Painful thoughts on the attacks on the Jewish state

October 13, 2023

I was aware of the physical frailties of old age—my parents lived to 88 and 89, my four grandparents late 80s and early 90s, and my great grandparents late 80s. I knew them all. I also knew my husband’s parents, grandmother and his step-grandparents all living to mid-80s and early 90s. Today is my brother-in-law’s 100th birthday. What I didn’t expect was this feeling of helplessness.

I didn’t expect to feel the promises of God’s mercy and caring to ring so hollow. After all, most of these dear ones of my past had lived through the Panic of 1893, the Spanish American War, WWI, The Spanish flu epidemic, the Great Depression, the scourge of polio, WWII, Korea and Vietnam. I even called my Dad on 9/11 for some comfort. Maybe they felt as helpless as I do now, and never mentioned it?

Today I was reading Psalm 25 in my morning devotions. I thought about those beautiful words such as TRUST, TRUTH, SALVATION, MERCY, LOVE, GOODNESS, UPRIGHTNESS, FAITHFULNESS, PARDON, FRIENDSHIP, COVENANT and FORGIVENESS. I couldn’t help but think back to Saturday’s assault on civilians in Israel. Where was God? Where were our elected politicians, our counterintelligence, our high-tech smarties who can shut down any opinion about Covid or pronouns they don’t like, but couldn’t find “chatter” of killers of Jews? It was Nazis in the ghettos of the 1940s.

What happened to the “rules of war” and the lessons of WWII we heard about in high school and college?

Also, I can't help but think of the silence of our churches—not just about the Israeli/ HAMAS/ Hezbollah/ Iran situation, but my own church's failure to speak out or call a prayer meeting on ANY issue—social, economic or political—from Covid to abortion to local bond issues, to the border crisis to transgenderism. I suppose it's understandable with 35,000 “protestant” and “Bible only” groups many of whom have split on secular issues, including slavery and feminism. It is still an eerie silence for anyone who reads the paper or watches the evening news. It’s possible in the 1930s we didn’t know about the Soviets starving the Kulaks or the Nazis invading Poland and killing Jews until it was too late. Today we have HAMAS uploading their crimes in real time on the internet for all to see. Today we know the U.S. returned $6 billion to Iran who has sworn death to Israel. We've bought their oil for untold billions. We funded this!

There’s an ugly dividing waste land that runs through our wealthy, educated metropolitan congregations. The same Christians who support abortion and “a woman’s right to choose,” sanctuary cities, open borders, climate change laws that hurt the poorest economies, demonization of half of America’s voters and the sexual mutilation of children in the LGBTQ spectrum, also have been willing to excuse over the years Palestinians and deny that the Islamic hatred and beliefs about Israel’s existence is a real threat to Jews and the U.S. It’s the elephant in the sanctuary. Right here in Columbus (specifically 2021, 2014 and this week) there were large demonstrations in support of Palestine and against Israel. Was anything said—prayer—discussion? Is there a direct line from our silence to beheading babies and shooting the elderly at bus stops?

If our churches can’t even object to the Governor or Board of Health about violations of our religious rights in 2020 and 2021 during the lockdowns, how can I even suggest we have the moral authority and strength to say anything about the Russia Ukraine war, or the tribal warfare in South Sudan among Christians, or the Ethiopian crisis, or the invasion by millions at our Southern border, or HAMAS attacking civilians?

Well, I do suggest it. Can I sit through one more Bible study or sermon or hymn and not be sickened by our silence, and my own feeling of weakness while we dither about hiring women pastors (an issue from the 1970s) or how many millions we can raise to keep our buildings up to date?

Leftists attack minority female—Trump pick

Neomi Rao, a 45-year-old Indian-American, has become the latest target of liberal activist groups and media smears, including BuzzFeed News, CNN, Mother Jones, Alliance for Justice, and Lambda Legal.

No one is safe from these vultures.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/01/16/the-left-attacks-trumps-pick-to-replace-brett-kavanaugh-for-her-smart-college-writings/?

“Take the example of Rao’s 1994 op-ed in The Yale Herald, headlined “Shades of Gray,” where she did indeed write that if a woman “drinks to the point where she can no longer choose, well, getting to that point was part of her choice.”

Activist groups are twisting this line to suggest Rao believes it’s women’s fault when they get raped, but that’s not what she said at all.

Rao wrote firmly that men should be prosecuted and held responsible for rape—not once, but twice, in case the point wasn’t clear.

“A man who rapes a drunk girl should be prosecuted. At the same time, a good way to avoid a potential date rape is to stay reasonably sober,” she wrote.”
Makes sense to me.  Women shouldn’t get drunk and men shouldn’t assault drunk women.

Guest blogger Mike on who is actually wealthy (New York Times opinion)

Commenting on https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/10/opinion/sunday/stop-pretending-youre-not-rich.html?

"I love being controversial when it leads to healthy dialogue, so here's an opinion to really stir the pot.

The overwhelming majority of wealthy and successful people obtained their assets through innovation, hard work, and strategic decisions, despite the claims to the contrary. Yes, there are a very small number of people who became powerful through unscrupulous methods, but this is not the majority that's often illustrated in an effort to mobilize mobs of people who think that something someone else has should be theirs, because after all, it's much easier to take something from someone else than to work for it yourself.

It is well known that once wealth is acquired, the excess obviously transcends future generations, so looking at an heir of their predecessor's wealth and begrudging them of what they have is nonsense because someone, at some point, worked for what they have.

The problem now is that there's this implied guilt and shaming with being successful, nefariously manufactured with its roots firmly originating in envy, and it's all nonsense. Envy is an emotion that destroys the holder, not the target. Getting over the "what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine" mentality is the first step towards a person's own success.

Intelligent people understand that by surrounding yourself with people more successful than yourself, it's a motivational catalyst to do more, and to do better. People who sit and stew in their own juices of jealousy condemn themselves to remain in place, rather than improve their situation, because they've diverted all of their energy into negative emotions and actions that intend to tear others down, rather than elevate their own situation.

Believing that equipoise is achieved by bringing those at the top into the gutter is equal distribution of misery, not success. I know a lot of people across the entire spectrum of income, intelligence, ambition, and overall success. I can say with confidence, that people create their own ceilings through the way they think, behave, and ultimately respond to situations.

Personal responsibility is the genesis of success and a happy life. As long as people continue to believe they can make poor life decisions and it's the responsibility of society to clean up the mess, we'll continue circling the drain as we have since this philosophy gained traction the late 1960's."

The widening gap between the rich and the poor—10 easy reasons

Nine years ago the  Wall Street Journal published a series—the widening gap between the rich and the poor—and this was before the recession and during very low unemployment and an economic boom.  I didn’t like any of their answers, so I wrote my own reasons for the gap. Keep in mind this was May 2005. Notice the word “easy.”

1. Easy credit cards: We got our first credit card in the late 60s--I think it was a "Shopper’s Charge." We now have one department store credit card and one bank card--we’ve never carried a balance. Since the late 80s and into the 90s, many new households have never known what it was to live on their earned income.
2. Easy divorce: Christians now have the same divorce rate as anyone else in the culture. When we married 45 years ago, regular religious observance offered families some protection. No fault divorce particularly hurt women and children, pushing them economically into competition with two income families.
3. Easy sex: Casual one-night stands were glorified in the movies of the 70s and 80s. Although adultery and fornication had long been a theme in literature, drama and movies, casual sex and living together before marriage became the gold standard of relationships by the 80s, even though it’s been proven that it increases the divorce rate. Then easy sex came into the living rooms via TV so that even young children think who’s spending the night is no more important than what toothpaste mom buys. Women having and raising babies alone is the biggest cause of growing poverty.
4. Easy birth control and abortion: The millions of Americans that might have sprung from the loins of some of our best and brightest have been denied life itself, and thus their slots in the pie chart has been taken by poor, less educated immigrants. Obviously this creates a huge gap between the middle class and the poor, who instead of having a solid footing as those aborted citizens might have had, flood across our borders or arrive as refugees with nothing.
5. Easy technology and gadgets: Time wasted on I-pods and text messaging and vegging out in front of bad movies on DVDs has certainly absorbed billions of hours that could have been invested in networking, education or advancing up the career ladder. Cable and cell phone monthly costs easily equal what we spent on a mortgage in the 1960s and 1970s.
6. Easy bankruptcy: Load up the credit cards with consumer spending, mortgage your future, then make the rest of us pay it off for you. It might have been Plan B 20 years ago, but is now Plan A. Interest only mortgages, leases for larger and more expensive vehicles, second mortgages--for a generation who thinks the future will be paid for by someone else, it’s a recipe for a growing gap.
7. Easy leisure: Thirty five years ago (1970) few middle class families took vacations--if Dad had a week off (and most companies didn’t offer it) he spent it fixing the house. Sure it’s a huge industry and employs a lot of people, but we’re looking at the gap aren’t we? We’d probably been married 10 years before we took a family vacation (my parents never had one), and then it was at my mother’s farm for a week. Our daughter and her husband had been to Key West, Aruba and took a Mexican cruise in the first 5 years of their marriage.
8. Easy entertainment: This is related to leisure and technology, but today’s young families have difficulty being alone or quiet, it would seem. Even 30 years olds seem unable to walk around without head phones. They are spending their children’s future at movies, sporting events and theme parks. A visit to the library is most likely to pick up a movie, not a book.
9. Easy college loans: Instead of attending a state school, working during the summer or attending closer to home, many young people begin their working lives with huge debt, a debt that takes years to pay off, assuming they don’t default. Loans were so easy in the 80s, that parents who could well afford to pay tuition had their children at the public trough.
10. Easy shopping: You can be a couch potato or a computer novice and never leave home to shop. Addiction is easy. Just call in with the credit card.

See? And I haven’t even said a word about how much health care costs, or how the women’s movement changed our culture, public transportation or taxes. And while the government is tangentially involved in these areas, mostly it boils down to perfectly legal choices, choices which when they become ingrained in our way of life lead to poverty or slippage down by a quintile for the next generation.

Is it you or is it WalMart?

Twenty two million Americans have diabetes. Logan Co. WV has the highest rate of type 2 diabetes in the country and their WalMart sells more snack cakes than any WalMart in the World! Whose responsibility is it to consume fewer snack cakes for this at risk population group? The people purchasing and eating or the WalMart stocking and selling?

If you are a liberal (why are you reading this blog) you probably change the question to something about should WalMart be allowed to shut down Mom and Pop stores, or does WalMart cover its part time employees with insurance. If you're a conservative, you just say, it's the individual's responsibility to control her diet.

But to complicate this even further, worldwide 330 million people have diabetes, and most don't live anywhere near a WalMart. So whose fault is that?

Performing a Mitzvah

There were some interesting letters to the WSJ in response to the opinion piece (Norman Podhoretz) on 9-11 which urged liberal Jews to "break free of the liberalism to which they have remained in thrall long past the point where it has served either their interests or their ideals." The writers responded about God's command for good works or mitzvah. Liberal Christians as well as Jews need to listen up here, because oddly enough, some Christians seem to think Jesus invented "good works" as the sum total of his ministry when in fact, nothing he said about how you treat your fellow man was new--he was reciting his religion--Judaism. As Podhoretz points out in his article

"Most American Jews sincerely believe that their liberalism, together with their commitment to the Democratic Party as its main political vehicle, stems from the teachings of Judaism and reflects the heritage of "Jewish values." But if this theory were valid, the Orthodox would be the most liberal sector of the Jewish community. After all, it is they who are most familiar with the Jewish religious tradition and who shape their lives around its commandments.

Yet the Orthodox enclaves are the only Jewish neighborhoods where Republican candidates get any votes to speak of. Even more telling is that on every single cultural issue, the Orthodox oppose the politically correct liberal positions taken by most other American Jews precisely because these positions conflict with Jewish law. To cite just a few examples: Jewish law permits abortion only to protect the life of the mother; it forbids sex between men; and it prohibits suicide (except when the only alternatives are forced conversion or incest)."

Yes, liberal Christians have the same viewpoint--they see the Democratic party as their vehicle to achieve their goals. (And to be fair, conservatives often see the Republican party that way although they are much more suspicious of government.) The readers wrote

"One cannot perform a mitzvah by having the government take one person's property and give it to another."

"There is no argument in the Torah that requires all people to be materially equal."

"The Torah demands personal responsibility from all Jews at whatever station they hold in life."

"The highest form of charity is giving a person independence (work) so that he or she will not have to depend on charity."

"Over the past 150 years classical liberalism and free-market capitalism revolutionized economies and did more to improve the conditions of the poor than any other competing system."

"No where does the Bible instruct us to tax others and rely on government to feed the hungry and clothe the naked."

Amen and amen.

Maddy has Crohn's Disease--an ethics tangle

Quite by accident, I discovered that one of my blogs on HR 3200 appeared as a link on a college reading list on medical ethics (so if you commented, you‘re there too). That got me interested in the program and I began browsing some of the other offerings. Some true to life scenarios were presented for students to discuss, and I thought this one about Maddy who has Crohn’s Disease was very interesting. I have a neighbor with Crohn’s (she’s 92, so has managed it well living longer than my parents who had no significant health problems until the final month of their lives at 88 and 89), and I used to work for a dear woman who had IBD (irritable bowel disease) which can be very debilitating.

Reading through the ethical responses by the hospital, her doctor, her friends, and society at large was really interesting. But there was no response from Maddy‘s point of view. What should have been her ethical response as a 25 year old to her illness, which she had known about since junior high school?

According to the information given, she had graduated from college, during which she’d had very few flare ups, but now had become very ill with frequent problems brought on by skipping doctor’s appointments and not eating right, worsened by moving away from home (just a guess, but Mom probably watched her diet). She’d become dehydrated and malnourished, terrible conditions for someone with Crohn’s, but the underlying assumption of the writer of the problem was this was caused by lack of insurance. She then required hospitalization, IVs, antibiotics, and surgery, which she didn’t choose. Her parents in the meanwhile (but not at the beginning) were experiencing financial set backs and she didn’t want to bother them with her problems. So, if I read the responses correctly, the problem then falls in the lap of the doctor, the hospital, the friends, and society at large.

Here’s my thoughts about Maddy.

1) If a person has a chronic or debilitating illness, she may have to modify her life’s dreams and career options. Her chosen field didn’t look promising to me either for income, or for a reduced-stress life (very important for these types of diseases). I don’t know what you do with a degree in “health psychology” but having worked in academe most of my professional life, it sounds like a way to keep the faculty employed. There are thousands of programs at the university level that lead nowhere except to frustration, low-income and living on credit.

2) She, her parents, and doctor had about 12 years to plan for this event (living on her own), knowing her student or parents' insurance would end, and that employer insurance may have requirements about pre-existing conditions.

3) She most likely, although it doesn’t say, became careless about the flare-ups since they had been rare before she graduated. Young people suffer from lack of learning from hindsight and planning with foresight.

4) She began missing doctor appointments and meds after graduation, rather than giving up other things in her life. This has a huge snowball effect. I don’t know what these could have been, and I know it sounds cruel and unAmerican to say “drop cable, cell phone, hair appointments, or nights out with friends“ so you can pay for your meds, but if you know the consequences of these missed steps, you can’t expect to stay healthy.

5) As a result of her own bad decisions, she is forced to return home a sick woman who will get even sicker to live with her family who is already under terrible stress from her father’s lost job and two younger children to support.

[Santa Clara University, a comprehensive Jesuit, Catholic university located in California's Silicon Valley, offers its more than 8,000 students rigorous undergraduate curricula in arts and sciences, business, and engineering, plus master's, Ph.D., and law degrees.]

Clean up your own trash

If the green-goes would set a good example, maybe picking up trash 10 minutes a day instead of flying across the globe to attend meetings, they might be more inspiring. If everyone took care of her own yard, carried baggies to clean up after his own dog, always put his trash cans promptly back after pick up or kept them covered to protect from animals, didn't toss cigarette butts in the street, and carried home her own trash from picnics, it wouldn't be long before we'd all have a better environment.

I can remember my mother saying while digging thistles instead of using chemicals, "I can't save the world but I can clean up four acres."

Trash in the creek
Pop on the rocks
Ubiquitous bags