#it's the same taking point you see repeated by zionists everywhere

[heritageposts]

During the recent “March for Israel” in Washington, DC, Al Jazeera interviewed a confident young man from Connecticut about the war in Gaza. Draped in an Israeli flag, Charlie appeared ready to answer any question. He made it clear from the outset that the ongoing war is not “Hamas vs Israel”, but “Hamas vs the whole world”. He said he regrets children’s deaths and prays for innocent lives lost. But he had no doubt about who is responsible for the death of civilians in Gaza. While Israel does everything to avoid civilian casualties, he said, Iran-backed Palestinian terrorists bomb their own hospitals, use civilians as human shields, and even place kids next to rocket launchers. Iran and its proxies are the source of all evil in Palestine and the region, he added. Charlie has clearly done his homework. He has studied the Israel Project’s “Global Language Dictionary [PDF]”, memorised its lines, and repeated them verbatim, not missing a beat. The playbook was created in 2009 after Israel’s first war on the besieged Gaza Strip, to guide Israel’s supporters on how best to speak to the media about the conflict. Inspired by Israel’s leading spin doctors, such as Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu, it is directed at young activists, as well as politicians, pundits, journalists and more. It tells its readers what to say, and what not to say, alerting them to words that should be used and others that mustn’t. One of my favourite tidbits in the playbook, as I wrote back in 2014, goes like this: “Avoid talking about borders in terms of pre- or post-1967, because it only serves to remind Americans of Israel’s military history. Particularly on the left, this does you harm.” And when civilian casualties mount during wartime in Gaza, the playbook recommends talking empathetically along these lines of “All human life is precious”, but emphasising that “it is a tragedy that Iran-backed Hamas shoots rockets at our civilians while hiding in their own” and that this “causes tragic deaths on both sides”. Sounds familiar?

. . . continues on Al Jazeera (20 Nov 2023)

PDF of the Israel Project’s "Global Language Dictionary"

#palestine #israel #gaza #i've been skimming through the global language dictionary and it's very eye opening #it's the same taking point you see repeated by zionists everywhere #of course only a handful of them will have read the actual dictionary but they've had these arguments spoon-fed to them by politicians #media personalities etc.

[rabbiandrewrosenblatt]

Seder Time Machine

Each week, this electronic letter brings you words of Torah and topical issues. The ideas are shaped by a dialogue that we have via email, text messages, phone calls, and the occasional face-to-face meeting over laptops and coffee.

Each year, at the Seder, the recitation of the story of the Exodus begins with a young child asking the four questions. This is followed without pause by a dialogue of the ancient sages of Bné Brak. They set the tone of the Seder by asking questions, and offering interpretations of the story of the exodus from Egypt.

This week we offer you our unabridged dialogue, in the spirit of this week’s topic: the Seder.

Regards,

Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt (RR), and Dr. Terry S. Neiman (TsN).

RR:

Andrew Solomon, in his bestselling book Far From the Tree articulates the central fear of parenting – which as it turns out, is the central fear of Judaism: that the children will not adopt the values of the parents. Judaism has always aimed to transmit a value system to generations many years hence. But I wonder, do we worry too much? We can’t travel into the future to know if these fears are justified.

TsN:

If anything qualifies as time travel, then the Seder surely does. The Torah defines the Seder by two positive commandments. We eat matzah, and we tell the story of the Exodus. It is a miracle that a bland cracker and a long and complicated story have outlived empires that tried to conquer the world.

To grasp the essence of this miracle, I reflect on how communication connects people in space and time. Communication scholar James W. Carey made a distinction between space-oriented – i.e., transmission – communication, and time-oriented – i.e., ritual – communication.

The point of transmission is to extend information across space. It assures that people everywhere get the same information at the same time. A sender uses technology to say the same thing to any number of receivers. For example, the internet is the vastest transmission channel in human history. Everyone reading this electronic message – in Vancouver, in Texas, in Israel – gets the same text. Transmission makes it possible for a central authority to control the content and placement of laws, news, and education over vast distances.  

RR:

It has been noted that humans have the power to control the minds and actions of others without chemicals or chains. Nothing more than the voice is required to produce thoughts and responses. Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels serves as the biggest negative example of this. Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Regan stand as positive examples, depending on your political views.

How can you use voice, or text to speak across many generations? Ritual may be the answer.

TsN:

The point of ritual communication is to extend information through time. People share stories, sing songs, and take meals together in a culturally meaningful way. The ritual mode carries the social structures and cultural processes of a community from one generation to the next. Rituals preserve experiences as stories, and use storytelling to give people repeated access to the essences of those experiences.

RR:

But ritual – and specifically the Seder – accomplishes more than that. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi teaches of the difference between history and memory. History is the facts. Memory is the consciousness of your own story.  The power of ritual is that it forges a memory, a consciousness. It makes Moses’ story your own story. And it makes your life the continuation of his. The Pharaohs may have built pyramids to live forever, but Moses insured that his descendants would still be living his story.

TsN:

According to Carey, societies tend to favour transmission. Rulers like its illusion of control, and the people like the feeling that new technologies will free them from being controlled. In Renaissance Europe, the Church opposed the introduction of the printing press. In 370 BCE, in the dialogue with Phaedrus, Socrates argued against the new technology of writing. However, Carey cited ancient Egypt as the earliest example of a transmission-oriented culture.

From the time upper and lower Egypt were unified under the First Dynasty down through the invention of the telegraph…through monopolization of writing or the rapid production of print, these messages, carried in the hands of a messenger or between the bindings of a book, still had to be distributed, if they were to have their desired effect, by rapid transportation… Our basic orientation to communication remains grounded, at the deepest roots of our thinking, in the idea of transmission:  communication is a process whereby messages are transmitted and distributed in space for the control of distance and people.

Road networks made it possible to unify upper and lower Egypt more than a thousand years before the nation of Israel arrived there. Networks created the conditions that would allow Pharaoh to enslave the Jewish people. It took the mighty hand and outstretched arm of Gd to free us.

RR:

Achashverosh used an early version of the Pony Express to control his vast kingdom. Today computer code controls much of our lives by filtering the information we receive. Facebook controls who sees your posts and what information you see. But it would seem that they also set their sights too short. They both achieved a sort of world domination for a moment: 127 provinces in Persia, and 1 billion daily users on Facebook, yet, the mighty Seder outlasts them all.

TsN:

Judaism became a resilient nation because it relies on both modes of communication. For example, in transmission, the words of every Torah scroll must be identical and error-free. In ritual, the reading of the Law dates back to Sinai:

And Moses commanded them, saying: 'At the end of every seven years, in the set time of the year of release, in the feast of tabernacles, when all Israel is come to appear before the LORD thy G-d in the place which He shall choose, thou shalt read this law before all Israel in their hearing. (Devarim 31:10 – 13)

Ezra the Sofer started the current practice of Sabbath and weekday public readings 25 centuries ago. In transmission, the Torah thus became fixed and eternal. In ritual, it thus remains a living documentary.

RR:

It is more than just the sum of the two modes. It is the interplay between them. We ground ourselves in the concrete meaning of the textual narrative, but the rituals of the Seder allow us to imagine ourselves in the story, to imagine the valences of its reality, and even the verisimilitudes in our contemporary reality.

In this synergy, the lessons of the Exodus have been timeless, from the release of slaves in Jeremiah 34, to the inspiration of the early Zionists, to the Jewish civil rights marchers in Selma, to the sensitivity to the plight of refugees articulated by the Agudath Yisrael only 3 months ago.

TsN:

As we are wrapping up this dialogue, I see on my news feed that the US has launched missiles against Syria in response to its use of poison gas against civilians. It seems that having cycles of conflict is also a timeless fact of life.

This is a timely reminder that we need the synergy of transmission and ritual in our lives.

For me, part of the miracle of the Exodus is that these practices have stayed intact for thousands of years. There is something timeless in the quiet moment when I lean back on a pillow and eat a sheet of matzah, and in the mayhem of the Styrofoam hailstones I toss across the table recalling the ten plagues. It is both a trip to a new land and a return to familiar territory. At the Seder one can be in two times at the same place. השתא הכא לשנה הבא בירושלים - now we are here, next year in Jerusalem.