So, it looks like I’ve quietly started posting here again after a long absence. My solo medical practice is up and running, I’m very busy with clinical work, but I would like to try to go on writing. I miss it, and I hope I still have some things to say that would be of interest to someone out there.
I’ve given it a lot of thought and I have decided to broaden the topics I write about. I don’t have time any more to read multiple blogs and newspapers daily to track all the fine points of Israeli and Palestinian politics; and, anyhow, it’s a little dry relying wholly on secondary sources to report on a situation half a world away from me.
I’m still deeply concerned about justice for the Palestinian people and also about the physical and moral future of the Jews. I’m still galled by the efforts of the Jewish right to suppress criticism of Israel within and outside the Jewish community. I will still write about these things - just not exclusively.
For readers who need their daily fix, in addition to news sources like Haaretz, Ma’an, and the Daily Star, there are some excellent weblogs that focus on Israel and Palestine. Some of my favorites are Tikun Olam, Lawrence of Cyberia and the International Solidarity Movement weblog, as well as the Jewish Peace News at Jewish Voice for Peace. I will try to update my links to include a full list.
I see that Robert Rosenberg, the publisher of Ariga, passed away. He was the first and the best of the bloggers on this topic. He will be missed and long remembered. Evidently Simon Spungin has taken over writing the daily post on the Matzav.
As for me, I have spent my blogging sabbatical reading Jewish literature of various stripe. I’ve been making my way through Nevi’im (Prophets) - the companion piece to the Pentateuch, documenting the history of the Jewish people from the pre-Monarchic period to the exile, and a little way into the restoration. I’ll post about that, and some of the academic literature on the Exilic period, when (presumably) much of the biblical content was composed, compiled and redacted to take the form we know today.
I’m also very interested in the growth of the Jewish Peace Movement in the United States; and in the emergence a new set of Jewish values that are not dominated by the Holocaust, Zionism or nostalgia for the shtetl - the three most powerful defining elements of American Jewish identity in the twentieth century.
At the margins of “established” Judaism, there is a fascinating process underway to re-engage older ethical, ritual and spiritual traditions. I think it will provide a new ethical basis for Jews to confront the problems of our time - globalization, material inequity, imperialism, ethnic nationalism (including Zionism), the destruction of the environment, etc; as well as new ways to connect with each other and with God.
I spend a good deal of my time reading about and practicing medicine, and maybe some of that will make its way up here. Plus, cool things I find on the web will be worth a post. It’s a blog, after all. How can you not link to You-Tube videos?
I haven’t talked with Brad lately but I hope he approves of this. Maybe he’ll even come back and post now and then. And if anyone else would like to join the blog, leave me a note in the comments section somewhere.
More soon.
