11/21/23

 Tuesday, November 21, 2023

In bed at 9:30, up at 5, mis-ack ache.  Let Lilly out.  39°, raining, high of  41°, wind ENE at 13 mph, 11-16/27, WC is 32°. 0.3" of rain in the last 6 hours, total expected is 0.45". Sunrise at 6:51, sunset at 4:22, 9+31.  "a damp, drizzly November of my soul. . ."   

Treadmill; pain.  I'm following yesterday's advice from the VA doc to take 3 Advil 200 mg. pills 3 times a day.  Started last night, and another 3 at 5 this morning.  I'm experiencing mild tightness and spasms this morning.  Advil: 0530.1330, & 2030.  Pain intensified during the afternoon, quite bad at 4 despite 2 unrestful lie-downs.  Advils seem to be totally ineffective for the pain.  Relief came with MB at 5 pm, but returned 10 minutes later, worse.  Rough day.

Geri down with bronchitis (?)  Heavily congested for the last 2 days, spent the afternoon in bed resting.  I brought her 2 coricidin & water at 5:15.  Not sounding good.

LTMW at a flock of 17 wild turkeys crossing the bend of County Line Road into Wakefield Court and coming onto our front yard.  Sixteen of the birds head south onto the McGregor's property, while one outlier turns around and pecks her way back toward County Line Road until she realizes she is all alone, whereupon she turns around and runs and then flies back to join her posse.  I'm not sure why these birds give me a thrill, but they always do.  I'm reminded that I saw a partridge once in some high grass along a road in Ozaukee County on one of my rides in the countryside. . .  I've seen hardly any birds at our full feeders this morning, even with 2 new suet cakes out, just a couple of goldfinches on the niger tube . . . By nightfall, those two goldfinches and the flock of turkeys were the only birds I saw all day.  I'm wondering if there is a predator in the area.

Ruth Marcus' op-ed this morning is worth reading.  She writes of the generational divide among American Jews regarding Israel, older Jews much more supportive of the Jewish state and younger Jews much less supportive.  

 My childhood memories are of the Six-Day War and the accompanying joy over access to the Western Wall; of the shock of the Yom Kippur War. . .  And, I am obliged to confess, the narrative of Israel’s founding that Jewish children of my generation were offered in Hebrew school and on trips to Israel was deeply misleading at best, tinged with anti-Palestinian bias at worst. This account utterly failed to acknowledge the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 or consider Palestinians’ legitimate claims to a homeland. The tenor of our rabbi’s sermons, the discussions in my childhood home, were that Israel could do no wrong.

My children grew up in a different environment — more honest about the contours of the conflict, more complex in the nature of the political discussion, and more fraught. They have scarcely known an Israel without Netanyahu, which is to say an Israel whose aggressive settlement policy that has made a two-state solution increasingly unattainable, and an Israel that fails to treat Palestinians with fairness and dignity.

It is, in short, an Israel that has made itself hard to love. . .  It is hard to demand that Israel constitute a central part of [my children's] Jewish identity when Israel’s behavior, during their conscious lifetimes, has been so impossible to defend. 

Her essay strikes home with me.   I think of one Jewish friend with whom I was and am close speaking disparagingly of Palestinians, telling me the Palestinians left what is now Israel during the founding war voluntarily, or because of encouragement by the neighboring Arab states, that there was no expulsion.  Very black and white, brought on by her anguish and anger over the Holocaust and historic anti-Semitism, and the situation facing the Jews who survived the Holocaust after their liberation from the camps, her understanding of the need for a safe, secure Jewish homeland, then and now.  I think of our good, dear Jewish friends of a lifetime and how we never speak of Israel in political terms, nor of Palestinians, but only of their memories from trips to Israel, in youth and more recently, without any mention of Palestinian Israelis, or the West Bank, Gaza, or East Jerusalem.  We never speak of Netanyahu, or Ben Gvir, or Smotrich, or the the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi divide, or the secular-religious divide, Likud and the religious parties, or the virtual disappearance of 'the Left' in Israel.  I think too of Marcus' admission of the bias infecting her indoctrination about the founding of Israel and its history (Israel can do no wrong) and how it parallels the bias infecting by indoctrination about the founding of the United States and its history (America can do no wrong), about Jewish superiority in Israel and White superiority in the U.S.