“I’m glad Judaism is not a religion.” – Rabbi Menachem Manis HaKohen Friedman
This is where I stand in life. I don’t *believe* in “God.” Anyone who has to believe in something knows nothing! I *know* that our ancestral YHWH god exists. How do I know this? Our ancestral YHWH god exists in our Jewish people’s Torah. Is this not enough? Jews don’t need physical or historical proof to know what we *inherit* to believe! As an indigenous ethno-religious Jew this is *enough*, whether I engage in modern “prayer Judaism” to this inherited YHWH god or not (which, full disclosure, as much as I’ve tried, prayer ritual has never been my personal thing, to my dismay – too much I am the rationalist, scientific-minded historically obsessed *teacher* of Judaism!).
What brings out, for me, my deepest Jewish spirituality is my *love* for our Jewish people’s stories! *Yes*, our indigenous ethno-religious people’s stories! The stories that teach who we really are as a people. Whether they be written in our TaNaKh and our Talmud, or whether they be orally expressed as is common among Chassidim. I would love to say our Ladino stories, too. But, I am a Sephardi-Ashkenazi born Jew (by Farkas-Gancz marriages in a troubled time, thus a tinok she’nishba wayward pintele yid descendant of Szatmár families – who couldn’t *not* teshuva!). All my life has been repentance for my broken father before me, and his broken father before him (you all know the Shoah!). The Shoah took its cost around this world, before it had even physically occured! I know, for I have studied Jewish history as much as I’ve studied Jewish “theologies.”
So, what am I trying to say? Despite *all* my inherited struggles in this life, my heart is devotedly Chasid, but my mind is devotedly halacha focused and history focused, and equally challenged by this. I struggle for our Jewish people over our ethno-religious identity as an Indigenous People of Judea-Samaria, and how to preserve this for the future generations. Add to this, I love the daily lessons of Ladino Jewish story culture! Because, who doesn’t love a good story about our indigenous people when you’re Jewish?! Put simply, I love and embrace all members of our Jewish people, full stop. I understand, we were never meant to emulate the religious Colonizers of this world (Christians and Muslims)!
Some Jews, shomer halacha and/or shomea halacha or frei halacha, might look upon my written posts and say, “Tsefan Josef, if you are shomer halacha, then why are you questioning G-d and Torah as written? Certainly a shomer halacha person understands this is no different than the Gilgamesh. As your yeshiva taught, Gilgamesh was a student in Shem’s yeshiva who dropped out and went East. Taking along what he learned through Shem and adding this and that. Gilgamesh didn’t influence the Hebrews, Israelites, and Judaism. It’s the other way around.”
I disagree with apologetics. If you have to historically validate Torah, then you’re doing the *Christian* thang – practicing a religion! I’m glad Judaism is not a religion. So, I get this a lot: “Well, if you are shomer halacha and not a biblical literalist, then you’re really an atheist!” If so, then I’m proud to be one, because as Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaCohen Kook taught:
“Atheism displays the power of life. Therefore, the real spiritual heroes extract sparks of great kindness from their atheism and turn its bitterness into sweetness.” – Rav Kook, Arfilei Tohar, § 120
“The destructive wind of disbelief will purify all the filth that gathered in the lower realm of the spirit of faith… Its light will shine as a new light upon Zion with a wondrous greatness.” – Rav Kook, Shemona Kevatzim 1:476, Orot haTehiyah, ch. 51, p. 199
In other words, it’s always okay to question and challenge our understanding as Jews. One can be shomer halacha and an atheist, at the same time. One can believe in the “God” of a human written and redacted text, and still recognize that this “God” is not actually present in the observable universe. Did I mention that it is okay to question “doctrine”? Chazal would disapprove, if a Jew – a halachic member of the Jewish people – disagreed with this! I’m done with this post.
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Post One of Two:
If you want to understand the plethora of Confederate monuments in the United States, if you want to understand the photos of American Nazism, then take a look at Poland, and other European countries – from whence the United States evolved from!
“Markers to Poles killed by Nazis for rescuing Jews have been proliferating in the Polish countryside for several years now. The effect of these memorials to Polish national virtue is a new historical narrative that depicts the rescue of the Jews as a default position of Polish society during the Holocaust. The Polish government denies it is engaging in Holocaust distortion, but these stone monuments play into a distortion of the historical narrative…. The Polish narrative of wartime heroism and valor is espoused by Poland’s nationalistic government, led by the right-wing Law and Justice Party….
To better explain how this distortion works, consider this: Of the more than 900,000 Jews who arrived in Treblinka, fewer than 100 survived the war. Jewish survivor testimonies of Treblinka are harrowing: Many remembered extreme thirst; they also recalled groups of Polish railway workers and Polish youths who stood close to the cattle cars ready to hand over water — in exchange for gold or cash. In their oral histories and written accounts, survivors described how they were met not with compassion, but with greed: Jankiel Wiernik, a carpenter and cabinet maker, recalled how terribly hot the day he arrived in Treblinka was. From the train he saw Polish locals selling water to desperate Jews. Abram Jakub Krzepicki remembered that people in the wagon were dying of thirst. He described terrible scenes of Jews pleading with the workers, handing over fistfuls of money for a mere half cup of water.
Poland’s efforts to reframe history reflect a trend proliferating in other European countries to obfuscate the history of the Holocaust. In France, the far right has made efforts to whitewash the record of the Vichy government, which collaborated with the Nazis. In Hungary and Croatia, local complicity and collaboration during the war is downplayed, shifting the blame for the Jewish catastrophe entirely onto the German occupiers. What makes the Polish example so distinctive is the apparent scale of state official involvement in redirecting the narrative.
Take the testimony of Adam Starkopf, who escaped the Warsaw ghetto with his wife, Pela, and their young daughter. Mr. Starkopf described in his memoir “Will to Live” being woken in the night in the town of Sadowne, where the couple were hiding in plain sight because Mr. Starkopf looked “Aryan” enough to pass as a Pole. A group of Polish villagers, he wrote, invited him into their plan to hunt down, rob and then turn over to the Gestapo a group of Jews who had escaped from a cattle car. “Just think — all these Jews lying on the ground, ready for the taking! It’s a windfall!,” Mr. Starkopf recalled his neighbors saying to him. “We’ll take their clothes, clean out their pockets and on top of that we’ll get a reward from the Germans for bringing them in.” (Mr. Starkopf declined to participate.)
Indeed, in Poland some of the commemorative markers have even been erected in places such as the town of Sadowne, where Mr. Starkopf described listening to the sound of Jews “being dragged through the snow to barns and stables” after his conversation with his neighbors. Thus the marker serves to deflect attention from atrocities committed by locals and to reframe their role in history. This commemorative drive allows the nationalists to present themselves as primarily defenders of the idea of historical innocence of the nation.” – Jan Grabowski, The New Wave of Holocaust Revisionism, Professor of History, University of Ottawa.
Just like European (“white”) Christians of the United States like to claim that the Confederacy was only about “States Rights” and had nothing to do with preserving Chattel slavery of kidnapped Africans to be forcibly bred and worked as subhuman domesticated animals, so too European Christians in Europe invented the “Ghetto” to keep segregated the Jewish people from “white” European people, engaged randomly in small genocides of Jews for political reasons and, ultimately, decided that it is just best to just rid the entire planet of the racially inferior Jewish people – but *now* want to proclaim that most white Christian Europeans were innocent during the World War II Nazi “Final Solution,” rather than fully indifferent and, even, outright heartless towards the Jewish people!
Never forget, never forgive, because this can *never* happen *again* in Human history! White people have got to start owning up to their European Christian racial sins. For, no, you’re not innocent but complicit, until you fully do so – by enforceable socially just legislation!
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Post Two of Two:
WAR EXPOSÉ 1918: This is a quote from the New York Times, on June 9th, 1918, sharing a surprise discovery by British troops about Jews in “Palestine” (Judea-Samaria) actively cultivating and sustaining our ancestral land:
“When the Anglo-Egyptian Army which is invading the Holy Land under General Allenby reached the territory lying between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean,… The soldiers of Allenby found thousands of acres cultivated by immigrant Jews dwelling in a dozen or so communities…. [the communities] were found to be in thriving and prosperous condition and far superior, as to scientific cultivation and housing, to the Arab farmers or those of the Turkish crown lands in the Plain of Sharon….
Why the Turks left this Garden of Eden comparatively unmolested is a mystery,… the Jewish artisans of Jerusalem whose work lost its market on account of the [world] war… Most of these [Jewish artisans], succeeding the British occupation, have joined those of their race at Ben Shamen or gone back to ply their old arts in the Holy City. Ben Shamen, among the foothills of Mount Ephraim,… When Allenby found it, there were about 120 Jews there, with an acreage that had been increased from 200 to 600 in two years, under olives, apples, and corn. Most of the people were from the Betsalel, the arts and crafts school in Jerusalem. They dwelt in stone houses looking down on the great plain…. Here, before the war, the [Jewish] men worked in brass and silver, and their wives wove carpets or made lace. With a wonderful power of adaptability, when they lost their market they quickly turned to the fields…. Among their farms are those of Arabs who have been cured of their nomadic habits of centuries and have settled down to till the soil.
Four miles south of Rishon Le Zion lies Rehoboth…. It has a population of more than 900 souls, including 270 Yemeni Jewish workmen, whose introduction has proved a great success. So far the British have found eighteen independent rural [Jewish] communities within their zone of occupation,… who, when the war began, were gradually attracting to them well-educated Jews and Jewesses from the towns – from Jerusalem, Damascus, and even from Beirut. After three and a half years of war they have a population of 10,000, who patiently cultivate more than 6,000 acres.
As to administration, social and political, they [these Jewish communities] are all of the same type; they are goverened by their vaads, or village council…. They are elected annually by all the adult landowners and resident taxpayers of three years standing, independently of sex…. Here, therefore, is a quasi-federal State of immigrant Jews [from the Middle East and Europe returning to ancestral land] made up of many independent colonies, proving two things: that Zionism is an established fact, and the Jews of the city, if they get the opportunity, will profitably till the soil.” – Zionism Already Begun in Palestine, NYT article from June 9th, 1918
Notes (it’s worth it!):
Even in the early 20th century, Europeans (same continent as our Levant just northern, like Arabs same continent just southern), yes, Europeans still considered Jews to be a *different* race, non-whites, hence why the “ghetto” was first created Europe (in early CE) to segregate the Jewish population and to restrict Jewish access to European Christian societies (then, being so successful an idea, the ghetto was imported into the United States to address the freed black slaves problem!).
Also, because history *is* important, the British courted the Arab Hashemite family in Arabia (south of the Levant) to form an alliance against the Turkish Ottoman empire (north of the Levant) occupying Judea-Samaria (aka, what non-indigenous call “Palestine”). The British also created the Arab Revolt Flag, designed by the British diplomat Sir Mark Sykes, to develop a feeling of “Arab-ness” among their southern Middle East allies. The British, as well, promised that, if successful, they – now being the new occupiers of Judea-Samaria – would reward the Arab Hashemite family with ownership of Transjordan (Jordan of today, part of which is *Jewish ancestral land*).
“According to Stanford University historian Joshua Teitelbaum, this claim is made both by Sykes’ 1923 biographer and by Hussein ibn Ali al-Hashimi, who in 1918 told Woodrow Wilson [ – a devout racist! – ] that it [the Arab Revolt flag] symbolized Hashemite rule over the Arab world.” – Arab Revolt Flag, Wikipedia
The Arab *colonized* world, of course. Like the British flag (formerly) and the British reinvented “United States” flag (today) symbolizes the *colonization* of the European colonized world. With the Jewish people (the Indigenous People of Judea-Samaria) being severly outnumbered and still sovereign-less like the Kurdish people, what could we do in that time period of war between Colonizers – who are at war with each other for possession of *other peoples’ lands*? The answer:
*Keep cultivating our ancestral land!* Of course! When World War II comes around and the occupying Europeans break their promises to the Indigenous Jews of “Palestine” (Judea-Samaria), we’ll chase them off with very determined Freedom Fighters – 5,000 Jewish men and women against 100,000 British male troops – because of their *antisemiticism* during World War II (they prevented Jews fleeing Hitler’s minions from returning to Judea-Samaria!).
Hat tip to *Israellycool* for this news archive find!
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Her name is Yocheved ben-Shmuel, and she was a Jewish freedom fighter. She is a Mizrahi (aka, Arab Jew) who was born in Iraq in 1928 and, at age 8, her family immigrated to Judea-Samaria (Mandatory Palestine). They got in, even though the British occupiers had made Jewish immigration illegal, while permitting Arab immigration.
Like many other Jewish women (one-third of the Hagana were women), she joined the Jewish underground army during pre-State Israel. She chose the Palmah, the elite fighting unit of the Hagana (other militias were Irgun and Levi), and became a combat medic. With one hand firing a gun and one wrapping wounds, she was there for the worst battles.
“During one battle, Shimeleh – who was only 16-and-a-half – was injured badly in the fighting,” Ben-Shmuel says, recalling how in one hand she held her Sten gun, and with the other helped Shimeleh take a sip of water from her canteen. “The Arabs had thrown a grenade at us, and I’d been injured by shrapnel in my leg and my back. I continued fighting, even though I was covered in blood. What choice did I have?”
The Kurdish freedom fighters are the same way. Both men and women fight together against Arab occupiers of their ancestral land. Just as Jewish freedom fighters had to do in the 1930’s and 1940’s against the British and Arab occupiers of our ancestral land. The Kurdish are still fighting for self-sovereignty to this very day. But, this story is about Jewish freedom fighters.
“I joined the Palmah after training with the Noar HaOved VeHalomed at Kibbutz Ein Gev,” remembers Ben-Shmuel. “I wore a backpack with the first-aid kit, a canteen full of water, a stretcher with a blanket, a Sten gun and three cartridges full of bullets. The most difficult moment was when I was escorting a convoy and many of our fighters got injured. All of a sudden, so many of them were screaming at me, ‘Yocheved, help me!’ I tried to calm everyone down as quickly as possible so I could treat each one of them, even though they were still shooting at us.
“There’s no question in my mind: I salute every girl who serves in a combat position. I was so proud of my granddaughters who live in Italy – my daughter is married to an Italian man – since they all came back to Israel to carry out their IDF military service. One of them fought hard to become accepted to the combat medic corps. I’m so proud of her.” ….
Read more of their stories here:
https://m.jpost.com/j-spot/these-women-fought-in-the-palmah-these-are-their-stories-669987/amp
Women of the Palmah: Hear their stories
By YAAKOV BAR-ON Published: JUNE 4, 2021
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The Jewish people, the Indigenous People of Judea-Samaria, was near extinction after WWII because of Christianity-created anti-Jewish racism. If we had not fought the British occupier off of our ancestral land to reestablish self-sovereignty, we’d still be just as vulnerable today.
The United States of America, born in the sin of human slaveownership, through an insurrection against the British government (the American Revolution), was an inspiration for Adolf Hitler! He incorporated white Christian USA Eugenics science into his “final solution” for the “Jew” problem. While Nazism was rampaging Europe and North Africa, white Christian “Americans” were assembling together in support of Nazism, giving the Nazi salute. After WWII, the United States hid Nazi war criminals on U.S. soil, and refused entry into the United States Holocaust camp survivors and Jewish war refugees.
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As far as whites and blacks in the USA are concerned, Jews have been added to the “white” racial construct. And, sadly, too many white-passing Jews in the USA have internalized this “white”ness. So, when blacks see Jews, they see white people. Hence, Whoopi Goldberg in all her colonized ignorance would say, “the Holocaust isn’t about race. No. It’s not about race” and that the Nazi racism targeting Jews is, “white people doing it to white people. So, this is y’all go fight amongst yourselves.” The white supremacist culture has taught blacks very well in the USA!
Whoopi Goldberg (Caryn Elaine Johnson) is the symptom, not the problem. United States European society has taught itself and its colonized minorities that the Jewish people are just a religion, like Christianity and Islam, thus anyone can claim Jewish status just because they “feel” Jewish or have “Jewish faith” or have Jewish “DNA/heritage” somewhere in their past. Nevermind the fact that membership in an Indigenous People anywhere in this world, including the Jewish people of Judea-Samaria, requires meeting the halachic requirements of the Indigenous People, per their beit din decision. So, for both whites and blacks in the United States and so-called “Palestinians” in Judea-Samaria, Jews are white European people with just a minority white religion – and that Christians and Muslims do not have to listen to the Jewish people for this, for they speak and decide for us.
Yet, instead of complaining about this as the Jewish people, we need to *educate* blacks on who and what Jews really are – the Indigenous People of Judea-Samaria. “Jews of Color” exists as a thang in the USA, because too many USA Ashkenazi communities have internalized “white”ness, and wrongfully question the Jewishness of brown skinned Jews of halachic status on sight! Thus, behaving like whites, and it is a problem.
Ultimately, the whole issue is a demographic one! In the USA, whites make up 61.6 percent of the USA population. Blacks are a minority at 12.7 percent (42 million out of near 340 million). Jews are a severe minority at 1.7 percent (5.8 million out of near 340 million). Not only are we spoken for and spoken about by society at large, not only are we not listened to, not only is anti-Jewish racism culturally ingrained in the USA white-established culture, but we literally do not have the physical numbers to change this ourselves.
Even First Nation Indigenous members of the USA outnumber Jews (2.9 percent). This is why Raskin and Schumer and colonized Jewish others are sooo flustered right now! Because we are severly overrepresented in the Federal govenment, and have no real power to force change in the USA. And we are severly underrepresented in State governments, because we lack the physical numbers.
Thus, it is *white* citizens that must listen to minorities – allow their feelings to get hurt – and educate themselves out of their historical ignorance! It is *white* citizens that must make the changes needed by blacks, Jews, and other minorities in the USA. We can’t do this without *whites* learning about *whiteness*, and *choosing* to legislate a real “Democracy” in the United States! Even “friendly” so called “white allies” are not really so, until they actively demand for these changes at the institutional level for the minorities of the USA.
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I come with receipts! Amnesty International is a liar! See for yourself, with the Arab articles quoted below:
Haled al Azm, Prime Minister of Syria in 1948 and 1949, wrote in 1973: “[T]he call by the Arab Governments to the inhabitants of Palestine to evacuate it and to leave for the bordering Arab countries, after having sown terror among them, following the incident at Dir Yassin. This collective flight helped the Jews, whose position improved, without any effort on their part…. Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we [Arabs] ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave…. We [Arabs] have brought destruction upon a million Arab refugees, by calling upon them and pleading with them to leave their land, their homes, their work and their business,… In addition, we [Arabs] accustomed them to begging for hand-outs and to suffice with what little the UN organisation would allocate them.” – The Memoirs of Haled al Azm, Beirut, Part 1, pp. 386-387, 1973
Abu Mazen (aka Mahmoud Abbas), 1976: “The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny but, instead, they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, imposed upon them a political and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live in Eastern Europe, as if we were condemned [by Arabs] to change places with them [the Jews]: they moved out of their ghettos and we occupied similar ones. The Arab States succeeded in scattering the Palestinian people and in destroying their unity. They [the Arab States] did not recognize them as a unified people until the States of the world did so, and this is regrettable.” – What We Have Learned and What We Should Do, published in Falastin el Thawra, the official journal of the PLO of Beirut, 1976
Sabri Jiryis, Institute for Palestinian Studies in Beirut, 1975: “It is not true that foreign States, especially Czarist Russia, Nazi Germany, Britain, and the United States were the only agents behind the conditions that led to the creation of Israel. The Arabs also took part in the process; sad to say, they were very active in it. When Israel was established, on 14 May 1948, it had an estimated population of 650,000 Jews. Today [1975] the number is three million, of which [over] half a million came to Israel during the last twenty-seven years from eight Arab States, all currently members of the Arab League and representing every type of regime that exists in the Arab world: monarchic, revolutionary, socialist, and progressive. This is hardly the place to describe how the Jews of the Arab States were driven out of the countries in which they lived for hundreds of years, then how they were shamefully deported to Israel after their property had been confiscated or taken over at the lowest possible price. It is plain that Israel will air this issue in the course of any serious negotiations that might be undertaken one day in regard to the rights of the Palestinians. Israel’s claims are these:… therefore, what happened was only a kind of “population and property exchange,” and each party must bear the consequences. Israel is absorbing the Jews of the Arab States; the Arab States, for their part, must settle the Palestinians in their own midst and solve their problems.” – How The Jews Were Driven From Arab Countries, published in Al-Nahar, Beirut, 1975
Why is it the Jewish people’s responsibility to give up our indigenous sovereignty upon our ancestral land, because Arabs created a refugee problem during their occupation of land-grabbed portions of our ancestral land (1948-1967 Jordan and Egypt occupations)? It is anti-Jewish racism, isn’t it, that insists the Indigenous People of Judea-Samaria, the Jewish people, are not entitled to their Indigenous Rights – because European Christian and Arab Muslim colonizers of our ancestral land deem themselves as having superseded us? So, for defending our ancestral land, decolonizing, and restoring our ancestral land to Jewish self-sovereignty, we are commiting “Apartheid” against the Colonizers who refuse to accept a Jewish nation on historic Jewish land?!
Abd Al-Ghani Salameh, Arab historian, 2017: “Before the Balfour Promise (i.e., Declaration) when the Ottoman rule ended [in 1917], Palestine’s political borders as we know them today did not exist, and there was nothing called a Palestinian people with a political identity as we know today, since Palestine’s lines of administrative division stretched from east to west and included Jordan and southern Lebanon, and like all peoples of the region [the Palestinians] were liberated from the Turkish rule and immediately moved to colonial rule, without forming a Palestinian people’s political identity. However, Palestine as a geographic area and the people dwelling within it enjoyed prosperity.” – Official PA TV, Nov. 1, 2017
Europeans and Arabs are pissed that an Indigenous People regained self-sovereignty upon their *colonized* land. ‘How dare those natives, *so few in number*, do that to supremacist us?!’ Hence, the revisionist history of the Middle East, that has populated through media outlets like an ignorance virus. Don’t believe me, and go study! Listen to Arabs who know firsthand, who admit that the Palestinians are the Arab States’ problem to resolve!
Khaled Abu Toameh, Journalist/TV Producer, 2013: “Mahmoud Abbas: Palestinians & Jordanians one people in two states. Jordan will not be a Palestinian state. Confederation no longer on table.” – reported on his Twitter account (@KhaledAbuToameh) July 22, 2013
It is Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas who are directly responsible for the “Palestinians” sufferings in the “West Bank” and Gaza, not Israel – who has tried way too many times to make peace with these land squatting Arab citizens of the Arab League of Nations!
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