Early this morning, raking some paths, I watched the red fox with the enormous tail glide by behind the honeysuckle bushes.
This afternoon, I discovered bear corn under some old logs. Here it is.
This evening, back at the top of the property to finish clearing paths, I watched a pileated woodpecker go at one of our dead upright trees. It took its time, letting me stand ten feet away gawking while its powerful beak easily tossed off large chunks of bark. The moment was much like this, except this woodpecker works on deepening a hole, while my woodpecker (what a big bird!) moved from one area of sheared trunk to another, gulping bugs as it went.
Oh, and then I found a large deer antler – not an unusual event around here. I tossed it to the dog, who added her teeth marks to the many already on it.
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Update: Who knew the woodpecker’s tree was called a “snag”? The New York Times pats UD on the back for keeping lots of dead trees around.
Yes, Sudan has just criminalized female genital mutilation. But Egypt criminalized it in 2008, and declitification continues there (and in many other places) with real gusto. UD is afraid it’s just too satisfying to castrate, disfigure, and torture us.
‘Rules’ like you need to vaccinate your kids, you need to educate your kids, you can’t steal from the welfare state, and you have to quarantine are … nothing.
[Illegal ultraorthodox] gatherings have led to disaster. Williamsburg, Borough Park and Crown Heights (the three major Hasidic neighborhoods in Brooklyn) have experienced horrific death tolls. Other Hasidic Jews and I have heard of weddings and other mass gatherings followed shortly by a rash of infections and deaths.
This is a systemic problem that won’t go away just by pointing out that other areas of New York have had moments of people gathering, or that they are a minority within the community (both of which are true, but have little relevance in a discussion about communal dynamics).
Many leaders were slow to act, and even when they did, it has been clear that they were unwilling or unable to stand up to the extremists in their communities who refuse to listen.
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You can keep throwing it all at the wall – antisemitism, it’s just a few extremists, how ’bout those spring breakers doing it too, we have to gather outside cuz our apartments are stifling, we didn’t get the memo cuz we’re too pure for any form of communication with the outside world, our rabbi said fuck that, if I don’t keep going to the ritual bath my husband won’t fuck me and we can’t get me pregnant, etc. etc. Go ahead and throw it all at the wall. You’re still killing yourselves and others and deserve all the condemnation coming your way.
But it isn’t only romantic suicide, lad; it’s romantic homicide.
Throughout yet another opinion piece urging us to admire the haredim and castigate ourselves because we’ll never be the Jews they are, the writer stresses only the self-harm the haredim generate by breaking virus containment laws. It killed many of them. Yes, and continues to do so.
And, because they’ve carried the virus to the rest of us, it is killing many of us.
See?
The writer doesn’t see. His argument seems to be that because the haredim believe divine promises to the point of communal decimation, they deserve a kind of backhanded admiration, rather in the way one has to admire the fervor of Mad Mike, even if his belief that his steam-powered rocket would make him famous rather than dead was flawed.
UD loves to chronicle the high-minded excuses some Jewish studies professors offer for the sickening irresponsibility of many haredim amid a pandemic. Here’s her current favorite.
Dartmouth Jewish Studies professor Susannah Heschel contends that, for many Jews, the restrictions “brought to mind times when religious persecution closed down synagogues.” In this sense, she said, the Haredi response “is a sort of defiance and affirmation of Jewish identity combined.”
Let other Jews learn from our defiant and affirmative Jewish identity; and let the world catch the virus we’re so nobly helping spread.
Nu, you could forget that for a very long time the ultraorthodox have been among the most powerful voting blocs in New York City; but viral containment restrictions in that same city understandably send us right back to a horrific world of synagogue closures.
Many Jews, like UD, whose own Jewish identity is thoroughly denied by the ultraorthodox establishment, are rightly appalled. Not least because ultraorthodoxy is far from Judaism’s definitive form. It represents one iteration of the faith, and a rather recent one at that.
Continuity is the biggest ultra-Orthodox myth. Their belief [is] that their way of life is the thousands year-old Jewish tradition, and that all Jews in all time aspired to… study Torah their entire lives. Of course, this is an invention.
The Haredi ideology of voluntarily closing their community off from the world is about 200 years old and came about as a reaction to enlightenment and emancipation. The practice of every man studying Torah all day, every day, only exists from the mid-1950s when the concentration of most ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel and the U.S. allowed them to live while learning, at poverty-level, but to live, in welfare societies.
It’s one of those more in sorrow than in anger pieces, but let’s concentrate on the anger.
The ultra-Orthodox are the victims of their own sociology. Many of the massive [coronavirus] deaths in the ultra-Orthodox community are, in large measure, self-inflicted. Many of them have no internet. They only listen to their rabbis. Their knowledge of what is going on beyond the pages of the Talmud is seriously limited…
This is what I want to say to them.
How dare you?
How dare you, my brothers and sisters, sacrifice your communal gains on the altars of your own stubbornness and/or lethal lack of knowledge and/or your cultic overdependence on your rabbis?
How dare you squander Torah this way? How dare you willingly let more Jews die?
How dare you endanger the lives of your fellow citizens — yes, rebbes, civic responsibility is a traditional Jewish value.
Mayor Bill de Blasio lashed out at Hasidic residents of the Williamsburg section in Brooklyn late Tuesday night after personally overseeing the dispersal of a crowd of hundreds of mourners who had gathered for the funeral of a rabbi who died of the coronavirus.
Hey, maybe now that the mayor has been willing to lash out, he could turn to Hasidic noncompliance with childhood vaccinations… Or, hey! How ’bout them education standards!
As in, they get measles and coronavirus and as a special bonus are unemployably ignorant. What will it take, observers have wondered for years, for city and state government to lash out? And now we have our answer.
America eats shit in some obvious ways (see the post below this one), but is also an amazing place. When idjits on the school board in Palmer Alaska banned some of the twentieth century’s greatest novels (details here), people there rose up and blew them a big ol’ collective raspberry.
Ever since an Alaska school board voted to remove five books from elective high school classes, the titles of the works have come alive throughout the community. One city council member reads excerpts from her favorite book on Facebook every night. An attorney began a movement to reward students who read them. Hundreds have joined a Facebook group to voice their opposition to the removal. And a local bookstore owner says donations have been pouring in since the vote from community members who want her shop to give teenagers those books for free. “There’s been a huge response from the community,” says Mary Ann Cockle, owner of Fireside Books in Palmer. “The outpouring of support and concern about banning and censorship has been quite a surprise — but in a good way.”
When a member of New York’s Hasidic sect “filed a complaint with New York City’s social distancing complaint hotline” after he found forty people gathered in a synagogue that was supposed to be locked, he became Hasidic Enemy Number One, his photograph posted all over town with words identifying him as a snitch.
Oh but then the JTA found a Yeshiva University professor to explain it all!
“The origin of this situation is that in much of Jewish history, Jews weren’t treated fairly before the law,” said Moshe Krakowski, a professor at Yeshiva University who studies haredi Orthodox society.
“Ultra-Orthodox culture is a very learned culture, so everybody’s got exposure to the same texts. So you’ll have people who will accuse others of all sorts of things, including mesirah, on the basis of their understanding, but not necessarily sanctioned by any rabbinic authority.”
Moshe, Moshe, Moshe. Do you really want to go on record telling us that we have to understand that because Jews have been treated badly they flout public safety laws and talk about killing law-abiding fellow Jews who report them to the police? Does that make sense, Moshe?
And why are you telling people who know better that ultraorthodoxy is learned? Let’s go back to your second statement and see if we can make sense of it.
Point One: UItraorthodoxy is learned. Memorizing prose passages, reciting them aloud repeatedly, handing your children appallingly substandard educations, and blindly following the opinion of your rabbi ain’t learned, my man. The same text exposure, absolutely, which is of course the primary sign that they don’t know much – people of one book and all that. So let’s not have any learned bullshit, please. Even their rabbis, if we can judge by some of the most prominent in the US and Israel, are dangerous idiots.
Point Two: So you say ‘so.’ So – because they are all learned and all read the same texts, they’ll accuse others of all sorts of execution-worthy offenses because… uh… huh? Oh, because for instance in their learnedness they learn that Judaism sanctions death for people who call the cops on Jews who break the law. Others may disagree! But you have to admire the intellectual ferment here…
