I do not consider Israel a civilized nation. (I wish it would have been, but sheesh and baksheesh, Germany is accruing beans faster on the civilized side of the scale.) I sincerely wish that America would stop sending money there. It is funding atrocities. This costs America a lot of civilized beans.
Intent to Kill
I do not consider Israel a civilized nation. (I wish it would have been, but sheesh and baksheesh, Germany is accruing beans faster on the civilized side of the scale.) I sincerely wish that America would stop sending money there. It is funding atrocities. This costs America a lot of civilized beans.
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Character notes for "Good Food Choices Are Good Investments"
These are the character notes for "Good Food Choices Are Good Investments." Penina Trueblood -- She has tawny-fair skin, blue eyes,…
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Poem: "Good Food Choices Are Good Investments"
This poem is spillover from the May 4, 2021 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by prompts from chanter1944, technoshaman, and Anonymous. It…
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Poem: "Who Can Create the Future"
This poem is spillover from the May 4, 2021 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by prompts from chanter1944, technoshaman, and Anonymous. It…
Thoughts
June 7 2010, 03:51:46 UTC 11 years ago
That is a circular argument:
http://www.fallacyfiles.org/begquest.html
>> That's the spot that the Romans kicked us out of. <<
This much is true, or at least strongly plausible based on available historic records. It does not follow that this particular place 'is' Israel. It's land. Land isn't a nation. It isn't a culture. It isn't a people. It can be the home of a people, historically or presently. It certainly influences culture, whether one wants it to or not. It can be dearly beloved, which is a good thing if it leads people to care gently for the land and treat it as the foundation of a healthy society, or a bad thing if it whips them into a berserk destructive territorial frenzy or causes them to think they've got a right to abuse it indefinitely without consequences.
But Israel isn't a place, and the Jews proved that when they survived as a people after losing their homeland -- a very rare accomplishment. A nation is an idea, an identity, not merely a location. People can migrate and carry their culture with them, if they love it enough. The Jews did that successfully for centuries. In Jewish writing, the portrayal of Israel ranged from the historic place to a kind of core ideal of Jewish nation-ness.
Then they had a chance to get a homeland again, and they were so desperately, totally fixated on that ... they lost sight of the fact that they were already carrying Israel around with them and just needed a place to set it down. A lot of Jews wanted their old homeland back, because of its history; not all of them did, preferring a fresh start elsewhere; but the ones who did won the argument. And they discovered that it wasn't as they had left it; it was a fragging mess, and a substantial number of decisions (theirs and other people's) since then have fragged it into even more of a mess. Meanwhile, most of the Jews in Israel plonked their nation in the sand like a great big flag, and sort of left it there. They had their goal, so they didn't always feel compelled to pour as much energy into maintaining the culture and its homeland-ideal as they did before they had a land to put it on. Sometimes, having is not so satisfying a thing as wanting -- particularly if the reality does not live up to the ideal, which in any regard is probably impossible for an ideal held by thousands of different people.
Re: Thoughts
June 7 2010, 10:37:17 UTC 11 years ago
Israel is the land which contains Mount Moriah, the land in which the Patriarchs and Matriarchs are buried, the land that was designated into regions for each of the tribes.
We Jews have never been a landless people -- we've been a people kicked out of our land. But we've always been very clear about where the land that we were kicked out of WAS, and what that land was.
Judaism is inextricably tied to that specific chunk of land.