Tikkun Olam

Hurricane Sandy , now dubbed by meteorologists the hybrid " Post Tropical Cyclone " has superseded anything I was going to write about, although my daughter's visit from Israel to the States was one of the topics under consideration.  But this storm became monstrous, and has, unfortunately, intertwined with her visit. She is now stranded at her cousin's apartment in New York City, without power, on the sixth floor.  They weren't worried when I spoke to them yesterday morning: they live in what was designated "beyond Area C," not expecting many problems and not expecting power outages.  Area A was the area in the direct line of the hurricane and closest to the ocean: lower Manhattan--the Battery Park area, which was under a mandatory evacuation. In this photo it looks as if the sea is coming in and taking over the land, which it is, at high tide in Battery Park. But as I stated above, my niece, her husband and my daughter who was staying wit...

I am feeling contemplative at the end of this special holiday season which began with Rosh Hashana, ten days later the holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur-the Day of Atonement-and culminated in the very festive and special holiday of Sukkot and Shemini Atzeret--23 days of prayer, introspection and celebration--and after almost  a month of no blogging, I decided to finally blog, after having read a post by Rabbi Avraham Arieh Trugman about the nations of the world converging on Jerusalem, to show their support for Israel and the Jewish People. My last post was about the savagery and inhumanity of Islamic extremists. I have written before of the world 's antisemitism and Israel's seeming isolation among the nations of the globe. We read in the Torah portion read on Sukkot that in the end of days, all the non-Jewish nations will come to Jerusalem to serve Hashem. This sounds like a fantasy, because in today's world,  Israel is being vilified and denigrated, mocke...