Antigonos' Annals: February 2013

Sunday, February 17, 2013

The Ship of State is Rudderless [Surprise!]

In about 4 more days Israel will have been one month without a government, which is about the worst situation -- even worse than having a coalition -- it can be in. I'm very glum. The Israeli system is really bankrupt.

This time around, the negotiations between the parties have not made a lot of headlines, so it is very difficult to determine just what is happening [if indeed anything is]. Bibi will continue as Prime Minister. Whether he will be able to govern in any meaningful way or be held hostage by competing interests is unclear.

And apart from the coalition infighting, Lieberman is going on trial: the joker in the pack. Whatever agreements are carved out now between the parties with the largest electoral blocs, it will all be moot when the verdict on Lieberman comes in. Watch his party bolt the coalition if he doesn't get his job as FM back; watch Yesh Atid or Bayit HaYehudi bolt if he does.

My Problem with Hagel

To be honest, I'd never heard of him until Obama put his name forward, so I don't have any premeditated feelings one way or the other about him. Maybe he's an anti-Semite, or anti-Israel [points of view which often overlap]. Maybe he doesn't like homosexuals. He is apparently on record as being willing to believe anything the ayatollahs say, and completely unwilling to force confrontation with them. Maybe he steals ice cream from children. I don't know.

But what is obvious to me is that he is currently tailoring his opinions to suit whatever Congress wants him to say, just in order to get confirmation. He apparently will take ANY position which will get him into the Cabinet. What's to say that tomorrow, as Secretary of Defense, he changes like a weathercock with every twist and turn Obama wants him to perform? This does not seem to be a person anyone can trust, and THAT makes him unsuitable to be in the Cabinet. IMO, it's not a partisan issue at all.

Monday, February 11, 2013

No Comment Needed, I Think

Cartoon by Stephen Rustad Don't call Hezbollah terrorists.

(click here to view)

Stephen Rustad
www.petaluma360.com
Feb 11, 2013

EditorialCartoonists.com

Milon (Glossary)

OLEH: an immigrant to Israel. The root of the word comes from the verb "to ascend". The plural is "olim". A female is an "olah", and a bunch of female immigrants is "olot".

YORED: an emigrant from Israel. The word means "to descend". Plural is "yordim".

MA'ABARA: pl. "ma'abarot". Tent cities which were built as transit camps in the years immediately following Israel's independence, as nearly two million Holocaust survivors and Jews from Arab countries arrived, often only with the clothes they wore.

MEDURA: pl. "medurot". Campfire.

TZENA: austerity, the name given to the period between Israel's independence and the mid 1950s, when times were very tough.

SHEMITTA: every seventh year, the land in The Land is supposed to lie fallow. Since this would lead to starvation, the ancient Sages developed a whole body of law that permitted cultivation using certain methods and/or the legal fiction that the fields in question were "sold" to a non-Jew for the year. Not all the ultra-Orthodox (virtually none of whom are farmers, and who lived for centuries in non-Jewish communities in the Diaspora where this wasn't a problem) will accept these ways around the commandment, and will only eat either imported produce or produce grown at vast expense in trays of soil raised OFF the ground (therefore not technically being grown "in" the Holy Land. Only a Jew would think of this)

CHAMETZ: literally, "leaven". It means all food which it is prohibited to have "in one's possession" during Passover. Different Jewish ethnic groups interpret this in different ways. Obviously yeast and fermented items are forbidden, but some communities will eat legumes and others will not; some will not eat anything made with matzah or matzah meal which has been in contact with water (gebrochts) like matzah balls. Some communities will eat rice, others will not.

TZITZIT: ritual fringes that males wear, often on the edges of a scapular worn under a shirt, or on the prayer shawl worn in the synagogue. There is a precise way to tie them, so that the knots and twists will add up to 613, the number of the commandments in the Torah.

SHAKSHOUKA: Eggs cooked in a spicy tomato sauce. See http://www.recipezaar.com/148450 for a recipe.

TESHUVA: Penitence.

LITVAK: An very Orthodox Jew from Lithuania. The foremost sage in that community, in the 19th century, was the Vilna Gaon, who excommunicated the hassidim as schismatics because of their mystic belief in their "wonder-working" rabbis. The Hassidim promptly returned the favor. "Litvaks" are noted for their minute, but rationalist, dissection of Jewish texts, and have a distinctive accent in Hebrew. The two communities both wear the black long coats (capotes), have long beards and sidelocks, and are often confused by outsiders as being the same.

Antigonos' Annals

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