Heat is on in the Holy Land after diplomatic debacle

The heat continues here…weather-wise as well as politically...and the Israeli Army has sealed off the West Bank for the duration of the Jewish holidays. I turn to Professor Shlomo Einstein for an interpretation. From the breaking of a hospitality gift under Bibi's elbow to the naming of a forest after Joe Biden's late mum, the diplomatic signals have been so mixed as to yield a fiasco.

The professor pondered and penned this:

What the media has not noted here/hear in the Holy Land of God's Chosen is that the shaming of a person in public...an ordinary person who is struggling to survive or even the VP of the USA... is one of Judaism's major sins...a "No..No" for both God and man.

The warmth of my greetings remain as I continue to experience that I live among Sabbath misusers, people abusers...a group of ritual wretcheds.
SO…I will share a story I was told this week…a Hassidic tale…a tale by which to greet The Shabbat queen.

One day, after much internal weighing, saying, struggling... one of the Hassidic Rabbis shared with his followers that one might not have to experience…carry out the Sabbath on Shabbat. He was a learned, honest teacher.

And so…they all met one day during the week…dressed in the Sabbath clothes which one wears when one goes to God’s abode to pray…as one would in the secular world wear finery when invited to the Queen and/or King of England. Palaces are not just architectural outcomes…and surely not of one’s God.

And the prayers of the Sabbath were prayed and the special foods of the Sabbath were eaten…notwithstanding…or perhaps because of one’s poor economic condition…and songs and melodies of the Sabbath were voiced…and the peace and contentment of being apart from the daily struggles of survival were distanced…for the Sabbath moment…a long moment of a day…and the Sabbath was ended with the special prayers alive from so long ago…the special candle lit…the wine blessed…the aromatic spices inhaled and one returned to ‘the days of regularity’…to the problems and realities of survival…until…
until…

The Rabbi was not simply able to ‘let go’ of what he and his followers had done. And so he went to another Hassid…one who could/would judge…described what he and his followers had done…not WHY…( there are and no doubt always will be WHYs) but rather WHAT.

And this learned man…having experienced so many Sabbath experiences did not judge…did not criticize…did not approve or disapprove. Rather he suggested that if indeed one experienced the Shabbat in its many dimensions and carried out the essence of this unique gift to mankind that calendar and chronology were not critical. Shabbat, after all, is not an institutionalized ritual to be documented…She is a gift to be experienced and celebrated in the best way that each of us can.

This week science, the secular DNA testing, which does not have to rest on the Sabbath, and the BBC…a 7/24 human creation… increased the Jewish People, who may want to know and to care, by approximately 80,000 Zimbabwen and South African Lemba; a tribe whose members abstain from eating pork, wear yarmulke-like skull caps, conduct ritual animal slaughter, has an oral tradition that links them to the ancient Jews, circumcise their male children, which is not a common practice in Zimbabwe, and even put a Star of David on their gravestones.

Interestingly enough the scientists and the media noted nothing about a Lemba Shabbat.

--guest post from Shlomo, who is not from the eponymous Ramat Shlomo!

Will future of Israel-Palestine become multi-ethnic and multi-religious?

In my view, it doesn't really matter if Netanyahu's slap in the face to [US Vice Prsident Joe] Biden derails the proposed indirect [peace] talks, writes the leftist journalist Juan Cole. The Likud-led government has no intention of allowing a Palestinian state, and there is now no place to put one. Israel-Palestine has unalterably entered the era of Apartheid (actually something worse), and it will spell both the end of dreams of peace in our generation, and probably over time the end of Israel as Netanyahu's generation knew it. The Palestinians cannot be left stateless (the legal estate of slaves as well as of Jews under Nazi rule, i.e. people with no legal rights) forever. If they can't have Palestinian citizenship, then they'll have to have Israeli citizenship. The future of Israel-Palestine is likely to become a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state like Lebanon. Ironically, it is Netanyahu who is in no small measure responsible for this likely outcome, the opposite of the one he aspires to.

Israelis claim a 'birthright' to do things like colonize Palestinian territory, based on romantic-nationalist reworkings of biblical narratives. But Canaan was populated for millenia before some Canaanite tribes adopted the new religion of Judaism, and it was also ruled, as Palestine, for centuries by Romans and Greeks, and for 1400 years by Muslims. The Palestinian Jews converted to Christianity and then to Islam, so they are cousins of the European Jews (who appear to have gone to Europe voluntarily as male merchants around 800 CE,, where they took local wives). European Jews are about half European by parentage and all European by cultural heritage, and it is no more natural that they be in geographical Palestine than that they be in Europe (where nearly two-thirds of their mothers were from and about a third of their fathers). From a Middle Eastern point of view, European Jews planted in British Mandate Palestine by the British Empire were no different from the million colons or European colonists brought to Algeria while it was under French rule from 1830-1962. (Algeria had been ruled in antiquity by Rome, and the French considered themselves heirs of the Roman Empire, so it was natural that people from Marseilles should return to 'their' territory. Romantic nationalism, whether French or Zionist, always has the same shape). I don't predict the same fate for Jewish Israelis as befell the French colons. Rather, I think they are likely to more and more resemble in their position the Maronite Catholics of Lebanon-- i.e. powerful and formerly dominant population-wise, but increasingly challenged by other rising communities.