THE BRAVE NEW LAND

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...

Did you ever have the experience of dreaming such a vivid dream that it was absolutely real, like your dream life was the real life while the life that you enjoyed when in a conscious state was only a vague and distant feeling, like a dream inside your dream? I have. I once had a dream that I drove my car backwards over a cliff. As I fell, looking up at the beams of my headlights that were bouncing off of the slowly receding cliff-top, I was absolutely aware that I was falling into the sea. I fell for a long time, as if time began to slow down, and then my life flashed before my eyes. I saw my family and friends and all my close relationships as they paraded across my ‘conscious’ mind. I was going to die and I knew it. When the moment of my death arrived, time came to a complete stop; I opened my eyes and realized it was all only a dream. I had this strange feeling, though, that lasted for a few minutes. I wasn’t quite sure which state was the dream and which was reality. In this week’...

What’s the red stuff you may be asking…? Well, I will get to that later. First I want to talk about the Ethiopians in Israel. There was a little get-together that was held at my house this week, in which two tall, thin Ethiopian gentlemen discussed their experiences, culture, and difficulties both moving to ‘Jerusalem’ from Africa and living in ‘Jerusalem’ as well. I say ‘Jerusalem’ because that is what they call Israel... ‘Jerusalem.’ Back in Ethiopia, there were Jews, Christians, and Muslims all living together in neighboring villages and in a neighborly way too. This is how these gentlemen described their lives in Africa—that they shared what they had with each other and lived in peace… once upon a time. History tells us that the Jews of Ethiopia were once made up of half of a million people. They ruled the mountain highlands of Gondar that surrounded Lake Tana and called themselves Bay’ta Israel (the house of Israel). The heights of Jerusalem have, for centuries, inspired their pra...