Written by Mordecai Schiller
Before there was fake news, there was Bob Mayes.
Hold your fire.
As for our grandchildren, my wife, Bobbi, and Zaidi and I. So I join yours in being offended by any disrespect towards grandmothers. Sol Steinmetz definition Bad luck in Dictionary of Jewish Usage: “A fantasy story. Pure fantasy.” He added, “The assumption that the literal meaning is the grandmother’s story… is false.” The original Yiddish phrase was I have MyseShe referred to a popular Yiddish poem called Bufo bookcomposed around 1507. The reason for the confusion was the similarity of the word Evil And the offensive expression “old wives’ tales.”
So why am I telling you this?
Since the joy of Simchas Torah turned into the darkness of October 7, I am no longer me. I don’t know who you are. I am neither a psychologist nor an investigator. But I think you have the same kind of feelings.
mentioned Bob Mayes Because I was thinking I was compulsively watching the news, and an image of a deer frozen in the headlights of an oncoming car came to mind. But it’s a Bad luck That deer are afraid of headlights. They can’t even see the car. They are active at night and their eyes expand much wider in the dark than human eyes. Therefore, they are temporarily blinded by the headlights and freeze. There is another belief that cobras possess a magical power to hypnotize their prey. It’s also a Bad luck. In the face of a swaying cobra, most animals simply become petrified.
Lately, I’ve been feeling this way about news coming out of Israel. I don’t know if “attraction/repulsion syndrome” is a real thing or just pop psychology. But it describes how I feel about the news. I can’t listen to it. But I can not no listen to this.
I was in Jerusalem in 1967 and I remember a strange local custom. The buses were equipped with radios, and every hour on the hour, passengers would stop to talk and the driver would turn up the volume so everyone could hear the news.
In 2011, Steven Pressfield was researching his oral history of the Six-Day War, Lion’s Gate. He interviewed Eli Rickowitz, a platoon leader whose group was the first to reach the Suez Canal. “Rykowitz’s habit of turning on the car radio at the top of the clock. Every hour. He listens to the news for 20 or 30 seconds, then turns the radio off. ‘Why are you doing that, Eli?’ And he says, ‘This is Israel,'” Pressfield noted. Be prepared.'”
I am not a soldier. My service in 1967 was as a HAGA (Israel Civil Defense) assistant in a nursing home. (One man refused to let me take him into the dining room, where we had put him in sandbags as a shelter. “I’ve been in wars for 50 years. I’m not going to sleep in a basement now!”) Like Eli. But Rickowitz still watches the news headlines obsessively. Only now, I listen in horror.
Among the victims of war are the very words used to describe it. As words are repeated, meaning comes out of them. Even words like harsh, heinous, shocking, Monsters And Atrocities She became anemic, weak, and lifeless…
Webster’s New Dictionary of Synonyms Struggling with the vocabulary of violence. Under the title massacreShe says, “Slaughter, butchery, massacre, massacre It can be compared to when it means the large and often brutal killing of human beings. massacre indicates [indiscriminate] and wholesale killing, especially of those who are not prepared to defend themselves and can offer little or no resistance.
Perhaps the closest term is massacre. “This applies in particular to the organized massacre of helpless persons which is usually carried out in collusion with officials. It is often applied specifically to such a massacre of Jews, especially in a European country.”
Slaughtering Jews has always been common, ever since Balak hired Balaam to curse Israelis“Saying: Behold, a nation has come out of Egypt. Behold, it has covered the face of the earth” (Bamidbar 22:5).
But in Russia, Ukraine and Poland pogroms have become a national sport. It was fertile ground for massacres and riots Touch tat (5408-9/1648-9), led by Cossack leader Bogdan Chmielnicki. (It is interesting that Encyclopedia Britannica Log in to Bohdan Khmelnitsky He somehow missed the fact that his revolution against Poland resulted in the massacre of more than 300,000 Jews, He is “Dr. I think the editors don’t find this fact important.)
Some historical descriptions of the massacres now seem eerily familiar. They read like news reports about a Hamas attack. Sheb’chol dor vador omdim aleinu lechaloseinu – In every generation they try to destroy us (Haggadah). The Holocaust began with a massacre known as Kristallnacht. It quickly descended into the utter depravity of the Nazi “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”
So how do you talk about the indescribable?
How do you think about the unthinkable?
In 1960, Hermann Kahn, a nuclear physicist, wrote: About thermonuclear war – where he calmly analyzed the possibility of atomic war. Review in American Scientific He attacked Kahn for his “unfortunate book”, and mockingly questioned his very existence, because “no one can write that way, no one can think that way.”
In response, Khan wrote another book: Think of the unthinkable. He claimed that “thermonuclear war may seem unthinkable, immoral, crazy, hideous, or highly improbable, but it is not impossible.”
Since that day in October, we have been speaking the unspeakable, thinking the unimaginable… and living the unlivable.
Dovid Hamelich said it best. May we soon see the day “when Hashem returns the prisoners of Zion,” when we look at the unspeakable, the unimaginable, the unlivable, as “dreamers.”
“On that day” we will wake up from our nightmare, “and our mouths will be filled with laughter.” n
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Language is a powerful tool that allows us to communicate and express ourselves, but there are still moments where we find ourselves at a loss for words. Whether it’s during a heated argument, when trying to convey a complex emotion, or when faced with a truly awe-inspiring sight, language can fail to capture the depth of our feelings and experiences. In those moments, we are left searching for the right words to truly convey what we are trying to express. This struggle is a testament to the complexity and nuance of language, and it reminds us of the limits of our ability to fully articulate the depths of our thoughts and emotions.