ה“ב Good morning my Jewish people Thank goodness one has to work and do the day's tasks.

Thank goodness one has to work and do the day's tasks. The endless layers of the multi-onion - there in Israel and out here in the wide world - drills our eyes and demolishes our hearts: Does almost everyone really hate us? Do they really believe what the Russian delegate at the United Nations says today, that "Israel has no right to defend itself" [sic] . In short: the world is not only debased but mad with anti-Jewish hatred. However, that hatred is not personal, just as projections aren't personal. It is directed against us because they have used us as a screen to hate, from their evil and their poisonous shadows, but they do not know us nor are they interested in knowing us. Much less truly. They just have a sick compulsion to confirm their morbid gallery of slander and monstrous icons about us. That does not save us from massacre, nor does it save us from this war or from the anguish of the kidnapped children, or from the horrors and this deep, ongoing trauma; nor of those who fell in combat yesterday and today. It does not save us from the fight there or from it here, from enduring local and global anti-Semitic hatred. But it allows us a modicum of sanity. Not much, but the essential nonetheless. They hate what they project onto us, they do not hate our being: they do not know us. They never knew the tenderness of grandmother and granddaughter blessing the Shabbat candles together. They were never in the heart of a proud dad when his child puts on Tefillin, goes up to the Torah. They never felt the intimacy of our tears of joy, nor do they know, nor understand, nor feel. They do not understand Yiddish, Ladino, Hebrew; They do not understand the underlying language, that of joining together for a Kaddish, nor the taste of Mom's matzah ball soup, nor the discussions between two Jews who have three opinions; nor do they understand Tevieh the milkman, nor our poetry nor our music, nor our compulsion for exchanging food recipes or figuring out who we are related to according to our last name, nor... They just don't know us! They project their demons, their vermin, their ogres and caricatures of themselves onto us. About us, against us. But without feeling or knowing us. We are not those nightmare images, those cheap and sadistic slogans, those lies repeated ad nauseum. We have nothing to do with them. And every time you take that bait, in which you fall into believing that it is about the "conflict" between "Israel and Palestine" you are wrong. It is like when Nachmanides was forced to debate in the thirteenth century with the friars. It was within the rules that he had to "lose." They would not stop hating us when we demonstrate that the Talmud does not speak ill of Jesus, doesn't even speak of Christianity and that we did not kill him. It is just as if Dreyfus, equally obliged, debated with the prosecutors who accused him of being a traitor to the French patrie. His innocence was not within the rules of the morbose game they impose on us. The anti-Semitism that blames him, projecting its demons - no longer religious but national - that is the issue, not the insults, infernal cartoons and twisted accusations. After Dreyfus and the anti-Semitic libels of the late 19th century, we Jews would constitute an inferior "race", which "contaminates" the Aryan race. Are you going to get involved in proving that this is idiotic, and explaining and clarifying that they are wrong? And now the excuse and iconography is about "Palestine" (and about "genocide", that "Palestinian children are killed", that "Zionism" would be this or that). A Spanish saying says a lady chimp can wear silk, but remains a chimp. When Armenia and Azerbaijan were at war two years ago, no one went to mark the houses of Azeris or Armenians to target them with hate. When Russia invaded Ukraine, no one went to mark the houses of Russians or Ukrainians. During any of the many wars, old, long or recent, no one went to paint the houses of Afghans, Iraqis, Americans, British, Argentinians... Only when Israel is attacked by Hamas, and its civilians massacred, burned, beheaded, raped and kidnapped; and if Israel exercises the right and duty to defend itself, Jewish houses are painted for hat targets in Paris, Berlin, Buenos Aires; Synagogues are burned in Tunisia, Spain, Armenia, Jews are attacked in New York, by an anti-Semitic mob in an airport in Russia and on university campuses, public transportation and streets around the the world. And mostly on social media. Are you going to let them insist that it is the "conflict", "Palestinians", "genocide" or "apartheid" or "bombing" or "Gaza" or "Zionism" or...? The "conflict in the Middle East" is the justifying disguise, the epochal excuse. Don't confuse the disguise with the underlying psychopathology. Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose they say in French : anti-: the more it changes excuses, the more it is the same scum. And it is subconscious, non-conscious scum. It is psychopathological, not a consequence of reasoning. The always lying arguments are its disguise, its camouflage, its capsule or wrapping. Believing that addressing with explanations and arguments what emerges from a sick mind can have a curing effect is like believing that a mental illness can be cured by arguing that it is a mistake. Antisemitism is not about us; It's about antisemites. Both that of the hereditary and that of the newly infected. Both that of the perverse and that of the useful fools who follow the current of the poison because they follow the majority, those who appear in millions like in a zombie movie, on social networks, or those who emerge as reporters and announcers on television, radio podcasts or media. Thus we err attempting to clarify a madman's arguments; thus we engage the ever-mutating cover-up plot of the same psychopathology of the paranoid orb and sadistic traces. Get out of the projection beam. Move out of it. They talk about us, but they don't talk to us. With this thought, I invite you to enter Shabbat. Now, at sunset, it will be Shabbat. We will forget about the news for 25 hours (if we decide so) and we will be able to mourn at ease what we have accumulated in four weeks, and deeper, this loneliness of having lost, in yet another incremental measure, something that remained of innocence in our worldview or faith. We can mourn friends who prefer the slanderous arguments of projective hatred over facts and truth, friendship and affection; we can mourn a sense that it was still possible to imagine a Jewish future in the diaspora. We are going to be shedding those of us who assimilate. We will witness the sneaky escape of the undefined. We will listen to the cover-up reasons of cowards and pleasers. Finally we will be less in the trenches - we will be She'erit Israel , a remnant of Israel -. And finally, if Assyrians, Babylonians, Seleucid Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Inquisitors, Cossacks, Nazis, Fedayeen, could not exterminate us all, the murderous lumpen who forces their subjects to serve as human shields, who like sewer weasels hide, and that on October 7 cut our throats, burned, raped and kidnapped us; they do not have even the slightest trace of the civilizational greatness of Babylon, Greece or Rome, have absolutely no possibility of destroying us or transcending us. They will be much more forgettable than our tormentors of yesteryear. Our cause is simply to live, not to let ourselves be exterminated. And we have the right to that. A truth so basic and simple, so indisputable, cannot be destroyed even with all the lies of Satan himself. Come closer to the awareness that we are the Jewish people, Israel, not the hatred with its accusations that they project onto us, using us as a screen. We will continue living, and we will be protagonists of the good in the world, from our land and for the planet; and for all humanity. Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Roberto Feldmann. __________________________________ © Rabbi Roberto Feldmann, November 2, 2023. Cheshvan 18, 5784. All rights reserved. Internet Domain Images not included in Printed Version.