POEM: Your Sabbath Day

“DE PROFUNDIS”

by poet and essayist Esther Cameron

Download (PDF, 255KB)

Source: B’OR HA’TORAH JOURNAL OF SCIENCE, LIFE AND ART IN THE LIGHT OF THE TORAH (1987) vol. 6 p. 121.

(Purchase the whole volume on JCT here or other issues here.)

I assume this is allowed under the doctrine of Fair Use.

 

 

One-Line Quip Stretched into Overlong Article…

The Handbook of Human Ownership – A Manual for New Tax Farmers

Hey – seriously – congratulations on your new political post!

If you are reading this, it means that you have ascended to the highest levels of government, so it’s really, really important that you don’t do or say anything stupid, and mess things up for the rest of us.

The first thing to remember is that you are a figurehead, about as relevant to the direction of the state as a hood ornament is to the direction of a car – but you are a very important distraction, the “smiling face” of the fist of power. So hold your nose, kiss the babies, and just think how good you would look on a stamp. A stamp, for mail… No, not email, mail. Never mind, we’ll explain later.

Now, before we go into your media responsibilities, you must understand the true history of political power, so you don’t accidentally act on the naïve idealism you are required to project to the general public.

Human Livestock – A History of Tax Farming

The reality of political power is very simple: bad farmers own crops and livestock – good farmers own human beings.

This is not nearly as simple as it sounds, hence the need for this manual.

The very first thing to remember is that you are a mammal, an animal, and like all animals, you want to maximize consumption while minimizing effort. By far the most effective way to do this is to take from other people, just as a farmer takes milk and meat from cows.

It goes downhill from there. 

Don’t continue to read the tedious, silly thing over here…

Charedi Unwitting\Hypocritical Complicity in War Crimes Around the World

I’m not even talking about the phony “Peace Process“, the Expulsion of Jews from Gush Katif, and so on. I mean undisputed, splashy tomato-sauce crimes; massacres in far-off lands, and all the war rapes they entail.

The Rogue State corrupting Israel and the Israelites enthusiastically sells the African, the American, and the African-American perps training, arms, and equipment in the name of “Maschara” (business), and has done so for at least half a century.

A shocking excerpt from an old eulogy for Elie Wiesel by Rabbi Yaakov Feitman in the English Yated:

Secondly, it is appropriate this week in particular to commemorate the wonderful things Mr. Wiesel did accomplish for Klal Yisroel. As a true noseh b’ohl im chaveiro, he taught us all what it means not to forget our brethren, be they those who perished or those who were languishing under Soviet oppression. Furthermore, almost singlehandedly, he made the great kiddush Hashem of demonstrating that we Jews are consistent. If we are critical of those who were silent during the massacres of World War II, we must show that we now care about others, and Elie Wiesel led us in protesting the evils of Darfur and Bosnia, Cambodia and Rwanda. In that, he was a shliach for all of us…

So much to gape at here…

Is the rabbi saying there were evils committed in Darfur, Bosnia, Cambodia, and Rwanda (and one can add to the list)? Why, how can that be?!

Don’t the religious parties sign off on (at least) all the budgetary “Defense” spending the better for Goyim to slaughter hundreds of thousands of women, children, and infants? Has anyone ever heard any “observant” pols or their “leaders” protest the slightest aspect of it all, ever?

Do they at least demand gobs of blood money “for Torah” in return for their not bringing down the coalition (as they did with the Gush Expulsion treason)?

If Mr. Wiesel was a “shliach”, how come we never heard about the appointment (as in the case of political “Shluchei Derabanan”)? And did anyone ever hear him criticize the actions of the Israeli regime in its own (admittedly few) direct war crimes (see here), or its role as an enabler of Goy-on-Goy Genocides (Mishna A.Z. chap. 1:7, אין מוכרין להם דבין ואריות וכל דבר שיש בו נזק לרבים)?

Rabbi Feitman says Mr. Wiesel “taught us all what it means not to forget our brethren“, as a “true noseh b’ohl im chaveiro” no less.

Well, another way to put it is Mr. Wiesel (like many of his ilk) worshipped a pagan deity known as “Thejoos” to avoid consistent worship of the God of Israel.

Now, this drivel wasn’t written by just anyone. Yated chose a shul rabbi serving for over forty years. And he sounds exactly like the type to avidly advocate the Israeli clericalist parties (the newspaper certainly does), because of the “Gedolim” (the same ones whitewashing lesbian rapist M. Leifer and wicked C. Walder).

Relevant excerpts (footnotes and most links omitted) from Wikipedia on the author:

Yaakov Feitman is a rabbi, speaker and author who helped build and expand congregations in more than one geographic region and was the founding principal of three schools.

Feitman was born in 1948 in a Displaced Persons camp to Holocaust survivors.

He received rabbinical ordination from rabbis Moshe Feinstein and Yitzchak Hutner.

Feitman is a past president of the Young Israel Council of Rabbis, has been a Scholar-in-Residence all over the world and spoken at OUTorah Umesorah and Agudah conventions.

Mr. Wiesel commendably spoke of those who were “languishing under Soviet oppression”? Oh, but the Jewish-American religious establishment instructed their laymen to mostly keep their silence about the Russian “Jews of Silence“. The same Jewish establishment Rabbi Feitman is part and parcel of, per Wikipedia above! (Myself, I don’t know what to think. My point is “לטעמיה”.)

And note the contradiction as Agudath Israel today freely antagonizes Russia by stupidly picking sides in the Ukraine war.

See the rest of the Yated abomination here…

(The flat-out flattery here for a pitiable mixed bag, at best, is another topic.)

Bottom line: What is the “kiddush Hashem” of supposedly “consistent” religious pols actively backing both public and quasi-private Merchants of Death bathing in Cushite blood — and their votary voters all oblivious to this day?!

Consult another Yated article with choice words on the sin of hypocrisy (by the, wait, same author…Hmm).


And no, Hyehudi won’t criticize goyim or Jewish renegades who do “the same thing”. Ostensibly observant Jews ought to be held to a higher standard!

Chazon Ish and John Stuart Mill: Seeing the Other Side

Chazon Ish Kovetz Iggros 1:33 (I didn’t see within now):

… עיקר עלי’ בתורה היא להבין דעת הניגוד תמיד, ואחר כך לשקול בפלס איזו דעה מכוונת טפי כו’ וחובה למי שקבע בדעתו את התמיהה להעמיק ולשמוע דעה השניה ואחר כך לשקול.

John Stuart Mill (Chapter Two of his “On Liberty”):

“Even in natural philosophy, there is always some other explanation possible of the same facts; some geocentric theory instead of heliocentric, some phlogiston instead of oxygen; and it has to be shown why that other theory cannot be the true one: and until this is shown, and until we know how it is shown, we do not understand the grounds of our opinion. But when we turn to subjects infinitely more complicated, to morals, religion, politics, social relations, and the business of life, three-fourths of the arguments for every disputed opinion consist in dispelling the appearances which favour some opinion different from it. The greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversary’s case with as great, if not with still greater, intensity than even his own. What Cicero practised as the means of forensic success, requires to be imitated by all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth. He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty. Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.”

We have written elsewhere wondering about the Chazon Ish disciple, Rabbi Dov Landa’s apparent departure from this rule.

(And no contradiction to the one on Bayesianism…)

The Chattering Class Was ALWAYS like This!

From the Daily Mail (by A N WILSON) on an evil, commie historian:

On Monday evening, the BBC altered its programme schedule to broadcast an hour-long tribute to an old man who had died aged 95, with fawning contributions from the likes of historian Simon Schama and Labour peer Melvyn Bragg.

The next day, the Left-leaning Guardian filled not only the front page and the whole of an inside page but also devoted almost its entire G2 Supplement to the news. The Times devoted a leading article to the death, and a two-page obituary.

You might imagine, given all this coverage and the fact that Tony Blair and Ed Miliband also went out of their way to pay tribute, that the nation was in mourning.

Eric Hobsbawm took part in one of the most extraordinary conversations ever on British television. Speaking in 1994 to the author Michael Ignatieff about the fall of the Berlin Wall five years earlier, the historian was asked how he felt about his earlier support for the Soviet Union.

If Communism had achieved its aims, but at the cost of, say, 15 to 20 million people – as opposed to the 100 million it actually killed in Russia and China – would Hobsbawm have supported it? His answer was a single word: ‘Yes’.

[See more of his own words on Wikipedia here. He should have at least the decency to answer evasively, per George Orwell…]

Just imagine what would happen if some crazed Right-winger were to appear on BBC and say that the Nazis had been justified in killing six million Jews in order to achieve their aims. We should be horrified, and consider that such a person should never be allowed to speak in public again – or at least until he retracted his repellent views and admitted that he had been culpably, basely, wrong.

Yet the awful thing about the phenomenon of Eric Hobsbawm is that the exact opposite to this is what happened.

He was awarded a Companion of Honour by Tony Blair – one of the highest accolades it is possible to bestow upon a British intellectual. A professor of history, he was regularly lionised on the BBC and in the liberal newspapers as our ‘greatest’ historian.

It is true he modified his hard-line support for Stalin and his death-camps as the years went by. The elderly Hobsbawm was not the same person who, in 1939, co-wrote a pamphlet defending not only Stalin but Hitler, too – and justifying the Nazi-Soviet pact to carve up Poland and dominate Eastern Europe.

But as far as the history of the 20th century was concerned, he never learned its lessons. The tens of millions dead, the hundreds of millions enslaved, the sheer evil falsity of the ideology which bore down with such horror on the peoples of Russia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Germany, never occurred to this man.

The truth is that, far from being a great historian who sometimes made mistakes, Hobsbawm deliberately falsified history.

In his book The Age Of Extreme, published in 1994, he quite deliberately underplayed the Soviet Union’s attack on Finland in 1939-40, saying it was merely an attempt to push the Russian border a little further away from Leningrad. He also omits any mention of the massacre of 20,000 Polish soldiers by Russian Secret Police at Katyn.

In the same book, he dismisses the appallingly violent suppression by the Nazis of the Polish resistance in the 1944 Warsaw uprising – when a complacent Soviet army ignored desperate pleas to come to the Poles’ aid – as ‘the penalty of a premature uprising’.

These are not mistakes – they are wicked lies.

Nor were Hobsbawm’s rewards merely the sycophantic praise heaped on him by Lefty academics and silly chatterers at London dinners. Having cultivated his group of Left-wing protégés at Birkbeck College in London, where he dominated the history department and went on to become President, he was showered with accolades by academics of the Left.

Read the rest of it here…


(Reread the title. Must I add that my objective in this and similar illustrations is to lessen despair by showing things didn’t suddenly change for the worse?)