Author Archives: First.One.Through

The Copyrights of Winnie the Pooh and Jews

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When Winnie-the-Pooh entered the public domain in 2022, the cultural floodgates opened. A once-beloved children’s character, wrapped in honey jars and innocent nostalgia, was immediately remade into a monster. “Blood and Honey” turned Pooh into a savage killer. Games, parodies, and dark pastiches flooded the market. The comforting bear was no longer safe; he had been transformed into a canvas for other people’s fears, cynicism, and jokes.

It feels eerily familiar.

For two thousand years, Jews have been cast into the public domain. Stripped of the right to define their own story, they became available for anyone’s use. And abuse. Once known as the people of the Book, bearers of commandments, prophets, and a covenant, their identity was seized and rewritten. Medieval Christians branded them Christ-killers. Islamic empires reduced them to dhimmis. The Enlightenment caricatured them as rootless and ruthless bankers. In the modern age, they became “colonizers,” “supremacists,” and the avatars of “genocide.”

The Jews never sold the copyright to their name or history, but the world took it anyway. Just as horror producers found amusement in twisting Pooh into a monster, antisemites—left, right, secular, religious—have scribbled their darkest nightmares onto Jewish bodies. Pogroms, expulsions, inquisitions, and now, boycotts and campus rallies all stem from a warped creativity that insists Jews cannot own their own narrative.

Israel’s rebirth was supposed to end this. After all, if you reclaim your home, revive your language, rebuild your state, surely you also reassert your identity. But even here, the appropriation continues. Israel was smeared as “apartheid,” “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “racist,” and “colonial” decades before Hamas launched its latest genocidal war. “Jewish self-determination” is rewritten as oppression. “Defending children” is recast as war crimes. The oldest continuous nation on earth is treated as a villain in someone else’s morality play.

The difference between Winnie-the-Pooh and the Jews is stark. The fictitious character Pooh was released into the public domain by the natural passage of time, his copyright protection simply expiring. The Jews were thrust into the public domain by malice—by the unwillingness of societies to allow them ownership of their story. The Jewish Bible was rebranded as the Old Testament, out of copyright protection. Blood libels took hold on the bleached pages of Jewish foundational documents.

The current Jewish year is 5786. Traditionally, Jews write the date in Hebrew letters like Roman numerals and drop the 5 as being well understood. The letters for 86 spell “Pooh” in Hebrew, so now is as good a time as any to attempt a change that the 1948 reestablishment of the Jewish State did not provide.

One simple action is for everyone to write a large ‘5’ before the date, making clear to themselves and others that their faith predates all others, and continues still.

Challenge every use of the phrase “Promised Land” as a vicious varietal of cultural appropriation, which strips Jewish indigenous people from their divine heritage.

More dramatic is to reclaim Jewish rights on the Temple Mount. Why should the world care about Jewish faith and feelings if the majority of Jews treat the center of its religious devotion as a vestigial organ instead of the beating heart? Are we a living people or a hollow chamber for others to draw upon?

We must not countenance the free license for others to slander, parody, or profit off the Jewish name. The Jewish people are not public property. They are the authors and owners of their own identity—and it is time for them to act as such.

Children of a Lesser God, on the Temple Mount

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Mark Medoff titled his play Children of a Lesser God to expose the way society infantilized the deaf, treating them as incomplete people. The phrase still burns because it names the humiliation: being allowed to exist but denied equal dignity.

That is precisely the status of Jews on the Temple Mount. The holiest place in Judaism, the very ground of the First and Second Temples, the site of the binding of Isaac. Yet Jews are barred from uttering a prayer there. Visitors, reluctantly and barely; worshipers, never. The “status quo” enforced by the Jordanian Waqf with United Nations’ support dictates that Jews must keep their mouths shut.

It is a civic cruelty disguised as compromise. Jews are told they may stand in the place of their ancestors, but only as tourists in a museum, not as children before God. Muslims pray freely on the Mount by the millions, but Jews are gagged at their own holiest site. That is not neutrality — it is Islamic Imperialism.

The excuses are familiar: security, stability, avoiding unrest. But those words simply sanctify discrimination as pragmatism. As every Jew is expelled for moving lips in silent prayer, the world is reminded: some children are still treated as children of a “lesser” god.

At the very moment Jews prayed in synagogues over Rosh Hashanah 5786 in September 2025, reading the story of Abraham binding Isaac on the Temple Mount and repeatedly praying for a complete Jerusalem, the Islamic world – from as far away as Pakistan and Indonesia – made demands of the United States that it would ensure that Israel maintains the “status quo” on the Mount. The despicable continued humiliation of Jews was essential for them even under the guise of stopping the Hamas war. Even above “humanitarian aid to Gaza.”

Islamic world makes demands on the United States to stop the war – and Jews attempting to pray at their holiest location

International diplomacy has institutionalized the humiliation of Jews. The so-called status quo is nothing but a permanent statement of inequality.

Medoff’s play forced audiences to confront a society that silenced the deaf. The Temple Mount forces us to confront a world that silences Jews. While both are intolerable, the latter is demanded at the anti-Jewish United Nations.

“Free Palestine” Means Dead Jews

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Words earn their meaning in how they are used. When a slogan is repeatedly screamed as an incitement to burn, stab, gun down, and terrorize people because of who they are or whom they support, it ceases to be mere rhetoric. It becomes a battle cry — and its meaning is what the battle cry does.

We have painful, recent proof of the sickness. In several separate, well-documented attacks in the United States, suspects shouted “Free Palestine” while carrying out murderous attacks. Investigations and prosecutions have treated these shouts not as abstract political slogans but as part of a violent intent to harm people identified as Jewish, Zionist, or supporters of Israel.

Man shoots people, killing one in New Hampshire yelling “Free Palestine”

When the slogan is used repeatedly for arson, firebombs, knives and bullets, its practical meaning is indisputable: it is a call for violence against Jews and Israel supporters. Institutions that track antisemitic violence warn that normalizing chants tied to violence contributes directly to more attacks. We see that “Free Palestine” is a call to murder.

Man burns people alive, killing one in Boulder, CO, shouting “Free Palestine”

That ugly truth cannot be dressed up in euphemisms or by pleading free-speech. “Free Palestine” is the current moment’s “Allahu Akbar,” the chant of radical jihadists intent on killing “infidels.” For the assailants, today’s infidels are Jews and Israel supporters.

Couple killed in Washington, DC by man yelling “Free Palestine”

It begs the question of what a “Free Palestine” means when used so frequently in murderous rampages. Are there zealots killing because they want a peaceful Palestine, or is it more likely that they seek a Palestine that is free to kill Jews the way thousands of Gazans did on October 7, 2023?

Man tries to kill Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and his family on Passover over “Palestine”

The one area that became a “Free Palestine” was Gaza when Israel left the region in 2005. Within a year, the political-terrorist group Hamas won 58% of the Palestinian parliament election and a year later took over Gaza. In the aftermath of the October 7 massacre in Israel, 72% of Palestinian Arabs supported the attack and the majority still want Hamas to rule according to Palestinian polls.

“Free Palestine” means death to Israel supporters outside of Israel, and death to Jews inside of Israel. Knowing this, are western countries recognizing a Palestinian State to both get a more proportionate death toll in the war and to kill more Jews in their own countries?

Palestinian terrorism has gone global. The question is whether the Palestinian Authority’s “Martyr’s Fund” start to pay killers of Israel supporters globally (as predicted on these pages in August 2023).

De-Islamification, The Twin of Decolonization

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“Decolonization” has become one of the most fashionable buzzwords of the modern age. It is taught in schools, shouted in protests, and deployed at the United Nations as a moral bludgeon against the West. European imperialists, we are told, robbed indigenous peoples of their land, stripped them of their culture, and erected foreign regimes on stolen soil. The work of decolonization — dismantling those legacies and restoring dignity — has been cast as the great ethical project of our time.

But what of the other colonial power that swept across continents, subjugating peoples and erasing their sacred spaces? What of Islamic imperialism, which invaded the Jewish promised land centuries ago, laying claim to sites that predated Muhammad’s birth by millennia?

Consider Hebron, the resting place of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah. For Jews, it is the Ma’arat HaMachpelah, the Cave of the Jewish Matriarchs and Patriarchs — a holy site woven into the very text of Genesis. When Muslim conquerors took over, they renamed it the “Ibrahimi Mosque,” transformed it into a shrine for their own creed, and barred Jews from entering. For seven hundred years, Jews were not even allowed to set foot past the seventh step of the building.

This was not preservation; it was expropriation. A classic colonial tactic: erase the indigenous name, overwrite the meaning, and forbid the natives from practicing their own faith.

But unlike the narratives drilled into young students about European settlers in Africa or Asia, the Jewish story is not told.

In 1967, Israel liberated Hebron, and Jews once again could pray at the burial site of their patriarchs and matriarchs. Slowly, painstakingly, the work of de-Islamification has begun — not by erasing the Muslim presence, but by restoring Jewish rights. Jews may now pray, Jews may now enter, Jews may now sanctify their ancestral home.

And in June 2025, a historic step was taken: the Israeli government transferred administration of the second holiest site in Judaism to Jewish leaders in Kiryat Arba, removing it from the sole control of the Islamic waqf. This was neither vengeance nor displacement. It was simple justice — the recognition that all of those buried at the site are the founders of Judaism (while only one is revered by Muslims), and Jews are the indigenous people in the land as proven by that fact.

Decolonization movements have received global endorsement. Universities run entire programs on “postcolonial studies.” Yet when Jews engage in the parallel project of reclaiming their holy spaces from centuries of Islamic imperial rule, the world looks away — or worse, condemns.

Why should “decolonization” be celebrated while “de-Islamification” is scorned? Both are projects of justice. Both undo centuries of cultural theft. Both restore indigenous peoples to their rightful heritage.

If the United Nations were consistent, it would champion de-Islamification alongside decolonization. It would recognize Jewish efforts as authentic acts of restoration, not “provocations.” Schools should teach children that just as Africans reclaimed their lands from European empires, Jews are reclaiming their sacred spaces from Islamic erasure.

Instead, the UN gives its platform to radical jihadists who claim that Israel is trying to “Judaize” the Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem and Hebron. It’s an offensive smear deliberately made to try to erase the reality of their Islamic imperialism, colonization, ethic cleansing and cultural appropriation.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas talking about the “Judaization” of Jerusalem to conceal that Islamic cultural appropriation.

The jihadists fear that after Hebron, the Jews will come for the site they know is really Jewish – Jerusalem. They are calling the transfer of the Cave of the Jewish Matriarchs and Patriarchs from the Hebron Waqf to Jewish authorities a “rehearsal for al Aqsa” in Jerusalem. They know the Jewish Temple Mount is the holiest site for Jews and Muslims invaded and took the site. They are proud of the feat and fear a reversal would legitimize a people they consider “sons of apes and pigs.“

There is no “Judaization” of Jerusalem and Hebron. There is de-Islamification.

Decolonization may be decades old, but de-Islamification is still in its early chapters. It deserves not only legitimacy, but applause.

Beyond The Battle Plan

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For the last several parshas, Moses has been addressing the children of Israel with a constant refrain: follow the commandments in the land, and you will be blessed; stray from them, and you will lose your inheritance. To us today, these verses are about mitzvot — the commandments that define Jewish life. But to the Israelites standing on the banks of the Jordan, the charge must have sounded different.

They had just watched an entire generation die in the desert. The memory of the spies still lingered — those men who declared that the land was too difficult to conquer, that the people within were too mighty to destroy. Could such whispers have been forgotten? Surely the children had heard rumors of what their parents had repeated around campfires for forty years. And now, standing on the edge of the land, they might have expected Moses to lay out the strategy, the order of battle, the plan of conquest.

Instead, Moses did something else entirely. He skipped the war. He jumped straight to what life would look like after. The rules of worship, the rhythms of daily life, the blessings and curses of obedience. It was as if the battles ahead — Jericho’s walls, Ai’s ambush, the wars against mighty kings — would be non-events.

Imagine a coach gathering his team before kickoff and skipping the playbook. Instead, he passes out dinner menus for the victory banquet to follow. No Xs and Os. No defensive schemes. Only a vision of celebration after the game.

Why? Perhaps it was Joshua’s role to direct the war, the next chapter of the Tanach already waiting to be written. Perhaps Moses, who knew he would not enter the land, wanted to leave the people with principles for the future. Or perhaps Moses was teaching something deeper: that the wars were only one part of securing a peaceful future. That the real challenge was not in winning the land, but in living faithfully within it.

The truth is, the dream of the land was already realized — even if the Israelites didn’t know it. Hundreds of years of diaspora were ending. The promise was being fulfilled before their eyes, not through a war plan but through divine decree. The land would be theirs. The victory was guaranteed. What remained in doubt was whether they would keep it.

Moses understood: the conquest would be won by God’s hand, but the inheritance would be maintained only through God’s law. The spies had feared giants and fortified cities, but the true danger was disobedience and forgetfulness once the land was secured. That is why Moses spoke not of how to conquer, but of how to live.

The people knew that Joshua would lead them to battle, just as he had over Amalek. And they had seen that Moses was their intermediary with God, who prayed for their success (Exodus 17:10-13). Now Moses was telling the people: you no longer need me as your agent; you are they keys to victory. Prayers during battle to secure victory; obedience thereafter to keep the peace.

Aaron and Hur hold up the hands of Moses in prayer as he grew tired, asking God’s help for Joshua to lead the people to victory in battle

And so it is today. The battles of our time are real, but they are only part of the threat. We must not be complacent. We must not assume that everything is on the battlefield. Beyond the battle plans lies our own responsibilities in living a meaningful life and knowing the source of our strength.

ACTION PLAN

Go to the United Nations and sing outside the line from Al Tira, “Utzu Etza”: “Take counsel together, and it shall come to nought; speak the word, and it shall not stand: for God is with us.”

The Wisdom of Waiting

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The ability to delay gratification has long been seen as a mark of intelligence. The famous “marshmallow test” placed children in front of a single treat and offered a simple bargain: eat it now, or wait and get two. Those who resisted often went on to succeed academically, socially, even financially. Patience was not just a virtue; it was predictive.

Yet it turns out this trait is not uniquely human. In a Cambridge experiment, cuttlefish were given a similar choice — a mediocre meal immediately or a shrimp, their favorite, if they waited. They waited. In fact, they sometimes endured two full minutes of temptation, holding out for the better prize. Even more remarkable: those same cuttlefish who delayed showed sharper learning in other tests. Intelligence, it seems, wears many disguises.

This was the first time this kind of patience was found in an invertebrate. Chimpanzees, crows and parrots have long been known to delay satisfaction in order to save food for later.

What makes this discovery all the more striking is that cuttlefish are solitary creatures. They do not form schools, build social bonds, or raise their young. Their patience evolved for the hunt — the advantage of waiting for the better prey, of holding still in camouflage until the perfect strike. Their foresight is purely individual, a strategy of survival.

Humans, by contrast, require patience not just for survival but for flourishing. Patience is what allows us to build together — to trust one another, to undertake projects that span generations, to cultivate communities and civilizations. Our ancestors planted trees whose shade they would never sit under and built cathedrals that took centuries to complete, as an extension of delayed satisfaction – a commitment towards a future society they would never enjoy.

But in our age of instant messages, instant news, and instant outrage, society no longer prizes waiting. Why suffer a moment of discomfort when a thousand distractions beckon from a glowing screen? Why wrestle with the silence of patience when clicks deliver dopamine now? Where our forebears saw wisdom in restraint, we see boredom. Where they saw the dignity of discipline, we see inconvenience.

Patience as a virtue is not just about self-control; it is the very condition that allows for deep thought and deep bonds. To abandon patience is to abdicate our gifts of reflection, to trade away the ability to imagine futures greater than the present moment. In our hurry, we become more animalistic, lunging at whatever stimulus flashes before us. And unlike the cuttlefish, whose patience serves survival, we squander patience’s higher purpose — the power to build not only buildings that endure, but bonds that sustain.

Are we in the process of losing our basic survival skills – in both the present and future? Are we burying our ability to ponder to be led like dolts to an unsuspecting danger?

The irony is sharp: solitary cuttlefish wait with foresight, while humans — the only creature who truly needs patience to hold communities together — are in danger of forgetting how. Delayed gratification once built civilizations. Instant gratification now tears at their foundations.

The cuttlefish reminds us that intelligence is not about speed but foresight. A creature with no interest in faith, family, or future still knows the wisdom of waiting. The question that remains is whether we do.

Pilgrims or Provocateurs?

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A Muslim who visits Mecca is called a Hajji. It is one of the highest honors in Islam, the completion of the Hajj pilgrimage, celebrated by family and community as a sacred accomplishment.

A Catholic who travels to the Vatican is a pilgrim. For centuries, the faithful have journeyed to Rome, walking into St. Peter’s Square with reverence, greeted with blessing and legitimacy.

And a Jew who goes to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem — the very place where the First and Second Temples once stood, the holiest site in Judaism? That Jew is branded a provocateur. Not a pilgrim, not a worshiper, not a faithful soul ascending to pray — but an instigator, an agitator, an accused trespasser, a “settler” on their own sacred ground.

The disparity could not be starker. What is celebrated as devotion for others is condemned as incitement for Jews. For Muslims, the Hajj is a right; for Catholics, Vatican pilgrimage is honored; but for Jews, even quiet prayer on the Temple Mount is labeled an offense — by the United Nations, NGOs, and international bodies.

It is not only hypocrisy; it is erasure. To deny Jews the name of pilgrim is to deny Jewish history, Jewish identity, and Jewish legitimacy. It casts the holiest place in Judaism as alien to Jews themselves, a desecration of memory turned into policy.

And why? Because the world has normalized the jihad. It has allowed Islamic Supremacy to dictate permissible behavior, even in the Jewish holy land.

The truth is simple: a Jew ascending the Temple Mount is not incitement. It is the most ancient pilgrimage of them all — the echo of three millennia of devotion, commanded in Torah, rooted in covenant, and carried in every prayer whispered toward Jerusalem, before Islam was even created.

The real provocation is not the Jew who prays on the Temple Mount but a world that dares to tell Jews they don’t belong at the center of their faith.

ACTION ITEM

Come to the United Nations in New York City and demand Jewish rights and freedom of religious assembly in Jerusalem.

Rockefeller Center and The Modern Tower of Babel

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In biblical times, after the Great Flood destroyed the known world, mankind responded not with humility but with defiance. They sought to raise themselves above God’s wrath, building the Tower of Babel as a monument to their own power, reaching for the heavens.

Centuries later, as the Great Depression ransacked America, another tower began to climb skyward. John D. Rockefeller, the oil titan turned philanthropist, commissioned an audacious complex in the heart of Manhattan. Out of the rubble of despair rose Rockefeller Center, a collection of soaring structures anchored by “30 Rock,” a 70-story monument of steel and stone.

Construction workers having lunch as they build the RCA Building in 1932

At its entrance, the vision was chiseled into eternity: “Wisdom and Knowledge shall be the stability of thy times” — the words of Isaiah engraved above the door. Flanked by sculptures representing Light and Sound, the building proclaimed its purpose: to be the voice of news and entertainment for the world, a modern temple to information and culture.

Sculptures atop the main entrances of 30 Rockefeller Plaza (photo: First One Through)

Yet curiosity lingers when one gazes up at that famous inscription. The line from Isaiah 33:6 was never meant to stand alone. The full verse concludes: “…and the fear of the Lord is his treasure.” But that final clause was deliberately omitted. The builders sanctified wisdom and knowledge, but excised God. The omission transformed Rockefeller Center into secular scripture, elevating man’s wisdom over divine truth. For nearly a century, the complex stood representing a modern Tower of Babel: a singular voice beaming news, culture, and entertainment to a world tuned to one frequency.

Sculpture above doorway of 30 Rockefeller Plaza (photo: First One Through)

But the world has shifted. The authority of a single edifice has collapsed. The pandemic pulled workers from office towers into spare bedrooms and kitchen tables. The internet, social media, and ubiquitous cell phones scattered the once-unified audience into billions of isolated “my-truthers.” The great tower that once declared itself master of wisdom and knowledge no longer reigns over truth — or even news. Instead, we have a digital cacophony, a post-Babel of infinite voices, each one clamoring for relevancy.

In the ancient tale, God looked down upon Babel, saw mankind united in defiance, and scattered the people with a confusion of tongues. It was divine intervention that broke apart the human project. The modern incarnation lacks lightning bolts from the heavens with thunderous judgment. The fracture came from within. By sanctifying ourselves over the divine, the builders enshrined wisdom and knowledge as supreme — and in so doing, they planted the seeds of our undoing.

Even in scattering, the ancient world retained stability. Though tongues differed, mankind still clung to faith. Out of the dispersion of dialects came hundreds of religions, with Abraham’s radical monotheism, affirming that there was one God who bound the human family together, at its heart. In contrast, modern society’s disdain for God has left us truly unstable. We do not scatter into tribes of belief but dissolve into atomized individuals, each enthroning himself as arbiter of truth, each rejecting the notion of any higher authority.

There is no “stability of thy times.”

As Lord Jonathan Sacks once observed, “If you want to take this diverse, fractured culture and turn it into a united nation, you have to get them to build something together.” Culture is not born of proximity but of purpose. Yet even that is not enough. For building without faith leads only to another Babel — a project that may rise high but will ultimately fracture under the weight of its own pride.

Our ancestors knew this instinctively. They struggled, they questioned, they even quarreled with God — but they never erased Him from the story. Faith provided the mortar that held their collective together. In contrast, our age has celebrated knowledge while amputating belief, enthroning technology while dismissing transcendence. We build networks instead of communities, platforms instead of sanctuaries. And without faith, what we construct collapses into confusion, as surely as Babel once did.

A Way Forward

The modern Tower has already cracked. Today’s Titans do not build skyscrapers broadcasting monoliths of truth but platforms and algorithms addicting both tweeter and tweeterdom. We live in a splintered archipelago of isolated truths. To endure, we must restore the missing half of Isaiah’s wisdom. It is time to harken to Isaiah’s full words and engage with humble faith together with wisdom and knowledge, so that we may yet build a more perfect union.

Perhaps an answer for us today is not chiseling new words above our heads into the stone of Rockefeller Center to amend the verse. The real task is closer to home. Each of us can sanctify our own entrances with God’s presence. A mezuzah affixed to the doorpost — of a house, an apartment, and our workplaces — serves as the quiet reminder that wisdom and knowledge alone are not enough. It is God’s presence within that provides the stability of our times. Where the tower excised Him, the mezuzah restores Him. And if enough doorways bear that mark, perhaps our fractured society can yet rediscover a shared foundation.

30 Rockefeller Plaza at night, September 2025 (photo: First One Through)

The Biographies of Two Shofars

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The sound of the shofar is meant to pierce the heavens. Sometimes the shofar’s story pierces the heart.

I remember coming home one day to find my son in tears. His beloved shofar — a gift from his grandfather — had been chewed by his dear dog. The horn was mangled beyond salvation. I carried it to the rabbi in desperation, asking if it could be saved. Perhaps the mouthpiece could be trimmed…. Alas, it could not, and I never saw it again.

My father had given it to him not long before, teaching his grandson how to coax sound from its ancient curves in preparation for his bar mitzvah. That shofar, which transitioned from a smooth polished mouthpiece to a rough and natural opening, was more than bone and horn — it was a link between generations.

My father bought my son a new shofar and continued to teach him how to blow. He was there on the bimah as my son blew it proudly in Jerusalem on the first day of Elul for his bar mitzvah. I took in the special moment, and also considered my son’s previous shofar that was not there. Even more, the profound emotion of a young boy torn at losing his grandparent’s bar mitzvah gift – to a dog whom he also loved, who was just being a dog. The gathered family and milestone in Jerusalem were the key celebrations of the day, but recalling my son’s well of tears months earlier over this moment which may not have happened, enriched it.

My father’s own shofar has a different story. He blew it for decades in his shul, year after year, his steady blasts calling our community to repentance. Eventually the horn began to crack, to dry, to lose its voice. He gifted the treasure to me some years ago, and I have placed it on my living room mantle, its curves still beautiful though its sound has fallen silent.

This year, my father — approaching 90 — will not blow the shofar. While he’s strong enough to walk to synagogue, some health issues will keep him from the bimah as he has done for as long as I can remember. The body ages. The shofar ages.

There are shofars that pass through the generations, blown by grandparents and great-grandparents a hundred years ago and still blown today. They carry not just sound but touch — the hands that held them, the lips that pressed them, the prayers that filled them. In many ways, these shofars still live.

We think of the shofar as the instrument through which we hear God’s call on Rosh Hashanah. It is the vehicle – and the subject. The shofar itself has its own biography. Some are placed on mantles, mute witnesses to decades of service. Some are destroyed, leaving only the memory of their sound. Some are retired to museums as quiet curiosities.

As we enter a new year, I think of two particular shofars in my life — one that I can no longer see, one that I can no longer hear — and of the special people who breathed life through them whom I am blessed to still hold and cherish. These horns, like us, are finite. But their stories resound forever, calling us to remember, to connect, and to pray for many more years of holding them and each other as a family and community.

The Touch of the Sound of the Shofar (September 2015)

From Hostage Posters to Charlie Kirk

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“What starts with the Jews doesn’t end with the Jews.”
We are watching that adage unfold in real time.

Seven hundred days ago, way too many people in western cities took to the streets and shredded the faces of Israeli hostages taped to lampposts.
Those faces were voices, each one a witness, a story, a plea — and that is precisely why some felt they had to be destroyed.
It wasn’t enough to ignore them; they had to be erased, obliterated, so that the public would never be confronted by their humanity.

So it was with the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
They didn’t just want his opinions silenced — they wanted his existence blotted out.
His death was a warning to anyone who shared his worldview: you will not be allowed to speak, and if you persist, you will suffer.

This is not merely a campaign against perceived bad ideas — it is a maximal campaign against the people who hold them.
They want Israel destroyed, and they want those who support Israel to feel pain.
They want conservatives destroyed, and those who think like them to live in fear.

This is not free speech but a purge.
It is a revolution that calls itself “good trouble” but wields the club, the knife, and the guns to bring the “intifada” to the west.

The secular left has adopted an “Islamonormative” framework.
It treats the faces of Jewish hostages like drawings of Mohammed, punishable by erasure, and treats conservative talking points as blasphemy, punishable by death.
This is not debate — it is jihad.

I’m Offended, You’re Dead.

America is not just losing empathy for hostages nor tolerance for opposing ideas — it is learning to enjoy their destruction.
The mob laughs as the faces are ripped down, cheers as the dissenter is silenced.
America’s youth are being groomed to take pleasure in erasing the unwanted.
Once that appetite is formed, it will not stay confined.

The spectacle of the auto de fe is slowly coming to America as society moves from speech to speakers. To infidels.

Jews have long been the most persecuted and hunted people in the world. Now, religious conservatives are becoming new Jews as the secular crusade vilifies their beliefs.

Ten years ago they came for blasphemers at Charlie Hebdo in France, and expanded their jihad to nearby Jews (read “random folks” by US President Obama). World leaders marched arm in arm that they would not be silenced. Now they offer to lie Charlie Kirk’s body at the U.S. Capitol building, in a sign of respect and a nation that remained unbowed. Gestures.

But the voice of the Jew, the face of the Jew, and the Jew himself are one and the same. People believe The Jew is targeted in isolation; that his situation is unique. A dynamic that will not pierce the majority. Until they realize that it has.

The drip of antisemitism infiltrates society and corrodes it from within, an insidious jihad. Stealthily, it kills morality and sanity. Alas, it is too subtle to recognize as a macro threat until it is a stage four tumor that has ransacked the body politic, then unable to proffer basic protection for the masses.