Koolulam: Startup Nation meets Secular Prayer

One place to start this story would be the dark years of the 2^nd Intifada, when Israelis tried to leave their homes as little as possible because visiting supermarkets, riding busses and walking down the street were all life-threatening activities. Jerusalem was perhaps worst-hit of all, and people from the rest of the country stopped coming. Then, as the security forces figured out how to block the suicide murderers, life slowly returned to normal. In Jerusalem a new phenomenon appeared, with thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of regular Israelis traveling there on the hot summer nights of August and September to participate in tours of old neighborhoods, synagogues, then finishing late at night at the large open square in front of the Western Wall, the Kotel. The highpoint of these pilgrimages are the final nights before Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar; in recent years the number of people cramming onto that square easily surpasses a quarter million each night, and their cumulative number exceeds 1.5 million. Once they're there, they sing slichot – medieval texts asking God's forgiveness. All together. Like this.

In early 2017 Or Teicher, a secular Israeli producer, saw that clip and wondered if he could bring together ordinary Israelis, strangers to each other, and get them to sing together with some sort of fervor. So he tried. He collected some talented people around him, they collected 400 people in Tel Aviv, and on April 15^th 2017 they sung together. Here, watch them:

On September 7^th 2017, as the Jewish High Holidays approached, they collected 600 people in Jerusalem. Their technique was getting better, and it was a smashing success:

On December 17^th 2017 they gathered 600 mostly secular Israelis in Tel Aviv and sang about believing, in English. Another roaring success.

There's logistics in there, and organizational ability on multiple levels. There's musical creativity in spades. The cameras turn a crowd into a sea of identifiable and fascinating people with faces. And of course, there's that astonishingly charismatic young man with the dreadlocks who pulls everyone into a seamless many-layered choir in a single hour, even as most of them have never previously sung a single chord with the others. So they upped their ante. On Jan. 1^st 2018, they organized 2,000 people in a gigantic tent in Tel Aviv, and proved the model worked with larger numbers, too.

On February 14^th 2018 they pulled together 3,000 people in Haifa, and sang Matisyahu's One Day in three languages, Arabic English and Hebrew. If you haven't been paying attention, concentrate on the faces, their diversity, and of course, their intensity:
   

Later that week was International Women's Day, so they had an event by and for women only, 2,000 of them. The endlessly energetic Ben Yeffet, not being a woman, wasn't there. They all had a great time.
  

They have no website, if you're wondering, and no swanky marketing operation. They're propelled by the excitement they're generating, as ever broader swathes of Israeli society take notice of this new cultural phenomenon sprouting among us; they announce their next events on a Facebook page.

On April 2^nd 2018 they tried something new, with 7,500 people singing simultaneously in five different cities: Jerusalem, Ashkelon, Dimona, Rishon Lezion, and Kiryat Motzkin. The genius was adding Kiryat Motzkin, a scruffy town no-one has ever even heard of unless they live there; it turns out the locals know how to sing as well as everyone else.

Then they turned deeply serious. For Yom Hashoah in April 2018 they collected dozens of Holocaust survivors and three generations of their descendants, and together they prayed Ofra Haza's song I'm Alive. If you can watch this one without being moved to tears, you're a lost case.

This week (April 16^th 2018) they unveiled their largest event so far: 12,000 people, joined by Israel's President Reuven Rivlin, singing Naomi Shemer's immortal paean to the beauty and wonder of this flawed land we live in. If this isn't a new form of mass devotion, I don't know what might be.
 

Reflections on Jewish Law, the Jewish Nation, and a Database

So are the Jews a religious community or a nation? And if a religion, how can secular folks call themselves Jews? And if a nation, how come all members must profess a particular religion? And why can’t the Jews just be simple and clear about these matters, like everybody else?

Far be it from me to resolve these weighty questions. Yet a magnificent book I’ve just completed made me look at them from a new perspective. It’s a 1,600-page book in Hebrew, with hundreds of quotations in Mediaeval Hebrew or Talmudic Aramaic-with-Hebrew, and it was first published in 1973; the copy I own has been sitting patiently on a shelf for more than 30 years, waiting for me to find the opportune time; when I finally did one of my considerations was to pay respect to the author during the first year after his death: Menachem Elon, once the 2nd highest justice in our Supreme Court. The book is his magnum opus, Hamishpat Haivri, Jewish Law.

His thesis, presented in the first of the book’s three sections, is that between the end of Jewish sovereignty in the Roman era, and the end of Jewish cultural autonomy at the beginning of the 19th century, the Jews maintained a national legal system, and lived according to its rules and practice.

This was no mean feat. With Jewish communities spread from Persia in the east to Iberia and England in the west, and from Yemen in the south northwards all the way to the Baltic, throughout the entire 2,000-year period no travel or communications ever went faster than walking, or perhaps rarely horse-riding. Legal decisions routinely took a year to arrive. Then there was the matter of varying political jurisdictions: the Jews shared one among themselves, but were spread over many different external ones. Language was an issue, since for most of the period Jews didn’t share one spoken language, nor did they maintain one language over the entire period in single communities, so their legal system used Hebrew, a language all knew and few spoke. Finally, there was the matter of the form of writing: for most of the period the only ways to record an idea and transmit it was by memory or handwriting. The printing press wasn’t around yet, and an author had to write his treatise by hand, and have it laboriously copied by someone else’s hand. A student interested in reading two items deciphered two handwritings; a student interested in, say, 500 items, read 500 handwritings.

By the time the printing press did get invented, there were thousands of items, some of them very lengthy books, which a scholar needed to have read, in thousands of handwritings. Assuming he could get his hand on all of them, an unlikely assumption, and assuming a dramatic relevant new one hadn’t been written in the past decade but without having yet reached his town, a likely assumption.

There was also the matter of persecution. It’s admirable to see how Elon never puts the persecution up front, yet it keeps on intruding, when scholars had to flee to other countries, or centers of learning were disbanded or ancient communities destroyed. The low-key, matter of fact mention, usually in passing, of an intruding calamity, underlines the extent to which the Jews never allowed persecution to serve as an excuse for collapse or retreat into disorder or even to halt their creativity in its shadow.

So in the first section of the book the author, a law professor at the time, lays out his case that the Jews had their own commonly-held and communally-run legal system in which they lived their lives, and they did so for two millennia, growing the system and adapting it as needed along the way.

The second section deals with what law professors apparently call the legal sources of the system, the legal tools the system uses. Imagine, for a moment, that it’s the 45th century, or the 50th, and you’re living in a United States which still regards the 18th century’s Constitution as its founding legal document. The legal tools are the modes of operation which enabled your forefathers to take that ancient document seriously all along: interpretation, legislation, jurisprudence and so on.

As Elon tells it, the Torah is of course the founding document, the source of authority, and being divine, not a letter of it can be amended. Yet amended it had to be for the system to grow with history. And so there were early tools such as Midrash (hermeneutics) which enabled the early legal scholars to derive their legal needs from the immutable text. Elon gives a very fine description of the various forms of Midrash, of which there were quite a few. Interestingly, however, these tools were mostly used by the Tanaim, the scholars who created that tanaitic literature which was then, in the 2nd century CE edited into (or out of) the Mishna. These Tanaim lived mostly in Israel, indeed, mostly in the Galilee, and held their discussions mostly in Hebrew.

They were followed by the Amoraim, the creators of the Gemara between in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th centuries. They tended to be in Babylonia (present day Iraq) except when they were in the Galilee or elsewhere, and they tended to work in Aramaic, except when they used Hebrew. They used much less Midrash then the Tanaim, and indeed, they related much less directly to the Torah, focusing mostly on the Tanaitic literature, in the Mishna and beyond it. They were followed by Savoraim and then Gaonim, which takes us till about the 10th century. The later in time, the greater the likelihood not to use Midrash, but to prefer decrees (a type of legislation – did I mention that the Jews never had a legislature throughout this 2,000-year period), then local decrees, binding traditions, precedents, and some forms of deduction. As the 2nd millennium began, the center in Iraq lost its luster and its hegemonic power, never to be replaced (until the 20th century?) From then on there were a series of centers, sometime even more than one at once; they all seem to have known of them all at any given moment, and communicated to the extent it was practical. As time went on, the local decrees and traditions took on greater significance – but as the persecution went on, local practices became less likely to be helpful in new communities of Jews from diverse old ones. None of which ever threatened to destroy the system, astonishingly.

A significant reason for this startling cohesiveness can be found in the third section of the book, where Elon describes the documentary sources of the Jewish legal system: the texts.

He harks quickly back to the Torah, Bible and Talmud, but spends most of his time on what came next, from the 9th century on. The central theme of the story is the codifiers vs the interpreters. The interpreters came in a number of flavours, those who saw their task in explaining the earlier texts, and those who worked through all the earlier texts to provide a legal ruling on particular matters. (Rashi being the single most important interpreter, and the Tosafot providing rulings – though neither of those examples is clear-cut). Then there were the codifiers, the scholars who saw the immense (and growing) literature and its extreme complexity, and tried to force order and simplicity on it all in one fell swoop, so to say.

Actually, there was only one scholar who tried to impose complete order on the complete corpus and in one fell swoop so s to serve as the final word on the matter, and that was the Rambam, Maimonides, in the 12th century (who also happened to wander the entire length of the Mediterranean as he tried to sidestep his persecutors). He was so gigantic a figure, so totally a genius, so far ahead of everyone else, that he felt he could carry off the trick; and no sooner had he done it, in his 14-volume Mishneh Torah codex, than a choir of his contemporaries and their disciples for the next few generations all tore into him for his arrogance and presumption, recognizing his intellectual superiority over them as they did so.

Then, over the next four centuries the battle between interpreters and codifiers raged back and forth, eventually ending in the victory of the codifiers with Rabbi Yosef Caro in the 16 century, who wrote the Shulchan Aruch but not until he’d completed the Beit Yosef, a gigantic work of interpretation. (Caro, it should be noted, was back in the Galilee, for those who think there was no significant Jewish presence in Israel for 2,000 years.)

Or did the codifiers really win? I’m not so sure. One of the oddest parts of the story is that while the cutting edge of the system of Jewish law kept on moving forward, as cutting edges tend to do, the single most important layer was and remained the Talmud, until this very day. The Rambam’s presumption to have his work enable the complicated Talmud to be superseded may have happened on the level of legal ruling; but there are 100,000 students of Daf Yomi today, not of the Daily Rambam program (which does exist, but is a pale shadow of the main show).

Where does all this lead us? Beyond being a fascinating yarn and a crucial insight into what made Jews tick? Near the end I found myself with a number of reflections. First, there’s the miraculous mystery of Zionism. Just as the legal and social and cultural tools which maintained the Jews for 2,000 years were being broken down by the modern conception of the individual facing the State without an autonomic community in the middle, as well as by the tidal wave of secularism which detached a majority of Jews from the traditional ways and texts, along came Zionism and replaced the magnificent-but-worn old tools with a whole new set. Just as the intellectual ferment which lasted millennia was finally (largely) exhausting itself, along came Zionism with a whole new context in which to live full Jewish individual and communal lives. (I’m writing this on the evening of Yom Hazikaron, Memorial Day, so I’ll add that Zionism also gave, and demanded, a new set of reasons and contexts in which Jews lay down their lives for the nation).

Even on a less grand scale, Elon’s book itself demonstrates how the Jews have developed alternative ways of studying their rich cultural heritage: no one prior to the 19th century would ever have thought to write a history of the Jews through the history of their legal development.

Finally, the archivist and information-professional in me looks at technology. Just about the exact moment when Elon was publishing his book, a group of scholarly computer-scientist types were banding together to put the entire gigantic sprawling Jewish legal library into a database, now known as the Bar Ilan project – an invention the Rambam and his fellow codifiers would greatly have appreciated if had they ever been able to conceive of it, which they of course weren’t.

Israel at the End of 2011: Better than Ever

No, this blog is still dormant, as explained here. However, I still post every now and then, so the Google overlords won't delete the entire blog for having gone entirely silent. The end of 2011 is a good moment to reflect on Israel's condition, which, if you believe much of the media, is catastrophic. Growing numbers of folks dislike us, we're told, our isolation is growing ever more dire, our democracy is crumbling, we're forcing women into second-class status, America's Jews are turning away in growing disgust, and so on and on and on...

Well, no.

Back in my blogging days I used to propose three criteria for measuring the long-term robustness of Israel. So let's start with them:

Economics: While the European economy enters recession if not worse, and the American economy is in a protracted funk, the Israeli economy continutes to boom. Here, check it out at the Economist website, which tells that GDP is growing higher in Israel than in any European country, the US, and lots of other places too. Unemployment, you might be interested to hear, at 5.6%, is not only lower than in most countries, it's at its lowest in Israel for decades and by some estiamtes, the lowest ever. If things stay this way until the next elections there will be no need to speculate on how crazy the Israeli voters have become to re-elect that supposedly universally hated government: any government running for re-election with an economy like this would stand a fine chance of re-election.

The BDS campaign to destroy Israel is not obviously working, apparently.

Culture: is Jewish culture thriving, stagnating or declining in Israel? This is a rhetorical question. There's no measure I can think of by which to claim there's any stagnation or decline. It has been thousands of years since the Jews have had such a broad-based cultural creativity, which isn't surprising if you remind yourself that for the first time in millennia there are millions of Jews living in their language in their own society (and their own land).

How does cultural creativity fit into disappearing freedom of thought, you ask? It doesn't. The disappearing freedom and democracy exist only in the minds of a certain section of Israeli society and the multitudes of ignorant foreign reporters and politicians who avidly agree with them whenever they criticise Israel. Apart from them, it's not happening. There's a racuous debate about all sorts of things, of course, but in other countries that would be called democracy, not facism.

Demography: here the question is simple: are there more Jews in Israel today than a year ago. Of course there are. In an aside, there are growing indications that the demographic pendulum has peaked and is swinging back in favor of the Jews over Palestinians, whose birthrate is either declining or tumbling, depending on the data-sets one uses. (Here, for example).

Terrorism is mostly dormant, by Israeli standards. 2011 was one of the most peaceful years Israel has had since 1947. (The Palestinians had a rather peaceful year, too, since there's some correlation between the two).

The internal clash with the Haredi sections of society seems to be moving in two contradictory directions. The crazies are growing ever more crazy; but there's a long-term trend in which ever-growing numbers of Haredi are slowly acquiring modern education and entering the labor market; some thousands of young Haredi men are even finding their way into special programs in the IDF. I can't say which trend will ultimately be more important, but I feel confident in hoping for the better outcome.

The Arab revolutions seem likely to create ever more outlandish-looking societies. I don't see how normal Westerners (as distinct from the chattering classes) will look at them in 5, 10, or 15 years, and then look at us, and not prefer us.

You'll hear endless punditry about how bad off Israel's Arab citizens are. Well. The reality I see is that growing numbers of them are integrating into mainstream society. I have Israeli Arabs working under me, as well as alongside me, and they are just regular folks and treated as such. I see Arabs - Israeli citizens or East-Jerusalem permanent residents - everywhere: in markets, at the university, in professional groups, in hospitals, at universitities, and so on. Also in the hallways of the government ministries and even in classified installations.

Whinch brings me to my final point. I stopped blogging when I joined the civil service, and went behind a wall of security clearance and the need to shut up about it. Indeed, I won't report on what cannot be reported. But I will say that what I find there is very heartening. Alongside the usual, and universal, red-tape and mediocracy, there are large numbers of highly talented Israelis purposefully going about their jobs of making this a better country, stronger, more successful, better able to withstand whatever gets thrown at it.

Yes, there are lots of folks out there who dislike us, but that's always been so. These days we don't have to give them too much attention. Seen historically, 2011 was probably one of the best years in millennia of Jewish history.

The Second Banned Song

In 1969 the military band of the Nachal brigade was at the peak of its creativity and fame. The story of shirim ivri'im in the 1960s and 1970s is unimaginable without the military bands, and the Nachal band was the best of them all. Any new creation of theirs was bound to catch everyone's attention.

No-one saw this one coming, however: Shir Lashalom, Song for Peace, with Miri Aloni as the lead.

First, the music. It was of a type the military bands had never used. Electrifying.

Second, the content: while it was a full-throated call for peace, and that was fine, it contained an enigmatic line: al tabitu leachor, hanichu lanoflim. Don't look back, leave the fallen behind.

It was an immediate smash, and almost as swiftly it was banned. As I noted when presenting Hasela HaAdom of 1954, songs can't be banned in Israel, but in 1969 the state control of the radio was still significant enough that an order not to play the song there was largely effective. But not fully: if the 1954 ban created mystery, the 1969 one aggravated, and never really succeeded. Everyone knew the song, and it was sung all over, accompanied by arguments (Israelis love to argue). I don't remember how long the official ban stood, but it couldn't have been very long.

No-one ever said so out loud, but there is reason to believe the unorthodox music was an added aggravation for the old codgers who felt it was their job to protect the purity of Israeli music. It was only five years since they had forbidden the Beatles to visit Israel (damaging cultural influence, they had called it).

In the 1970s the national disagreement about the price of peace versus controlling the occupied territories got worse, and shir lashalom became the anthem of the peace camp; in those years it definately wasn't part of the consensual canon of shirim. Miri Aloni never really took off as an important singer, either.

On Saturday night, November 4th 1995, middle-aged Miri Aloni was brought out of semi-retirement to sing shir lashalom at the end of a massive demonstration in Tel Aviv, called to bolster the declining political standing of the Rabin government in the face of rising Palestinian terror and broadening Israeli public dissatisfaction with what was then called the peace process. She was flanked by Rabin to her right, Peres to her left, and assorted apparatchiks on either side, and they fervently sang for peace. (Well, Rabin didn't really sing. But he tried).

A few minutes later Rabin was dead, shot by Yigal Amir. Rabin had folded the sheet with the song's words into his pocket, and at his funeral Eitan Haber, his top aide, presented the blood-stained page. Israel was plunged into deepest shock... and shir lashalom was elevated to the pinnacle of consensus, where it remained for a number of years.

After 2000 and the Palestinian determination to terrorize Israel into positions it wouldn't take, the song lost luster. Today it's solidly part of the canon, and everyone knows its words and melody, but it isn't a religious article anymore. It's a nice song, with lots of historical baggage if you care to reflect on it.

Hebrew words
English translation
Let the sun rise
light up the morning
The purest of prayers
will not bring us back

He whose candle was snuffed out
and was buried in the dust
bitter crying won't wake him up
and won't bring him back

Nobody will bring us back
from a dead and darkened pit
here,
neither the victory cheer
nor songs of praise will help

So just sing a song for peace
don't whisper a prayer
Just sing a song for peace
in a loud shout

Allow the sun to penetrate
through the flowers
don't look back
let go of those departed

Lift your eyes with hope
not through the rifles' sights
sing a song for love
and not for wars

Don't say the day will come
bring on that day -
because it is not a dream -
and in all the city squares
cheer only for peace!

The first video has pictures of Rabin, with the original, 1969 version of the shir. The second has a segment of the Nov. 4th 1995 performance.

Remembrances of Things Past

The New York Times carried an obituary the other day of Josef Burg, a Yiddish writer who died in August at the age of 97. Born before World War 1 in the Habsburg empire, the world he was born into was destroyed before he went to school. The world he grew up in was destroyed by the time he was a young adult. The world he spent his middle age in has been gone almost a generation. Dramatic change, you might say, was boringly constant in his life. It fit comfortably into his main occupation, which was to write in a mostly dead language about a vanished world to a public that no longer existed. Ironically, the road to having an obituary in the NYT went through the German language; late in his life his Yiddish manuscripts were discovered by a young German, translated, published, and rather widely sold in Germany, of all places. (This is actually not as surprising as you might think. There is far more genuine interest in things Jewish in Germany now than there was when Burg was born).

Not long ago I read Aaron Lansky's fun book Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books. Lansky, an American Jew with a tenuous connection to Yiddish until college, set out in the 1970s to find Yiddish books to read, realized they were mostly to be found in places with no future such as the homes or social clubs of elderly Jews whose children were not interested, and decided to gather them up. The experts he consulted told him there might be as many as 70,000 volumes to be found if he was systematic; he and his friends ended up collecting about 1,500,000. It's a poignant book - I read long stretches of it laughing and crying, both.

The people he met along the way are just about all gone by now, but so is their world, in a way far more profound than the mere passage of time would explain. Three main things did it in. The first, chronologically, was the Shoah, which destroyed the Eastern European heartland of the Yiddish world - for Yiddish, as a thriving culture, was an invention of 19th century Eastern Europe. Previous to that it had been a living language of the Jews for about a thousand years, but it hadn't been the language of their cultural creativity - that had been Hebrew, or Arabic, and near the end, German.

Second, the Yiddish world didn't survive the emigration to America. At one point Lansky notes that a significant majority of Yiddish books ever published, were published in New York. Yet the Eastern European Jews who came to the New World and the Goldene Medine migrated so their children might have better lives in the land of the free. They were wildly successful in this, but at the price of putting the new land above just about all aspects of the old country - and Yiddish was about as Old Country as possible. So the immigrants' children had no use for Yiddish, their children never knew it, and their children - mostly - neither know about it nor care in the slightest. The world of Yiddish wasn't strong enough to compete. (This goes for other lands of immigration, too - the English speaking ones, but also the French, Spanish and Portuguese ones).

The third reason the Yiddish world disappeared is that it's roots were too shallow to thrive in Israel. People who know better than I tell me Yiddish is a better tool for studying Gemara than any other language, with myriad turns of tongue that can explain an entire complicated passage in three or four words. (A teacher I study with often uses "shrek fun allen seiten" to clarify a knotty problem, but we're not really using Yiddish; it's merely a remnant). But faced with Hebrew as a living language for all parts of life, Yiddish never had a fighting chance. After 1948, when the largest group of Jews in Israel were from Arabic-speaking lands, it wasn't even in the competition.

Of course, there still is one vibrant corner of the Jewish world which still uses Yiddish. Part of the Haredi community, in Israel and in the US, still raises its children in Yiddish and speaks it at home and in daily life, much as it did for a thousand years. But it's only part of the Haredi world; and anyway, as Lansky show very convincingly, the Haredi community isn't part of his story. Read his book to find why.

The Voice of Desperation?

Unlike most commentators and bloggers, I'm doing my best to refrain from commentary on what the IDF can or will achieve in this war. I don't expect it to go on for long, so I can wait with my predictions of what can or cannot be achieved. Another week or three; at which point I can always go back and see who knew what they were talking about and who didn't.

Instead, I try to look at the actors, and see if there's anything interesting to say about them. One obvious thing that's happening is the major uptick in hatred towards Israel. And so, I asked myself earlier this morning while perusing the various hate-dripping depictions of "Israel's brutal attack on Hamas" (Chris McGreal), isn't it possible that the hatred reflects the weakness of the haters? Is it possible they expect Israel is achieving some of its goals? That at the end of all this, there won't be rockets raining down on Israeli civilians? Hamas will be weaker, not stronger?

A few months ago I proposed three criteria by which to measure Israel's long-term sucesses:

1. Are there more Jews in Israel than there were the previous year?
2. Is Jewish cultural (or religious) creativity as strong as it was last year, or perhaps even stronger?
3. Is Israel's economy, and with it the condition of the Israelis, better than it was last year?

In any year where the answer to any one of these questions is positive, we're doing alright...

Well, just the other day we slipped out of 2008, a year in which the number of Jews in Israel grew, the cultural creativity grew, and even the economy suffered less than in many countries including some of the richest. You need to retain a sense of perspective, and if you do you'll have to admit the over-arching trajectory is rather good.

Perhaps this is what has the antisemites so desperate?

A New Blog You Needn't Read

Some months ago I offered the Argentinian fellow who hides his true identity behind the title Ibrahim ibn Yusuf the option of sharing a blog. The idea - or at any rate, my part of it - was to have a thoughtful, systematic discussion between two people who radically disagree about Israel. I intended to look into Ibrahim's methodology, his thought processes, his relationship to facts and sources, and eventually also his motives. I don't know what his intentions regarding me were, but it was a free platform and he could have taken his part of it in whatever direction he wished. Theoretically, he could have bested me, though I admit I didn't think he would. The little I'd seen of hs work and the much I'd seen of others of his ilk left me mildly confident that most careful readers of our blog would find him to be the second most convincing of the two of us.

Shortly after we started some serious doubts began to accrue regarding Ibrahim's honesty in presenting himself. He himself admitted that it would have been easy to dispel the doubts, had they been based on falsehoods, but he was adamant in his refusal to do precisely that, eventually telling me that in the meantime the whole exercise no longer interested him. Personally I felt at the time and feel still that he feared he'd gotten into something he hadn't reckoned on so he ran, but I can't prove that, obviously.

What I can do, however, is to point you at his new blog, The Hasbara Buster. In one of his recent comments he said he's glad he has pro-Israeli readers and commentators, because that way he gets to understand how they think. Interesting comment, given his past behavior, and I'd suggest that what he really means is that he looks forward to talking to such people in an environment that he controls.

There's a pro-Israeli blogger named Yitzchak Goodman, author of Judeopundit, who is doing an admirable job of responding to the Buster's posts. I wish him luck, though I ask myself if he's not wasting his time. The Buster is way out there on the fringe of anti-Israeli bloviating, and it's unlkely that he makes any difference in the world. People such as myself, and also Goodman, need to ask themselves each year if any of the following three things are happening:

1. Are there more Jews in Israel than there were the previous year?
2. Is Jewish cultural (or religious) creativity as strong as it was last year, or perhaps even stronger?
3. Is Israel's economy, and with it the condition of the Israelis, better than it was last year?

In any year where the answer to any one of these questions is positive, we're doing alright, no matter what the Busters of the world do. Since most years all three questions have positive answers, why care about what those feverish folks think or say? Enemies of the Jews have been spewing their ire for millenia, and the Jews keep on doing their thing; these days, their thing is pretty miraculous, all in all, in spite of the blemishes.

The question that does remain, however, is why. Why should an instructor of language (Catalan, I think) in Rosario have this urge to "bust" things Israelis say about themselves. It's not because he has a good case - you're free to go visit and see for yourself how sloppy and often silly he is. It can't be because Israel is uniquely worse than other societies, because it isn't. Sometimes he tells that he's compelled to unveil Israel's crimes because the Israelis claim they're better than others. OK: and the Israelis are the only ones in the world who claim they're better? And even if they were the only ones, why should this be such an obsession in faraway Rosario?

In a recent post the Buster said I'm engaging in character assassination for posing this question. I don't agree. Not given the history of the Jews and their detractors these past few millenia.

Why was Judea Destroyed?

The destruction of the Jewish communities of Erez Yisrael in the first century of the common era, with the destruction of the 2nd temple at its heart, followed by the genocide of the Jews of Judea 70 years later, were a catastrophe of epic proportions. All the while as they were happening, Jewish creativity never slowed down for a moment; indeed, the mishnaic era is rightfully regarded as one of the peaks in a history of millenia of cultural creativity. Yet while the creativity was never blunted, the echoes of the catastrophe reverberate resoundingly all the way into the main political discussions of the 21st century.

Page 55b of the Gitin tractate launches a long discussion of the catastrophe, its causes, its outlines, and its results. These 4-5 pages deserve a book-length analysis, which I'm not about to undertake. Still, here's the first story, that launches the discussion; it's very well known by many educated Jews, whether they've studied Gitin or not. I find it fascinating on many levels, one of which is the total lack of the feeling of victimization the powerless or weak are so supposed to revel in these days, as if weakness is a moral trophy. Well, those Jews sure proved to be the weaker side, and they sure were persecuted, but for the next few thousand years they told themselves stories about all the things they did wrong to bring their suffering upon themselves. So here's perhaps the single most important story of all, the story of Kamza and Bar Kamza, because of whom Jerusalem was destroyed:

There were once in Jerusalem two men, one named Kamza and the other named Bar Kamza. And there was a third man who's name has mercifully been lost, who was a friend of Kamza and an enemy of Bar Kamza. This man hosted an important social event, and told his servant to invite Kamza. The servant mistakenly invited Bar Kamza. When Bar Kamza arrived, the host threw him out. Bar Kamza, publicly mortified, begged to be allowed to stay, offering to pay the cost of his board, or even the entire cost of the event, but the host refused. Bar Kamza was especially furious that the high society of the time, the scholars, watched this happen and didn't do anything to save him from humiliation, and so he went to the Romans and told them the Jews were plotting a revolt, and this set the whole story in motion.

The moral of the story, the Talmud tells us, is that Jerusalem was destroyed because of sin'at hinam, unnecessary animosity between people. Not, say, occupation, or the heavy weight of Roman rule, or a wish for freedom or liberty or any sort of noble action one could attribute to the Jews or ignoble policy to attribute to the Roman. The Jews were punished, according to their own version, because they deserved it.