7/25/2025

 Friday, July 25, 2025

D+259/187/1274

306 Constantine I was proclaimed Roman Emperor by his troops

1941 FDR banned selling benzine/gasoline to Japan

1968 Pope Paul VI published the encyclical "Humanae vitae (Of Human Life)" which rejected any artificial forms of birth control

2019 US Justice Department resumed the use of the death penalty, scheduling five executions

In bed at 10, up at 5 with waking thoughts of Epstein, Maxwell, Trump, and Clinton. 'lifestyles of the rich and famous.'  69°, high of 77°, cloudy all day, foggy morning.

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 7:15 a.m.  Trulicity injection at 7:30 a.m.

  

Looking back and looking forward: Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.   I often look back on journal entries from the year before and the two years preceding the current date.  In a few days, I will be able to look back three years, if I continue journaling.  I am glad that I have at least some sort of record of having been alive and semi-functioning during these years of senectitude and decrepitude, 'proof of life' snapshots.  Last year on this date, I was on15 mg. of daily prednisone and experiencing quite a bit of bad pain, but my waking thoughts were of Benjamin Netanyahu, Gaza and the West Bank, the 'two state solution,' I wrote a piece focusing on seeing the world through Netanyahu's eyes and the eyes of Israelis who had lived perhaps through the Holocaust, Israel's war of independence,  the 1967 Six Day War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Hezbollah wars in Lebanon, the rocket attacks from Gaza and Lebanon, the intifadas, the Achille Lauro, the Munich Olympics, the bus bombings, and on and on.  I also try to see through the eyes of Palestinian Arabs, the Nakba, the dispossession and occupation of what had been their homeland.  I concluded: 

I don't know where to go with these thoughts because they lead me back to the fundamental question of the wisdom and legitimacy of Israel itself as 'the Jewish homeland' on territory that had been overwhelmingly Arab before colonization or settlement by mostly European Jews, by people like Netanyahu's father, who moved to Tel Aviv in 2020 as an ardent Zionist.  The idea of Zionism has "baked into it' if not the expulsion of the indigenous Arabs in Palestine, at least their subordination to Jewish hegemony.  In his speech yesterday, Netanyahu conflated the State of Israel with Jewry but we know that not every Jew is a Zionist, much less a supporter of the modern government of Israel.  There were Jews on the streets outside the Capitol demonstrating against Zionism as he spoke.  Theodor Herzl's touting of Zionism was opposed by most assimilated Jews in Germany at the time, and perhaps even by Jews in the shtetls to the East.  The fear was that if Jews were seen to have a homeland in Palestine, they could be seen as not belonging where they were, in Europe.  And Zionism raises the perplexing problem of who is a Jew and whether there is a Jewish nation.  Yeshayahu Leibowitz argues that the only halakha that ties Jews together is the observance of Jewish law, the written law and the oral law. What does a Jew living in Singapore have in common with a Jew living in Los Angeles and a Jew living in Morocco or Ethiopia?  Not language geographical ties race or allegiance to a nation-state or customs other than halakha.  Where do secular Jews, like Netanyahu and his birth family,  fit into this taxonomy?  How about Reform Jews?  Atheist Jews?  Leibowitz wrote: "The Jewish people, as it existed in history, is definable only by reference to its Judaism - a Judaism that was not a mere idea in the mind but the realization of a program of living outlined in the Torah and delineated by its Mitzvoth.  This way of life constituted the specific national content of Jewishness or, in other words, the uniqueness of the Jewish people.  The Jew practiced a way of living that was exclusively his."  Unique dietary behavior, unique marital laws, unique butchering behavior, unique Sabbath behavior, etc.  The point is that it is the uniqueness of behavior, practice, or way of living that defines Jewishness, and that way of living is provided in halakha, Jewish law.  Where do all these thoughts take me in terms of Netanyahu and yesterday's speech?  in terms of Zionism? and in terms of the military and settler occupation of the West Bank? the war in Gaza?  Always back to the question of the defensibility of Zionism itself.  What do I make of this muddle of thoughts?  That I am not a Zionist.  That Zionism is understandable but not defensible.  That Zionism, long term, has not been good for the Jews and indeed is a leading cause of antisemitism around the world, for which diaspora Jews pay the heaviest price.  That Zionism is just another form of pernicious nationism very much akin to the White Christian Nationalism that plagues America.

Do I still think this way, or are my thoughts still hopelessly muddled? What purpose is served by wondering about the legitimacy of the nation-state, which came to be out of warfare and has been in existence and universally recognized since I was 7 years old?  I should struggle not with what Zionism meant in the 1940s and before, but with what it means in 2025 and hereafter.  I don't yet have an answer to that question, but I'm sure that I do not do what Netanyahu always does, which is to equate Zionism and the nation-state of Israel with worldwide Jewry.  I do not equate Zionism with support of Likud or its current incarnation as Netanyahu-Smotrich-Ben Gvir.  What I wonder is whether most of the world will come to equate Zionism with what has been occurring in Gaza and in the West Bank under this government.  The continuing news of children and others dying of starvation, of the IDF mowing down Gazans in crowds waiting for food (like fish in a barrel), and of settler and IDF depredations in the West Bank cannot be "good for the Jews," neither those in Israel nor those in the diaspora.  It is incontrovertible that deprivation of food and clean water from the civilian population of Gaza has been the official government and military policy of Israel from October 7th onward.  I struggle with these issues because, for most of my life, my best friends have been Jews, starting with my first boss, Wally Halperin, who owned the food and liquor store at 74th and Halsted in Chicago.  They have all been faithful supporters of the state of Israel.  What have they been going through since Netanyahu's alliance with Israel's far-right parties?  Since October 7, 2023?  I don't know because "Israel" has become a topic not raised in friendly, polite conversation, especially with non-Jews.  That button has become too hot to push.

    In last year's reflection, I quoted Yeshayahu Liebowitz on the issue of Jewish identity: Who is a Jew?  What distinguishes a Jew as a member of a distinct nation or people?  His argument is that it is only observance of Jewish law, halaka, that defines Jewishness.  This view creates a problem, of course, for atheistic Jews, secular Jews, Reform Jews, and other non-observant Jews, and one may agree or not with his argument.  What can't be argued, however, was his wisdom in opposing the occupation of the lands seized during the Six Day War in 1967.  He foresaw what would happen in and to Israel and in and to the people in the Occupied Territories, and it wasn't good for the Jews.   He was right.  Gaza and the West Bank have turned out to be Israel's  Tar Babies, with a big difference.  In the Uncle Remus story, Br'er Rabbit escaped from Br'er Fox by tricking him into throwing Br'er Rabbit into a briar patch.  Israel, especially under Likud and Netanyahu, is doing everything it can to steer clear of a briar patch.  It wants to hold onto its Tar Babies forever.

Day 2 and it's turning out not as good as I had hoped, but better than I had feared.  I knew the hair would be a challenge, and it was, but it turned out not awful.  I thought the striped skirt would also be a challenge and, like the hair, it's a far cry from Renoir's original, but not awful.  The gray turned out to be darker than I had intended, and the red stripes less vivid than I had hoped, but it could be worse.  I'm also daunted by Renoir's background of lush greenery, which could be a real problem, ditto whether to add some texture or folds to her top (camisole?  chemise?  blouse?)   Then I'll have to decide what to do about her blotchy skin.  And there's that missing ear; probably better to leave it missing.  I'm wondering whether I should also just forget about the greenery in the background.  I think I probably will.  Chicken.

An anniversary note re Humanae Vitae, from my memoir:

The Catholic Church also revealed its feet of clay during 1968.  Cardinal Spellman was spouting his murderous nonsense about ‘a war for civilization’  without restraint by the Vatican and Catholics were generally as resistant as any other group to much of the civil rights demands.  The big difference maker in terms of authority however had nothing to do with war and peace or civil rights, but with sex, Paul VI’s encyclical banning contraception, including birth control pills.  In 1963, John XXIII had established a commission to study population and birth control issues.  Paul VI appointed 15 cardinals and bishops and 64 lay experts to the commission.  The commission provided a report in 1966 saying contraception was not intrinsically evil.  The vote among the clergy was 9 to 6; the lay commission vote was 60 to 4.  One of the dissenters was Karol Wojtyla, later John Paul II.  The dissenters feared that a change in the Church’s position would call into question the pope’s teaching authority.¹  The report was leaked to the press in 1967 and there was a very favorable reaction among modern Catholics, who expected the pope to adopt the commission’s recommendation.  Instead, Paul VI rejected the recommendation and adopted the dissenting position, undoubtedly fearing that any change in the Church’s position would weaken the claim to papal authority.  What happened, of course, was precisely what Paul and the Vatican conservatives wanted to avoid: widespread rejection of the Church’s teaching authority, especially by American and Western European Catholics. The pope and his conservative curial apparatchiks were seen as, at best. mired in medievalism, and, at worst, more concerned about the power of its shepherds than in the welfare of the flock.

From my point of view, the United States’ position on the war in Vietnam and the Church’s position on contraception flowed from the same source.   Johnson and his advisors and Paul VI and his advisors were more concerned with institutional credibility than with the lives of their “subjects.”  Not losing face, nationally and personally, was more important to Johnson than the lives of the Americans and Vietnamese who were suffering in the war.  Better that thousands should die or be horribly wounded than that the United States be seen for what it inevitably was in Vietnam, an arrogant and feckless loser.

¹“If it should be declared that contraception is not evil in itself, then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches in 1930 (when the encyclical Casti Connubi was promulgated) and in 1951 (Pius XII’s address delivered before the Society of Hematologists in the year the pope died). 

“It should likewise have to be admitted that for a half a century the Spirit failed to protect Pius XI, Pius XII, and a large part of the Catholic hierarchy from a very serious error. This would mean that the leaders of the Church, acting with extreme imprudence, had condemned thousands of innocent human acts, forbidding, under pain of eternal damnation, a practice which would now be sanctioned. The fact can neither be denied nor ignored that these same acts would now he declared licit on the grounds of principles cited by the Protestants, which popes and bishops have either condemned or at least not approved” [Emphasis added by me.]

Reading these words today, 20 years or so after I wrote them, puts me in mind of Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society, in which he argues, persuasively, that we are much more likely to sin, to act selfishly, as members of a group than we are as individuals.  His theory explains our tendency to "circle the wagons" whenever group integrity, identity, cohesiveness, safety, standing, or privilege is attacked.