Our Hearts are Breaking

Our Hearts are Breaking.

Boruch Dayan HaEmes.

May their neshamas have an aliyah.

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Rachel Maddow on Obama’s Re-election

All Americans, ESPECIALLY Republicans and those who belong to what used to be The Tea Party Movement, need to listen to this…

The Rachel Maddow Show: November 8, 2012.

“Ohio really did go to President Obama last night. And he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is legitimately President of the United States. Again. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the Congressional Research Service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not skewed to ‘over-sample’ Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad. Nate Silver was doing math. And climate change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes. And evolution is a thing! And Benghazi was an attack ON us, it was not a scandal BY us. And nobody is taking away anyone’s guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually. And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And the moon landing was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. And UN election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as Communism.

Listen. Last night was a good night for liberals and for Democrats for very obvious reasons. But it was also, possibly, a good night for this country as a whole. Because in this country we have a two-party system, in government. And the idea is supposed to be that the two sides both come up with ways to confront and fix the real problems facing our country. They both propose possible solutions to our real problems. And we debate between those possible solutions. And by the process of debate, we pick the best idea. That competition between good ideas, from both sides, about real problems in the real country should result in our country having better choices, better options, than if only one side is really working on the hard stuff. And if the Republican party, and the conservative movement, and the conservative media is stuck in a vacuum sealed, door locked, spin cycle of telling each other what makes them feel good, and denying the factual, lived truth of the world, then we are all deprived, as a nation, of the constructive debate between competing, feasible ideas about real problems.

Last night the Republicans got shellacked. And they had no idea it was coming. And we saw them, in real-time, in real humiliating time, not believe it even as it was happening to them. And unless they’re going to secede, they’re going to have to pop the factual bubble they have been so happy living inside, if they do not want to get shellacked again. And that will be a painful process for them, I’m sure, but it will be good for the whole country – left, right, and center. You guys, we’re counting on you. Wake up.

There’s real problems in the world. There are real knowable facts in the world. Let’s accept those and talk about how we might approach our problems differently. Let’s move on from there. If the Republican party, and the conservative movement, and conservative media are forced to do that by the humiliation they were dealt last night, we will all be better off as a nation. And in that spirit, congratulations everybody. Big night.”

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Grave Desecration in B.C.

Last week, vandals went into a Jewish cemetery on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

Swastikas were scrawled on gravestones in Victoria’s historic Emanu-El Jewish Cemetery.

The vandalism was reported Saturday night (Dec. 31/11) and occurred the same day because a caretaker had been there a day before.

Rabbi Harry Brechner wrote an open letter calling on the vandals to confess and to “come clean the gravesites, and when you are through take a tour with me around the cemetery and meet some of the people who lived through Nazism.”

Both the cemetery and the Emanu-El synagogue date back to the 1860s, and the cemetery is the oldest Jewish burial ground in western Canada. The synagogue is Canada’s oldest Jewish house of worship in continuous use, according to the Victoria newspaper, the Time-Colonist.

The images speak for themselves. Sadly, the Jewish souls buried there cannot.

To those family members still alive, allow me to say…

“Hamakom y’nachem etchem b’toch sh’ar aveylei Tziyon viYirusholayim”

(May God comfort you among the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem)

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