🔗 What Chafes My Groin #12

The Separation of Synagogue and Demagogue

I heard some American Jewish actress by the name of Hannah Einbinder just won an Emmy award for freeing Palestine. What an achievement! Apparently, she said this in her acceptance speech:

“I feel like it is my obligation as a Jewish person to distinguish Jews from the State of Israel, because our religion and our culture is such an important and long standing… institution that is really separate to this sort of ethno-nationalist state.”

[…]

“I am ashamed and infuriated that this mass murder is funded by our American tax dollars. It should not be controversial to say that we should all be against murdering civilians.”

Boy, don't we all feel stupid. I mean sure, I get why a diaspora Jew would want to distance themselves from things they have nothing to do with, because at the end of the day, any and every Jew will be requested to answer for the actions of some other Jew at a certain point in their lives. That's just Judaism 101. She needs to protect herself, sure. But could she maybe do this without throwing every Jew in Israel under the bus?

Let me start with the "ethno-nationalist state" comment. What kind of psycho-babble bullshit is this? If countries with an ethnic majority were ist-ic, then she just condemned an insane amount of countries. The ethnic majority in Israel—Jews—accounts for 72% of the population. The ethnic majorities in literally all of the countries that surround Israel and accuse it of being an ethno-somewordthatendswithist state, on the other hand, approaches 100%. Is the whole world upside down? Doesn't anyone notice the hypocrisy?

But the funniest thing she said was that Jews have to distinguish themselves from the State of Israel, which is a completely separate thing. When I hear her say "our religion and culture are such long standing institutions" the first cultural characteristic of the Jewish people that springs into my mind is that of being small minorities dispersed throughout the world due to multiple forced exiles from Eretz Yisra'el throughout history. Ms. Einbinder may be okay with it, but not all Jews are lucky. Most Jews on Earth do not live in the same safety that she enjoys. The millions of Jews that immigrated to Israel long before Einbinder was born moved there because they were murdered, oppressed and driven out of their homelands. For her to suggest that the story of almost the entire world Jewery returning to their ancestral homeland is somehow separate from Judaism and the history of the Jews is the most pathetic attempt I've seen yet for a Jew to distance themselves from Israel, not to mention a quite insulting one.

If I were her, I would thank God that I was born in the USA, kiss the ground of my Los Angeles home, and leave my thoughts about Israel out of a fucking TV award ceremony.

The Conjoining of Shabbat and Hiking

Speaking of America and its Jews, I am currently three weeks into my almost-yearly working-vacation to the country. I've been coming to the US almost every year since 2012. I love Small Town America and spend most of my time in the country in such places. Back when I was "working on my project" to visit all of the National Parks in the Contiguous US I moved between places almost daily; but after I completed that, and since my trip last year, I'm now instead renting an apartment for a few weeks or a couple of months in a small town, working remotely during the weekdays and traveling around on the weekends.

Being here is always a pleasure and I'm always grateful for the kind and interesting people I meet. For the past two weeks, I had been staying in Culver, Indiana, a very small and charming town of just 1,129 people. The town sits on the shores of Lake Maxinkuckee, deep inside a vast area of mostly corn fields. Seriously, there's so much corn here it's crazy, unending fields across thousands and thousands of square miles.

When I got to Culver two weeks ago, I immediately noticed what appeared to be high-school students wearing very interesting clothes. The boys were wearing military-style, official-looking uniform with long gray pants, buttoned-up light blue shirt, and some kind of military cap. The girls, on the other hand, were wearing checkered black-and-white skirts and white or black T-shirts. It didn't fit in my mind as the way high-school students would be dressing in the town's school, which they had just happened to be walking by when I first saw them.

A bit later I learned that there was some kind of an academy right outside the town, and figured they must actually be from there. Last Friday I was out hiking in Tippecanoe River State Park, trying to force myself to ignore the fact that there was a constant cloud of bugs buzzing right over my mouth or biting my skin, and trying every few meters to pick off another cobweb I had passed through. A few miles in, I just couldn't stand it any longer and turned around.

Driving back into Culver, I felt like I wanted to keep walking, so I immediately left my apartment when I arrived and started walking next to the lake. There are a few paths that emerge from the Culver Park on the lakeshore and head east. I had already walked two of them before (and generally walk on the shores of the lake almost every day), but this time I took the third path which I hadn't taken before.

Like the other paths, this new one headed into the forest, but skewed more towards the north. After a bit, I emerged out of the forest and found myself inside the campus of the academy I had just mentioned. It was Friday evening and the campus was very quiet. Walking and looking at the beautiful campus with its red brick buildings and large green lawns I noticed a guy in those military-looking uniform walking in some direction. Turning to him, I said "Hi" and asked him what was the place. The well-groomed kid with braces in his teeth immediately and pridefully answered that it was a military academy, and explained to me about the academy and the campus. His speech was assured, with no hesitations, no umm-s or pauses, like he's been practicing for that question for years.

The young student (or is it "cadet"?) and I started walking together and he basically gave me a tour of the campus, pointing and explaining about the buildings, the history and present of the academy, the history and present of his family in the academy, etc. He proudly showed me his "senior's ring". He didn't need to do any of that, he could have just said "military academy" and kept walking, but instead he stopped and had a conversation with me because he was so proud and happy to share it with, I guess, anyone who cared to know. He also explained that the military academy is not necessarily an avenue into the US Military, but rather more a private school that puts leadership—amongst other ideas—as its core tenet.

He asked me where I was from, and when I said "Israel", he was thoroughly surprised and told me he was Jewish, that his name was Noah, and that he was actually just walking to the senior's building for Shabbat services with the other Jewish students of the academy, and thus invited me to join him. I'm not religious, but I wouldn't pass up an offer to do Shabbat services at the Culver Military Academy, that's Judaism 202.

And so I found myself with about 20 Jewish teenage students in a military academy inside a city of 1,000 people deep in the American Corn Belt for the Shabbat prayer. They sang almost the entire prayer in this happy, joyful style flaired by their American accents. When they weren't singing, they took turns reading passages from the prayer book. Everybody who read did it proudly and assuredly.

When the prayer came to its end, Noah asked me to say Kaddish. It is common practice in prayer services for people in attendance to mention the names of recently deceased people (such as family members, friends, members of the community) right before saying the Kaddish. One of the students mentioned Charlie Kirk, whose brutal murder just a couple of days before shocked me to my very core. I mentioned the name of a childhood friend's father who had recently passed, and said the Kaddish.

After the services, Noah made sure to introduce me to everyone, and I got to chat with the other students, who were all very nice, cheerful and composed in their demeanor. There was even one student from Israel in the academy. It was a nice chance event, and I was impressed by Noah, who was knowledgable and truly had the air of a natural leader. I wish him and them a lot of success.

The Jewish students of Culver Academy's custom of joining together for Shabbat prayers, alone in one of the rooms of one of the school's buildings, is exactly how Judaism survived for so long despite living as small minorities amongst giant majorities who historically conquered large swaths of Earth and eliminated hundreds if not thousands of religions. Thankfully for them, they have a place to do it in relative safety and acceptance.

The Confluence of ALF and Lounging

Speaking of the disgusting assassination of Charlie Kirk, an extremely sad event in recent American history, I decided to take heed of the Governor of Utah's words (at least I think it was him) and log off for a while. Social media is absolutely destroying our lives, and even though I don't really have any social media accounts, I still found myself exposed to so much reprehensible vile after Charlie's murder. So I decided to at least limit my exposure to the Internet for a while and find something more innocent to pass my time with.

Immediately, I thought of the old TV show ALF. I'm lying, of course, I did not think about it at all, it's just one of the things that's available out of the box on the TV in my apartment. I started watching it from the beginning, and I gotta say, it was refreshing. I really missed innocent, good hearted, uncontroversial TV. Something that doesn't shove sex and war down your throat all the fucking time.

I mean, seriously, if you really think about, many of the shows that are considered "family friendly" these days are so full of sex and war it's insane. Hell, even Friends, one of the most beloved and heavily-broadcast TV show in history, has jokes about oral sex, anal sex, countless references to sex and even an on-screen orgasm. Hey, I have no problem watching these things as much as next guy, after all, Seinfeld and Married… with Children are my two favorite TV shows, and they've had sex jokes all the time. But these shows were never billed as family-friendly shows. They weren't shoved down our throats ad nauseam. There are no TV channels dedicated to playing these shows 24 hours a day.

It's nice to see something that can be funny or at the very least amusing and fun to watch without all the bullshit. Sure, nostalgia has some part in this, and the show does have its tropes and cliches, but it's good and wholesome, so I recommend you do the same, try and forget how humanity is doomed and watch a show about a cute furry alien. There's nothing you can do about it all anyway. Free Frankenstein!