Bass Jamming

Trying out my camera with a little bass jam.

Jewcy Thoughts: Would Gandhi Have Survived Israel?

Recently the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem released a video showing an Israeli solider shooting an Israeli protester with a rubber bullet at close range. The vid got me thinking about the following question: Would Gandhi have survived Israel? My response to that question is my latest from Jewcy. Here is a taste:

The “Gandhi in Palestine” theory also ignores the reality that the Israeli heart, like an egg in boiling water, has become hardened. It’s not that the Israeli people are lacking in compassion. It’s just that the situation has created more than one wall dividing us from the Palestinians. The only reason we pay attention to this video is because it captures an Israeli solider shooting a fellow Israeli. Were this a Palestinian, we would not have cared. Indeed, it would take a great deal of exposure to lucid raw injustice to weaken our Dershowitzian Super-Egos — those voices inside our heads that have been fine-tuned to explain away and assuage our guilt.

To read more, please click here. As always, if the spirit moves you, please feel free to leave your comments at the end of the article.

Poem of the Day: Sonnets To Orpheus, Part Two, XII

Sonnets To Orpheus, Part Two, XII
By Rainer Maria Rilke

Want the Change. Be inspired by the flame
Where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.

Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.

The Tao of Kobe.

Chris Ballard writes a good article on the drive that compels Kobe to be the best basketball player on earth. It is not pretty, but it is worth a read:

So, you see, this is Kobe, all of this. Sometimes childish, sometimes regal, sometimes stubborn, always relentless. This is a guy who, according to Nike spokesperson KeJuan Wilkins, had the company shave a couple of millimeters off the bottom of his signature shoe because “in his mind that gave him a hundredth of a second better reaction time.” A guy who has played the last three months with a torn ligament in the pinkie of his shooting hand. A guy who, says teammate Coby Karl, considers himself “an expert at fouling without getting called for it.” (Watch how Bryant uses the back of his hand, not the front, to push off on defenders and a closed-fist forearm to exert leverage.) A guy who says of being guarded by the physical Bowen, “It’ll be fun” — and actually means it. A guy who, no matter what he does, will never get the chance to play the one game he’d die for: Bryant versus Jordan, each in his prime. “There’d be blood on the floor by the end,” says Winter, who has coached them both.

This is Kobe Bryant, age 29, in pursuit of his fourth NBA title. Even if it’s hard for us to understand him, perhaps it’s time that we appreciate him.

Random Thought: Were Edward Norton and Bashar Assad Separated at Birth?

Poem of the Day: A Ghost Tale

A Ghost Tale
By Roi Ben-Yehuda

A ghost is an incomplete.

A soul yearning for a body
A lover calling for a beloved.
A people searching for home.

God aching for the faithful.

All are ghost.
All are incomplete.

The world conspires against ghosts.
There is an exorcism in every corner.
Every heart struggles with its own incompletes.
At once expelling and admitting potentialities.

Humanity is a ghost.
And history is one long ghost tale.
Restless apparitions crawling, marching, running.
Entering Eden through the back door.

But Fear not. For in the end all ghosts rise in the air.
And as the poet once told us
All that rises must converge.

A Muslim and A Jew Solving the Arab-Israeli Conflict One Walk At A Time.

My good friend Raquel Evita Saraswati has written a beautiful, honest, and insightful blog entry inspired by a conversation we had a while back on the Arab-ISraeli conflict. Here is an excerpt:

Last year, Roi and I were strolling the streets of New York City, hashing out our proposed solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. George Bush wasn’t listening, for sure. Of course, neither was Hamas. But there we were, an Israeli and a Muslim, a man and a woman, working through our most unlikely Manhattan Peace Accords.

I’ll admit now what I didn’t admit to Roi then: this was a tough conversation for me. It’s an issue that - like it does for so many - frustrates me. I remember exactly where I have been every time major movements have been made toward peace in the region. However, I better remember where I’ve been every time that already fractured chance at peace has been shattered by a resurgence in violence.

Something Roi said during our walk remained with me. He shared a powerful analogy I’ve found applicable to so many struggles for justice, for peace and for reconciliation.

Roi talked about what would best be called an escape to safety at someone else’s expense: if you are in a burning building, you may have no choice but to jump. After all, you’ll die otherwise. But - what if the result of your leap to safety is that you land on someone else’s back? What if, after you realize that you’ve landed feet-first on another person, you stayed there? What if, finally - you thought of stepping off, but feared that once you did, the person whose back you’ve occupied might finally take this chance to retaliate? This last fear may be irrational, it may not be — but even still, it is a real fear. What would you do?

To read more, click here.

Quote of the Day:Huston Smith

“Institutions are not pretty. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the American Medical Association? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion… religion is institutionalized spirituality.”

Diversity for the sake of unity - Islam As It Ought To Be.

Moez Masoud delivers an inspiring speech on my favorite suras in the Quran.

Sura 49:13:

“O people, we created you from the same male and female, and rendered you distinct peoples and tribes, that you may know one another. The best among you in the sight of GOD is the most righteous.”

The music at the end is cheesy, but the speech is sincere and spot on.

“We are here temporarily” - Israelis In The U.S.

From PresenTense, my article on Israelis liviing in the United States. Here is an excerpt:

For a long time, Jews who immigrated out of Israel were viewed in a negative light. By leaving Israel, they physically rejected and negated what the Jewish state stood for—an ingathering of exiles. Given that Israel as a democracy could not bar its citizens from leaving, its only tool was to bludgeon their Zionist superego with guilt.

The stigmatization was evident in the language itself. The very Hebrew word for the people who left the country is “yordim” —literally, those who descend or go down. This stood in stark contrast with “olim”—literally those who ascend or go up. In 1976, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin famously described yordim as “leftover weaklings” and “lowliest of parasites.” Rabin later retracted his statement, but for a long time afterwards, the notion stuck in the collective consciousness of most Israelis.

In recent years, the Israeli government has taken a different and softer approach to the phenomenon of yordim. Instead of shaming them into returning, the government has attempted to entice (some would say bribe) them back.

To read more, click here.