Monday 18 May 2009

A SOLDIER AND AN OLD WOMAN

A Soldier and an Old Woman


From Aish by Ruchama King Feuerman

The Six Day War had ended. The generals assembled the commanders and foot soldiers for a customary review and analysis of the battle. After the military questions had been asked, and the investigative committee was about to disperse, a commanding officer pointed to one of the soldiers. "Wait a minute. I have a question for you. Yes, you, the soldier who put up the flag on the Temple Mount."

The soldier nodded.

"Where did you get an Israeli flag, and why did you put it up?"

The soldier spread out his hands and smiled, a gesture that indicated that here was more than just a one sentence response. He told the following story:

The night before the Old City was liberated, a contingent of soldiers fighting near the Old City took cover in a shelter in a Jerusalem neighborhood. Hordes of children, mothers, old men and women packed inside the bunker alongside the soldiers. People looked frightened and bereft. The government had imposed a news black-out so that the Arab countries wouldn't be able to figure out their positions. And the news -- originating from Jordan, Egypt and Syria -- was enough to induce hysteria: calls from Saudi King Faisal for the total elimination of Israel, calls from every Arab country to push the fledgling country into the sea.

Things looked so bad, Israelis famously converted public parks into mass graves, in preparation for the expected casualties. (Israel's Chief of Staff, Yitzchak Rabin, had even suffered a nervous breakdown.)

As the soldier sat there in the bunker, hopeless and uncertain, he saw an old woman slowly make her way over to him. "Excuse me," she said, standing at his side. She held a satchel in her arms.

He lifted his eyes. "Yes, Doda. Tell me, what is it?"

"Tomorrow you'll go to the Old City and you'll go to the Kotel."

He shook his head at the absurdity. He said, "No, we won't." There were no army plans to liberate the Old City. First, they were fighting just to hold their positions. Also, overtaking the Old City would entail hand-to-hand combat which was greatly feared: Many people would die. Moreover, any bombardment of the Old City might demolish even more of the holy sites than had already been destroyed by the Jordanians. He tried to explain all of this.

The old woman looked at him, steady-eyed. "No, you will go," she said, not as if she were trying to convince him, but as if relaying simple facts.

He shrugged. An old woman's delusions. He wasn't going to argue with her.

Before he turned away, she said, "I have a favor to ask you." She reached into her satchel and took out an Israeli flag. From the way she touched it, it was clear the flag had some personal meaning for her. Had she made it? Perhaps it had been draped over a loved one's grave? But what was she now saying? "When you go, please take this flag, and when you get to the Temple Mount, I want you to hang it up there." She held out the flag.

The soldier repeated, "We're not going into the Old City."

"You're going," she said. Again, she held out her arm.

A thought struck him. "I can't take it," he told her. "It's against army regulations."

"It'll be all right. Just take it."

"I'll get in trouble. You're only allowed to carry a few specified items."

Please," she said hoarsely. "Do me this favor."

He shrugged again. Why was he arguing with this old woman? Let him take the flag, let him make an old woman feel good. He could always get rid of it later.

The next day, the Israeli army, contrary to everyone's expectations, took the Old City. Sure enough, the soldier's unit ended up at the Temple Mount. As he and the other soldiers came close to the Western Wall, he suddenly remembered the flag and the old woman's words. Yes, he would do it, he would! He enlisted two buddies, and together they draped the flag over the grating on the upper left most side of the Kotel, and there they hoisted and hung the Israel flag.

The commanding officer conducting the investigation said to the soldier, "And what were you thinking when you put up that flag?"

The soldier said, "I was thinking that this was the answer to 2,000 years of Jewish suffering."

And so ends the story of the soldier, our hero.

But there's an unsung hero, too. What about the old woman who supplied the flag? One wishes the investigating officers had tracked her down. What did she have in mind as she entered a shelter with an Israeli flag in her satchel? And who was she, anyway? The only identifying feature is that she was old and carried a bag. But her advanced age already tells us plenty: that she knew something about Jewish history, probably having personally lived through it...World War I, Arab attacks, the Holocaust, the War of Independence, 1956. What hadn't she seen?

There, in Israel's darkest moment, outnumbered and surrounded by enemies, terrified that the next morning there will be no Israel, the old woman sees what no one else can see, what no one else is capable of conceiving. She insists on her vision, she practically browbeats the soldier into carrying out her plan. We'll never know how she knew, only that, like many Jewish women before her -- the Matriarchs, the midwives in Egypt, the righteous women in the desert -- she just knew. There are two kinds of prophecy. One that predicts the future, and one that makes the future.

taken from: For Zion's Sake

Life in Israel: Quote of the Day (qotd)

Life in Israel: Quote of the Day (qotd)

Life in Israel: Strawberry Cheesecake

Life in Israel: Strawberry Cheesecake

The Torah Revolution: There is a problem with this column

The Torah Revolution: There is a problem with this column

FLAWED BUT REAL HISTORY

Flawed but Real History

The Gemara on Bava Batra 131a has a convoluted legal discussion I'm not going to try to unravel here - something about the legal status of wills, which are problematic tools since once you're dead you're dead and it's not clear how your opinion matters anymore - or rather, once you're dead, you can't have an opinion anymore, so how can it be binding on anyone?

At one point in the discussion Rabbi Natan sardonically rebukes Rebbi for not being consistent; his formulation is "shanitem bemishnatchem", "you wrote in that Mishna of yours". Given that the codification of the Mishna in the 2nd century CE is easily near the top of any shortlist of crucial turnpoints in Jewish history, and Rebbi was the editor in chief while also being the political leader of the diminished Jewish community in post-Hadrianic Israel, this is a startling formulation. If you know that Rabbi Natan was one of the most important Jewish leaders of his day in the large and flourishing Babylonian community, the statement gets even more interesting. Clearly, this is an expression of a growing determination of the Babylonian Jews to flex their religious, cultural and even political muscle towards parity or beyond in their relationship with the sinking, war-ravaged and at times persecuted community in the ancestral homeland.

The teacher of our study group, however, then went off to look at a different discussion on page 13b of the Horayot tractate, a minor tractate often overlooked. Horayot offers a juicy and detailled description of a fracas between Raban Shimon ben Gamliel (Rashbag) on the one side and Rabbi Natan and Rabbi Meir on the other. The fracas was purely a matter of honor and powerjockying, and at the end of it Rashbag was firmly on top; part of the punishment of the two rebels was that henceforth their positions wouldn't be attributed to them anymore; rather, they'd be attributed to "Others say" in the case of Rabbi Meir, and "Some say" in the case of Rabbi Natan. Rashbag was Rebbi's father, so Rabbi Natan's harsh criticism is not only inter-communal politics, it's also part of an intergenerational feud.

Years after the altercation in Bava Batra, however, Rebbi publicly regretted his swift response to Rabbi Natan's attack on him. "I was young and unthinking and shouldn't have responded as I did", he said. Rabbi Meir, in the meantime, seems to have had the final laugh, since as a result of the decree not to name his attributes, all cases throught the Mishna which don't specify an author are now attributed to him, surely not what Rashbag intended.

Confused? Sorry. I tried to make it accessible, and cut out most of the details. Anyways, my point lies elsewhere. The whole description is a bit sordid; telling of the human weaknesses of some of the most illustrious rabbinical figures ever. Yet that's a very Jewish trait, to dwell on the flaws in our most illustrious figures; even to write it all up where anyone can see it.

This insistence on presenting warts and all is ultimately a source of strength, aggravating as it is at the time.
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)

SEVEN OTHER CHILDREN

Seven Other Children

Carol Churchill's antisemitc little skit continues to make the rounds. I've already commented that a play is better than an op-ed or blogpost for disseminating ideas, right or wrong, because it's shelf-life can be longer, especially if it's got a constituency. Which is why it's neat that there are now two plays out there. Churchill's antisemitic one, and a counter-one by Richard Stirling, called "Seven Other Children". Stirling, like Churchill, is not Jewish.

Since there are two plays, and they're both short, one can now demand that both be played together. After all, Churchill's piece purports to want to "encourage discussion", and what better a way to do so than by having two 11-minutes pieces which deal with similar materials from differing perspectives?

This story indicates how the discussion might play out. One side won't allow stirlings' play to be shown because it's new:

In explaining the rejection of Stirling's play, the festival's development
coordinator Madeline Heneghan said: "The program is planned months in
advance." The request was "unrealistic at this point", she added.

Churchill's play about events in Gaza four months ago, you understand, managed to get onto the program. The other side, however, now has a tool, and in this case the careful politicians are cutting funding for the event because only one side of the "discussion" is being granted a platform. An interesting dynamic, based upon the fact that although antisemitism is widespread, at least in the West it's also something one ought to be a bit embarrassed by.

I haven't read Stirling's piece yet.
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)

Terrorists in the 'Hood - HUMAN EVENTS

Terrorists in the 'Hood - HUMAN EVENTS

Gateway Pundit: Obama: Waterboarding Terrorists-- Bad... Infanticide-- Good

Gateway Pundit: Obama: Waterboarding Terrorists-- Bad... Infanticide-- Good

A TRUE JEWISH HERO - ROI KLEIN

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