THE BRAVE NEW LAND

And the storm raged on… here in the Holy Land recently, lasting for about 3 days and flattening anything that was mildly at rust or untended, trees, buildings, signs, and cliff faces collapsed or just plain disappeared. Flash flood warnings in the Negev desert were in high effect and we all buttoned up our houses with whatever we had on tap. The fires that had just swept through the north were still smoldering and the ash of the ruin of many people’s entire lives hadn’t even begun to settle; all of this, and yet... we were happy —  the rain was finally coming. The crispy ground covering the Holy Land has been parched for years from a severe draught. The Kinneret (Sea of Galilee), where much of our water comes from, has been going down, down, down, and is in its 7th year of decent; it is now 85 cm. above the ‘black line,’ the line that we dread. The black line is below the lowest ‘red line,’ which we passed a while ago. Sinking below the black line means that we will not only no longer

How strange... Growing up in a secular, Episcopalian home, I always wondered when I would stop thinking about this time of year... you know, family... as a kid, waiting for the Big Labowsky in a red suit to squeeze down the chimney and deliver all sorts of goodies, some desired and some dreaded. I have been running for 25 years to get away from that, all the while secretly desiring the closeness that I remember in my family. Dad loved it. Grandma came. Mom was beside herself. Grandma came. Uncle came. He is only five years older than I am. I always liked that... I work at a Christian Zionist Kibutznikeem Factory run by Germans that don’t really celebrate Christmas because they are Mennonites... I think. I asked my work mate in Graphics about it and he wouldn’t part with anything juicy to post here. When I was in Sales at the same factory, I asked my coworker about it and he wouldn’t part with anything either. When I was working in the Woodshop at the same factory, no one would part wit

When the latest round of Middle East peace talks began… again…, I thought to myself — hmm… what’s happening here? There isn’t any ‘peace’ on the horizon that is any different from the last time the sunrise set over the evaporating ozone rainbow. These supposed ‘talks’ are just the usual talking heads of state, desperately trying to reflect the rainbow that had already disintegrated into tiny holes left from the secretly squeezed blackheads that now pock the night sky. When the interviews and commentaries began to dribble out of the sides of their mouths, I knew (actually we all knew) that it was only a charade of flimsy tinsel set design, intended to lull us to a deeply disturbed sleep. Yet, we all slogged forward; we were hopelessly hoping that it would become the normal daytime drama TV show that it conjured itself to be, definin g and refining our intellects with smooth jazz, scratching out of elevator speakers, buried somewhere beneath the acoustic panels that we wore as a hat. Yo

The first principle of existentialism, according to Jean Paul Sartre is, ‘Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.’ He goes on to say, ‘The first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders. And, when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men.’ It appears to me that this is exactly what Hashem had in mind when he made the world. The problem is that it puts me square in the middle, in the center of Creation, and puts all of my faith in only one hand. Faith is an important element to understand in this dynamic. Having faith in ‘me,’ to make the right decisions, to do the right thing, is challenged daily by the thought, ‘who am I?’ Losing faith in ‘Me,’ causes the scale to tip to one side only; this is paramount to suicide of the inner se

Since the coming of the New (Secular) Year is right around the corner, I thought that I would look into the history of calendars around the world... a bit. Of course, the first thing that popped into my mind was the Mayan calendar and its apparent evaporation into nothingness in the year 2012 (and now it’s a major motion picture!). I have not seen the movie yet, but wh en I started researching calendars, I saw a funny little video review and that is where I got the title of this blog from! I guess the whole idea behind the movie is that the world is coming to an end and there was really no purpose at all for it to have existed in the first place… or, something like that. Um… I beg to differ. I mean, how does that make any sense at all? The ‘official’ text that describes the movie goes like this: The end is nigh in this apocalyptic disaster film that mixes Christian values, Mayan mythology, and scientific theories about polar shifts. When four strangers journey into Mexico in 2012,

Last week, on Thursday evening, when I saw from my office window that the out-of-control, burning bush fire was flaming up over the ridge, glowing in the night sky, like an evil locomotive coughing out bitter smoke at the western horizon, I had no idea that I would soon get a glimpse of something much deeper; a brief window of understanding, a blink of an awareness that the world had finally begun its inevitable turn towards the unity of human kind and beneath that, the long awaited clinging by an ‘almost’ collective humanity to Hashem. At the time, the world had been in a hopeless morass, sinking into the muck of the ‘WikiLeaks’ scandal and everyone on Earth, including myself, seemed to have an opinion, looking deeper into the matter, in order to validate their 15 minutes of fame and prove their own unique philosophy, undeniably correct. There were people advocating the unprotected sharing of the whole truth behind the secrets and lies that were told by our elected officials. There we

Have you been challenged recently? I have… I think it started a few months back when my mom was diagnosed with cancer; well, I guess that is really more of a challenge for her than for me... Anyways, she has been undergoing chemo and I am due to visit her back in my birth country, SoCal, fairly soon; but more on that later down the page. Another challenge that I have been dealing with recently is, at work, I have been trying to iron out a bit of a communication problem. This is the kind of communication problem that affects the company’s whole marketing concept and there are a few opposing departments that are butting heads (with me smack in the middle). I am kind of the only marcom guy there and I have been trying to implement a style guide, as well as sweeping reforms to the branding concepts, and to organize the way that information is stored, labeled, and accessed for later retrieval. The guys I work for are Christian, Zionists from Germany ― very ‘yashar’ (straight), accept that

The night of Motze Shabbat (Saturday night), I had trouble sleeping. All night long the dogs in the neighborhood were barking and yelping. Once in a while, I could also hear the calls of the jackals that run in packs in the wilderness near my house. Something, it seemed, was not quite right in the neighborhood. Eventually, after finally falling asleep, I woke with a start from a dream into which I had descended. It was a gruesome dream, a dream that scared me wi de awake in the dead of the night. When I sat up in bed, there was a silhouette, still afloat in my subconscious mind, of a zombie ripping the flesh from a woman’s neck with its pointed yellow teeth. In the dream, I had been trying to save her and her family from the raging creatures while driving like a bat-out-of-hell, screeching around corners, looking for other people to help escape the zombie mobs. The front cab of the pickup truck that I was driving had been organized to accommodate as many people as I could fit in and I

Recently I was abruptly interrupted from my childlike stupor, which had ensured me that reason would eventually prevail in the world. What happened… you may ask? Well, I have always felt that, when it comes down to it, people will be reasonable and rational, even if they have a few hiccups along the way. It all started about a month ago, on Facebook, when I received a friend request from someone that I didn’t know. As usual, when this occurs, I sent him a message asking him how he found me. He replied that he liked what I wrote on the status of a Dali Lama post. I don’t remember what it was now, but probably something that differed with Mr. Lama’s assertion about compassion for our fellow human beings, in and of itself, as a way to true and everlasting peace in the world. I feel that without a higher source, we will always get lost in the fluff of our egos, but more on the ‘ego’ thing later. Once this guy and I were ‘Facebook friends,’ I commented a few times on his posts, which were m