It’s Midrash to the Rescue
by: Schvach Yid


Once a year, every year, I hear the reading of the Megilla on Purim. I know I should hear it twice, but I’m too lazy to go back to schul for a second reading. For a week or two preceding Purim I read the text of the Book of Ester, as well as portions of Midrash Rabbah Esther.

Regrettably, I must have missed something.

So, enter the author and owner of the Bagelnosher blog site, a woman ensconced in Be’er Sheva whose identity is unknown to me. She has provided me with a modicum of enlightenment with a recent blog, found at:
http://bagelnosher.blogspot.com/2009/06/timely-tale-of-palace-intrigue-and-why.html

It’s a lengthy piece, so get comfortable (according to Tzvi Fishman, author of the ‘From Hollywood to the Holy Land’ blog on Arutz Sheva, there’s a nice Etrog liqueur made in Israel…).

Pro-Israel Jewish bloggers and on-line reporters are hot and heavy in their concerted condemnation of our President’s dealings with Israel and with the Moslem world. I’m perplexed and dumbfounded at the analyses of Prez Obama’s spiel concerning Israel. If he really does have it in for the Jewish State, then, G-d willing, Bibi Netanyahu will muster the koach to say no and ‘do the right thing’. Brass cajones are difficult to come by; Israel certainly used to express them, but alas, that was a long time ago, at least by modern Israeli history standards.

Doing the right thing entails several components. First, the various and sundry elements that comprise the Israeli government will have to discover a new element of mental function. It’s called ‘unity’. They should try it; they’ll like it. It provides the soil for a new sort of experience in Israeli national life. It’s called winning, and by winning I don’t mean a quick military victory followed by an even faster capitulation to an imposed cease fire, which in turn is followed by an almost instantaneous surrender of all that has been gained. Remember, the Jew haters are loathe to see Jews as winners. ‘Who the hell do you people think you are; you’re supposed to lose, remember?’

Actually, no, we don’t remember the bit about some fantasized obligation to lose.

Secondly - and please forgive this criticism jadies and jents - we Jews, and especially Israelis, have to start acting as though we mean what we verbally assert. Once upon a time at least some of us were persistent. Back then, the Jew haters cat-called such Yiddin ‘pushy’, a term I last heard applied to a Jewish saleswoman by a Jew hater at work (she, the Jew hater, was my boss) somewhere between 1995 and ’96.

If we believe the Land of Israel is ours, then we have to conduct ourselves accordingly. That means no negotiation about the so called ‘West Bank; you know, YESHA. There, we build - period. No new ‘Palestinian’ city in the ‘West Bank’. A couple of new Jewish cities, along with a few dozen new Jewish towns would be very nice, and no Jewish ‘settlers’ are to dwell in mobile whatchamahoozits – I think the Israelis call them ‘Caravellas’; in Arab literature, I think they were called ‘Caravanserai’ (just kidding; besides, it’s French, not Arabic). When we Jews are told ‘no’, the best thing we can do for ourselves is to get chutzpadik and do precisely as we wish - and then fight back, in no uncertain terms, to win (but they hate us as winners).

Lastly, no Jewish army in Israel, whether military or law enforcement agency, is to assault or attack Jews. We are not to use the Israeli military to oust Jews from their homes because of some lousy and fraudulent ‘peace negotiation’. Aside from being the wrong thing to do, it looks stupid, and there’s no Nobel Prize awarded for stupidity. We all know how fond we Jews are of Nobel Prizes; after all, we invented them, didn’t we.

Israel has a bad habit of emulating the United States. YESHA in 2009 is not Little Rock Arkansas in 1957. The Palestinian Arab Moslem Jew haters of today have nothing in common with the victimized American ‘Negro’ of half a century ago, and Israelis are not ranting racists. In 1948 we Jews said yes; it was the Arab Moslems who said no, and it was the Arab Moslems, and the Iranian Moslems, who prevailed upon Jew-hating Britain to keep European Jews from fleeing the onslaught of the ‘Nazi swine’ by preventing our immigration to Britain’s Mandate of Palestine. Let’s keep the facts straight folks.

One last item - those shoes in the photo of the Prez. You’d think the ‘guy’ (Michelle’s term for him) could afford a new pair of shoes. At the very least he should get resoled (get it?).

Well, that’s all folks! See what a little midrash shiur can do to an amateur critic?