#save me jewish scholars save me

[hermthejewishwyrm]

Whenever a goy says something dumb about Judaism or Tanach i mentally picture them saying that same thing to rambam and than getting torn to absolute shreds verbally.

[forthegothicheroine]

For those asking, I no longer have my sociology report on trick or treating because it was (god help me) 10+ years ago and I probably used a local save file. However, here's what I recall learning from books and from interviewing all the parents I knew about the practice.

Trick or Treating itself does seem to have ancient roots, but it's not as simple as 'it started as x thing and became y thing.' People have always wanted to have a big holiday when the harvest comes in and it starts to get dark early. Children going around and asking for treats specifically seems to have gone in and out of fashion over different time periods, but there is a strong history of partying.

Candles in fruit and vegetables does seem to have history in this regard. I read a fairy tale about how Jack of the Lantern pulled a trick on the devil and so was not allowed into either heaven or hell but had to roam the earth carrying only a lantern to guide him, but I suspect that is not actually the origin of the practice.

Some variants on trick or treating took place on Christmas. This mostly died out in America by the mid 20th century.

Nobody in living memory had celebrated All Hallows Eve as a religious Christian thing (as opposed to Day of the Dead, which is a separate holiday, or neopagans celebrating Samhain.) Religious children, Christian or Jewish, were more likely to have been forbidden from trick or treating.

The Celts likely had some form of human sacrifice because a lot of ancient cultures did, but it's hard to know the details because the Romans had a vested interest in making them appear barbaric.

There have been a couple cases of people putting pins in candy, but the razor in an apple thing seems made up. In the most well known, confirmed and tragic case of candy tampering, it was the victim's own father who did it. Due to this panic, the practice of giving out home backed cookies was mostly dead.

As with Rocky Horror, Halloween used to be a time where you could dress in drag and not get hassled.

Most of the parents (Boomer and older) I talked to had gone trick or treating as children, except the ones who were immigrants from a place without that practice.

City and suburban parents said far fewer children were trick or treating at their houses now, as kids can go to stores downtown, but the more rural the neighborhood, the more likely kids went door to door.

You used to be able to demand a "trick" from a child in exchange for a treat and they would do something funny. Nobody knows this now except my husband, who was eager to perform magic tricks as a child at the drop of a hat. (He got a lot candy this way.)

I imagine that there's been a lot more Celtic history research since I went to college, so do not take this as an authoritative guide! I will still recommend a book I heavily referenced for this, Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween by horror scholar David J. Skal as both informative and a whole lot of fun.

[girlactionfigure]

Rabbi Reuven Israel Kott was a Torah prodigy whose cleverness and chutzpah saved thousands of Jews from annihilation by the Nazis.

Born in a Polish shtetl in 1897, Reuven was one of fifteen children. His family were Hasidic followers of the Ger Rebbe.

Reuven’s exceptional intellect was apparent at a young age. He was a gifted scholar of Talmud and Jewish scripture, so precocious that he was given rabbinic ordination when only 17 years old.

The Rebbe took a special liking to Reuven, and every Friday night Reuven sat next to the great man at his festive Sabbath gathering. Small in size - he stood only 5’1” - Reuven was known for his big brain, and big heart.

Reuven was selected by his community to represent them as the Jewish voice on the local provincial council. When the Polish president died in the 1920’s, young Reuven stood at the graveside with other clergy and delivered a eulogy on behalf of the Jews of Poland.

Although life seemed fairly good for Polish Jews at the time, the Ger Rebbe sensed that big trouble was coming. He urged his followers to get out of Poland and move to Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel), at that time British Mandate Palestine.

As the Rebbe’s right-hand man, Rabbi Reuven Kott threw himself into the mission of helping Jews leave Poland and return to their ancestral homeland.

The British had a quota system restricting the number of Jewish families they let in. Reuven took advantage of a bureaucratic loophole defining “family” as two parents and an undetermined number of offspring.

Reuven collected money and bribed Polish authorities to get blank birth certificates. He would then “create” new families, matching people up, changing names and identities as needed. Every “family" had at least a dozen children.

Reuven told those he helped that they must stick with their fake identity. Most people complied, but a few didn’t and were caught. Under threat of being sent back to Poland, somebody gave Reuven’s name to the authorities.

Reuven and his brother were on a train in Warsaw when three plain-clothes officers approached. After verifying his identity, they arrested Reuven for bribery and forgery and threw him in jail. As a pious Jew, Reuven couldn’t eat the non-kosher jail food, so every day his daughter brought him a kosher meal - a two hour journey each way.

After several long months, his brother finally got word that there was going to be a hearing in the case. He went to visit Reuven in jail, told him the news and asked which lawyer he wanted to hire.

Reuven scribbled something on a scrap of paper, folded it up and slipped it through the bars of his cell. Outside the jail, Reuven’s brother unfolded the note. He was shocked to read the contents: “Hire me the most anti-Semitic lawyer in Warsaw!“

Reuven’s family was baffled. With so many top-notch Jewish lawyers, why would he want an anti-Semite? Had his incarceration led to a mental breakdown? Reuven’s brother assured them that he was of sound mind, and he went to Warsaw and found an attorney notorious for his fierce hatred of Jews.

The day of the hearing arrived, and the courthouse was packed with hundreds of Hasids from Reuven’s community. Reuven was allowed only three minutes with his lawyer, and then the hearing began.

To everybody’s shock, Reuven’s lawyer stood up, made a brilliant argument, and got the case dismissed.

Back home in the shtetl, everybody wanted to know what Reuven had said to his lawyer in those three minutes. Reuven said his Talmud study had taught him that in a business deal, if you get three “Yes” answers, the deal will close.

He asked his lawyer three questions:

- You hate us Jews, don’t you?

- Do you want to see me rot and die in jail?

- Would you like all of us Jews gone from Poland?

The lawyer answered yes to all three questions. Reuven immediately shot back, “What good would it do if one measly Jew rots in jail? If you set me free, I can get all the Jews out of Poland!”

Reuven got what he wanted by blinding the lawyer with his own hate. He continued his work “creating” large families and helping them move to Palestine. The anti-Semitic attorney even helped him procure more blank birth certificates. People often asked Reuven when he would go to Eretz Yisrael. He said, “I’m like the captain of a sinking ship. It is my responsibility to get all the passengers out before I get in the lifeboat.”

Over the course of 20 years, Reuven helped tens of thousands of Jews escape Poland. Today, almost half a million descendants of those Polish Jews owe their lives to Rabbi Reuven Israel Kott.

Unfortunately, Reuven himself never made it to Israel. He was murdered at Auschwitz in 1942.

For proving that one small man in three short minutes can accomplish miracles beyond measure, we honor Rabbi Reuven Israel Kott as this week’s Thursday Hero at Accidental Talmudist.

This story was told to us by Reuven’s granddaughter, Ziporah Bank. She heard it from her mom - the daughter who brought kosher meals to Rabbi Kott in prison. 

Accidental Talmudist

[spacelazarwolf]

I’m an Italian ger who’s being converted in an Ashkenazi community. I want to connect to my culture so badly!!! Is there any books you’d recommend, Italki food you love, or special rituals you do on Shabbat / during the week that are influenced by being Italian? I’d love to introduce more into my own practice!!

yeah! also this ended up being probably more in depth than you were asking for so apologies lmao.

so for some context (in case you or anyone reading this is not already aware), italki jews are a specific group of jews within italy. italki isn't like a nationality, so it's not a synonym for "italian jew", it's more like a regional identity. people from rome, naples, and venice are all italian, but they're also roman, neapolitan, and venetian. even if they move somewhere else, they'll likely still retain that regional identity. italy didn't become a unified republic until 1871, so culture and language and food varied a lot by region (which it still does), and that's true of jewish communities too, especially those that came from other places.

italki jews are jews who were brought to italy by the romans or traveled to rome to be merchants, and have been there since roman times. ashkenazi jews came during the middle ages, primarily settling in the north in places like venice. it's very worth noting that ashkenazim in italy, with the exception of one or two communities, have significantly different musical tradition, pronunciation, language, and food than other ashkenazi communities. sephardi jews came mostly after the expulsion from spain and portugal, though there were some living in sicily and southern italy.

with all that in mind, i'd definitely recommend doing some research into the demographics of the jewish community in the place you or your family is from. if you already live there, it should be much easier!

resources:

the jews in italy- their contribution to the development and diffusion of jewish heritage

cookbooks by edda servi machlin (she has several, but some are hard to find)

cucina ebraica

i highly recommend checking out torah.it. it's a fantastic archive of recordings and pdfs all about italian jewry. you will spend hours there and still have only scratched the surface.

rabbi barbara aiello also has a lot of different resources.

i highly recommend checking out the work of leo levi for research on italian jewish music. he spent years interviewing and recording chazzanut, scholars, and other community leaders and saved so many italian jewish melodies from complete extinction. (i believe all these recordings are uploaded to torah.it as well)

primo levi is another italian jew to research. he wrote many books that are available for purchase, including a memoir about his survival in auschwitz. there is also an institute in his name dedicated to the preservation, study, and celebration of italian judaism.

ensemble bet hagat put out an album of reimagined italian jewish music a few years ago and i believe they are also working on a second one. it is beautiful.

anyway that's probably enough nerding out, i can get to the more personal stuff and answering the actual questions you asked me now lmao.

right now, it's just me in my apartment so there's a lot of traditions i can't do, but if you have family or friends you can invite over, there are a lot of lovely traditions you can incorporate. i use a three branched candelabra for my shabbat candles. the middle candle is lit first and used to light the other two, as you would with hanukkah candles. if you have multiple people at your table, you can give them their own individual candles, in which case you will light the shamash (middle candle), pass it around the table for each person to light their individual candle, then the host will light the two other candles.

for food, i love making riso del sabato. it's a risotto dish with saffron and it is delicious. there's also a pumpkin ravioli in brown butter and sage sauce in cucina ebraica that is to die for.

[determinate-negation]

German anon again. Of course I think Germans and the German state are racist. I thought i made that pretty clear. This is about where left-wing people show up and where they don't. Where we join in fights and where we start wishing people a slow death (wtf?). Where some people completely manage to ignore the violence towards jewish people (which has increased significantly) and where we tolerate other forms of antisemitism like no longer listening to what Jewish people or scholars say. Again, anti-zionist Jewish people. Antisemitism doesnt go away just because the state of Isreal is committing crimes against humanity. As you said yourself, Isreal and Jewish people are not the same.

And the far right wing party, the AfD has plans to get rid of all POC as well as left-wing people who "cannot be saved" including LGBTIQ+ people so i dont know what yout point here was? Of course they will also target disabled people, Jewish people, other minorities. They are literally a Nazi party with Nazi members. And currently the left is completely divided because apparently being anti genocide, pro palestinian and also pro protecting Jewish people in Germany all at the same time is not possible for some people. And the facists here and in the US have it even easier because of it. If this opinion is so controversial that people find it cringe or wish me a slow death then great, we are so far beyond of having any meaningful anti-fascist, anti-imperialist resistance against what's to come that we are genuinely so fucked. I would also appreciate for you to be mindful of what messages you share. It's quite upsetting to try and connect and find common ground with other left-wing people who offer a position and insight from their country and have such a hateful response. We are not enemies.

Once again about 2014: The response in Germany was more than anyone had anticipated. People started offering apprenticeships, their homes, emotional and bureaucratic support, soli-parties, and again all language courses were booked out for months. Free language classes offered by private persons. That doesn't mean suddenly Germans aren't racist anymore and i know very well how violent life in Germany is for refugees. I was trying to compare social action in times of crises and where people show up quickly and efficiently to help and where they remain abscent. When Jewish places got attacked recently there was one antifa Mahnwache but no nation wide protests against anti-semitism. My only point is: I think we have capacity to show up for more causes. We have to. Ukraine's fight is our fight. Palestine's fight is our fight. Imperialism, racism, antisemitism, desinformation, anti-LGBT* are all our fight. I thought this was the whole point.

thanks for totally proving my point about german political pedantry. i dont think my response was especially hateful but youre pushing me cause this is kind of obnoxious

ive seen coverage of “anti antisemitism” and pro israeli rallies in germany, maybe leftist anti zionists arent associating with them bc theyre full of genocidal zionists and racists. meanwhile i see german police arresting pro palestine jews, and nearly 1/3 of people who got their events cancelled in germany for being pro palestine are jewish. but you already conflate burning israeli flags with antisemitism so you seem to have a distorted view on this

also ukraine is not my cause. and people dont generally go out and protest in support of things their government is already funding

[momentsbeforemass]

The best part

In the church I grew up in, we got the parable of the Good Samaritan (today’s Gospel) over and over.

It was used all the time in sermons, in Sunday school, plays, programs, etc. Watered-down. Until it was little more than general niceness.

Looking closer, at the context for the Good Samaritan? That’s rescued the parable for me, helped me to hear Jesus’ actual message. Here’s what helped me the most.

First, the priest and the Levite who walk by the wounded traveler do this to avoid ritual defilement. According to the law, they would be defiled if they handled a corpse. The traveler was gravely wounded – but they were treating him as if he was already dead.

·       The ones who publicly declare themselves to be believers are using their faith to avoid helping others. Even though their own teachings tell them to break the Sabbath (their greatest commandment) to save a life.

Second, the Samaritan (the hero) is worse than a foreigner. Samaritans were Jews who had intermarried with gentiles. They didn’t worship at the Temple in Jerusalem. Their scriptures stopped with the Torah. In Jewish terms, they were heretics. And the two groups’ hatred for each other was legendary.

·       The one who asked, “who is my neighbor?” is a scholar of the law, someone who would be expected to hate the Samaritans.

Third, the two silver coins given to the innkeeper are two silver denaria. Enough money to pay for the traveler’s care and lodging for two months.

·       The Samaritan’s help isn’t just a one-and-done. It’s more than enough, for as long as it takes. As shown by his commitment to the innkeeper to pay even more. Because of this, a lot of the greats of the early church (Augustine, Ambrose, Origen, Jerome, etc.) saw Jesus in the Samaritan.

But the part that hits the hardest for me is the shameless love that shines out in Jesus even telling the parable of the Good Samaritan.

In telling the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus is responding to someone asking a BS question to make himself look clever – “But because he wished to justify himself, he said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” 

Instead of calling him out on his BS or telling him off, Jesus takes the time. To see if there’s more going on than just someone trying to look clever. To get through to the person behind the carefully manufactured public image of a scholar of the law.

To me, that is the best part. God loves us so much that He will even use our BS – if that’s what it takes – to get through to us. God never gives up on us.

Today’s Readings

[mariacallous]

“The Hague’s Hypocrisy,” roared the headline in one of Israel’s mass-circulation dailies. “The Hague’s Disgrace,” blared the competing paper.

Outrage was the most obvious public response in Israel when the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, announced that he’d seek arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on charges of crimes against humanity. Khan’s parallel request to arrest three Hamas leaders didn’t quiet the fury.

Netanyahu, predictably, accused Khan of feeding “the fires of antisemitism.” But even Israeli legal experts who are deeply critical of the prime minister were disturbed that Khan seemed to put Israeli and Hamas commanders in the same category. “It’s unacceptable to create legal equivalence between the attacker (Hamas) and the attacked (Israel),” as one wrote.

I’m an ordinary enough Israeli to share some of that reflexive anger. The world does seem to pay outsized attention to Israeli actions, and to forget which side committed atrocities on Oct. 7, 2023, and ignited this war.

But outrage is a poor tool for judging whether Khan has a case against Netanyahu and Gallant. For me, the key to answering that question is in a name: Theodor Meron.

Before submitting his request, Khan submitted his evidence to a committee of leading experts on the laws of war. They agreed unanimously that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the suspects he identifies have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity within the jurisdiction of the ICC.” Theodor Meron—a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor, jurist, and former Israeli diplomat—is by far the most prominent of those experts.

I first encountered the name “T. Meron” in the Israeli State Archives more than 20 years ago while researching The Accidental Empire, my book on the history of Israeli settlements in occupied territory. His signature appeared at the bottom of a page in a declassified file from the office of the late Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. The top of the page was marked “Most Secret.” What appeared in between pushed me to find out more about him.

Meron was born in 1930 to what he would describe as a “middle-class Jewish family” in Kalisz, Poland. His “happy but, alas, short childhood” ended at age 9 with the German invasion. Somehow, he survived the Holocaust while living in Nazi ghettos and labor camps. Most of his family did not. Soon after the war, at age 15, he managed to immigrate to the city of Haifa in what was then British-ruled Palestine.

For six years, his only schooling had been suffering. The lost years of education “gave me a great hunger for learning,” he’d say later. He completed high school in a new language, then a law degree at the Hebrew University, then a doctorate at Harvard and post-doctoral studies in international law at Cambridge.

In 1957, with no academic position in the offing, he took an offer from the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Just after the Six-Day War in 1967, he was appointed as the ministry’s legal advisor—effectively, the Israeli government’s top authority on international law—as a 37-year-old wunderkind.

A decade and an ambassadorship later, he returned to academia. As for many Israeli scholars, this meant going abroad—in Meron’s case, to New York University’s law school. His legal writing has been described as having “helped build the legal foundations for international criminal tribunals”—starting with the one established by the United Nations in 1993 to deal with crimes committed in the wars following the breakup of Yugoslavia.

By then a U.S. citizen, Meron was appointed as a judge on that tribunal in 2001. He served for several years as its president and on its appeals court. In an interview, he said he found his position “poignant” and “daunting”: the onetime child prisoner of the Nazis now presiding in judgment on crimes including genocide. He has taken particular pride in a ruling that “defined rape and sexual slavery as crimes against humanity.”

Well into his 90s, Meron is again a law professor, this time at Oxford University—as well as an advisor to Khan, the ICC chief, most recently on the case against the Israeli and Hamas leaders.

It is crucial to recall that Khan’s request for warrants is not a conviction. What Meron and the other experts confirmed is that the evidence and the law provide a basis for trying Netanyahu and Gallant, as well as Hamas figures Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh.

The experts’ report rejected any Israeli claim that the International Criminal Court lacks standing. “Palestine, including Gaza, is a State for the purpose of the ICC Statute,” they said. Unlike Israel, it has accepted the court’s jurisdiction. The court therefore can rule on actions in Gaza—and by Palestinians on Israeli territory, the report says.

In a joint opinion piece in the Financial Times, Meron and his colleagues also stressed that “the charges have nothing to do with the reasons for the conflict.” To unpack that: Israel may be fighting a justifiable war of defense—but certain Israelis, including the head of government, may have committed crimes in the way that they’ve conducted that war.

The proposed charges against Sinwar, Deif, and Haniyeh include the crime against humanity of extermination in the killing of civilians in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and the war crimes of taking hostages and of rape.

The central charge against Netanyahu and Gallant is that they engaged in “a common plan to use starvation and other acts of violence against the Gazan civilian population”—in order to eradicate Hamas, free the Israeli hostages, and punish the Gazan population. In other words, impeding humanitarian aid wasn’t a foul-up. It was allegedly an intentional means of waging war.

Khan lists the types of evidence that he gathered—interviews with survivors, video material, satellite images, and more. He did not release the evidence itself. For now, we’re left to rely on the unanimous view of the experts. And there is likely no one on earth more qualified than Meron to judge whether Khan has a solid case. To suggest that Meron is persecuting Israel seems laughable. To claim that he is antisemitic is obscene.

This isn’t a verdict. It’s a reason to take the charges seriously.

In fact, Israel would likely not be in this situation if its government had taken Theodor Meron seriously much sooner—in September 1967, when he wrote the memorandum that I found in the archives.

At the time, Prime Minister Eshkol was weighing whether Israel should create settlements in the territory it had conquered in the unexpected war three months earlier. Eshkol leaned toward reestablishing Kfar Etzion, a kibbutz that had been overrun by Arab forces in 1948. The site was between Hebron and Bethlehem in the West Bank, which had been ruled by Jordan in the intervening years. Eshkol was also interested in settlement in the Golan Heights, Syrian territory that had also recently been conquered by Israel.

In a cabinet meeting, though, the justice minister had warned that settling civilians in “administered” territory—the government’s term for occupied land—would violate international law. Eshkol’s bureau chief asked the Foreign Ministry’s legal advisor to weigh in.

Meron’s response was categorical: “My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.” The 1949 convention on protection of civilians in time of war, he explained, barred an occupying power from moving part of its population into occupied land. The provision, he wrote, was “aimed at preventing colonization” by the conquering state.

Nine days later, a group of young Israelis settled at the Kfar Etzion site, with the government’s backing. At first, the settlement was identified publicly as a military outpost. As Meron himself had noted, it was legal to build temporary military bases in occupied territory. But this was a ruse, and it quickly wore thin as the civilian character of new settlements became obvious.

So the government soon depended instead on the argument of two prominent Israeli jurists, Yehuda Blum and Meir Shamgar. They argued that the Fourth Geneva Convention didn’t apply to the West Bank. Since Jordan’s sovereignty there had gone almost entirely unrecognized internationally—so their argument went—it wasn’t occupied territory.

As Meron himself wrote in 2017, 50 years after his original memorandum, this theory doesn’t hold water. The convention isn’t aimed at protecting states and claims of sovereignty. It protects people living under occupation from acts of the occupying power.

This raises the question: What would have happened if Eshkol’s government had gritted its teeth in 1967 and accepted its own lawyer’s opinion?

To start, there’d be no settlements in occupied territory. The entire network of large Israeli suburbs, smaller gated exurbs, and tiny outposts wouldn’t exist. The Israeli military would not need to guard these communities, and Israel would not have invested vast resources in tying itself to occupied territory.

We can’t know if there would now be a Palestinian state next to Israel, or perhaps peace in some other constellation. Settlements have not been the only obstacle to a peace agreement. But they are a major one. Moreover, a portion of the settlements—the ideological exurbs—have been a hothouse for the Israeli radical religious right, utterly opposed to giving up land. The two most extreme parties in Netanyahu’s government are led by settlers and count the settlements as their core constituency. Without the settlements, the odds of Israel avoiding its current predicament would have been better.

Accepting Meron’s opinion back then could also have established a different attitude toward international law among Israeli politicians and military leaders—namely, a position of stringent observance. Perhaps such an attitude would have led Netanyahu and Gallant to conduct the current war in a different way, avoiding the acts now alleged by the ICC prosecutor.

Yet the key word is alleged. A critical element of the crimes that Khan alleges is that they were intentional—that starvation and other causes of civilian death were a policy.

It is indeed possible that Israel’s leaders deliberately prevented food and other basic needs from reaching the people of Gaza—that aid was blocked as a means of pressuring Hamas to release hostages or even to give up rule of Gaza. Hamas has used Gazan civilians as human shields; perhaps Netanyahu sought to use their suffering as a weapon against Hamas.

It’s also possible that the failure to get food to Gazans is a result of multiple factors: of the chaos of battle, Egyptian mistakes, Hamas actions, Israeli soldiers mistakenly firing on aid workers just as they have sometimes mistakenly fired on other Israelis, and of the Israeli government’s incompetence—a continuation of the miserable ineptitude that left Israel unprepared on Oct. 7.

All too many people in the world seem to be certain already which of these possibilities is true, based largely on their prior assumptions or the tsunami of media reports. If Khan ever does manage to bring Netanyahu and Gallant to trial, though, he will need to establish intent with hard evidence.

There is another lesson that I took from finding Meron’s 1967 memo: The best evidence of government intent often lies in documents that stay secret for decades. This is even more true of decisions in war, and it adds to the reasons that Israel itself should be investigating what has happened in Gaza.

It’s unlikely that the International Criminal Court would have access to classified Israeli documents. On the other hand, an Israeli state commission of inquiry into the entire conduct of the war—from the disastrous intelligence failure of Oct. 7 onward—would be able to demand such access, and to call top officials and officers to testify.

An explicit point made in Khan’s announcement is that he would defer to Israel if it were conducting its own “independent and impartial” investigation of the alleged crimes. This is the principle of “complementarity”: The ICC’s jurisdiction applies only when national judicial systems fail to act.

A commission of inquiry isn’t a criminal proceeding. But if Israel were investigating itself, then Khan would have good reason to suspend or end his own investigation.

Within Israel, however, it’s a given that Netanyahu’s government will not instigate an inquiry commission with the necessary independence and wide mandate. That can come only if the country’s intense political crisis leads to the fall of the government and new elections.

Netanyahu would like to use the reflexive public anger against Khan’s request for arrest warrants to restore some of his lost support. But the rational reaction is the opposite: The potential ICC case is one more reason to end Netanyahu’s rule and investigate all facets of the war.

Or to put it differently: In 1967, at the start of the occupation, an Israeli government ignored a warning from a remarkably young advisor on international law. Today, Israel needs to heed a new warning from a remarkably old authority on the laws of the war—the same man.

[sapropel]

NAOMI KLEIN

April 24, 2024

My friends, I’ve been thinking about Moses and his rage when he came down from the mount to find the Israelites worshiping a golden calf. The ecofeminist in me has always been uneasy about this story. What kind of god is jealous of animals? What kind of god wants to hoard all the sacredness of the Earth for himself? But there is, of course, a less literal way of understanding this story. It is a lesson about false idols, about the human tendency to worship the profane and shining, to look to the small and material rather than the large and transcendent.

What I want to say to you this evening at this revolutionary and historic Seder in the Streets is that too many of our people are worshiping a false idol once again. They are enraptured by it. They are drunk on it. They are profaned by it. And that false idol is called Zionism.

It is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery, the story of Passover itself, and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide. It is a false idol that has taken the transcendent idea of the Promised Land, a metaphor for human liberation that has traveled across faiths to every corner of this globe, and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militarist ethnostate.

Political Zionism’s version of liberation is itself profane. From the start, it required the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and ancestral lands in the Nakba. From the start, it has been at war with collective dreams of liberation. At a seder, it is worth remembering that this includes the dreams of liberation and self-determination of the Egyptian people. This false idol of Zionism has long equated Israeli safety with Egyptian dictatorship and unfreedom and client state. From the start, it has produced an ugly kind of freedom that saw Palestinian children not as human beings, but as demographic threats, much as the Pharaoh in the Book of Exodus feared the growing population of Israelites and thus ordered the death of their sons. And as we know, Moses was saved from that by being put in a basket and adopted by an Egyptian woman.

Zionism has brought us to our present moment of cataclysm, and it is time that we say clearly it has always been leading us here. It is a false idol that has led far too many of our own people down a deeply immoral path that now has them justifying the shredding of core commandments — “Thou shall not kill,” “Thou shall not steal,” “Thou shall not covet” — the commandments brought down from the mount. It is a false idol that equates Jewish freedom with cluster bombs that kill and maim Palestinian children.

Zionism is a false idol that has betrayed every Jewish value, including the value that we place on questioning a practice embedded in the seder itself with its four questions asked by the youngest child. It also betrays the love that we have as a people for text and for education. Today this false idol dares to justify the bombing of every single university in Gaza, the destruction of countless schools, of archives, of printing presses, the killing of hundreds of academics, scholars, journalists, poets, essayists. This is what Palestinians call scholasticide, the killing of the infrastructure and the means of education.

Meanwhile, in this city, the universities call the NYPD and barricade themselves against the grave threat posed by their own students asking them... questions like “How can you claim to believe in anything at all, least of all us, while you enable, invest in and collaborate with this genocide?”

The false idol of Zionism has been allowed to grow unchecked for far too long. So tonight we say it ends here. Our Judaism cannot be contained by an ethnostate, for our Judaism is internationalist by its very nature. Our Judaism cannot be protected by the rampaging military of that ethnostate, for all that military does is sow sorrow and reap hatred, including hatred against us as Jews. Our Judaism is not threatened by people raising their voices in solidarity with Palestine across lines of race, ethnicity, physical ability, gender identity and generations. Our Judaism is one of those voices and knows that in this chorus lies both our safety and our collective liberation.

Our Judaism is the Judaism of the Passover Seder, the gathering in ceremony to share food and wine with loved ones and strangers alike. This ritual, light enough to carry on our backs, in need of nothing but one another, even with — we don’t need walls. We need no temple, no rabbi. And there is a role for everyone, including especially the smallest child. The seder is portable, a diaspora technology if ever there was one. It is made to hold our collective grieving, our contemplation, our questioning, our remembering, and our reviving and rekindling of the revolutionary spirit.

So, tonight — so, look around. This here is our Judaism. As waters rise and forests burn and nothing is certain, we pray at the altar of solidarity and mutual aid, no matter the cost. We don’t need or want the false idol of Zionism. We want freedom from the project that commits genocide in our name. We want freedom from the ideology that has no plan for peace, except for deals with the murderous, theocratic petrostates next door, while selling the technologies of robo-assassinations to the world. We seek to liberate Judaism from an ethnostate that wants Jews to be perennially afraid, that wants our children afraid, that wants us to believe that the world is against us so that we go running to its fortress, or at least keep sending the weapons and the donations.

That is a false idol. And it’s not just Netanyahu. It’s the world he made and the world that made him. It’s Zionism. What are we? We, in these streets for months and months, we are the exodus, the exodus from Zionism. So, to the Chuck Schumers of this world, we do not say, “Let our people go.” We say, “We have already gone, and your kids, they are with us now.”

[sallysetoncore]

so elsie and i just finished 11x6 Our Little World which is the episode in which they explicitly reveal for the first time that Amara is "god's sister" and they explain their version of the creation story; that god had to sacrifice his own kin for humanity. and elsie points out. "uhhhh i sure hope he does???" and proceeds to do the sign of the cross. which is so insanely funny to me but i also like. had to sit there and process it.

bc like me and a billion other jewpernatural scholars have talked at length about how supernatural was never going to do Jesus. like . kripke is jewish and it would not have made sense. there's like two throwaway lines the whole show to Jesus and a fuckton of great crucifixion imagery w Sam specifically but like. there is no Jesus (or that would dramatically shift how heaven/hell works!!! and like the whole show would fall about). but like. yeah. fucking. yeah i guess.

which like sets up the question of like. okay so amara isn't jesus obviously (nor do i want her to be) AND we're talking about god making a sacrifice to create humanity, not for saving them from hell/damnation/sin. supernatural's god does not really give a shit about who goes to hell? like that's not his job and he would never sacrifice his own son to make sure people could go to heaven. like it does not fit in w supernatural lore and i love that. i love their absent god. which i want to talk about more when i hit s12 in this rewatch but i don't want to go too in depth on while me and elsie (again, my third watch, elsie's first watch) are only on s11 (as a reminder,,,,,, like at this point in s11,,,,, we don't even know that we've seen god and we've only seen him once, BRIEFLY, at the end of 10.5 . an entire season ago and we don't even know it's god. like last we heard of him was what, cas praying in 6.20???? and he doesn't respond???? anyway that's all i can say for now). but my question about amara is.... shouldn't she be a guy?

HANG ON OKAY. so this is the brothers show. it's a show about brothers. that's like the fucking tagline right (outside of saving people hunting things). and we just did the mark of cain in s10 right. and they didn't cast abel. they didn't cast abel. so wouldn't it make sense if this was a brother versus brother thing? like we haven't really done that since s5's lucifer v michael. could be fun to do it again.

but noooooo amara has to be a girl because of the weird dean shit going on. to be clear i fucking love amara, i think she's one of the more fun and interesting villains, and i LOVE the evil women of supernatural (meg and ruby and lillith and abaddon i loveeee you). but it's like. oh you had to make her a woman because you didn't want dean to be gay. you have a billion other male villains up against dean who have a weird like, face cradling "i know your shame/soul you have a hole in your heart i know you" dynamic with dean (crowley and alastair come to mind first). and we have a male version of every female dynamic sam has (sam gets ruby, dean gets cas. sam gets amelia, dean gets benny. sam gets the girl in mint condition, dean gets the guy. etc etc etc). but because the amara/dean thing is just SLIGHTLY more explicit... couldn't be a guy.

anyway does anyone remember when the market research was

[paulinedorchester]

Men of Vision: Anglo-Jewry’s Aid to Victims of the Nazi Regime, 1933-1945, by Amy Zahl Gottlieb. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998.

For the past several decades, it has been fashionable in certain parts of the Jewish community to the point the finger of blame at other parts of the Jewish community when asking why more Jewish lives weren’t saved during the Holocaust — no-one who could have done anything lifted a finger, we are told. Several years ago, while doing fanfic-related research, I came across citations of two fairly recent books to this effect by British scholars looking at British Jews, both apparently highly condemnatory. I don’t recall many other details, such as when those books appeared (it seems to me that they were published within a year or two of each other), but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Amy Zahl Gottlieb wrote Men of Vision as a rebuttal to this type of rhetoric.

One thing that I do remember is that the authors of both books were quite young. (I also recall that some digging revealed that the books sank without a trace, along with the academic careers of their authors.) Gottlieb, on the other hand, was actually there.

She was born in 1919 in Stepney, East London, and left school in 1934; I don’t know what she did for the next decade, but at the beginning of 1944 she became part of the first Jewish Relief Unit of the Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad (JCRA), serving in Egypt and Greece. She then joined a still-extant American organization, the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, for which she oversaw the emigration of thousands of people in European D.P. camps to North, Central, and South America, Australia, New Zealand and, to a much lesser extent, the U.K. If what I’ve read is to be believed, Gottlieb single-handedly arranged for Oskar Schindler to emigrate to Argentina in 1949. She led quite a life, all in all; here’s her obituary in the April 2010 issue of the newsletter of the Association of Jewish Refugees:

JCRA was to a certain extent an offshoot of the Central British Fund for German Jewry (CBF), which was organized in 1933 by a group of Londoners, many of them finance-industry leaders, all of them Jewish and most with close family ties to Germany. In the late 1980s Gottlieb was asked to organize CBF archival materials that had been discovered unexpectedly; it seems that most of the CBF’s files had been destroyed not long after the war ended. At a time when consumable resources of all kinds were in short supply, pulping those records could have been seen as a patriotic act.

However, Gottlieb maintains that throughout its history the CBF was deeply publicity-shy, seeking attention only in the pages of The Jewish Chronicle. For what it’s worth, searching the organization’s name in the British Newspaper Archive got me 86 results (mostly coverage of fund-raising events during the first few years of its existence); but given that CBF’s goal was to get as many Jews as possible out of Germany (and, later, Austria and Czechoslovakia) and have them least temporarily housed in the U.K. — this at a time of mass unemployment and in the face of attitudes from the Chamberlain, Churchill and, yes, Attlee governments that ranged from indifference to thinly-veiled hostility — she is able to make a strong case had that its leadership had to tread very carefully.

That the CBF was able to accomplish as much as it did seems miraculous: it was involved in the rescue of 10,000 unaccompanied minors and nearly as many unattached adults and people in family groups, all before the war began. Even during the war it helped some of them to emigrate to British Mandate Palestine, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, or other places. These journeys were undertaken at tremendous risk to the refugees, but there must have been times when they seemed like a better alternative to staying in Britain. Finding places for the refugees there ended up requiring the CBF to work with a variety of Christian organizations, some of which were completely open about their agenda: to place as many unaccompanied children as possible in situations where they could be “introduced to authentic Christian family life.” “Some of those young people were lost to Judaism,” Gottlieb remarks, with restraint.

The title of this book is liable to give some people fits, I know, but it appears to have been accurate: in Gottlieb’s telling, at least, the handful of women who were involved played strictly subsidiary roles.

This seems to have been Gottlieb’s only book, and it could be better organized and more smoothly written. But as a corrective to the negativity that too often prevails, it works.

[fanchonmoreau]

You, probably: at least now that we've moved from Chilling Adventures of Sabrina to Doom Patrol, we won't have weird Jewish theology lectures with our Michelle Gomez content.

Me, rolling up my sleeves: Laura de Mille's redemption arc works because it is grounded in the Jewish medieval scholar Maimonides's steps of Teshuvah (repentance). There are variations of how many steps there are when modern scholars talk about them, but the outline is that the person who has done wrong: regrets the action, recognizes it was wrong, confesses to the hurt party and asks forgiveness, does whatever they can/is asked of them to make it right, and makes a different and better choice at the next opportunity. We've seen Laura through most of this process, and her arc will likely culminate with her being given a choice between saving the Doom Patrol and saving her own skin. The final test of her repentance will be if she trusts the Doom Patrol enough to go down with them, making the choice that she couldn't with the Sisterhood of Dada.

[girlactionfigure]

Back in the 50s, Danny Thomas was a major TV star who had a successful comedy series on national television (CBS) called ‘Make Room for Daddy’ (Later changed to ‘The Danny Thomas Show’). The son of Maronite immigrants from Lebanon, read that a young medical student, the son of Chassidic immigrants from Ukraine, was struggling to pay his tuition, and donated the shortfall. As a result, countless lives were saved and made better by Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski.

Rabbi Twerski described the story in an interview with the Pittsburgh Quarterly on November 19, 2007:

“By that time, I had several children, so my dad and some members of the congregation helped me to pay for school. I applied for a scholarship through a foundation, but it didn’t come through, so in my third year, I fell two trimesters behind on tuition.

One day, I called my wife at lunch as always, and she asked, “What would you do if you had $4,000?” I said, “I’m too busy to talk about fantasies.” She said, “But you really do have $4,000!” I said, “From where?” She said, “From Danny Thomas.” “Who’s Danny Thomas?” She said, “The TV star.”

Then she read me an article from The Chicago Sun. Local officials had told Mr. Thomas about a young rabbi who was struggling to get through medical school. Thomas asked, “How much does your rabbi need?” They said, “Four thousand dollars.” He said, “Tell your rabbi he’s got it.”

Rabbi Twerski was a scholar with feet planted firmly in two worlds — the rabbinic world of Torah and Talmud study, and a medical doctor and licensed psychiatrist. It was a rare pairing that earned him respect in both the insular ultra-Orthodox Jewish world and wider American society. He was an expert on addiction and scion of a long line of prominent rabbis descended from the 18th-century founder of Hassidic Judaism, the Baal Shem Tov.

Rabbi Twerski was a prolific writer. He authored dozens of books on a wide array of subjects: from addiction and mental health to religious law for medical professionals and commentaries on Jewish texts. Twerski also collaborated with late “Peanuts” comic strip creator Charles Schulz on a series of popular self-help books featuring Charlie Brown and Snoopy.

May his memory be for a blessing.

Rabbi Yisroel Bernath

Danny Thomas was also the founder of St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital.

[inkydreamzart]

why do you make art?  is what you make honest and true to your beliefs and values?  does your art center, or distract?  These are a few questions I’m thinking on after attending an artist teach-in for Pal3stin3 yesterday.  

I’ve been sitting with current events and processing a lot lately.  We are out here watching whole human beings being mass bombed and murdered every day, because the powers that be are fine with sacrificing entire family lines and destroying history and cultures for oil and land.  It’s soul-crushing.  The islamaphobia, orientalism, and casual anti-asian hate I’m seeing people in my life share on social media, is also soul-crushing.  as william faulkner once said, and as all my professors have always said, the past is never really past.  

when i see all this, i feel consumed by horror, and disgust, and anger. when i see our government continue to murder Indigenous people like it always has, it’s still jarring witnessing what has always happened, happen again.  Hearing my partner’s refugee family stories, and watching more people become refugees, is terrible.  I don’t understand why Pal3stinians need to do so much to prove their worth and humanity to others, and am equally freaked out how videos of their struggles are not enough for some to care.  But watching the homies continue to make art, share stories, share information, and build community through protests + teach ins, reminds me that people have always been fighting oppression, and always will– the past of our resistance continues to the now. I make what I make because it’s useless to just sit with my feelings and the facts, and take them nowhere.  I would also rather die than make dishonest work.  I hope that if I keep writing and posting about this, that you dear friends, will consider how much power your individual and group actions can have towards creating a world we can all live in.  Your feelings right now are important– they’re motivation to do something.  It’s a privilege that we’re able to sit with them.  If you’re unsure of what to do and are feeling overwhelmed, don’t worry–  I’ve got a list of things you can do right here.  

1) you can learn more!  If you don’t feel well informed enough to be sure that your actions match your intentions, you can check out @palestinianfeministcollective, or @bayareapym to sign up for a teach-in session with organizers and academics. You can also check out the readings & educational resources they have linked in their bios.  Ethnic studies and Feminist studies scholars from around the world have a lot of great stuff to say on these pages.

2) you can attend protests, and share info on protests!  @JVPLA is the LA branch of Jewish Voice for Peace, a great org that has been leading huge c3as3fir3 protests all around the world.  @bayareapym is also another great page to check out for protest information and political education.  If you are located near a school or university, you can also check out its branch of SJP (for example, @ucsbSJP), or students for justice in pal3stin3.  JVP, SJP, and PYM all have local branches all over the place, so see if your town or city has a branch you can get together with!  USCPR is also a great org that’s working to end US military support to 1sra3l.  Our elected officials are ignoring us when we ask politely for them to stop murdering, so going out and protesting will help make sure they hear us and actually represent our values and beliefs.  

3) if you don’t have money or time, there is also the power of boycotting!  Never underestimate the power of a “no”.  Check out the next slide to see how boycotts work to help defund the war machine, and save lives. Art credit for slide 2 goes to Mona Challabi.  Withholding your time and money from corporations that are willing to sacrifice people’s lives for resources will teach them through boycotts, that people are not down for mass murder for the sake of material wealth.  I definitely don’t want my tax or spending money going towards killing random people. if I can help it, I will make sure my money goes somewhere it will do good.

4) email or call your elected officials to tell them directly that the people want an immediate c3as3fir3!  Check out @woketeachers for info on what numbers to call, and some scripts if you need help figuring out how to voice your demands.  You can even use those phone scripts as a template for emailing your elected officials– I like to use it as a little outline before expanding it into a longer message.

Anyways, there are four powerful ways to take action instead of stewing directionless in feelings.  Please do something– your voice matters.

(photo credit from @/eye.on.palestine of a father saying goodbye to his child who was murdered by the occupation)

[jojoturnip]

A response to a mother at war, the poem of a friend:

You think of things so cosmically, don't you? I'm not surprised. I've seen your poetry of angels and your notebooks brimming over with theories of the world to compile into your games and campaigns.

There is no problem with that. Maybe that's a part of why I'm drawn to you and others who do the same. I like deep thinkers. I'd like to consider myself one.

There's nothing wrong with having your head in the clouds but don't forget you stand on earth.

I've been asked to hold a science writing workshop for another university's students who want to put science on the ballot (go them!!), so I've been thinking of some of my best writing advice. One piece I think of constantly when I write I found a long time ago scrolling through Pinterest:

"Don't write about the Holocaust. Write about the pair of children's shoes left behind in the street as they were taken away."

That one resonates with me a lot. Maybe it's the Jewish fear. I think it's more than that, though.

I, too, have been torn apart and eaten by the cosmos. I was punctured by the points of stars that promised to light the way. I have known and loved the darkness of man, the darkness of voids. I saw the big picture before I knew what it was.

It isn't pretty. Stepping back and looking at the timeline of my life, it isn't pretty.

Come look closer with me, though. Do you see that smudge? That's where my sister and I used to spray men's shaving cream at each other in the backyard when it was too hot to play like normal in the desert. Oh wait, no, look at this one, it's me hanging up my first houseplant, a rabbit footed fern. Does this one of me playing Minecraft with my cousin even look like me anymore?

No, no, this one you should see. You'll remember it. I had invited my sister, my roommates, my creative writing friends, and you all to the award ceremony for my literary award. You came with me, no one else did. Did you see how close to crying I am? Not from sadness even, just joy that you were there and supported me even though you didn't understand and it wasn't your thing. You were just there.

Don't think me stupid for finding that joy, my friend. The connections of the universe may be hard to conceptualize, but the constellations look nice. Did you hear we're supposed to be able to see the Aurora tonight?

Stepping back, I see all the pain and suffering that you do. And it's true that it overpowers the rest. But isn't it lonely up there? Only seeing the big picture and none of the details that make it worth painting?

I'm no artist. Or ethics professor. I'm not the one to tell you what's right and what isn't.

I study life. Both in botany and in writing. And I'm convinced, even after all the ugly I have pulled my rubber boots up from to stay afloat, that life is beautiful.

My bus driver always waves to other bus drivers we pass. But, when we come across a bus on the same route going the opposite direction, I see the flash of toothy smiles and special waves and salutes, like secret best-friend handshakes. My coworker dug a digital camera out of someone else's trash so I could use it to take pictures of my niece. The girl I complimented in the coffee shop today on her leather jacket beamed and told me how she was pretending it was warmer than it really was.

One of my favorite quotes comes from a source almost as odd as Pinterest, Norman Borlaug's biography. He's the father of the green revolution, and credited with saving more lives than any other person. I read it as a Borlaug Scholar in high school, and it was mostly dry. But he talked about his grandfather a bit, who said,

"Don't look for God in the sky. Look for him in the ground. That's where things grow."

Some of the tulips in the horticulture garden are planted above a hot water pipe, and the soil is warm enough for them to bloom early. They always come up short and have purple anthocyanin stress marks on their leaves, but people stop by to see the early flowers anyway.

I understand where you are, up in the universe, seemingly above it all but feeling swallowed by the vacuum. There's a beauty in that, too, in having a mind that can untangle dark matter. So I'm not here to change you.

But I also know your feet are as gravity-striken as mine. Welcome to Earth, my friend, come dig in the dirt with me. We can find earthworms and seeds and a thousand lives too small for us to see. It does not take away from the big picture, or the acknowledgement of your pain to pay them notice.

I brought you an extra trowel, but I cannot help you find god or hope or love or whatever it is people dig for. You have to want it. Then you have to dig for it.

I'm just digging next to you.

[hegory-grousing]

FFXIV Healer jobs as House MD characters aka post with an audience of ONLY me

Sage = House. this is an easy one considering the core SGE healing spell is called Diagnosis and the crit shield buff is called Differential Diagnosis. the only problem is that White Mage is the job that uses a cane so we can't have him use his cane as a cane 😔. ALSO the SGE gap closer is called Icarus - "I was worried your wings would melt" hehe.

Scholar = Cuddy. SCHs are academics (dean of medicine at a teaching hospital) and military commanders (she's Da Boss). also really love the mental image of Cuddy in a giant mortarboard with House as her fairy/seraph companion (he's ignoring her commands and blaming it on ping)

White Mage = Wilson. this is much more vibes-based. however there are a couple supporting things - WHM has a lot of abilities named after concepts from christianity and you cannot convince me Wilson is not (ironically or fittingly considering he's Jewish) a christ figure; WHM artifact gear is all white robes and he's the only one of the hudson trio who consistently wears a white coat. plus something something WHMs are the best at saving dying people cause they have Benediction and higher heal potency and Thin Air for free raises etc.

Astrologian = either Amber or Thirteen. this is the most tenuous one because there isn't really anyone in the cast with AST Vibes (that I have seen so far, idk if one of the later-introduced characters is canonically really into space or tarot or something). anyway I think the whole prophecy/divination theme of AST meshes real niceys with the concept of being doomed by the narrative (Amber)/knowing about your inevitable death (Thirteen)

I think Wilson would also make a very good Paladin/tank in general. I have had SGE!House floating around in my head for ages (and have a House alt that I made a while ago and need to level so he can actually be a SGE) but im gonna be honest the thing that inspired this was my brain cooking up the phrase "Kutner is the Haurchefant of House" so. I have that to be sad about now

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

Music For the Soul by Alexander MacLaren

Fleeing and Clinging

"We… who have fled for refuge to lay hold of the hope set before us." — Hebrews 6:18

The writer blends two vivid metaphors here, the one of a fugitive unsheltered in the open, surrounded by foes; the other of a man grasping some strong stay. Look at the two pictures. " Fled for refuge." The scene brought before us is that of a man flying for his life, with the pursuer clattering at his heels, and his lance-point within a yard of the fugitive’s back. Grass will not grow under that man’s feet; he will not stop to look at the flower by the road. The wealth of South Africa, if it were spread before him, would not check his headlong flight. It is a race for life. If he gets to the open gate he is safe. If he is overtaken before he reaches it, he is a dead man. The moment he gets within the portal the majesty of law compasses him about, and delivers him from the wild justice of revenge. " By-and-bye" kills its tens of thousands. For one man that says, "I am not a Christian, and, what is more, I never intend to be," there are a dozen that say, " To-morrow! tomorrow! " " Let me sow my wild oats as a young man; let me alone for a little while. I am busy at present; when I have a convenient season I will send for thee." What would have become of the man-slayer if he had curled himself up in his cloak, and laid down beside his victim, and said, " I am too tired to run for it"? He would have been dead before morning. A rabbi’s scholar, as the Jewish traditions tell us, once said to him, "Master! when shall I repent?" "The day before you die," said the Rabbii. The scholar said, " I may die to-day." Then said the Rabbi, "Repent to-day." "Choose you this day "whether you will stand unsheltered out there, exposed to the pelting hustling of the pitiless storm, or will flee to the Refuge and be saved.

Look at the other picture: "to lay hold of the hope." Perhaps the allusion is to the old institution of Sanctuary, which perhaps existed in Israel, and at any rate was well known in ancient times. When a man grasped the horns of the altar he was safe. If so, the two metaphors may really blend into one: the flight first, and then the clutching to that which, so long as the twining fingers could encompass it, would permit no foe to strike the fugitive. This metaphor speaks of the fixity of the hold with which we should grasp Jesus Christ by our faith. The shipwrecked sailor up in the rigging, with the wild sea around him, and the vessel thumping upon the sand, will hold on, with frozen fingers, for hours, to the shrouds, knowing that if he slips his grasp the next hungry wave will sweep him away and devour him. And so you should cling to Jesus Christ with the consciousness of danger and helplessness, with the tight grasp of despair, with the tight grasp of certain hope.

I remember reading of an inundation in India, when a dam, away up in a mountain gorge, burst at midnight. Mounted messengers were sent down the glen to gallop as hard as they could and rouse the sleeping villagers. Those who rose and fled in an instant were in time to reach the high ground, as they saw the tawny flood coming swirling down the gorge, laden with the wrecks of happy homes and many a corpse. Those who hesitated and dawdled were swept away by it.