infested with termites? Would I still want to live there? Is it still my home? Or is it just an old house? My six months in Israel have been one of the most confounding ordeals of my life. I was supposed to be coming home. And I would have to think that it meant more than a set of longitudinal and lattitudutinal quadrants on a map. I would think it implied something about values as well, Jewish values hopefully. So why do I feel as though I am on Mars, living alongside Martians? There's a song from the 1970s called "New York's Not My Home" by Jim Croce. Jim was an easy-going Italian American from Philadelphia. He came to New York because that's where folk singers had to go to ply their trade, but the experience unnerved him. He wrot...

In a lifetime of mistakes, it is challenging to rank the worst of them, but I'm fairly confident at this point that making aliyah sits high on the list. I'm still trying to figure out the positive elements of this situation. Other than abstract notions that border on cliches, like this is your home, you're fulfilling a mitzvah, aliyah seems to have worsened my life situation in every way. As much time as I spent at work in New York, now, with the commute, I spend even more. I haven't seen my children in four days. Well, I see them sleeping at night when I come home and in the morning when I leave. I wouldn't call that quality time. Our neighbors - and there's only one other apartment on our floor - don't say hello. Nobody in the building has ever invited us over. Even the shul I have attended for four months has proven itself inhospitable. One positive thing I'll say about the shul is that they do offer a few classes at times that I can attend, unlike mo...

Can't say we weren't warned. How many gadolim needed to condemn secular Zionism before we got the message that Jews cannot live successfully without Torah. As the Talmud says, if not for Torah, Jews would destroy the world because they are "az", ie bold. Israeli's anti-terrorism laws are not appropriate for a civilized democracy. However, Israel endures a situation unlike that of any other democracy in that it is surrounded by a billion enemies that work daily to destroy it. That would be the justification for the policy of harsh dealing with terrorists. The logic does not apply to a few isolated cases of crazy Jewish youth. There is no epidemic of Jewish terrorism. The Israeli cabinet completely contradicted the intent of the policies in applying them here. The cabinet members are so driven by rhetoric, politics, and ambition, so inured to a sense of justice and compassion, that they have taken secular Zionism to a nadir reminiscent of the days when heartless fan...

"The state of the nation is impoverished, overpriced and unproductive, according to the Taub Center for Social Policy’s annual State of the Nation report, released Wednesday. According to the report, the country’s overall poverty and inequality rates, when calculated based on market income (gross income from work, capital and private pensions), are close to the OECD average. However, using disposable income (after transfer allowances and direct tax payments) overall poverty and inequality rates are among the highest of Western countries."   continue Jpost.com

Glasgow, Dublin, Calgary, Italy, Spain, France, LA, NYC, Cleveland, and the far Eastern end of the USSR - no two people from the same place except for two New Yorkers. As we sit in one classroom in Israel, and we all talked about our birthplaces with our broken Hebrew, it hit me how this Ulpan class demonstrated the ingathering of the exiles. It was stunning. This is one of the joys of living in Israel. As the days go by I move from the "you can have it all" ads of NBN to the true wonder of the place which is Klal Yisrael. One day I visit a cave where Eliyahu the prophet hid (and one could feel the holiness) and the next I sit in the middle of a miracle that is happening as I write.

This is a full day trip but a good one. Get to the Beit Shemesh train station - cab for 35 shekels or 12 or 15 bus. Get on the train to the Chof Carmel stop in Haifa. It's a 1:45 trip that includes much ocean scenery. 46.50 per ticket. Seems to be the same price for adults and kids. Change at Tel Aviv Mercaz station. It's another 45 minutes from Tel Aviv. The Chof stop is 100 yards from the beach, a gorgeous beach. Very clean. Great waves. If you go in the winter, they'll be nobody else there. Just enjoy the site of the water and the sand. The water is not cold so you could swim. From there take a cab to the Maritime museum. 40 shekels. 10 minute trips. The cabs are at the station. Or take the 112 bus. The museum has tremendous archeology like many museums in Israel. If you love the seas, you'll enjoy this. Price is around 20 shekels per person. There are family plans. From there walk to Eliyahu's cave. It's a hundred meters down the road and up some steps. You...

So today we took a trip to Haifa. Pretty long trip and coming back we were tired. The train was full so we needed to take a seat here and there. That's when a man sitting in two seats by himself offered us a seat and then when one of the children was hesitant to take it he offered to cross the aisle and sit with another person freeing up the seats for us. Toda rabbah sir.

Last night I phoned a credit card company in America. After taking care of the matter at end, the very pleasant middle-aged lady on the phone asked me if I had done my Xmas shopping yet and then chatted a bit about the dangers of giving credit cards to one's wife during Xmas season. She was so nice, so friendly, and so well meaning that I was taken aback. I had to quickly remember how to engage in a civilized, easy-going exchange with a stranger where I was an equal and important participant. For two minutes, I mattered. I was a citizen of the world who was worth another human being's time. Wow. It's been a while since I experienced that sort of thing. I'm not going to tell you I was having such experiences in New York either. But in moving out of New York I was trying to improve my life. Too bad moving to South Dakota wouldn't count as Aliyah, technically. Even though in many ways it would be an Aliyah.

I'm having great success in the government district of Jerusalem. First there was the Kennesset which was an inspiring experience. Then there was the impressive Biblelands Museum. More recently, I had a great day at the Israel museum. It's the national museum of Israel and it's impressive. The archeology if off the charts. Then there's the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Aleppo Codex. Then there's the historic synagogues and the impressionist art wing. The museum is indoor-outdoor so you are not locked in a building all day. It's all very well done and big enough for multiple visits.