#murder on the Jerusalem express

[readerrabbitsuperfan]

please help god please help

does anyone have a link to murder on the jerusalem express or maybe downloaded it before church of the rock copyright struck it?? I would be forever indebted to you you can have my first born child. my friends and I made bingo cards please we are desperate

[superdillin]

It is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day

And I have some big feelings, as a part of the diaspora. Remembrance Day is an inappropriate title for a time in which Armenians still face genocidal forces. Just last year, Azerbaijan, armed by Turkey, ethnically cleansed over 280,000 Armenians from Artsakh. The illegal colonizer state of Israel, currently in the midst of their 6+ month-long genocide against the Palestinians, has placed the Armenians who call Jerusalem home under threat and siege.

The Armenian struggle and the Palestinian struggle are deeply linked.

In his rise to power, Hitler is quoted to justify his actions against the Jewish, Roma, Queer, Disabled, and other victims of the Holocaust, to say "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

Echoing these chilling words, Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish wrote:

Who Remembers the Armenians? I remember them and I ride the nightmare bus with them each night and my coffee, this morning I'm drinking it with them You, murderer - Who remembers you?

The trauma sustained during a genocide is not limited to the people experiencing it right now. The echoes of that trauma leak forward into the next generations, passed down through survival, and that is so insidious. My grandmother got to live, but did so believing that her parents did not love her, because the trauma they endured prevented them from expressing it. Abuse and unhealthy attachment were passed down because that starving hunger for love and acceptance was passed down. It is so deeply cruel and unfair that our oppressors get to reach through time and hurt our children's children.

We need to band together and stop the present-day abusers, the genocidal monsters that oppress the people of Palestine, Armenia, Congo, and so many others.

We need to uplift art made by those who survived, and by those who are surviving. Art is always targeted by the oppressor to erase cultural identity, to destroy legacy, and to break spirits. Support Palestinian and Armenian poets, and artists, and writers.

If you are one of the many who never learned about the Armenian Genocide, learn today. Ask yourself why people worked so hard not to educate you on this piece of history.

[probablyasocialecologist]

The context of the Hamas attack on Israelis, however, is completely different from the context of the attack on Jews during the Holocaust. And without the historical context of Israeli settler colonialism since the 1948 Nakba, we cannot explain how we got here, nor imagine different futures; Biden offered us, instead, the decontextualized image of “pure, unadulterated evil.” This weaponization of Holocaust memory by Israeli politicians runs deep. In 1982, for instance, in the context of Israel’s attack on Lebanon, the Israeli PM, Menachem Begin, compared the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Beirut to Adolf Hitler in his bunker in Berlin at the end of the war. Three decades later, in October 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu took this weaponization to new levels when he asserted in a speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem that the Palestinian grand mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini planted the idea to murder Jews in Hitler’s mind. And last Tuesday, Netanyahu described Hamas in a press conference, together with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, as the “new Nazis”. The Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant said: “Gaza will not return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” Nissim Vaturi, a member of the Israeli parliament for the ruling Likud party, to take another example, called for “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth”. There are many other such expressions by Israeli politicians and senior army officers in the last few weeks. The fantasy of “fighting Nazis” drives such explicit language, because the image of Nazis is one of “pure, unadulterated evil”, which removes all laws and restrictions in the fight against it. Perpetrators of genocide always see their victims as evil and themselves as righteous. This is, indeed, how Nazis saw Jews. Biden’s words constitute therefore a textbook use of the Holocaust not in order to stand with powerless people facing the prospect of genocidal violence, but to support and justify an extremely violent attack by a powerful state and, at the same time, distort this reality. But we see the reality in front of our eyes: since the start of Israeli mass violence on 7 October, the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza has surpassed 4,650, a third of them children, with more than 15,000 injured and over a million people displaced. Israel has also escalated the violence against Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank, including the killing of more than 95 people and an intensification of expulsions, including the destruction of whole communities. Hamas wields no power in the West Bank, but the reality that we can all see means little for Israelis fighting, in their minds, Nazis.

[matan4il]

Passover is the Jewish festival of freedom.

Israel has 133 hostages, alive and dead, still held in captivity. I'm grateful for each one released, but as long as some of our people, Jews and non-Jews alike, are hostages, we all are. Also, yesterday alone, Israel saw no less than 6 terrorist attacks (attempted or thwarted) with zero casualties, and I'm grateful no one got hurt, but what kind of freedom do we have, when this is our daily reality, and it's not even recognized?

At the end of every Passover Seder, for 2,000 years now, Jews have concluded the holiday feast with, "Le'shana ha'baa bi'Yerushalayim (לשנה הבאה בירושלים)," next year in Jerusalem.

(here's a Passover Hagaddah from Casablanca, in Morroco, with this phrase and a drawing of the Hebrew Temple in Jerusalem -)

Passover is the festival of freedom, the story of a nation breaking its bonds of enslavement, it's a story of emancipation, and as such, it is a beacon of hope and a reminder that freedom is possible for all those who yearn for it. That's why slaves in the US south adopted this language, and expressed their hopes for freedom through the story of the Jewish exodus from Egypt.

But the story doesn't end as soon as the Israelites have left Egypt, it doesn't end in the desert. Achieving freedom is a process. That ancient story demonstrates that, but we have other, more recent examples. Jews liberated from the Nazi camps were still re-living the horrors of the Holocaust every night, if not more often than that. The hostages who have been released from their captivity at the hands of murderous, rapist Hamas terrorists are still working to recover. Freedom is a process. And in the story of the exodus from Egypt, which Jews have been re-telling annually for thousands of years, guiding our thoughts and understanding of what our freedom is, the story doesn't end when our ancestors left Egypt. The final note of the story defines our freedom as only being fully achieved after going through the journey in the desert, the process, when we are once more living freely in our ancestral, promised land, when we return to our holy city. And no matter where we live, we express this idea in Hebrew, our native, ancestral language.

(here's another Passover Hagaddah, this one from 1940's Cairo, in Egypt of all places, with this same phrase -)

Poet Amnon Ribak (whose career was originally in hi-tech before he started delving into what his Judaism means to him) once wrote, "Every man needs some sort of an Egypt, to deliver himself from its house of slaves, to leave in the middle of the night into a desert of fears, to walk straight into the waters and see it parting in front of him." He takes the Jewish exodus and turns it into a metaphor for personal challenge and growth. And how does he finish this poem? (my emphasis) "Everyone needs an Egypt, and a Jerusalem, and one long journey to remember forever through the feet."

Here's the poem composed as a song (composing poems is an Israeli tradition. And while we're at it, this is a reminder that the biggest center of original Jewish culture and art in the world today is Israel):

This Passover, we will be remembering and re-telling the story of our ancestors' exit from Egypt, we will collectively yearn for Jerusalem again, we will do our best to learn from this ancient story as if each of us has been personally delivered from Egypt, we will cherish the freedoms that we have, and keep in mind the ones we still have to fight for, first and foremost the literal freedom of our hostages. Please, if you celebrate Passover, consider leaving an empty chair at your Seder table for all the people who are not yet free.

And may we all have a happy and meaningful Pesach! <3

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[determinate-negation]

"However, it is clear from reading Lozowick’s writing that the primary argument for retaining the Viennese materials in Israel rather than returning them to Central Europe is a conceptual one. Like the National Library lawyers argued over Kafka, Lozowick contended that the archives of Jewish Vienna belong in Israel because they are historical materials of the Jewish people and are therefore able to be claimed as the legal property of the Jewish state. Israel, according to Lozowick’s conceptual framework, is the cultural axis around which the entirety of the Jewish world rotates: “The transfer of the collection [from Vienna] to Israel was an ideological expression of the Viennese Jewish community accepting the centrality of the new Jewish state—otherwise it could have been transferred to London or New York... The founders of the archival world in Israel in the middle of the twentieth century regarded the state as the center of world documentation of the Jewish people.” Within this framework, Lozowick understands Israel to be the essential Jewish cultural hub, and as such, he is able to assert a legally viable claim of ownership over the historical materials produced elsewhere in the Jewish world. Such a sweeping argument has incalculable consequences for the status of property ownership and cultural production in the Jewish Diaspora, and Lozowick’s claim would be almost indefensible if he had not grounded it in the unique calamity of the Holocaust. In his decision, Lozowick asserts the following: “When [the Viennese archive] is in Jerusalem, it is part of Jewish heritage. Its expulsion from Jerusalem would send it to the periphery of the Jewish world. The leaders of the community after the Holocaust understood this well, so they sent their archives to the center so that their community would be remembered forever in the center.” As in the Kafka case, the historical memory of the Holocaust serves to justify Israel’s self-conceptualization as the center of the Jewish world. As Lozowick states, the role of Israel, particularly in an archival sense, is to keep the memory of the murdered Jews of Central and Eastern Europe alive in the modern Jewish state. This implicitly asserts that adequate Holocaust memorialization can only be achieved in the State of Israel, for the memory of the murdered Jews of Vienna would be memorialized far from the epicenter of Jewish cultural life if the archive were returned to Austria."

[baldwinivmybeloved]

Hi, (I’ve been obsessed with Anne Boleyn lately) could you please do one where King Baldwin IV’s wife is executed by beheading on false charges of adultery and witchcraft in front of a large crowd, Balian, Tiberius and Guy de Lusignan are in the crowd, and they are devastated (well, except guy of course) and a few months after her beheading it’s proven she was innocent and Baldwin regrets it and is very depressed, and his wife comes down from heaven to visit him. (Please revolve most of the story during her execution) Thx ❤️❤️ (love your writing!)

༘｡𖦹  THE EXCECUTED QUEEN✴︎  ㌍㍉ BALDWIN IV

In the summer of 1180, Queen Maria of Jerusalem stood on the scaffold of Acre Castle, awaiting execution by beheading. Her eyes fixed on the crowd of men, women, and children surrounding her, and she felt her entire world slipping away.

The charges of adultery and witchcraft, accusing her of killing her own child, seemed unfounded. The king, Baldwin IV, had trusted her, and she had returned that trust with love and affection. But the resentment and envy of others had led to her downfall.

Balian of Ibelin, Tiberius, Count of Champagne, and Guy de Lusignan watched the heartbreaking scene with grief-stricken eyes as Queen Maria was left behind to be executed. They hoped someone would intervene on her behalf, but they knew it was already too late.

All of them were close friends and loyal to the queen, and she loved them more deeply than anyone. But the Maiden's Tower loomed over her, and she was destined to be brought down.

The knight who would behead her had been chosen by the king, and she knew he was not inclined to show mercy. The other knights had requested the execution to be carried out immediately, so the people would not realize the truth behind the sentence.

Queen Maria stood firm under her red mantle, preparing for her death. Her face was as serene as an angel's, but her eyes silently pleaded for help.

But that would not happen.

Someone shouted from the crowd, and all eyes turned toward him. It was a dwarf man, carrying a metal pike and a mat.

"This is the man who accused the queen of witchcraft," said the dwarf, loudly. "This is the man who has caused the fall of our innocent queen."

All eyes turned to him, and Queen Maria's hair turned white with fear.

The dwarf continued, "This is the man who has been lying for months. He is the real witch, not her. He is the real murderer, not her. He is the real adulterer, not her."

Queen Maria's eyes trembled, and she felt that everything that had been happening over the past few months was no longer real.

The dwarf went on, "From what I have found, and from what I have known, and from what I have come to believe, all of this has been a heap of lies, and Queen Maria is innocent."

The crowd went wild, drowning in their shouts and cries.

Balian of Ibelin, Tiberius, Count of Champagne, and Guy de Lusignan stood silently in grief as Queen Maria was absolved of her false accusations of witchcraft and adultery.

The people were also astonished, and they looked at Baldwin IV with a gaze of confusion and anger.

Baldwin, who had trusted his advisers and the evidence presented against Maria, now found himself consumed by doubt and guilt. But it was too late. The executioner's sword was already raised, and with a single stroke, Maria's head rolled to the ground, her eyes still open in a final plea for justice.

The crowd's horrified scream echoed off the city walls. Balian fell to his knees, tears streaming down his face, while Tiberius covered his face with his hands, unable to bear the sight. Guy, on the other hand, maintained an expression of indifference, his gaze fixed on the lifeless body of the queen.

The months following the execution were a torment for Baldwin IV. Guilt consumed him day and night, his dreams plagued by the image of Maria and her eyes filled with love and betrayal. Finally, the truth came to light: Maria had been incriminated by enemies at court, and the evidence against her was fabricated and false.

One night, as Baldwin sat alone in his chamber, steeped in despair, a soft, warm light filled the room. Maria appeared before him, her spirit descending from heaven. Her face was full of peace, and her voice was a soothing whisper.

"Baldwin," she said, "do not torment yourself any longer. I have forgiven you. The truth always comes to light, and though my life was unjustly taken, my love for you will never die."

Baldwin, tears in his eyes, fell to his knees before her. "Maria, my love, my queen... how can I live knowing what I did to you?"

Maria extended an ethereal hand and touched his cheek. "Live with the truth, Baldwin. Honor my memory by seeking justice, and find peace knowing that I have forgiven you. Love transcends death."

With those words, Maria's spirit faded, leaving Baldwin with a mix of pain and hope. Though the guilt would never completely leave him, the king vowed to honor the memory of his innocent wife, working tirelessly to ensure that such an injustice would never happen again in his kingdom

[enigmalynne]

A Newsroom Reunion

Title – A Newsroom Reunion

Pairings – Y/N&Jensen

Word Count – 3,970

Warnings – war crimes, depictions of torture (just in case)

Prompt – Journalist(s)

A Jewish reporter goes to Israel to cover the Israeli/Gaza war and gets taken hostage live on air in front of her boyfriend, who is anchoring the news. She's kept hostage for weeks, with no information on whether she's dead or alive being given back to her station, and her boyfriend is beyond panicked about her safety. One night, she gets rescued in a trade: American hostages for Hamas soldiers. How will her boyfriend react when she is brought back to the studio after being gone for so long, a prisoner of war?

“If anyone is going to know what the hell is going on over there, Eric, it’s me. I’ve been inundated with this shit since I was a child. If we are going to cover this, we need to make sure we cover this correctly and not like these other media hacks who are acting like this is a brand-new war,” Y/N said, pacing in front of his desk with her hands on her hips. Eric followed her with his eyes, confusion coloring his expression. 

“What do you mean?” he asked her. She scoffed as she shot him a look, continuing her path back and forth. 

“Israel and Palestine’s governments have been duking it out over land forever. I think the last negotiation back in… I think it was in 2010 when it was not accepted because Jerusalem wasn’t included in the Palestinian portion. Still, it was one of the best land distribution deals Israel had ever offered them. But that’s the key point. It’s not the people who are fighting; it’s the governments. Most of the people have been living peacefully amongst each other for decades. The people want peace,” Y/N ranted in one long breath. She then stopped and turned to face the news director face-on with narrowed eyes. “Hamas is a terrorist organization that is killing everybody: Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. Hell, they are killing their people! They are using the Palestinians as human fucking shields and teaching the children that Jews are evil and need to be murdered.” 

Eric was quiet for a long time as he considered her words, and when he finally spoke, his voice was low and concerned. 

“Your fiancé isn’t going to like it.”

“It isn’t his choice to make.” 

“Are you trying to prove something?”

“This is work, it’s not personal.” 

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure! I want to cover this, and you know as well as I do I’m the best one to do it.” 

Eric went quiet again for a long moment before sighing. 

“Alright, fine. But you explain it to Jensen.” 

“It’s been almost three fucking weeks since anyone has heard from her, Eric, don’t tell me to calm down!” Jensen shouted at his news director. The entire newsroom at CNN pretended to ignore them while listening to the argument that had been occurring and growing in intensity every day since their lead reporter… their lead Jewish reporter… went missing while covering the Israel/Hamas crisis. 

“We are working on a solution to getting her out of there, but it takes time,” Eric explained with exaggerated calmness.

“That’s not good enough! Do we even know if she’s alive?” Jensen asked, pounding his fist into a nearby desk. Eric opened his mouth to say something to calm his lead anchor down but closed it, knowing nothing he had said could. The truth was, he had no idea if she was alive or not because despite what they were hearing about Hamas treating hostages humanely… there was zero proof of that. 

“Jensen,” Eric said, his voice low and controlled. Said Anchor roughly, running his hands over his face and shaking his head. 

“I know how good of a reporter she is, and I know she’d beat my ass for saying this, but that doesn’t mean she should have been sent there. You know she was spoiling for a fight.” 

Y/N was standing before the camera wearing a bulletproof vest with the word PRESS across her jeans and polo shirt. She wore a helmet with CNN’s logo on her head. She knew that helmet would do nothing to protect her skull from damage should a rocket land near her. Jensen knew it, too. 

Around her neck was a thin gold chain and a Star of David charm he gave her on their second anniversary. He begged her not to wear anything remotely Jewish over there, but she said she was going to represent her religion and her culture and tell the true story of the war. She had it around her neck when she kissed him goodbye at the airport before walking through the security checkpoint. She had it around her neck the last time she was seen on the air. 

Before she even finished her live shot for the evening news, Hamas terrorists were there. They grabbed her, knocking off her CNN helmet and yanking on her arm. The camera was still rolling as they shouted at her in Arabic. She tried to pull away from the man yanking on her, yelling at them that she was a reporter. She turned toward the translator with them and shouted at him to translate what she was saying. 

Back in the United States, Jensen and the rest of the staff of CNN watched in horror as Hamas dragged Y/N away from the camera and shoved her into a waiting vehicle. Jensen started shouting at the screen, saying things like she was American and a member of the Press; they couldn’t do this to her. The terrorists couldn’t hear him. No one other than the people in the studio could listen to him, not that it mattered. The car had already driven away, and she was already gone. 

“Never should have sent her out there,” Jensen muttered, leaning on one of the tables. 

“You weren’t going to stop her,” Eric said with a sad smile. “She was going to find a way to get out there and cover this war regardless of whether we sent her.”

“Hey, Jensen!” Katie called out as she walked over to where they were standing. 

“What!?” he snapped at her, turning her head to the side to glance at her. Katie paused, her eyes growing wide as she stumbled a little bit. She had never been on the receiving end of his temper before.

“Yuh… You’re uh… you’re needed on… on set… in 10,” she stuttered, her voice much more subdued and quieter than her usual perky, cheerful self. She then immediately turned and walked away as fast as she could, heading toward the producer desks with a glance over her shoulder at him. Jensen turned his head forward and closed his eyes, a curse muttered under his breath. 

“You need to get your shit together. You can’t just snap at AP’s because you’re worried about Y/N. We all are, but we also have a job to do. She’d be furious if she knew you were acting like this,” Eric reprimanded under his breath, so no one realized that he was disciplining his lead anchor in public. 

“I know,” he muttered guiltily, running a hand over his face before rubbing it over his hair and neck. “I’m just scared out of my mind and hate feeling this helpless.” 

“We’re gonna get her back,” Eric said, touching Jensen’s shoulder. “Have a little faith. Go get ready to get on air.” 

Y/N had no idea how long it had been since she had been taken, only that she was exhausted, hungry, and desperately wanted something to drink. She was given very little food and only had one glass of putrid water daily. Her clothing, which was nothing but rags at this point, was hanging off her body. Her shoes were long gone, and her feet were cut up in various places as she was forced to walk barefoot across the burning, sharp stones. 

She was sore. There was a cut on her mouth from where she was backhanded by one of the Hamas soldiers when she mouthed off to one of them, another above her eyebrow for struggling when they came into her cell. Her eye was black, her stomach hurt, and her muscles ached from lack of nutrients. 

Loud voices speaking in Arabic started shouting just outside her small room. Y/N startled, trying to shrink closer into the corner she was sitting in. Wide eyes watched as arguing men walked over to her room, one of which was unlocking the door. Someone shouted at her in Arabic, and she sat staring at the man. He repeated it, louder and angrier, but she shook her head slowly. With frustration, he walked over to her and grabbed her arm. He yanked her up to standing and shoved her out the door. 

“No, no, please,” she begged with a rough voice. Another man grabbed her arms behind her, slipping her hands through rope and tying them tightly. 

“Whatever is happening, please don’t hurt me,” she muttered, shaking her head as tears flooded her eyes. With a man on each of her sides holding tightly to an arm, Y/N was dragged out of the building and toward a waiting car. Shoved not so gently into the back seat, the door was slammed behind her. When she looked up, she saw another American there.

“What’s happening?” she whispered. The man sitting there shook his head. 

“I don’t know. Are you hurt?” he asked, his voice scratchy. 

“No, not really.” Y/N moved herself to a seated position and looked out the window. She was jolted awake over an hour later when the car stopped moving. She hadn’t even realized she had fallen asleep. 

“What’s going on? Where are we?” she asked, her voice still just a whisper. The man in the car with her shook his head. Suddenly, her door flew open, and she was yanked out of the car. The man shouted after her, but the same happened to him moments later. They were dragged around to the front of the vehicle and shoved toward a patch of grass. More Arabic shouted at them, guns drawn and pointed at them until they were standing on the green grass. Once there, they returned to their vehicles and drove away. 

The four Americans looked at each other, wondering what to do next, when a string of Jeeps bearing the Israeli Defense Foundation insignia pulled up. The relief that flooded Y/N at that moment brought her to her knees, and she began to sob. 

“They didn’t even untie their hands, those filthy bastards,” she heard one of the soldiers with a thick Israeli accent mutter as they came closer to them. One of them came up to her, placing a hand on her shoulder as another one went to the ropes behind her back and began to untie her hands. 

“Are you alright? Here, has some water,” she said, holding a bottle of cold water. Y/N looked up, her tear-streaked face looking into the kind eyes of a young Israeli soldier. She held the bottle to Y/N’s mouth and let her drink a bit before pulling it away. “Only a little; you don’t want to be sick.” Once her hands were free, the other soldier approached her opposite side. 

“Come, let us help you up and get you someplace safe. You have many people worried about you,” the kind Israeli soldier said. They each took one of Y/N’s arms and helped her stand and walk to one of the waiting Jeeps. 

“With the latest on the Israeli/Hamas conflict, we head into the newsroom to our correspondent Jared Padalecki. Jared,” Jensen read off the prompter. Jared nodded his head with a somber expression.

“We have just learned moments ago that Hamas has released four American hostages, however, the identities of those hostages are currently unknown,” Jared said as he referred to information he was looking at on a computer. 

Jensen’s eyes lit up at the comment, his heart picking up its pace. Hostages have been released.

“What we do know is the four hostages are American and were taken during the early days of the conflict,” Jared continued. “As you know, CNN’s Y/N Y/L/N was taken hostage from assignment during an air raid near the Erez Crossing. CNN has been in negotiations with Hamas for the safe release of Y/L/N but with no success yet.” 

Jensen’s breathing ticked up a notch, his eyes bouncing between the monitor showing Jared, his report, and the camera. He knew Eric was in the control room, monitoring the show from the booth tonight. He knew Eric was monitoring him from the booth tonight. 

Jensen shook his head as he glanced down at his hands, wanting nothing more than to jump up from his seat and call every contact he knew to find out if Y/N was among the four rescued Americans. There were four chances that Y/N were among the rescued hostages, and he could have her back in his arms any day now. 

Jo, the female anchor for the evening, reached over and squeezed his hand. He looked over at her with red-lined eyes. She gave him a hopeful look before retreating to her seat. 

A few days later - 

Y/N watched the elevator numbers change slowly, shifting her weight back and forth between her feet. Her arms were wrapped around her middle as if they were holding herself together. Her hair was dirty despite multiple showers at the hospital she was taken to, and then she was debriefed at the military base, so she pulled it back into a messy bun on the top of her head. Whisps and strands fell around her face and down her back anyway. Her skin was sunburnt: her cheeks and nose were bright red, and her lips were chapped despite the heavy layers of ChapStick she had been wearing since the hospital. The cuts to her lip and eyebrow were still healing, but the black eye was still dark and swollen.

They gave her a pair of worn jeans that belonged to someone who worked on the base and an oversized T-shirt that fell to her knees. She took a pair of scissors to the T-shirt, slicing up the side and knotting it at her hip. Military-issue boots adorned her feet.

She was tired and still hungry despite the food she was given. She was still thirsty despite countless bottles of fresh, cold water she had drank. And this? This was the slowest elevator ride ever. 

The two Marines escorting her had been kind the entire time they were with her. Making sure she had enough water and whether she wanted any more food. She was always asking her about her comfort. She asked one of them if they had any advice on how to make the nightmares stop so she could get some sleep. He had smiled in a reflective, sad way and told her that time was the only way. She didn’t speak much after that. 

When the elevator finally opened on the 18th floor, she walked out and looked around the newsroom for someone she knew. When her eyes landed on a television and saw that Jensen was on air, she realized just how late it was. Without thinking about it, she slowly made her way toward the studio. That’s when the whispers began around her, but she ignored them. She had one thing on her mind at that moment.

“Ma’am, do you know where you are heading to?” one of the Marines asked gently. Nodding, Y/N reached over and grabbed the handle of the heavy door that led to the studio. 

“Y/N!?” a voice called out in surprise. She turned her head toward the voice, staring blankly at Meg. “Oh, my God… Y/N…”  Meg started to go over to where the tired woman was, but Y/N shook her head.

“I’m seeing Jensen first. I don’t care if he’s on the air,” she whispered roughly, her eyes watering. She gave the producer a broken smile, then pulled the door open. 

“Oh, my God,” Meg repeated, watching as Y/N entered the studio with two dressed Marines following her. Suddenly, she snapped out of her stupor and turned, shouting as she ran to the booth. “Katie!! Find Eric and tell him to get his ass to the booth! Y/N’s back, and she’s about to interrupt the newscast!” Katie was startled, confusion coloring her face. 

“What?”

“Now, Katie!” Meg shouted as she ran down the long hallway to the production booth, where a crew was putting the show on air. She threw the door open, startling the people inside. 

“What the fuck, Meg!” the director shouted at her, looking at the well-liked executive producer like she was crazy.

“Whatever is about to happen, stay with it. Y/N’s about to reunite with Jensen on air right now!” she shouted, walking over to the producer's seat. She pushed the producer out of the way, holding out her hand. “Gimme your headset, gimme gimme gimme”

Y/N slowly made her way around the long wooden wall that made up the set's backdrop and turned the corner into the room. Lights above them angled toward a large desk centered in front of the backdrop, and cameras with people manning them were also pointed at the desk. Y/N didn’t see any of it. Once she spotted Jensen, she made her way to stand in his sightline. The water gathering in her eyes started to fall as she stared at her fiancé. 

He was studying the paper scripts in front of him, a pen in his hand. He made some notes in the margins of the paper. Suddenly, he frowned and moved to hold a button down before he spoke. 

“Whatever it is, Meg, it can wait,” he snapped, letting go of the button and returning to his notes. A small smile danced on Y/N’s lips, the movement feeling foreign. He repeated the action a moment later, snapping at the producer again. 

“Jensen,” she tried to say, but it came out as a whisper. Dropping her head, she tried to clear her throat, swallowed, and then looked up again… into the vast green eyes of her fiancé. He was staring at her in disbelief, his breath almost nonexistent. 

“Jen,” she muttered roughly, quietly. 

“Y/N?” Jensen asked in disbelief, moving slowly: he stood, reaching into his ear to pull out his earpiece simultaneously. The second time, he said her name was stronger. “Y/N?”  She nodded a small smile on her lips, tears making their way down her face. That’s when his restraint broke. He moved around the desk and to her in three steps, wrapping her in his arms. 

“Thank you, God,” he muttered as he held her as close to him as he could get, one arm wrapped around her, the other pressed against her neck. Once Jensen’s arms were wrapped around her, and her arms were wrapped around him, she began to cry. 

“I thought I was never going to see you again,” she whispered, pressing herself as close to him as possible. He pulled back slightly and gently brushed her tears away with his thumbs before pressing his mouth to hers in a gentle but passionate kiss. 

“I love you so much,” he breathed once they separated. 

“I love you,” she repeated, pressing her lips back on his. They separated and stared into each other’s eyes for a long moment before Jensen pulled her back into his arms, relishing the feeling of her being there again. 

“I’m never letting you go on assignment again.” 

“I’m okay with that,” she said with a smile, looking up at him, her face wet with tears. She looked tired and beaten up, dressed in clothing that wasn’t hers and didn’t fit her, and it was the best thing Jensen had ever seen. 

Moving carefully to wrap his arm around her shoulders, Jensen led them out of the studio and back into the newsroom. Once there, the entire room erupted in cheers, causing Y/N to flinch and pull away. One of the Marines with them immediately took control of the situation and moved forward to quiet down the cheering friends. 

“What’s wrong? Are you alright?” Jensen asked quickly, his voice laced with panic. Y/N shook her head frantically as she pulled away, trying to back away from him. The other Marine who was with them gently removed Jensen from her side and began to speak quietly to the frightened woman who was on the verge of a panic attack. 

“Take a breath, ma’am. You’re in New York now, not Gaza. Close your eyes and pay attention to your surroundings. Notice that the air smells different here. Things feel different here…” 

It took almost ten minutes, but soon, Y/N could open her eyes and breathe normally again. At some point, she had made it onto the floor. She looked to the Marine apologetically and shook her head, looking away. She rubbed her hand over her chest and held back a sob. 

“Hey, we talked about this. It’s going to take a while. Finding a good therapist to help you work through the trauma is going to be necessary, but having friends and family here to help you is a great first step,” the Marine said, kneeling next to her. Jensen came up next to her, finally being allowed to approach her. “We didn’t warn anyone about your aversion to loud sounds like we had discussed doing, so it’s expected that this would have happened.”

“Is she okay?” Jensen asked quietly, kneeling. He placed a hand on her shoulder.

“She will be. Right?” Y/N nodded slowly, accepting the hands to help her stand. She looked over at the group of people watching anxiously.

“There’s a lot of people who want to see you,” Jensen said quietly, looking back into the newsroom. Everyone stood and looked on worriedly. “You think you can handle that?” Y/N nodded and made her way over. Moments later, they swarmed her in a group hug. 

“Are you the gentlemen who brought our Y/N back to us?” Eric asked, approaching the two Marines standing near them. The Marines turned to face the news director, and one nodded. 

“We escorted her here as she requested,” he answered. “She was held there the longest and experienced the worst of the abuse. I’m the Chaplain of the Navy, Captain Mathew Davis, and this is Lieutenant William Arnold.” Eric held his hand out, which the Marine shook.

“Thank you for bringing her home.” 

“Just doing our job.” 

“You did more than that, trust me,” Eric said, shaking the other man’s hand. The two Marines nodded, then turned and left the building. 

“I wanna go home. Can we go home, Jen?” Y/N asked softly, looking up at her fiancé with tired eyes. Jensen looked down at her, pressing his lips to her forehead. 

“Of course. Let’s get you home,” he muttered. Eric watched the couple stand and turn. 

“Take a few weeks off, Jen,” he said, causing Jensen to turn and look at him. “I’ll send you the contact information of a good therapist. You both should go. We’ll talk next week sometime.” 

“Thanks, Eric,” Jensen said with a soft smile, his arm wrapped around the most crucial thing in his life. Eric’s eyes drifted down to his star reporter, recognizing the look of trauma all too well. 

“You have no idea how glad I am you made it out of there, kid,” Eric said quietly. Jensen looked down at Y/N and moved his arm as she hugged Eric. Eric closed his eyes and held her tighter, kissing her temple. 

“Thanks, Uncle Eric,” she whispered before pulling away. Eric brushed some hair from Y/N’s face, causing her to smile softly before curling back under Jensen’s arm.

“Get out of here. I’ll come by this weekend, and we can talk more then,” Eric said. Jensen nodded, pulling Y/N with him. 

“I’m never letting you go,” Jensen whispered to her hair as he kissed her head, guiding her to the elevator. Y/N laid her head on his chest and sighed. 

“I’m holding you to it.”

[moxiebustion]

I'm not even remotely religious in any way, but I am begging people who are going to write about a character going into a monastery/nunnery whatever to please, please, please read some of the Cadfael Chronicles before you cast an entire population of people as fire-and-brimstone, self-mutilating, repressed, fanatical zealots.

For the uninitiated, the Cadfael Chronicles was a long series of medieval-set (specifically set in the 12th century) murder mysteries where the gumshoe role is taken by a monk who is well into middle age, a skilled herbalist and a former soldier and sailor who joined the Order late in his life (which for one, did happen!).

Now, there are some dated things about the writing that bears some examining; Ellis Peters (psued for Edith Pargeter) first started writing then in the late seventies (the last book was published 1994, a year before her death), and while she was a fantastic amateur self-taught scholar (she was so good she got an honorary degree from Birmingham University, having never even been to any higher education than high school) she is writing about the time of the Crusades and the Crusaders who invaded Jerusalem and she doesn't really delve that deep into the implications of her characters being involved in that, even though the characters are portrayed as the good guys, especially the titular one. But it's very possible most of the scholarship she had available for research at the time was all Western perspectives, which, you know, history is written by the winners, etc. She has a writers bias towards her protagonist, so of course he is framed fairly glowingly, though not without flaw.

But whether she had a view on the moral implications of the Crusades or not, the way she wrote medieval Britain and medieval Wales is absolutely textually fascinating because she doesn't flinch away from the fact that yes, Britain at this time was a feudal serfdom with slaves included, and was hard on marginalized people, chock full of patriarchy that did affect the lives of her female characters or that the Church was a big landowner themselves, and there was plenty of political tension and violence due to an ongoing civil war, but nonetheless the town the Chronicles are set in and the monastery where Cadfael lives is portrayed as a community.

Seriously. They don't just pray and whip themselves for 'bad thoughts'. The monks can be funny, snarky, and shy, and ambitious. They can be irreverent - yes, even about God, that thing that they are meant to be the most reverent about. They can have petty rivalries, they can annoy one another, even the Abbot, and not be sent for a backbreaking penance. They aren't thumping on bibles and telling people that if they don't make the cut that they're going to burn in hell.

They care. They take care of the children left in their charge, whether they're rich scions there to get an education or some poor thing left on their doorstep. One monk, in charge of the children, expresses real and genuine concern over a new novice that is having horrific dreams, worried that he has suffered a tremendous hidden trauma (he's right) and they're all concerned about what they can do to help him. A pair of teenagers literally fuck on one of the altars and the reaction from Cadfael is rueful amusement at young people's folly, not disgust or anger. They collect alms for the poor, redistribute everything given to them to help people survive. They crack jokes and show each other kindness and...

... look, I'm not saying that there weren't and still aren't zealots in religion. No religion is really innocent of that. And yeah, those zealots have done some pretty heinous things when they're put in charge - see Witch Burnings, Various Inquisitions, Crusades, Terrorism, etc. But I do wish writers wouldn't write about religious life like everyone who ever entered it was either a complete bag of bible-thumping assholes or just miserable all the time.

For one thing, that's really boring. Religion is a way we can tell stories about the complex reality we live in and the rules we think are important when dealing with other people. To reduce all that potential down to Miserable, Repressed, Self-Harming, Witch Hunting Jerks is intellectually lazy at best.

For another thing, you are losing the opportunity to portray a fundamentally queer experience. I don't mean they were all fucking (although some of the proscriptions that they felt the need to write down would rise your eyebrows - hand holding was apparently banned at one point); I meant that this was a group of people that took themselves out of the amatonormative status quo entirely and dedicated themselves to something that wasn't marriage, children, mercantile endeavors or anything 'normal' like that. That was, at the very least, a queer experience with clear queerplatonic overtones (not to mention, there were FTM trans monks that literally went on to sainthood, chosen gender kept intact).

And also? It just isn't historically accurate. Plenty of men and women actively chose a life outside the norm because they wanted to serve god and the community. They're just a group of people, all living together, making space for one another, all trying to serve people in whatever way they can. These people were less raging witch-burners and more Jedi without the lightsaber.

In the Cadfael books, they have brushes with zealots and they're reviled as bad guys every time. One (in the very first book) more or less fakes a whole-ass vision to manipulate the order to go to Wales and try and acquire a Welsh saint's bones and ends up doing even worse things because he believes he is destined for greatness and will get it by whatever means necessary. The head of the mission (who edges close to zealot territory himself and fully buys into the con for his own benefit) tries to buy the saints relics and causes a massive diplomatic incident as a result of this insult that makes him look like an idiot.

The other zealot that gives them trouble is a priest appointed to run the church. This man is as big a bible thumping, hellfire and brimstone dickhead as you might always picture a medieval priest to be and he is uniformly despised by both the monks and the township at large because his zealotry and strict adherence to only the letter of religious law and nothing else actively harms the community.

He's so hated, in fact, that when he (spoilers) dies, the reactions of all and sundry is mostly just relief that he's gone.

The Catholic Church has a lot of sins that it forgets more than it reckons with, but that doesn't mean that life in a monastery was all hair shirts and self-mortification, every abbot a little dictator. People have lived just fine in small communes for a lot of human history and they didn't all have small-minded tyrants continually cracking the whip. Most of them didn't.

I know it's an easy shaft to mine angst from, shoving people into an oppressive environment that they must either endure or overcome. And yes, the way we write about religion is sometimes a product of working through a complicated and traumatic relationship with it. I'm not trying to say any writer can't or shouldn't write that because your art is always supposed to be about putting parts of yourself out there, about telling the world a story about how you see it; and if you're working through something, if you need to tell a story about the scars that zealotry absolutely have and do leave, go for it, more power to you. That's a story that should and must be told.

But if your character is going into a monastery, try to remember that humans are social creatures. We make friends more than we make enemies. Even under intense tyranny, we make allegiances and form bonds and find ways to make the world were in a little bit more bearable wherever we can. And we tend to show each other compassion and mercy, even when we don't always like each other. It's true today, and it was true then too.

Monastic life was a queer experience that happened right under the noses of the dominant power structures for centuries. I think there's a story or two to be mined from that as well.

[eretzyisrael]

by Dion J. Pierre

The State University System of Florida has at least two institutions with active National SJP chapters, according to Rodrigues. Citing state law that deems the knowing provision of material support to a terrorist group as a felony, he said that the two chapters cannot continue operating.

“These chapters exist under the headship of the National Students for Justice in Palestine, who distributed a toolkit identifying themselves as part of the Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” the memo stated. “Based on the National SJP’s support of terrorism, in consultation with Governor DeSantis, the student chapters must be deactivated. These two student chapters may form another organization that complies with Florida state statutes and university policies. The two institutions should grant these two chapters a waiver for the fall deadlines, should reapplication take place.”

The measure will affect SJP chapters at the University of North Florida, located in Jacksonville, and Florida State University, located in Tallahassee.

Support for terrorism against Israeli civilians among SJP chapters is not new. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), for example, reported that SJP expressed on at least 10 occasions last year admiration for Leila Khaled, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a US-designated terror group. She is known for previously hijacking two planes.

Other SJP chapters at the University of Texas, Dallas, New York University Law School, and the University of Massachusetts posted violent images containing PLFP’s logo and guns. In January, the University of Chicago’s SJP chapter honored Khairy Alqam — who murdered seven Israeli civilians exiting a synagogue in Jerusalem — in a collage titled “Honoring the Martyrs.”

DeSantis has taken previous steps to crack down on anti-Israel activity in Florida.

[frmartinshomiliesandreflections]

1st September >> Fr. Martin's Homilies/Reflections on Today's Mass Readings for The Twenty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B) (Inc. Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23): ‘It is from within, from people’s hearts, that evil intentions emerge’.

Twenty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

Gospel (Except USA) Mark 7:1-8,14-15,21-23 You put aside the commandment of God, to cling to human traditions.

The Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered round Jesus, and they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with unclean hands, that is, without washing them. For the Pharisees, and the Jews in general, follow the tradition of the elders and never eat without washing their arms as far as the elbow; and on returning from the market place they never eat without first sprinkling themselves. There are also many other observances which have been handed down to them concerning the washing of cups and pots and bronze dishes. So these Pharisees and scribes asked him, ‘Why do your disciples not respect the tradition of the elders but eat their food with unclean hands?’ He answered, ‘It was of you hypocrites that Isaiah so rightly prophesied in this passage of scripture:

This people honours me only with lip-service, while their hearts are far from me. The worship they offer me is worthless, the doctrines they teach are only human regulations.

You put aside the commandment of God to cling to human traditions.’ He called the people to him again and said, ‘Listen to me, all of you, and understand. Nothing that goes into a man from outside can make him unclean; it is the things that come out of a man that make him unclean. For it is from within, from men’s hearts, that evil intentions emerge: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, malice, deceit, indecency, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within and make a man unclean.’

Gospel (USA) Mark 7:1–8, 14–15, 21–23 You disregard God’s commandment but cling to human tradition.

When the Pharisees with some scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus, they observed that some of his disciples ate their meals with unclean, that is, unwashed, hands. —For the Pharisees and, in fact, all Jews, do not eat without carefully washing their hands, keeping the tradition of the elders. And on coming from the marketplace they do not eat without purifying themselves. And there are many other things that they have traditionally observed, the purification of cups and jugs and kettles and beds.— So the Pharisees and scribes questioned him, “Why do your disciples not follow the tradition of the elders but instead eat a meal with unclean hands?” He responded, “Well did Isaiah prophesy about you hypocrites, as it is written:

This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts.

You disregard God’s commandment but cling to human tradition.” He summoned the crowd again and said to them, “Hear me, all of you, and understand. Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile. “From within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly. All these evils come from within and they defile.”

Homilies (7)

(i) Twenty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

There are times in our individual lives and in the lives of our communities when we need to recover what is truly important. We can all lose sight of what really matters and give ourselves over to what is of much lesser value. We are familiar with the expression, ‘missing the wood for the trees’. This is true in the area of our faith as well as in every other area of life. We can attach too much importance to some expressions of faith and not enough importance to other expressions of faith.

In the gospel reading, Jesus accuses the religious leaders of his day for doing just that. They are giving more importance to various human religious traditions than to the word of God. As Jesus says, ‘You put aside the commandment of God to cling to human tradition’. Jesus was saying to them that what was important to them was not so important to God, whereas what was important to God was not so important to them. The central question when it comes to our relationship with God is, ‘What does God want?’ It may not always be easy to answer that question, but it is worth asking it. Jesus came among us to show us what God wants for our lives. In today’s gospel reading, he points us in the direction of what God wants from us. He suggests that what really matters to God is what is in our hearts, our inner core. He quotes from his own religious tradition, the prophet Isaiah, to show that this is what God has always wanted, ‘This people honours me with their lip-service, while their hearts are far from me’. In spite of the fine sounding words that come from their lips in prayer, their hearts were not give over to God. Their hearts did not belong to God. Their hearts were not in the right place. The religious leaders in the gospel reading were very concerned with ‘the tradition of the elders’. They criticized Jesus’ disciples for not showing respect for this tradition, by their failure to observe certain rituals relating to the washing of hands before eating. Yet, for all their concern about these religious traditions, Jesus could see that their hearts were not given over to God. They had not allowed God to live in their hearts. If they had, they would not have been so critical of Jesus’ disciples.

What God really wants is a heart that is open to receiving God’s abundant love and a heart from which God’s love is then poured out upon others. When Jesus was asked once, ‘What is the greatest commandment in the Law?’ he quoted two texts from the Jewish Scriptures, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all you mind’, and, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’. What God wants from us more than anything else is a heart given over to God and to all God’s people in love, in response to God’s love for us. Etty Hillesum was a young Jewish Dutch woman living in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during the Second World War. She died in Auschwitz at the age of twenty-nine. She wrote a diary while she was there and at one point she wrote, ‘Every atom of hate we add to this world, makes it more inhospitable... and every act of loving perfects it’. She refused to hate those who had taken everything from her. She understood what was at the centre of her own Jewish faith, namely love for all. It was this centre that Jesus always highlighted, not just by what he said but by his whole way of life.

Jesus came not just to show us what God wants but to empower us to become what God wants. Through his life, death and resurrection, Jesus poured the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God’s love, into our hearts, so as to create in us hearts that reflect the loving heart of God, hearts that are the source of a loving way of life. A loving heart and the life that flows from it is not just down to our own efforts. It comes to us from God, through his Son and the Holy Spirit. As Saint James says at the beginning of today’s second reading, ‘It is all that is good, everything that is perfect, which is given us from above; it comes down from the Father of all light’. We need to keep turning to God, asking him to give us the heart that God desires for us, as in that lovely prayer, ‘Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in us the fire of your love’. We can personalize that prayer for ourselves, ‘Come Holy Spirit, fill my heart, and kindle in me the fire of your love’. If we can keep the fire of the Spirit’s love burning in our hearts, then we will be lovingly attentive to the most vulnerable among us, and this is certainly what God wants. As Saint James says at the end of that second reading, ‘Pure, unspoilt religion, in the eyes of God our Father, is this: coming to the help of orphans and widows when they need it’. This has always been the heart of the matter for God and always will be.

And/Or

(ii) Twenty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

Our families of origin tend to have their own traditions. In being born into a particular family, we inherit traditional ways of doing things that have been part of the story of our family, perhaps for several generations. When a family member breaks with those traditions and does things differently, it can often create some initial tension in the family. Yet, every generation within a family has to creatively shape the family tradition in ways that correspond to the culture and times in which they live. Tradition is not a kind of dead weight to be passed on faithfully from one generation to the next. Any tradition that is worthwhile has to be something living and vibrant, capable of change and development. A living tradition is one that embodies the wisdom of the past while being open to new wisdom that comes from further reflection on experience.

If every family has its tradition, this is even more so of the church which is two thousand years old. Within the Roman Catholic Church in particular, tradition has always been recognized as a source of God’s revelation. God speaks to us through the Scriptures, but also through all of those people who from the earliest days of the church have reflected upon and given expression to the Scriptures in their way of life. One expression of the tradition of the church would be the lives of the saints, who can continue to teach us what it means to be a follower of the Lord. Other examples of the church’s tradition would be how the church has worshipped over the centuries and how it has given official expression to its faith in its creeds and teachings from earliest times. The church’s tradition is a living tradition. Like a human body it grows and develops. There is always continuity with the past but also change and new life. Looking back over the history of the church, it is possible to identify moments when the church’s tradition underwent a very significant development in a relatively short space of time. The Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s was one such a moment, when the whole church made a serious effort to listen to the signs of the times and to allow the church’s tradition to be reshaped accordingly.

Jesus was a Jew. He was born into a Jewish family and inherited the traditions of his Jewish faith. The gospels suggest that he understood himself as sent by God to renew Judaism, to launch a kind of second Vatican Council within Judaism. He respected deeply the Jewish tradition he inherited but he wanted to reshape it so that it came to express more fully God’s purpose for the Jewish people and for all of humanity. This mission to renew and reshape the Jewish tradition brought him into conflict with those who wanted to maintain the tradition as it was at that time. A good example of such conflict is to be found in our gospel reading this morning. The Pharisees who were committed to preserving and promoting the traditions of the elders accused Jesus and his disciples of riding roughshod over these traditions. Jesus in turn declared that the Pharisees give more importance to human traditions than to God’s commandments. While very concerned about traditions relating to food - what is eaten and how it is eaten – they had neglected much more fundamental values in God’s eyes, what Jesus refers to elsewhere as the weightier matters of the law, such as mercy, justice and love. Jesus challenged the upholders of the tradition to pay less attention to externals and to attend more to what is within the human heart and to the actions that flow from that. In a certain sense, Jesus was calling on them to get back to basics, to return to the wellsprings of their tradition, as found in the message of the prophet Isaiah, whom Jesus quotes.

The Second Vatican Council was the church’s attempt to get back to basics. What drove the deliberations of the Council was a desire to return to the sources of our faith - to Scripture and to the earliest traditions of the church. Every religious tradition needs ongoing purification and the path to that purification always involves a return to the sources. Today’s readings invite us as a church and as individuals to keep on returning to the sources of our faith, in particular, the Scriptures, the word of God.  In the second reading, St James calls on us to ‘accept and submit to the word which has been planted in you’. Such acceptance of and submission to God’s word, he goes on to say, involves not just listening to God’s word but doing what that word tells us. For James, central to God’s word is the call to show care and concern for the needy and most vulnerable. In returning to the sources of our faith, we will always hear afresh the call to serve each other and to build each other up. It is clear from today’s gospel reading that Jesus was much more concerned about how people were relating to each other than about food regulations. At the end of that reading he lists attitudes of the heart that were destructive of human relationships. Jesus understood the values that were central to the Jewish tradition, and he proclaimed those values in the ways he related to people, especially those who were on the margins for one reason or another.

We live in an age in which loyalty to religious tradition can be a very destructive force. Today’s readings remind us that for us as Christians, the real traditionalists, those most faithful to our Christian tradition, are people who live in ways that give expression to the healing, compassionate and life-giving presence of the Lord.

And/Or

(iii) Twenty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

While he was hear, Pope Francis spoke a lot about family life. Our families of origin tend to have their own traditions. In being born into a particular family, we inherit traditional ways of doing things that have been part of the story of our family. When a family member breaks with those traditions and does things differently, it can often create some initial tension in the family. Yet, every generation of a family has to creatively shape the family tradition in response to the culture and times in which they live. Tradition is not a kind of dead weight to be passed on faithfully from one generation to the next. Any tradition that is worthwhile has to be living and vibrant, open to change and development. A living tradition is one that keeps within it the wisdom of the past while being open to new wisdom that comes from further reflection on experience.

If every family has its tradition, this is even more so of the family of the church which is two thousand years old. Within the Roman Catholic Church, in particular, tradition has always been recognized as a source of God’s revelation. God speaks to us through the Scriptures, which are the earliest and most authoritative expression of the church’s tradition. God also speaks to us through all those who from the earliest days of the church have allowed the Scriptures to shape their way of life. One expression of the tradition of the church would be the lives of the saints, who, even though they belong to the past, still have something to say to us about what it means to be a follower of the Lord today. Other examples of the church’s tradition would be how believers have worshipped over the centuries, and the many ways the church has given official expression to its understanding of the faith in its creeds and catechisms from earliest times. The church’s tradition is a living tradition. Like a human body it grows and develops. There is always continuity with the past but also change and development. Pope Francis embodies that understanding of the church’s tradition. Looking back over the history of the church, it is possible to identify moments when the church’s tradition underwent a very significant development in a relatively short space of time. The Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s was one such moment.

Jesus was born into a Jewish family and he inherited the traditions of his Jewish faith, those laws and customs which, according to the first reading, made the people of Israel wise and prudent. Yet, the gospels suggest that Jesus also wanted to renew his Jewish tradition so that it could more fully express God’s purpose for the Jewish people and for all of humanity. This mission to renew and reshape the Jewish tradition brought him into conflict with those who wanted to maintain the tradition as it was. In today’s gospel reading, the Pharisees who were committed to preserving the traditions of the elders accused Jesus and his disciples of riding roughshod over these traditions. Jesus in turn declared that the Pharisees give more importance to human traditions than to God’s commandments. While they were very concerned about traditions relating to food - what is eaten and how it is eaten – they had neglected what Jesus refers to elsewhere as ‘the weightier matter of the law’, namely, mercy, justice and love. Jesus challenged the upholders of the tradition to pay less attention to externals and to attend more to the attitudes that reside within the human heart and to the actions that flow from them. Jesus was calling on them to get back to basics, to return to the core values of their tradition, as found in the message of the prophet Isaiah, whom Jesus quotes at lenght.

The Second Vatican Council was the church’s attempt to get back to basics, to return to the sources of our faith, Scripture and the earliest traditions of the church. Today’s readings invite us as a church and as individuals to keep on returning to the sources of our faith, in particular, the Scriptures, the word of God.  In the second reading, St James calls on us to ‘accept and submit to the word which has been planted in you’. Such submission to God’s word, he goes on to say, involves not just listening to God’s word but doing what that word tells us. For James, central to God’s word is the call to show care and concern for the needy and most vulnerable, exemplified by the widows and orphans of his day. In returning to the sources of our faith, we will always hear afresh the call to serve those in greatest need. Today’s gospel reading shows that Jesus’ primary concern was those attitudes of heart which shape how we relate to each other. At the end of that reading he lists attitudes of the heart that were destructive of human relationships. Jesus understood the core values of his own Jewish tradition. He proclaimed those values in the ways he related to people, especially those who were on the margins for one reason or another. We live in an age in which loyalty to religious tradition can be a very destructive force. Today’s readings remind us that for us Christians, the real traditionalists, those most faithful to our Christian tradition, are all who live in ways that give expression to the Lord’s healing and life-giving presence.

And/Or

(iv) Twenty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

To some extent, most of us are creatures of habit. We have traditionally done things in a certain way and it can be hard at times to start doing things differently. The personal habits, or traditions that we have developed can serve us well; yet, there can come a time when they begin to hold us back. As well as personal habits or traditions, we also have communal traditions, traditional ways in which we as a society or as a church have done things. Those communal traditions can serve us well, but there can come a time when they can restrict us.

In the gospel reading Jesus comes into conflict with the Pharisees who had a great regard for what is referred to in that gospel reading as ‘the tradition of the elders’. These were traditions that had been passed down orally for hundreds of years and that applied the Jewish Law to all the details of daily living. These traditions were not written in the Scriptures but they had come to acquire an authority that was equal to that of the Scriptures. In the course of his ministry, Jesus challenged the prominence that the Pharisees and other religious leaders gave to these religious traditions. In the gospel reading Jesus contrasts these human traditions to the commandment of God and he declares that in their zeal to uphold these human traditions, the religious leaders have ended up undermining the commandment of God. Jesus is implying that what mattered so much to the Pharisees did not matter to God. God had other priorities. Long standing traditions about ritual washings of hands and of cups and pots do not matter to God; what does matter to God, according to Jesus, is what is in our heart and what comes from out of our heart.

Those of us who are into gardening know we have to prune our bushes and shrubs. Otherwise, they can get too big and the flower or fruit loses its quality. Jesus was in many ways a pruner. He pruned back the traditions that had come to acquire an importance they did not deserve. In his pruning he tried to highlight what was most important in God’s eyes. Jesus did not jettison the Jewish tradition completely. In this morning’s gospel reading he critiques the traditions of the Pharisees by drawing upon the tradition of the prophet Isaiah. Jesus was able to identify in the Jewish tradition what really mattered to God and what did not. Jesus did not dismantle the Jewish tradition in order to start completely afresh. Rather, he wanted what was best in that tradition to flourish. He highlighted those elements of the Jewish tradition that revealed God’s desire for our lives, most fully. Jesus was very aware that religious tradition can hide God as well as reveal God. An important dimension of his work consisted in pruning back those elements of the tradition that were hiding God.

Our own religious traditions are always in need of pruning, be they our own personal traditions or the traditions of the church. What has become important to us over time may not be as important to God. That is why we need to keep going back to the New Testament and to the gospels in particular to learn over and over again what Jesus says is important to God. We have to keep going back to the source of our Christian tradition, which is the word of God, to allow that tradition to be purified and pruned. The Lord continues to speak to us through his word, reminding us of what is important to God and what, therefore, should be important to us. Today’s second reading from the letter of James calls on us to ‘accept and submit to the word which has been planted in you’. The word of the Lord is not just outside of ourselves in a book; it has been planted in us, through baptism. In attending to the Lord’s word we are attending to what is deepest within ourselves. James reminds us in that reading that accepting and submitting to the Lord’s word means not just listening to it but doing it, doing what the word tells us. If we submit to the Lord’s word in that full sense, then what is important to God will become important to us. The letter of James is very clear about what is important to God. In the words of our second reading, ‘pure unspoilt religion in the eyes of God our Father is this: coming to the help orphans and widows when they need it, and keeping oneself uncontaminated by the world’. I have no doubt that Jesus would have been very happy with that way of expressing what is important to God.

The first priority in God’s eyes is how we relate to one another, in particular how we relate to the weakest and most vulnerable among us. Jesus did not hesitate to heal the sick on the Sabbath even though the tradition of the elders held that this constituted work and so was unlawful. The words and deeds of Jesus are always are best guide to what is of real value in our own religious tradition and what it is that may need to be put aside.

And/Or

(v) Twenty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

Etty Hillesum was a young Jewish Dutch woman living in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during the Second World War. She was soon to die in Auschwitz at the age of twenty-nine. She wrote a diary while there and at one point she wrote, ‘Every atom of hate we add to this world, makes it more inhospitable... and every act of loving perfects it’. She refused to hate those who had taken everything from her. The essence of her Jewish religious tradition came through in that purity of heart which she maintained against all the odds.

In this morning’s gospel reading, Jesus and the Pharisees are in conflict as to what it is that constitutes the true Jewish religion. What is the essence of the Jewish religious tradition? Jesus locates it’s essence in what goes on in the human heart and what comes out of the human heart. The Pharisees were more preoccupied with what they called ‘the traditions of the elders’. These were concrete observances of various kinds that had been handed down through the generations. Some of them, for example, related to how people should wash their hands before eating, and how vessels that are to be used for eating and drinking should be prepared beforehand. It is evident that Jesus and his disciples did not follow these traditions of the elders very faithfully. The Pharisees accused Jesus and his disciples of not acting in accordance with the Jewish religious tradition. They were not being ‘religious’ in the sense that the Pharisees understood it.

Jesus did not reject Jewish religious tradition. He himself stood very much within it. His concern was to get to the essence of his own religious tradition. The prophets were a very important part of the Jewish tradition and in this morning’s gospel reading Jesus goes back to one of the prophets, Isaiah, uncover the essence of the Jewish religious tradition. Jesus quotes God speaking through Isaiah, ‘this people honours me only with lip service while their hearts are far from me’. Jesus is saying that the God of Israel wants people’s hearts. Their hearts are to be given over to God and to what God wants. This is the purity of heart that Etty Hillesum displayed against all the odds. As far as Jesus was concerned the Pharisees were giving too much importance to what was peripheral in the Jewish tradition and not enough importance to what was central in that tradition. As he says, they were clinging to human traditions while putting aside the commandment of God. They had all the externals of their tradition right but they were missing what was central.

Jesus prompts us to continually seek out the core of our religious tradition. What is it within our own Catholic religious tradition that matters most to God and that speaks to us of God’s purpose for our lives? The term ‘traditionalist’ can sometimes be used in a disparaging way today. Yet, we are all called to be ‘traditionalists’ in the sense that Jesus would have understood that term. We are to keep in touch with those core elements of our tradition which are a true revelation of God for us today. We find those core elements above all in the Scriptures and, especially, in what we as Christians call the New Testament. The Scriptures are the primary expression of the church’s tradition. The Second Vatican Council which took place in Rome over a period of four years or so in the early 1960s set itself the task of taking a close look at the various traditions of the church, and it went back to the Scriptures, especially the New Testament, to separate out what was central in all those traditions and what was peripheral, what needed to be retained and what could be changed, just as in the gospel reading Jesus went back to the prophet Isaiah to do the same. We, the church, have to keep going back to the Scriptures to be reminded of what is at the core of our religious tradition and what is less important.

When we do go back to the sources in that way, we discover that there is a strong emphasis on the importance of the heart, the inner core, of the person. If we can somehow get that right, everything else will find its rightful place. In one of his beatitudes Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God’. He declares blessed those whose heart is given over to God, those who seek what God wants above all else. Etty Hillesum was certainly among the pure in heart in that sense. In this morning’s second reading, James calls on us to accept and submit to the word that has been planted deep within us. He speaks there of an inner core, a heart, that has been shaped by the word of God. It is from such a heart that will flow what James understands to be authentic religion, namely, supporting those who are most vulnerable among us. Jesus calls for that inner transformation of the heart. This is only possible through the power of the Holy Spirit, the power of God’s word. If what is deepest in us is of God, all else will follow.

And/Or

(vi) Twenty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

Many of you will be familiar with the lovely hymn ‘Abide with me, fast falls the eventide’. The author of the hymn was Henry Lyte, an Anglican minister, a curate in Taghmon in County Wexford from 1815 to 1818. According to a plaque erected in his memory in Taghmon Church, he also preached frequently in Killurin Church, about nine miles from there. It is believed that Lyte composed the hymn in 1820 while visiting a dying friend, William Augustus Le Hunte. As Henry Lyte sat with the dying man, William kept repeating the phrase "abide with me…". After leaving William's bedside, Lyte wrote the words of the hymn and gave a copy of it to Le Hunte's family. Shortly before his death, Lyte composed the music for the hymn and it was sung for the very first time at his funeral in 1847. The biblical link for the hymn is the invitation of the two disciples at Emmaus to the risen Lord, ‘Stay with us because it is towards evening’. The second verse of the hymn concludes with the lines, ‘Change and decay in all around I see; O Thou who changest not, abide with me’. There is a recognition there that everything changes in life, nothing stays the same. Yet, God does not change; the risen Lord does not change.

Today’s second reading refers to God as ‘the Father of light’ and declares ‘with him, there is no such thing as alteration, no shadow of a change’. Elsewhere, the Scriptures declare that God’s love never changes; it endures forever. We all long for a love that endures, that is faithful, that remains strong in good times and in bad, when we are at our best and at our worst. God alone can ultimately satisfy that longing, because his love alone never changes. God remains faithful in his love for us. As Saint Paul says in one of his letters, ‘if we are faithless, he remains faithful’. Hopefully, we will experience in the course of our lives human expressions of God’s faithful, enduring and changeless love, people who stand by us even when we fail them, even when we make great demands on their love. Jesus was the fullest human expression of God’s faithful, changeless, love. He remained faithful to his disciples even when they deserted and denied him. He was like the father in the parable of the prodigal son whose love for his rebellious son remained constant, who ran out to embrace his son as he stumbled home in a spirit of repentance.

‘Change and decay in all around I see’. The author of that hymn in the early part of the nineteenth century could never have imagined the pace of change we have all experienced in recent decades. Just in the last fifty years alone, Irish society has changed more fundamentally than it had in the previous two hundred years. In an era of rapid change, the need for some reality that changes not becomes all the greater. In the whirlwind of change we need a still centre that helps to hold us together. God comes to us through his Son, our risen Lord, as that still centre, as the one who changest not, who, in the words of that hymn, abides with us, ‘through cloud and sunshine’, ‘in life, in death’. There are several more verses in that hymn that we don’t usually sing. The last two lines from one of those unsung verses goes, ‘Thou hast not left me, oft as I left Thee. On to the close, O Lord, abide with me’. The Lord’s loving companionship endures ‘to the close’, until the end of our earthly lives. It endures beyond our earthly lives into eternity. As Saint Paul says in his letter to the Romans, nothing in all creation, not even death, can separate us from the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus.

If God alone is changeless, everything else changes, including long-standing religious traditions. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus comes into conflict with the upholders of the religious traditions of the time who ask Jesus, ‘why do your disciples not respect the tradition of the elders?’ They were referring on this occasion to various ritual washings which they considered unchangeable. Earlier in this gospel of Mark, Jesus had said to his critics, ‘no one puts new wine into old wineskins, otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost’. Jesus was saying that some of the old religious traditions were not adequate to contain the new wine of God’s changeless, enduring, love present in his person and his ministry. The presence of the changeless one required an openness to change in others. It called for constant renewal of religious practices and structures. Jesus did not reject his own Jewish tradition. He critiqued elements of it from within that tradition. On this occasion, he quoted from the Jewish prophet Isaiah to show that God’s primary concern was not external rituals but what was in people’s hearts. God looks for human hearts that are open to being transformed by his love, human hearts from which flows a love that reflects God’s changeless love, a love that in the words of today’s second reading, ‘comes to the help of orphans and widows’, those who are most vulnerable among us. It is above all the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the risen Lord, who can create such a heart with us.

And/Or

(vii) Twenty Second Sunday of the Year

It could be said that one of the important tasks of life is to be able to distinguish what is really important from what is not so important. There are times when I find myself getting quite worked up about something, and afterwards realizing that the issue was not really all that important. We use expressions like ‘making a mountain out of a mole hill’, or ‘creating a storm in a tea cup’, whenever we recognize the tendency in ourselves or others to get things out of proportion. Perhaps it takes the best part of a lifetime to learn to distinguish what really matters from what is less important, and to react accordingly.

That tendency to give undue significance to what is not really important can be evident in religious matters as much as in other areas of life. In the gospel reading this morning the Pharisees complain because Jesus’ disciples did not submit to certain religious ritual washings that the Pharisees considered important. In response Jesus accuses the Pharisees of attaching more importance to human traditions than to the commandments of God. In putting too much emphasis on something rather peripheral in their religious tradition, they were neglecting what was really important. On one occasion in the gospels, Jesus speaks of straining out a gnat while swallowing a camel. We can all find ourselves fighting the wrong battles at times, creating a major fuss over something rather insignificant, and missing what really matters.

The challenge for all of us is to acquire something of God’s perspective on things, to give importance to what God considers important, to value what God values. It is above all Jesus who reveals God’s perspective on things. In today’s gospel reading Jesus suggests that God’s perspective focuses more on the heart of a person, what is within, rather than on externals. Jesus makes a distinction there between honouring God with lip-service and honouring God with our hearts. The heart in the biblical tradition is the seat of the will and the intellect, as well as the seat of the emotions. If God looks at the heart, what is within, we often tend to give more importance to externals, to what is visible. In our own culture, even more so than in the culture of Jesus, image is hugely important. God’s perspective - Jesus’ perspective - goes deeper than that. When a widow put two copper coins into the temple treasury, Jesus recognized the tremendous significance of her action, even though it must have seemed a gesture of no significance to others. Most people in the temple at the time would not even have noticed her, never mind noticing what she did. Yet, Jesus recognized that her gesture, small as it seemed, revealed a big and generous heart. Much of what God values today in people’s lives probably goes largely unnoticed by others. It will never make headlines.

If we are to acquire something of God’s perspective on things, the first step is to acknowledge that our own perspective can be limited at times, that we are prone to attaching too much importance to what is peripheral and to miss what is of real value. The second step is to recognize that God’s perspective is not something we can acquire by our own efforts alone. The second reading this morning suggests that we need to pray for God’s perspective, that it is a gift given to those who seek it. Saint James says in that reading: ‘It is all that is good, everything that is perfect, which is given us from above’. Included among ‘all that is good’ is the wisdom that enables us to have God’s perspective on things. A little earlier in that same letter, James had said: ‘If any of you is lacking in wisdom, ask God, who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly’. We need to pray for God’s wisdom, if we are to have God’s perspective, if we are to learn to value what God values.

One of the ways we pray for God’s perspective is by listening prayerfully to God’s word, which reveals God’s perspective on things. As James says in that second reading, ‘Accept and submit to the word that has been planted in you’. God’s word, which contains God’s perspective, has been planted in us, through baptism. In a sense we have already been shaped by God’s perspective through baptism. When we attend to God’s word, we are attending to what already resides deep within us. This attentiveness to God’s word will help to keep us focused on what really matters in God’s eyes. In that second reading, James spells out what really matters in God’s eyes: ‘coming to the help of orphans and widows when they need it, and keeping oneself uncontaminated by the world’. This is James’ understanding of what is important to God: caring for each other, especially the vulnerable, and holding on to the values of the gospel in a world that is often hostile to them.

Today’s readings call on us to acquire God’s perspective, so that what matters to God comes to matter to us. The gospel reading suggests that this may involve looking at some of our cherished traditions and regulations, including our religious traditions and regulations, and acknowledging that they may not all be as important to God as they have become to us.

Fr. Martin Hogan.

[girlactionfigure]

ISRAEL REALTIME — DEFENSE & SECURITY - war updates

— BARZELAI HOSPITAL STRUCK BY ROCKET, Ashkelon, children’s care wing.

— UNITY GOVERNMENT DETAILS…

The State Camp, let by MK and former general Benny Gantz, has joined with the coalition to form an emergency unity government.

A new limited war cabinet will be formed, which will include MK Gantz and MK Eisenkot, both former IDF generals.  National Camp MK Sa’ar will join the general cabinet as a minister (not said what ministry, or ‘without portfolio’).

— 2x DRONE ATTACK… from Gaza, to Nir Oz, to Ashdod.

— JERUSALEM GUSH ETZION TUNNEL CHECKPOINT ATTACK… terrorist eliminated.

— 12 INJURED IN ROCKETS, Ashkelon.

— ROCKETS fall in the GOLAN, 4.

— GOLAN enters defense level 2… all Golan settlements, without exception, are in a status that requires being near protected areas at all times. Also, there is a restriction on gatherings in an open area up to 30 people, and a restriction on gatherings in a closed structure up to 300 people.  You can continue to go to workplaces and carry out limited activities in places with access to a protected space.

— MAJOR BARRAGE, Tel Aviv and Mercaz.

— TERRORISTS hospitalized?  I received the following note… “As of 2:30 p.m. - the hospitals where terrorists who participated in the horrific massacre in which women were raped, babies murdered, and people were burned alive are hospitalized are:  Soroka, Barzilai, Bilinson, Sheba, Assaf Harofeh    Hospitals are public space. Everyone is allowed to come and express their private protest, even tonight for example. It is important to observe the law at all times.

— DID EGYPT WARN?  Egyptian officials who are quoted both in the press there and in the Jerusalem Post here clarify: We did not warn Israel before the attack. (Amit Segal)

— LOCAL ELECTIONS, scheduled for end of October have been officially postponed for 3 months due to the war.

— SCHOOL… The Ministry of Education announces that starting next Sunday (Oct 15) all students will return to distance learning (COVID style).  

— GAZA ELECTRICITY DOWN… they have run out of fuel for their power station, Israel has cut their portion of the supply.  Gaza will be dark tonight.

— RABBINUTE TO WORK ON SHABBAT… The Chief Rabbi of Israel HaRad Lau visited the Shura military rabbinical base a little while ago, where the holy work of identifying the fallen victims and bringing them to the grave of Israel is carried out. In response to the question of how to behave on Shabbat (when work normally is not permitted), the Chief Rabbi said, "I am moved and thrilled by the great dedication of all the teams, I appreciate that they will not finish before Shabbat, but it is important and required work because of moral and mental status - if it turns out that someone is not informed and he misses a funeral. In a state of war this is required morale. You continue to work even on the holy Shabbat and will make every effort to continue the holy work as if a weekday and with God's help we will have a comforting Shabbat

[warrioreowynofrohan]

Getting back to Marmion! Some bits of context for the last few days’ posts.

A palmer was sort of a continual pilgrim, who spent a period of time travelling to holy sights and praying. The greatest holy sight of all was Jerusalem, where the palmer in the poem has in fact been, along with a huge list of other holy sights, from Mt. Ararat where Noah’s Arc reputedly came to rest after the Flood, to Mt. Sinai, to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and in England Durham and Canterbury among others.

I think (I am not sure) palmer paid for their travels in part by donations from pious people, who might want the palmer to pray for them at some shrine. Marmion himself expresses a more lighthearted picture of palmers in general -

I love such holy ramblers; still

They know to charm a weary hill,

With song, romance, or lay:

Some jovial tale, or glee, or jest,

Some lying legend, at the least,

They bring to cheer the way.”

- and that may not be unrealistic for a category of people that could have included the medieval equivalent of a tourist with a GoFundMe. But this palmer is not of that kind - he’s haggard and gloomy, and kind of disturbing with his nighttime mutterings. But Marmion chooses to accept him as a guide all the same, and the next morning the whole group departs.

The first canto (The Castle) ended, we switch scenes and characters for the second (The Convent), to a boat travelling north, up the eastern coast of England, from Whitby to the island of Lindisfarne (also called St. Cuthbert’s Isle) with a group of nuns aboard. Now, where has Lindisfarne been mentioned in the previous canto? In the bit about Marmion’s former page:

That boy thou thought’st so goodly fair,

He might not brook the Northern air.

More of his fate if thou wouldst learn,

I left him sick in Lindisfarne:

The voyage is both a little scary and exciting for the nuns, who don’t get out much. Many of the castles the pass, like Warkworth and Dunstanburgh and Bamburgh, are ones you can still see on the Northumberland coast today.

But two of the group in particular are not having fun: the abbess (chief nun), who is not named, and the novice (i.e., has not yet taken vows and become a nun) Clare. Clare joined the convent recently after the loss of the man she loved, and in order to escape an unwelcome suitor who is trying to marry her in order to get at her property.

She was betrothed to one now dead,

Or worse, who had dishonoured fled.

Her kinsmen bade her give her hand

To one who loved her for her land;

Herself, almost heart-broken now,

Was bent to take the vestal vow,

And shroud, within Saint Hilda’s gloom,

Her blasted hopes and withered bloom.

On top of these griefs, there’s been an attempt to murder her, and the people who attempted it are now prisoners in Lindisfarne awaiting trial:

And jealousy, by dark intrigue,

With sordid avarice in league,

Had practised with their bowl and knife

Against the mourner’s harmless life.

This crime was charged ’gainst those who lay

Prisoned in Cuthbert’s islet grey.

Moving back a bit to yesterday’s entry, this is why the abbess of Whitby is going on this journey: to sit in judgement on these attempted murderers.

Sad was this voyage to the dame;

Summoned to Lindisfarne, she came,

There, with Saint Cuthbert’s Abbot old,

And Tynemouth’s Prioress, to hold

A chapter of Saint Benedict,

For inquisition stern and strict,

On two apostates from the faith,

And, if need were, to doom to death.

Lindisfarne is a tidal island: at low tide it is a peninsula that can be reached from the mainland across mudflats, but at high tide it is an island.

The tide did now its floodmark gain,

And girdled in the saint’s domain:

For, with the flow and ebb, its style

Varies from continent to isle;

As the ship reaches Lindisfarne, the nuns of Whitby on the ship sing a hymn, and the nons and monks of Lindisfarne sing one in return.

[soon-palestine]

Alison Russell, a Scottish-born Belgian citizen and Human Rights Defender, was detained by the Israeli occupation authorities while documenting the demolition of a house in Masafer Yatta, in the South Hebron Hills of the occupied West Bank. She was deported after very perfunctory proceedings at the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court. Israeli police alleged in a public statement that Alison “supported a terrorist organization.” Her attorney pointed out that this claim had no basis. Nevertheless, the presiding judge issued a verdict couched in fiery nationalist rhetoric, claiming that “There are many faces to Hamas terror. There are various kinds of terrorists. Some terrorists wield guns and bombs while others use a computer keyboard”.

In the last month and a half, the charge of being a “supporter of a terrorist organization” has become an excuse for an extensive campaign of political persecution against anyone who dares to post any protest the unfolding genocide in Gaza. This has affected Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship and against Israeli Jews, such as the teacher Meir Baruchin, who was detained for almost a week on completely unfounded charges. In the Gaza Strip, a far more brutal procedure for the same allegations is implemented. A Gazan journalist or political activist accused of “supporting Hamas” may expect to be targeted and/or have their family targeted by a missile from an Israeli warplane. Such was, for example, the fate of Ahmed Abu Artema and countless other Palestinian activists and journalists. Nowadays in Israel, all it takes to be charged with “supporting terrorism” is to express sorrow and pain over the killing of children in the bombing of the Gaza Strip. State Attorney Amit Isman strongly criticized these detentions, but Israel’s police, controlled by Ben-Gvir, persist in carrying out such detentions.  In the case of human rights defender Alison Russell, the far-fetched charges of “supporting terrorism” or “keyboard terrorism” cover up the real reason for her detention and deportation. In court, the state asserted that “she had many times disrupted the activities of the IDF troops, whenever she came in contact with them”. Indeed, it is highly disturbing for the troops to have outside observers and witnesses present where acts of oppression take place, which often constitute blatant violations of International Law. 

The tiny villages at Masafer Yatta in the South Hebron Hills are attacked by settlers on one side and the army on the other: The settlers attack the villages, destroy whatever is at hand and threaten entire communities with murder, and in these criminal acts they enjoy complete immunity from the police and army. For its part, the army arrives to destroy the houses of the villagers, houses which were declared to be “illegal” by the Supreme Court. Alison was detained and deported when she tried to document the destruction of one of these houses. The police had stated “a deportation order from Israel” was issued to Alison, as well as a decree to “prevent her from entering Israel” in the future. We would like to emphasize that Alison never wanted to “enter Israel.” She wanted to come to the West Bank, a Palestinian territory occupied by Israel, by the express invitation of Palestinian residents to document and intervene in human rights abuses and stop an ongoing nakba. In the words of Alison herself, “The UN, created when the world was saying ‘nie wieder faschismus,’ has given up on Palestine. But right now, right here, in a tiny little corner of Palestine, there are a dozen villages that are under direct and immediate threat. When the handful of determined people that are here manage to organize a group to sleep in the hamlets, we delay their expulsion…I’m here ‘cos I really think our action is effective. Please make it more effective by getting involved too.”

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Ben Cohen

A member of San Diego’s Human Relations Commission was forced to step down this week following a furious response to antisemitic comments he proffered at a meeting of the body on July 18, in which he claimed that the Torah instructs Jews to murder Palestinians.

The resignation of the commissioner, Khaliq Raufi, was announced on Wednesday by San Diego County Supervisor Joel Anderson in a scathing statement.

“Commissioner Raufi’s ignorant comments were hurtful and in no way reflect my personal views, but they do highlight the urgent need to focus on education, bridge building, and to advocate for tolerance,” said Anderson, who appointed Raufi to the 31 member commission. “After meeting with Commissioner Raufi, I have received his resignation letter.”

The city’s Human Relations Commission — which answers to the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, the county’s legislative branch — was established in May 2020 to “promote positive human relations, respect, and the integrity of every individual regardless of gender, religion, culture, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, or citizenship status.”

At the July 18 meeting, which was recorded, Raufi told those in attendance that he had read a few verses of the Book of Deuteronomy — the fifth and final book of the Torah — calling it the “Book of Jews.”

“It states, ‘go kill Palestinians — wipe them all out,'” Raufi claimed. “It’s a teaching that they, on a daily basis, teach their followers in their synagogues. So how are we gonna resolve that?”

At this juncture, Raufi was interrupted by an observer, Sara Brown, the San Diego regional director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), who pointedly asked him, “are you serious right now?”

Brown later expressed her shock that only one of the assembled commissioners — Kate Clark, who works for Jewish Family Services — took Raufi to task for his remarks. “It was so unbelievably shocking in the moment — and even more shocking was the silence of every single commissioner and county staff,” she told the San Diego Union-Tribune.

An editorial in the same outlet quoted San Diego’s Mayor Todd Gloria’s statement that “hate has no place in San Diego and there will be consequences for those who spread it in our city.” It went on to argue: “The county Human Relations Commission, which needs better vetting and training, must take that to heart. Otherwise, what’s the point of it?”

Raufi delivered his speech during a debate concerning a controversy at the commission the previous month, in which another commissioner — George Khoury, a supporter of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) — denounced Israel as a “racist, fascist state” as he described how his Palestinian family fled from Jerusalem during the 1948 War of Independence.

In a June 20 letter to the commission following Khoury’s speech, local Jewish leaders noted: “Rather than speak about the importance of Arab American Heritage Month, an opportunity to further celebrate diversity in our San Diego community, Commissioner Khoury’s statement negated Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, diminished the historical Jewish connection to the land, and depicted the creation of Israel as a war crime — language that goes beyond legitimate criticism of Israeli government policies.”

[matan4il]

Daily update post:

I don't have an online source yet other than a tweet in Hebrew, but I heard a report about at least two Hamas divers who tried to invade Israel through the sea. The threat has been neutralized, but this shows once again, that as long as Hamas exists, the civilians in southern Israel are NOT safe. That's along with Hamas still firing rockets at Israeli civilians whenever they can.

This morning also saw another independent Palestinian terrorist attack, this time on one of the major roads leading into Jerusalem. Two Israelis have been stabbed and injured, a 25 years old man, and a 19 or 20 years old woman (I heard contradicting reports, so I'm citing both options). The terrorist was 15 years old, and has been neutralized. He reached the scene of the attack riding on electric bicycles. Just a reminder, inciting and recruiting a teenager to carry out a terrorist attack is morally wrong, if not downright criminal, and it should be where everyone's ire is directed.

The IDF has confirmed that it has killed a Hamas leader in Lebanon, Mustafa Hadi. He was in charge, among other things, of promoting terrorist attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets outside of Israel.

I've heard a journalist saying that there are enough aid trucks entering Gaza, the issue is that Hamas is confiscating about 60% of the humanitarian aid brought in. The info is confirmed in this article, about a new pilot the IDF is trying, to try and bypass Hamas. If the last attempt (which backfired) was to bring aid in from the south, and the IDF would secure it as it's transferred to the north (instead of handing it to local elements for the transfer), now they're going to check the trucks in the south, but bring them into Gaza directly in its northern part.

I've already expressed my POV about what is probably the worst speech given at the Oscars this year, maybe ever. Now, the Holocaust Survivors' Foundation has denounced the Holocaust-hijacking, anti-Israel speech at the Oscars as "factually incorrect and morally indefensible." The ADL sent out the same message.

I've already pointed out that the absolute majority of survivors were and are Zionist (as were many of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust), but I think it really matters that the survivors who are still around are using their own voices to speak out against this distorted narrative. Will this director and others like him, who have hijacked the Holocaust for their political messages, actually listen and apologize? I kind of doubt it. Holocaust survivors are to be listened to! ...But only if they're one of the 5 or so who hate Israel.

And while we're at it, it should also be mentioned that the red hand pin that many stars wore at awards ceremonies this year stems from a symbol featured in many anti-Israel protests, leading back to the 2000 brutal lynching and murder of two Israelis who took a wrong turn into the Palestinian city of Ramallah. I think it says a lot in itself, that Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular SAFELY walk around Jewish majority Israeli cities every day, or live in them, but Jews have to fear for their lives when they enter, even accidentally, Arab areas that have been ethnically cleansed of Jews. Regarding the red hand symbol, I'm not saying that every person using it fully understands its origin, that it became a feature of anti-Israel demonstrations only after the lynching, it was never spotted at them before that, it became a prominent feature of the Second Intifada (2000-2005), I'm also not saying this is the only use of a red hand as a protest symbol ever, so people who saw the pin would have easily been unaware of its origin in this context. But it feels like another sign of the same problem: people are ignorant about this conflict, yet they allow themselves the freedom to talk about it, or use its symbols and terms, without truly understanding them, and without seeming to care about the consequences. It's a bit like someone who might have watched Dukes of Hazard, and started wearing a pin of the Confederate flag, initially not knowing (but later also not showing any care for) why this would hurt the feelings of many African Americans.

Here's another reminder from November 2023, that informed people knowing about the origin of this symbol pre-dates the Oscars:

BTW, I should probably mention that the Italian press crew, which documented the lynching and the proudly presented bloodied hands of one murderer, shared the footage despite threats to their lives from Palestinians (while another Italian film crew threw that one under the bus, promising that their TV station abides by the rules of the Palestinian Authority, implying they comply with the PA's censorship of Palestinian-committed violence). An American news team from ABC, was attacked and prevented from documenting the lynching. A British photojournalist, Mark Seager, who tried to document the lynching as well, was attacked by Palestinians, his equipment was destroyed, and he said he would have nightmares for the rest of his life. Back in 2009, Fatah (the ruling party of the PA) used the lynching to claim they were more deadly towards Israelis than Hamas. ANYONE who lived through this, as many Israelis and Jews did, or even just heard about it growing up, would not easily forget the symbolism of the red hand in this context.

This is 13 years old Mai Zuheir abu Subeich.

She was an Israeli Arab Muslim Bedouine. She excelled as a student, and dreamed of being an English teacher. Family members say she was even already teaching her siblings and cousins. On Oct 7, she was killed when a Palestinian rocket from Gaza hit her home, in the Negev desert. This Ramadan, as IDF soldiers continue to fight in Gaza, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Bedouins and Druze, please remember they're fighting to keep the Muslim citizens of Israel safe from Hamas, too.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[rivertalesien]

Jewish doctor speaks out on Israel and Palestine

Via Independent Catholic News

In this reflection for the Your Inner Child website, Dr Gabor Mate, Hungarian-Canadian physician and author describes his own life experience and expresses his view on the situation in Israel and Palestine. The video follows the transcription below:

"I'm personally a Holocaust survivor as an infant, I barely survived. My grandparents were killed in Auschwitz and most of my extended family were killed. I became a Zionist; this dream of the Jewish people resurrected in their historical homeland and the barbed wire of Auschwitz being replaced by the boundaries of a Jewish state with a powerful army…and then I found out that it wasn't exactly like that, that in order to make this Jewish dream a reality we had to visit a nightmare on the local population.

"There's no way you could have ever created a Jewish state without oppressing and expelling the local population. Jewish Israeli historians have shown without a doubt that the expulsion of Palestinians was persistent, pervasive, cruel, murderous and with deliberate intent - that's what's called the 'Nakba' in Arabic; the 'disaster' or the 'catastrophe'. There's a law that you cannot deny the Holocaust, but in Israel you're not allowed to mention the Nakba, even though it's at the very basis of the foundation of Israel.

"I visited the Occupied Territories (West Bank) during the first intifada. I cried every day for two weeks at what I saw; the brutality of the occupation, the petty harassment, the murderousness of it, the cutting down of Palestinian olive groves, the denial of water rights, the humiliations...and this went on, and now it's much worse than it was then.

"It's the longest ethnic cleansing operation in the 20th and 21st century. I could land in Tel Aviv tomorrow and demand citizenship but my Palestinian friend in Vancouver, who was born in Jerusalem, can't even visit!

"So then you have these miserable people packed into this, horrible…people call it an 'outdoor prison', which is what it is. You don't have to support Hamas policies to stand up for Palestinian rights, that's a complete falsity. You think the worse thing you can say about Hamas, multiply it by a thousand times, and it still will not meet the Israeli repression and killing and dispossession of Palestinians.

"And 'anybody who criticises Israel is an anti-Semite' is simply an egregious attempt to intimidate good non-Jews who are willing to stand up for what is true."