Tzedek-Tzedek

This week I googled "flights to Frankfurt" and suddenly I am getting adverts popping up on unrelated websites and communications, about flights, hotels, hire cars etc in Frankfurt. This blog rarely gets theological, so let's try it out. One of the challenges for God fearing Jews is to endeavour to comprehend the scope and scale of God. It seems frankly incredible that God is on the one hand the Creator of the World, and yet knows all about and even controls our lives (the only thing we apparently control is our own "fear of Heaven": "everything is the hands of Heaven, except fear of Heaven"), for the billions of people on earth, and even the workings of an ant. Indeed this is the crux of the Theism vs Deism dispute, a hot topic in the 17th and 18th Centuries, promoted in the writings of Voltaire. Voltaire held that God is the Creator of the world, and set natural law in motion, but is not involved in the days to day running of our affairs...

I have previously posted ( here and here ) that I have recently taken up my Galaxy 5S cellphone camera, which is remarkably agile, and I am experimenting with PicsArt and Instagram. Here are some of the latest photos, with a 'focus' on portraits. Hold Hands for the Ride! Tamar plays with the sunhat, mid-ride  Three Delicious Granddaughters - Shulamit, Netta and Tamar Gilad Shulamit gets comfortable on Ariel's shoulders during a tiyul Sibs on a Hay-Stack The "artist" - spotlighted in a shaft of sunshine at Beit Guvrin Caves                                                       

This is a particularly sharp satire. Sweden, the hosts of last night's Eurovision are perhaps the most extreme case of left wing liberalism, resulting in a moral blindness on the Middle East & Israel, best exemplified by their foot-in-mouth Foreign Minister Margot Wallström. Abbu, being a play on Abba, Sweden's greatest Eurovision and pop-music success ever. The four severed heads are those of that famous four Abba members. The song references the Muslim mass-migration/invasion of Europe, encouraged by Sweden, the terrorist murders in the Paris Hyper-Kascher food market and Islamic homophobia. And a catchy tune to boot. (Better IMHO than most of the real Eurovision songs). 12 points.  

Celebrating Yom HaAtzmaut in Beit Shemesh last night (Photo: Richie Sevrinsky  )

As we set out on a day-trip northwards during the Pesach vacation, one of my two accompanying sons suggested we visit Akko... There were no objections, so with a couple of corrective taps on Waze, we changed course towards the ancient coastal port. It has been around a decade since my last look around Akko, and I remembered it then as a run-down version of Jaffa, with a smattering of the Moslem Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem.  I had distinct memories from my previous visit of feeling uncomfortable wondering in Akko's dark alleys with predominantly Arab population (it was the tail end of the Second Intifada). We parked just outside the Old City walls and casually toured around the various sites. Our first stop was at a folk/ethnographic museum, "Treasures in the Wall Museum", located in the ancient wall. There was a quaint exhibition of various craftsmen's workshops. Quite a lot of the exhibition material were items I recollect from my childhood, and se...