The Evolving Jew

I just got up from sitting Shiva this morning. I will write more about my father when I have had time to process things more. But I want to share a picture of me and my father some years ago (before my beard grayed to match his). I miss you, Abba. May the neshama of Yitzchak ben Avraham Yosef Halevi have an aliyah.

What's going on in Israel is extremely alarming. The fact that they could have a constitutional crisis where the judiciary and the Knesset are staring each other down is unprecedented, with the judiciary threatening to strike down the law that's intended to neuter the judiciary. Mass protests, members of the government calling for the arrest of opposition leaders? Democracy there has never been more at risk. Of course it's easy for me to blame Bibi, and I do, for cozying up and elevating extreme elements. But honestly, one can blame the center opposition parties as well. Was it worth rejecting Netanyahu so utterly that you end up with a coalition like this? The only stable coalition that would govern from a normal center-right place, that would preserve democracy, is a national unity government with Likud, Yesh Atid, and a few others. That would be stable, would still lean to the right, as Likud voters obviously wished for. And you wouldn't have this moment of crisis. L

Interesting post from 2013. I had even forgotten some of this stuff myself: V'ten Tal U'matar, Thanksgivikkah, and the slippage of the Hebrew calendar http://evolvingjew.blogspot.com/2013/12/vten-tal-umatar-thanksgivikkah-and.html

I've been looking through some of the saved drafts of posts imported from my old blog that I never published here, or never finished writing, so never published at all. Here's one from 2008: Title: I want to raise kids far away from NY Even Modern Orthodox institutions in the NY area have elements like this: Racial Comments ‘Shock’ Principals Do I really want my kids hearing this racism from their classmates? In "out of town" schools, this is far less common. Fast-forward 14 years, I am raising my kids "out of town" and the Modern Orthodox community here is by-and-large free of racism :-)

Translation of every front page newspaper headline in America today: "We still don't know anything because no votes have been counted, but here's yet another bunch of inane articles about the election to keep you reading and cover the fact that there won't be any real news till tomorrow"

Or more accurately, it was the 15th anniversary last month of the various iterations of my blog. I started out as the blogger "Yehudi Hilchati" just over 15 years ago - my first post was on February 28, 2007. Though along with the rest of the JBlogosphere, my blog is mostly silent these days, I happened to notice that I missed the anniversary and decided to mark it.