Posts Tagged → Judaism
Passover & Easter messages of Freedom
Freedom has been the goal of human beings forever.
Freedom to be your own unique self as God created you, freedom to think your own thoughts, freedom to travel where you wish, freedom to worship God in your own way, freedom to speak your mind without fear of reprisal or punishment, freedom to pursue the work you like, freedom to read the books you want and etc.
And yet, despite all of the deepest yearnings humans have had for individual and communal freedom for tens of thousands of years, freedom has nonetheless been really tough to achieve or gain for any meaningful amount of time. Here in America, the concept of freedom as Americans know it today was achieved on the frontier, where European settlers, run-away and freed blacks, and American Indians lived in a sometimes mostly peaceful communal free-for-all, and most of the time in an ebb-and-flow of painful tumult and settlement. It was on the American frontier that Europeans finally broke the chains of feudal serfdom, because they were finally out of the reach of feudal overlords.
They lived as they wanted to live.
Along the American east coast British and Dutch militaries enforced iron laws that funneled money, goods, and loyalty to far distant monarchs in Europe. But within the American interior, what we call the frontier, a new kind of human was developing. European ideals of hard work and self sacrifice blended with American Indian ideas of self-reliance and communal reliance, free of overbearing overlords imposing their own selfish demands. And what resulted was pure freedom, now enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.
While early in our nation’s history the American Indians were still largely nomadic, or at least seasonal travelers across wide landscapes, the European Americans brought a focus on permanent settlement. They also brought values and hopes from the Torah (Old Testament) and the Gospel (New Testament), what today we accurately describe as a uniquely synthesized Judeo-Christian ethic for daily life and expectations from our government.
Both Judaism and Christianity celebrate freedom, and in this week of Passover (tonight) and Easter (coming Sunday), and in this American time of great peril for individual freedom, it is important to note how both these faiths mark freedom and value it as the highest form of human expression.
Why is American freedom in great peril? Because bad people who crave control and dominion over everyone and everything have seized control of the American government. Like the early Americans did in their battle with Britain, we must think of these bad people as the Pharoahs in the story of Exodus, and think of the American citizen – you and me – as the ancient Israelites, escaping harsh bondage.
These bad people constantly demand that We, The People behave one way, while they conspicuously behave the opposite. They wear their double standard hypocrisy like a badge of honor. To them, it demonstrates their authoritarian power over everyone else, their ability to behave contrary to the way they demand everyone else behave. Behaving publicly in a hypocritical manner is a demonstration of their power over everyone else. I know this is sick and anti-democratic, but the Left is completely drunk on power and is anti-democratic. They think they know what is best for everyone, and that we must all live according to their supposedly brilliant ideas (that have already failed in so many other places like the Soviet Union, China, Venezuela, Cuba etc), so no freedom for us regular “little people.”
With the holiday of Passover, Judaism teaches about the centrality of physical freedom. Freedom from slavery, freedom from political overlords who control everything we eat, think, say, and do. While Jews always celebrate Passover, there are many Christians who also observe a “Last Supper” tonight among friends and family.
With the holiday of Easter, Christians celebrate the concept of spiritual freedom; freedom from earthly limits and earthly/ physical chains. One of the first steps any authoritarian government does is to break the link between humans and one another and between humans and God. The state must become God for the state to become all-powerful, and so spiritual freedom is a powerful antidote to evil people running government badly.
Both of these separate celebrations this week, Passover and Easter, are critical to Americans and to any human being anywhere who wants to remain free or attain freedom. America has a unique blend of individual freedom and individual opportunity that no other country has. It is why everyone in the world wants to move to America.
But if we Americans are going to hold onto the Constitutional Republic that so many men have died to create and hold onto, then we must make public our celebration of freedom and our demand for freedom. We must embolden one another and embrace one another and stand side by side with one another, because right now We, The People are facing a truly tyrannical and evil government that seeks to take away the freedom that we all have. All of it. Forever.
Only standing all together can we withstand their attack on us.
Freedom. Celebrate it, mark it, identify it, value it, cherish it, and never ever relinquish it. Whatever freedom the government people can take away from you they will never ever give back to you.
Happy Passover and Happy Easter freedom to all of my fellow Americans. Celebrate freedom as you will, but celebrate it by God and never ever stand down.
Merry X-Mas to all Americans
Today is Christmas, the national holiday of America and most Western nations. Its origin is easy enough to decipher from the English name we use today, which is a conjunction of two words, Christ and Mass, or Christ’s-Mass, Christ being the Anglicized version of the Greek Chrystos, which means anointed.
Why does any of this matter? Because people best do things they agree with and understand, and in order to understand a thing, a person must understand the entire thing, especially its genesis.
Holding a Christian Mass -or Christmas- in honor of the Jewish man Joshua the Nazirite (or Joshua of Nazareth) whom orthodox Christians believe fulfills anointed messianic prophecy as interpreted from the Hebrew Scriptures (TANACH, or Torah (The Old Testament), Nevi’im (the Prophets), and Ketuvim (the Writings), is a way of celebrating the person at the center of the Christian faith. At least as the faith has been understood after the First Nycean Council (held in Nyceae Greece, now Iznik Turkey, in the year CE 325), when the first 275 years of Christianity was then greatly reformed and shaped, and out of which a religious orthodoxy emerged that both Protestants and Catholics today follow.
Apparently observed mostly as an austere holiday devoid of outward joy or expressions of happiness for most of its 1,500 year history, and conveniently set for the 25th day of December to match up with Hanuka’s 25th day of the Hebrew month of Kislev, Christmas as we now know it in America was created by a Briton, a 19th century writer named Charles Dickens.
Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, something almost all Americans are familiar with. Starring one Ebenezer Scrooge and Tiny Tim and a cast of other characters designed to tug at our heart strings and elicit our deepest sympathies and emotions, A Christmas Carol aggressively addresses what Dickens saw as a dearth of happiness and Christian charity. Especially at that time, when the modern industrial revolution had pulled people off the rural farms and pooled them into teeming urban slums, creating a huge strata of direly poor people in need of everything and unable to provide for themselves as they had back on the farms.
(note that Karl Marx wrote his Communist Manifesto at the same time in response to the same industrial revolution socioeconomic dynamics playing out in Germany and Europe, but instead of trying to encourage Christian faith to rise to the occasion, like Dickens, Marx sought to supplant Judaism and Christianity with his own new religion…)
Dickens believed that those who had benefited most from the industrial revolution and its cheap labor had a Christian duty to share their success in the form of charity with those living in the urban slums. And so Dickens’ A Christmas Carol story is both a huge guilt trip and emotional plea that was immediately and wildly successful when it debuted and continues to shape our own Christmas experiences to this day.
Combined with Scandinavian traditions of Santa Claus and reindeer, evergreen trees decorated with festive lights, and German gift giving, Dickens’ vision of a friendly, happy, merry, relaxed Christmas is how Americans celebrate, observe, or simply enjoy the holiday today.
So today is Christmas in America. Whether or not one is an orthodox Christian, an orthodox Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or any other religious or nonreligious faith or identity, this day is yours to make of it what you will. Religious or secular. Even the secular version has the best of human traits.
Why not make the most and best of it? Wishing some stranger in the shopping center a Merry Christmas can have as much theological meaning as you want it to have, or it can simply be your best of heartfelt personal well wishes to a fellow American citizen. It is yours to choose what you mean by saying Merry Christmas, but the point is that saying it neither detracts from your own faith, nor does it add to anyone else’s faith if you simply wish them a Merry Christmas.
Some places like Dearborn, Michigan, and Borough Park, Brooklyn, have such an absence of Christians that it would not make sense to wish anyone one encounters there a Merry Christmas.
But to everyone else in America, I wish you a very Merry Christmas, with only the best of hopes for you today and in the year 2023 ahead.
Mastriano is the normal guy, Shapiro not
Doug Mastriano is the most normal person you can possibly meet. In 2021 I met and briefly spoke with him, and he was direct, cheerful, serious, confident. He is a former 30-year military career guy, and most men like him are like him in mannerisms and personality. He has been tested in battle, and in the world’s largest bureaucracy (the American military). He has taken dangerous risks, made dangerous sacrifices, for the public. He is a refreshing political outsider, and his political views are normal for his demographic. While I do not agree with Mastriano on everything, I also do not need to agree with him or any other candidate on everything in order to support him.
Yes, there is a TON of negative advertising about Mastriano, and some of it is accurate, and most of it is completely false. The thing I care about is that Mastriano is normal and he stands openly on what he believes. He stands by his views because he has views, and because he is a guy with integrity, he says his views in public and is therefore open to criticism about them. Whatever his views are, Mastriano’s political policies and views are almost unimportant if he wins. I have seen it over and over again: A governor gets elected and within weeks discovers that no one on Capitol Hill in Harrisburg gives two figs about his views. He will have to work within the system in which the governor is just one cog out of three, or four cogs. Maybe it’s five cogs, if we count the state bureaucracy…
Now, let’s consider Josh Shapiro, the candidate running for governor against Mastriano. Shapiro is the definitive political hack, a person with very few real honest to goodness views of his own and very little integrity. Very little real life experience. Certainly no risks or sacrifices for the betterment of society. He has been hiding inside air conditioned offices his entire career. Shapiro is hoping to get elected to the governorship by virtue of committing little to public knowledge, and also criticizing his opponent intensely.
(Incidentally, the phrase political hack comes from the hack horses used in mining and public transportation from about 1750 to 1920. A hack horse is trained to mindlessly follow the familiar horse in front of it, carrying or towing its burden without independent thought or motivation. The same is said of political hacks, who are led by the nose by political bosses and big political donors, and whose sole motivation is self-enrichment)
I have never met Josh Shapiro, but he did something corrupt that affected people near me, including a murder victim I knew personally, and he caused a lot of pain. Here is what I have seen of Shapiro: In 2011, Ellen Greenberg was brutally murdered in her Philadelphia apartment. From the moment after she was murdered, a lot of big political strings were pulled in plain public view to blatantly protect the one person who appears to have probably done the deed, her former fiance.
All kinds of personal favors were done for her fiance’s family, including letting his family members enter her crime scene apartment and removing and tampering with evidence. The Philly Police Department may never have been a bastion of integrity, but its senior personnel managed to hit a real low spot with the sloppy coverups of their officers’ mishandling of the bloody crime scene.
Then there was the coroner who called Ellen’s death like everyone saw it, a murder, and who was then summarily fired. Subsequent scientific and forensic analysis supporting the belief that Ellen was murdered was provided to the Philly Police Department, only to have them sit on it, hide it, ignore it.
It seemed that every official person involved in investigating Ellen Greenberg’s bloody murder was doing everything possible to protect the murderer and to shut up everyone who tried to get answers or obtain justice for this beautiful, sweet young woman.
Literally everyone involved in the obvious coverup is a member of one political party.
All of this came to a head last year and again this year when powerful new evidence about the murder was handed to AG Josh Shapiro. What did Shapiro do with the new evidence? He refused to act on it, sat on it, and then he handed it off to the very same political people who had already engaged in a years-long coverup of the murder of a beautiful, innocent Ellen. Shapiro enabled the coverup to continue, thereby protecting his political buddies and obstructing justice from being done.
AG Josh Shapiro is loyal to his political donors, I will say that much. He is also loyal to his political party, which as he is a political hack is understandable. But Josh Shapiro is not loyal to the rule of law, or to the Pennsylvania citizenry, or to solving crimes when they involve high profile members of his political party. And that makes Josh Shapiro a corrupt person, and really a lawless person. Not a normal person.
Who the hell works hard to cover up a murder and to protect “important people” in a political party who were involved in the murder? A dirtball is who does this stuff, and Shapiro is at the very least a dirtball. Shapiro’s entire career has been spent in politics, and politics is all he knows. He is a political animal, for whom there are no absolute truths or morals, just opportunities to move ahead and get more power, at any cost. Including protecting a politically connected murderer.
Yuck. Yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck.
I know Doug Mastriano has been portrayed as some sort of “right wing” loon, and of course that is BS. The same crap was done to Judge Roy Moore several years ago in an Alabama senate race, and now that Moore is stacking up court wins the truth is finally coming out about him. Roy Moore is innocent of the ridiculous accusations the media and its one political party ally made against him, and Doug Mastriano is likewise innocent of the ridiculous accusations being made against him. Yes, he believes that life begins in the mother’s womb, and so he believes the body of the living child deserves protection. Reasonable people can argue and disagree about this and other issues, but there is no argument about this:
Doug Mastriano has integrity and honesty, and Josh Shapiro has none, zero, nada.
Doug Mastriano deserves our votes for the simple reason that he is a good guy fighting the good fight against a corrupt bipartisan political system that benefits when bad people like Josh Shapiro are in power.
Vote for normal guy, political outsider Doug Mastriano, you will not regret it. If you vote for Josh Shapiro, we will all regret it.
Doug Mastriano praying at the Western Wall. Doug is more pro-Israel, pro-Jewish, pro-Judaism than Josh Shapiro could ever be.
Easter vs. Academia
We are in the midst of Passover and just beginning Easter.
Passover and Easter are about birth, spiritual and physical freedom, and in America, the power of co-existence. Not only of different faiths, but different ethnic groups, different ideas.
However, for decades, college campuses have increasingly harbored anti-American staff, whose teachings run counter to everything America stands for. Many are at state-run colleges, where public taxpayers foot the bill for their salaries and benefits. Private colleges often receive huge federal grants that also support these anti-American professors and administrators. Number one on their hit list is usually Christianity, the dominant faith of our great nation. Christianity is the repository of values in America, so tearing down the faith leaves a vacuum they are trying to fill with secular humanism, atheism, etc.
A week ago a student at Florida Atlantic University complained about his professor, Deandre Poole, who had assigned the students in his class the job of writing the word “Jesus” on a piece of paper and then stomping on it on the floor. The offended student was suspended from class. Can you imagine if the word “Allah” or “Mohammed” had been written on the paper? It would have been an international incident. Yet because the student is a Christian, the school has nothing to say to him. Yes, the oppressive Mr. Poole is not in his class room right now, but that is because the school says he has been threatened, not because he is an awful teacher.
I don’t care what your faith is. Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Zoroastrian….if you are an American, recognize that people like Deandre Poole are at war with your ability to practice your religion without harassment or oppression, and that Poole and his friends will outlaw your ability to fight back.
It is Easter vs. Academia, and I hope Easter wins.