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“CEASEFIRE NOW” PRESSURE On Israel Equals, “Let Hitler & His Nazis Live After Babi Yar!”

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The Morally Inconceivable Aspect of “Ceasefire Now” Pressure On Israel

HamasNaziFlagFORBIDDEN.jpg

“According to reports sent to the Einsatzgruppen (Nazi Genocide Squads) headquarters in Berlin, 33,771 Jews were massacred during a two-day period at Babi Yar in September 1941. It  was only one of many mass shootings perpetrated by the Nazi Germans beginning in 1941. It was also one of the largest mass killings at a single location during all of World War II. ” – From “The Holocaust Encyclopedia”

 

This seems an appropriate Blog/Essay for Tisha B’Av in this current season of history.

Now, in mid-August 2024, the naive and antisemitic “Ceasefire Now” push on Israel is seeking to compel the Jewish State to stop its war against Hamas with the equivalent of the 1945 Nazi government (Hamas, now) and Adolf Hitler (Yiyeh Sinwar, now) still alive and intact as Nation and Führer; and still openly and enthusiastically committed to Nazi goals like world-conquest, destruction of “inferior races,” and Jewish “vernichtung” (annihilation): genocide of all Jews everywhere.

Would we?

After knowing that Babi Yar was not a unique massacre but merely  an example of the Nazi “standard model” in action – would we have allowed Adolf Hitler to emerge from his bunker in 1945 alive, with a surviving portion of the Nazi government and military, including its uppermost leadership who planned, authorized, and executed its aggressions and mass-barbarities? 

Shall we see Hitler emerge triumphant, declare victory as having come from monstrous choices like Babi Yar … and perhaps worst of all, gleefully announce he and his surviving Nazis intend to commit the same level of atrocities wherever and whenever they are able, until the world is emptied of “mongrel races,” and the swastika flies over every national capital in the world?

THAT is the choice the world is pressing Israel to make.

Would we?

If some Mexican radical sub-group was successfully holding a piece of land just across the Mexican-American border, and was steadily firing rockets into San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas, and holding atrocity-squad expeditions into south Texas to mass murder, mass rape, and mass pillage, demanding that America “end the occupation” by evacuating all of Texas and handing it over to Mexico under the government of the radical sub-group … 

Would we?

If thousands of Americans had been killed, maimed, or raped … 

Would we?

If hundreds of thousands of Texan Americans had been displaced from their homes by violence, and were living displaced for almost a full year, and the Texan economy were in ruins for months …

If it were our nation and October 7th befell our people, would we …

Leave October 7th architect Sinwar alive literally next door?

Leave Hamas in place as “the” power in Gaza?

Permit their use of their survival to plan and execute more October 7th-style atrocities against our nation and people at their every opportunity? Hamas has plainly said this is their intention without diminishment of any kind.

No. Of course, we would not.

We would use the full military might of our nation to end the absurd barbarity quickly.

Absurd levels of barbarity.

In Hamas, the aggression’s goals are to murder or subjugate by force anyone who does not accept as valid, and submit their lives or nations to the rule of a set of governmental and ethical-spiritual ideas found vacant of merit by all of civilization having educated analytical tools in their cultures: the religion of Islam as set forth in the Quran, claiming to have been dictated by the illiterate mass-murderer, Muhammad of Mecca.

Ceasefire now?

Let Hitler live?

Let the Nazi war machine go on?

Brace ourselves for an endless series of Babi Yars/October 7ths?

I think not.

For “The Golden Rule” to be truly golden, it must apply to the treatment of Israel and Jews as well as the rest of humankind. “Do not do to (or demand of) others what you do not want done to (or demanded) of you.”

Rabbi Bruce L. Cohen

Erev Tisha B’Av 5784 • 12 August 2024

A New Halloween Essay: Human Lemmingry

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Behavior With No Reason Other Than “Everyone Else Is Doing It”

by Rabbi Bruce L. Cohen ©2022

“The crowd is untruth.” – Søren Kierkegaard 

“You shall not follow a crowd to do wrong.” – Moses, Exodus 23:2

It’s Halloween again. The 31 October 2022 issue of “The New Yorker” magazine shows a pool of very “normal” people in Manhattan’s Grand Central Station – a rather elite environment – walking around “normally,” except for being dressed as witches, warlocks, zombies, and the occasional robot or alien. The humor in this cover art is the highly elite and erudite background of Grand Central Station, a miracle of human engineering and careful contemplation, filled with people acting en masse totally irrationally.

People are doing what everyone else is doing, and dressing as proponents of witchcraft, sorcery, star reading, and necromancy. 

Why are even intelligent, rational people doing this? 

Even many of our fellow-Jews are doing so, despite the Torah’s direct commandments against such things. Why?

Our human genetic hardwiring says these two things very loudly:

Run with the pack, and you’ll survive.

Don’t, and you won’t.

Approve the current “Alpha” and you’ll survive.

Don’t, and you won’t.

These survival-enabling values are embedded in us through the eons of life-form development having led to us existing in our present form.

Lemmings are cute little feral rodents with a hardwired reflex to run wherever the pack is running. While it serves them in some ways, it also leaves them vulnerable to mass-compliance-driven errors like running off a cliff literally “just because everyone else is doing it.” Since they are animals – “bio-machines” without human level understanding and thinking processes – they follow their hardwiring without any contemplative analysis.

We humans also have instinct-level hardwiring.

One of those engrained patterns is crowd-following, for the same reasons lemmings do so.

Even a superlative intellect like Harvard Law School Professor Alan F. Dershowitz admitted in his 1997 book, The Vanishing American Jew, “… I grew up around the (religion-based total separation of) milchigs (dairy) and fleischigs (meat) as Orthodox Jews observe them, and certainly (practiced them) without having the foggiest idea why.”

No level of intellect, capable of extremes of sophisticated analysis, is autoimmune to these autonomic patterns.

The “move when the pack moves” reflex leads us to start running away from danger before we have individually perceived it, merely because our group appears to be fleeing from it. We ask questions later: we run now – with the pack. Ones who survive run first and ask questions later: ones who ask questions before they start moving get eaten by the predator others have perceived and are already fleeing. This is framed in the old joke about the two men in the woods who encounter a carnivorous bear and start running: the one behind shouts to the other ahead, “Do you think you’re really faster than a bear?” The reply shouted back is, “I don’t have to be faster than the bear; just faster than you!” 

However, The Scriptures teach us, “Humankind, without תְּבוּנָה t’vunáh (contemplative understanding) is like the beasts that perish.” Psalm 49:20

What distinguishes us from animals like lemmings is our ability to consider the wisdom, validity, or ethical nature of our choices.
Kierkegaard told us, “the crowd is untruth” because he observed “civilized” human beings driven or released into uncivilized behaviors among crowds – like shouting “Death to the Jews!” in nineteenth century Paris at the trial of Alfred Dreyfus. Not an act a civilized Parisian would undertake while standing alone and distinguishable as an individual: yet, enacted by thousands of Frenchman, Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, and others when embedded in crowds knowing the “alphas” among them thought thusly, and wanted others to do the same: whether the French aristocrat Esterhazy, or the German political madman, Hitler.

Every year, as Hallowe’en approaches, I look at the human lemmingry all around me in action: my Jewish people doing what everyone else is doing, with no idea why they are doing it; and most importantly to me, directly defying the Torah of Israel to do so, as casually as if they were turning on a lightbulb.

The faith laws of Israel (Deuteronomy 18:10-12) forbid us from any sorcery or necromancy, which are respectively attempts to manipulate reality using spiritistic tools, and attempted communication with the dead.  The only valid spiritual tool to change reality is prayer: we ask The Most High, and He replies yes, no, or wait. We seek The Most High, his breadcrumb trail of validated “revelation” we call “The Scriptures,” or the tools of truth seeking involving seeking expert advice, the advice of elders or more experienced persons, and disciplined thought. 

Every October 31st in western culture, the entire culture celebrates the dark side of spirituality. Sorcerers and witches, magic, necromancy: the works. Everything we’ve been told to eschew, not only by action, but association. What kind of person would dress up as Dahmer, Bundy, or Gacy? We don’t dress up as sociopaths or Nazis “for fun” or “cosplay.” Or – do we?

This pattern is as bizarre as we Jews ending the Yom Kippur fast with a lobster dinner.

If you’d do the latter, why do you bother doing the former?

Oxymoronicity abounds: sane, rational conduct disappears. 

Why?

Run with the pack, and you’ll survive.

Approve the current “Alpha,” and you’ve survive.

Pause to consider, and you may become a meal for a predator, or be caught up in a tornado, flash-flood, forest-fire, or some other natural danger from which you’d have escaped if you had just started running when everyone else did, in the direction they ran, and the moment they started running.

For some, life has a momentum that simply excludes contemplation. My parents did it – I grew up doing it: so, my kids’ll do it. Many a terrorist inherited his or her belief in this way: and look where that can tragically lead. Emerson’s “examined life” is not only worth living – it can save countless lives as well.

Scripture enjoins us to use the human and humanizing quality of t’vunah rather than react by mere reflex:

Proverbs 15:28 The heart of the righteous ponders how (correctly) to answer/react.

James 1:19 This you know, my beloved brethren; that everyone must be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to anger (or any emotion-driven or reflex-driven choice).”

I have heard many allegedly God-revering, Scripture-adhering folks justify their family’s Halloween participation with:

“I don’t want to deprive my kids.”

My “rabbi” reply? “Your kids have Purim! They can dress up to their heart’s content, for good reasons! And not in profane or dark-magic evocative garb! Your kids need you to be parents, not pals! To role-model Isaiah 8:20 to them in ‘real world’ situations.”

“My kids will be stigmatized” or “I’ll be ostracized at work, if they know we / I take the Bible so literally.”

My “rabbi” reply? “So, by this formula, if you are pressed to be less than honest at work because ‘everyone else is doing it for the team:’ will you avoid being ostracized by discarding Biblical values and your very honor?

As stated clearly in our Torah …

Deuteronomy 18:10 There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, one who uses divination, one who practices witchcraft, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, 11 or one who casts a spell, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. 12 For whoever does these things is detestable to the Lord.

and

“You shall not follow a crowd to do wrong.” – Exodus 23:2

As for the excuse, “Oh, I don’t practice those things: I just dress up like other people who do, one day year, for fun …”

If you saw someone at a party dressed up as a Nazi Gestapo officer, would the following excuse placate your outrage?  “Oh, I don’t really believe in Nazism! I just dress up like a Nazi one day a year … for fun. And because everyone else is dressing up. See – look at Mao Tse-Tung over there sipping his Pumpkin Martini. Lighten up!”

The police ethic, “Broken Windows,” seems to me to apply here. Get reaction to small breaches right, and the big crimes are less often likely to shipwreck anyone.

If you go irrational on things appearing trivial, you prime the pump for errors on the big stuff.  “He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much; and he who is unrighteous in a very little thing is unrighteous also in much.” Luke 16:10

There are moments when “not going with the flow” is not only the best choice: morally, it is the only ethical choice.

And – humankind is depending on us to get these things right. (Exodus 19:6)

Rabbi Bruce L. Cohen

31 October 2022

Russia’s Blitzkrieg On Ukraine • Pragmatism & Pasternak’s Poetry

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This author in Moscow’s “Red Square” 29 years ago, while teaching at one of the first “Messianic Jewish” Conferences in the first season of “Glasnost” (openness)

“You will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not frightened.” – Matthew 24:6

“If a leader pays heed to lies (becomes delusion-driven), then all his ministers/underlings become agents of those same lies.”- Prov. 29:12

War in Europe began once more today. As Yogi Berra said, “It’s like déjà vu all over again.” Along with the rest of the democratic West, I awake today seeing the Russian “blitzkrieg” hitting Ukraine as the Nazi “lightning war” hit Poland less than a lifetime ago, and I am deeply moved by the pain yet another delusional madman is inflicting on the world because he has terrorized or murdered all opposing voices into silence.

Let’s be clear: here is Vladimir Putin’s argument for his war on Ukraine: he asserts the Ukraine leaving Russia is like one of the Confederate Southern States in 1860 having left the United States. His argument sums up as this: America fought a civil war to get states wrongfully having left the United States to come back in – against their own will. This is our war on Ukraine today. Ukraine is a state within Mother Russia; and Mother Russia will have her children back. In this, Putin ignores the fact that unlike the Southern States in America who joined the United States willingly under their own volition, Ukraine never voluntarily entered into a Union with Russia. In 1922, under a Russian assault they could not withstand, the independent nation of Ukraine was forcefully subjugated and absorbed against her will into the U.S.S.R. – Russia.

Putin’s view of the Ukraine as an historically natural part of Russia is pure delusion. It has no basis in historic fact.

Additionally and sadly, Putin is using the exact same argument for his attack on Ukraine that Adolf Hitler used to take over Czechoslovakia’s “Sudetenland” (Southern Region): Hitler asserted the Sudetenland was filled with German speaking, German people who were oppressed by the Slovakian majority surrounding them; and Germany attacked to ‘protect’ them from the abuse of the Slovaks who surround them. The Führer’s “logic” was pure nonsense; but lying to justify his own delusions was something Adolf Hitler turned into a kind of evil art-form.

The solution to 2022’s Russian Blitzkrieg problem is not to attack Russia.

It is somehow to remove Putin.

Imagine Nazi Germany in September 1939, if, once the German Blitzkrieg against Poland started, Hitler was somehow removed. Game over. No World War II. The Nazi Agenda was entirely an artifact of Adolf Hitler’s personal delusional quest.

Christian theologian and pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, understood this, which is why as a Two-Testament believing spiritual leader, he cooperated with Von Stauffenberg’s April 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer’s antipathy for “cheap grace” also expressed itself in disdain for the version of faith finding expression often as confrontation-avoidance rather than robust, ethics-driven action. Bonhoeffer did not subscribe to the idea that the highest Biblical value was the absence of conflict.

Additionally – it is wrong to punish sheep (bound by their nation’s laws to serve their country) for the choices of their leaders who are abusing their high offices. And Scripture teaches us, “If a leader heeds lies (becomes delusion-driven), then all his ministers/underlings become agents of those same lies.” (Prov. 29:12)

Bold American leadership in this situation?

Find some way to remove Putin from power as quickly as possible.

All Hitler wanted for a “Greater Germany” and “A Thousand Year Reich (Empire)” and a Europe made “Judenrein” (empty of Jews) ended the day Hitler’s reign over Germany ceased.

The world could move on.

Historian George Santayana (1863-1962 ce) said, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Putin is running the exact same game on the West now that Hitler ran on Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in the late 1930s: lie about his territorial ambitions, and just keep taking-and-placating, taking-and-placating … moving toward his genuine goal – German Hegemony (world-rule).”

Putin wants the USSR back in its pre-Gorbachev/Perestroika form. Everything else is just conversation. As much so as trying to dissuade Adolf Hitler from his “Thousand Year Reich” vision by using reasonable arguments against its founding ideas of Aryan Supremacy, Mongrel Races, and The Jewish Plot To Rule The World. No facts or logic would avail. The ideas were not the result of rational thought, so rational thought would have no effect on Hitler – nor Putin.

There seems little actual hope of prying Putin’s delusions about Ukraine from him: and, the vast aquatic, mineral, chemical, and agricultural wealth in the Ukraine is an irresistible attraction for the actually-plutocratic Putin, who is, at present, one of the wealthiest people on earth – as his people suffer and die and starve.

Putin is the problem – not the Russian people.

The beautiful Russian soul is still alive, as Boris Pasternak held forth in his heroine, Larissa Antipova, in his novel, “Doctor Zhivago.” A Russian literary analyst with whom I discussed Pasternak in Israel last July, I told I understood from my comparative literature point of view, why he chose the names of many of his characters in Zhivago: for instance, the parasitic main villain is Komorovski – which is Russian for a mosquito, a bloodsucker. But I have long been puzzled by Pasternak’s choice of the name of his heroine: “Larissa” or “Lara” for short. So, I asked this Russian-born, Moscow-raised and educated master of Russian literature, whose Russian was far superior to my own, if she knew why Pasternak chose that name – and she answered that she did not know. She had never thought about it before I asked. But – thinking about my question, it seemed to her “Larissa” is suggestive of the Russian word, ларец “lari’etz” – a treasure-box meant to hold heirlooms of great value and significance. Larissa is the name with which Pasternak seems to have suggested his heroine was the symbolic cache of the Russian soul’s loving and exploited beauty; and the fact the poet, Yuri Zhivago, could see her for what she was, love her for what she was, and wrote exaltingly of her soul – that was Pasternak’s response to the Russian Communist Party’s assertion, “The personal life in Russia is dead.” and “The State is all that matters.” Pasternak wrote truth in response to delusion. The regime’s reaction? Of course, the Doctor Zhivago was banned in Russia by the delusional power-holders. Just as today, 24 February 2022, as Russia’s Novveye Gazetta newspaper declared it would publish in both Russian and Ukrainian to affirm the Russian People do not consider the Russian language used in parts of Ukraine an excuse to take over the country, Vladimir Putin quickly issued a statement saying, “Any publication criticizing the action on Ukraine will be considered treason (a capital crime) against ‘Rodiyna’ (The Motherland).” The Führer … uh, President Putin … will tolerate no dissent.

Putin said a short while ago, “Happiness (the pursuit of which was articulated in the American Declaration of Independence to be one of the core rights of humans everywhere) is non-existent in the world. It is a fantasy, and therefore, of no importance.” Like all despots, he leaves his own happiness out of his aphoristic reduction of reality. So says a man who has become a billionaire (which seems to make him very happy) at the expense of all the people he has murdered or trampled.

The madman Putin, has taken peace again from humankind simply trying to live in a world that makes that simple task challenging enough.

May this new Blitzkrieg end as quickly as it started.

The thoughts and prayers of this Two-Testament believer are with the people of the Ukraine – and Russia – as they and the West are newly at war – again.

Bruce Louis Cohen

24 February 2022

P.S. – My thanks to my friend “A” and my wife “D” for their input in creating a 2nd, better draft of these ideas. – BLC

The Case Of Heard v. Believed

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THE CASE OF HEARD v. BELIEVED

By Bruce L. Cohen

Now that the appointment of Judge K is a done deal … what happened to the “credible charges” of sexual assault? There is no statute of limitations on that felony in Maryland, where the alleged attack is said to have occurred. The appropriate Maryland District Attorney should open a criminal investigation with all the FBI has gathered – and do its own investigative track down of any remaining loose ends; and if there is sufficient probable cause to believe Judge K committed the crime – arrest and try him for it. If he is convicted – then impeach him from the Supreme Court. IF – I repeat IF – there are actually “credible charges” sufficient in credibility to ruin a man’s life. 

If the goal was merely with insufficiently clear allegations to ruin his career sufficiently to deflect him from appointment to The Court … well, Justice Kavanaugh may, himself, have a very strong suit for defamation against the people who launched the public melee against him. The direct intention of destroying Kavanaugh’s career for political ends certainly meets the “with malice” standard of “mens rea” (state of mind, intention); and the charges not meeting the standard even to provoke the interest of the relevant District Attorney/Prosecutor is probably enough to get their international publication deemed “reckless” and “untrue” enough to meet the malice+reckless+untrue standard for a finding of guilty on defamation against Kavanaugh’s accusers. 

As Bill Maher said so concisely last week” The ‘Me, Too’ Movement (which I support to a great degree) has morphed the cause from ‘Women Who Come Forth Should be HEARD …’ (which is right) to ‘Women who come forth MUST be BELIEVED.’ – and that is not right. 

Charges of criminal misconduct must be vetted for sufficiency before being published, or they fall under the qualifying rubrics of Slander. Libel, and Defamation. Due process must precede destroying anyone’s name, career, or life. The Fifth Amendment demands it; as does “The Golden Rule,” which is the clearest litmus of sincere, rather than goal-driven ethics. 

– One Fan Of Due Process & The US Constitution