This is Unbelievable!
Have a beautiful, enlightened, and cheery day my friends!
•A•
Today is both Christmas and Chanukah.
To my supporters: YOU are my friends. Anyone with $36 dollars to spare who does not help me out isn't a friend. However, anybody who does not have $36 to spare who considers me a friend should please contact me to let me know.
My ability to thrive is hampered SEVERELY by poverty. If you can support me and don't you are evidently not a friend.
ALL of my friends are supporters.
One friend sent me $1500 last year, someone who has a very low income came across me through a random youtube suggestion and after a few months, unsolicited sent me $20. That's been the range, with other friends sending me a couple hundred dollars every few months (through PayPal, Patreon, CashApp, or Zelle), and others subscribing right here on Substack.
All of you are my friends.
•B•
To those of you celebrating Chanukah I wish you the most wonderful Chanukah! 🥳
Here's a very short video for you on the relevant subject.
Setting the Scene: When Alexander the Great conquered Persia, the imperial power over Israel was suddenly Grecian. And the Greeks were impressive.
'The People of The Book’ suddenly encountered a confident people and culture much admired. The confluence of Jewish and Greek Culture produced awesome upheavals and every Jew had an opinion.
In the ensuing commotion the person generally considered to have been the rightful Cohen Gadol (Main Cohen or High Priest) exiled himself to Egypt where he built a replica of the Beit HaMikdash (Home of the Holy) near Cairo. He knew the injunctions against returning to Egypt but he felt it necessary to preserve pure Judaism. I haven't yet visited the site to put my hands through the dirt, but from all the written information I found as well from all my queries of current inhabitants it seems that very little, if anything, can be said to remain from that Temple. When I have additional supporters I may seek out the matter personally and report back to you any new findings.
In the meantime, things were coming to a head in Israel (then called Yehuda or Judah) as Greek rulers and business interests annoyed the Jewish inhabitants in various ways. One thing led to another and some Greek administrators decided to put an end to Judaism by force of law - including through laws and practices whose transgression could result in immediate death.
The Hasmonean Family of Cohens (popularly known as The Maccabis) led a successful violent campaign against both the Greek Rulers and those Jews who enacted the foreign rulers policies.
There were revolts against the Greeks (and in varying measures against their culture, broadly called Hellenism) before and after the Maccabis but only the Hasmonean revolt was successful.
The pre-Maccabian revolts were easily squashed by the Greeks themselves in a rather humorous manner.
The Greeks were sustaining losses against these pious Jews with no prior knowledge of warfare until they discovered This One Call Trick!™ Pious Jews would not work on Shabbat (Saturday). Not even to lift a shield to save their lives.
You can imagine the astonishment of the Greeks at this discovery. All it took to kill these pious, but dangerous, Jews was to find them on Shabbos! They resisted not evil on that day and thus they were slaughtered to the last one.
Those who rebelled against Greek outrages and Hellenistic culture and corruption after the success of the Hasmoneans were rebelling against their Hasmonean Rulers — a mixed lot whom power appeared to have corrupted quite quickly. And as every insurgency throughout human history has found, the populace are always far more sympathetic to local bad rulers than to foreign good rulers.
And so it was that the Hasmonean Family ruled for hundreds of years despite never being fully accepted beyond the first flush of victory (the Beit HaMikdash in Heliopolis, Egypt, for example, never disbanded during this time) until the Hasmoneans suffered some court intrigue between each other, leading the way for a recently-converted Idumean high official to establish the Herodian Dynasty which was finally crushed with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70, and the Herodian Queen choosing to be the semi-official royal consort of Titus, the general-turned-emperor who actually led the destruction of Judah and Jerusalem.
There were two more last ditch attempts to route Grecian Rome (the Hellenized Roman Empire) over the next 60 years before an absolute end to Jewish hegemony and confidence was ensured by rivers of blood in the year 135. A feat that made the Jews who they were until a recently relieved Polish soldier under British command named Menachem Begin declared the Hebrew Revolt against the British occupiers of The Holy Land in 1944.
The Video: I was in one of my favorite places, The Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan in mid 2022 looking at an exhibit of Jewish Coins relating to the aforementioned events.
Museum placards tend to be routinely terrible, so, spying a confused-looking, swarthy fellow trying to decipher those related to these coins I offered to explain them to him (I am an international tour guide) and I turned on my camera so we could zoom in on the coins behind the glass.
I had a great day thereafter with this fellow too. His name is Asad and he's a computer genius from Pakistan who was on holiday in New York celebrating his having just completed the creation of the Frontier Supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It was, when we met, the most powerful supercomputer ever yet devised.
Unfortunately a computer is only as good as those who control it so, through no fault of his own, during his tenure (and against his preference) it was wasted in the service of “discovering and disseminating the Covid vaccine”.
History is quite a tapestry.
•C•
To those of you celebrating Christmas today I wish you a most merry and joyful Christmas! 🥳
Religion being what it is, there is no universally-agreed upon day for Christmas.
Unless you follow a particular Christian custom of not celebrating Christmas at all (as a Jehovah's Witness, etc), if you follow Christian customs you are likely celebrating Christmas today, on the 25th of December.
There are groups who celebrate Christmas on January 6th, others on January 19th, and yet others on whichever Sunday falls out within certain dates.
But for my purposes, Egyptian Coptic Christians, like many other Orthodox denominations celebrate Christmas on January 7th which is why locally, despite the strong Christian presence in much of Egypt, I have nobody to wish a Merry Christmas! to today, nor amy midnight mass to attend.
But thanks to you, I can enjoy the good tidings and good cheer of Christmas today by wishing you my heartfelt wishes for a very very merry, carefree, friendly, optimistic and holy celebratory day.
I published the following video last year on Christmas Day. It's called: My Jewish Jesus.
It was an instant success. Within a day it had quadrupled the previously ranked highest video view count and received more comments than any video to date.
And when I say “comments” I mean good comments. Trash comments by people who have clearly not watched the complete video never see the light of day. Happily, despite that sort of comment always arriving in bulk, there are already dozens of excellent comments on that video that I was pleased to publish.
If you haven't watched it since last Christmas, I think you'll enjoy watching it again, now that you know me a lot better. If you've never seen it, I'm sure that you will enjoy it.
It's a full hour chock full of revelations you aren't likely to have heard much about elsewhere and if the statistics are right, My Jewish Jesus has accrued thousands of view hours since it was published.
Updated or new, I await your comments and input.
•D•
A few weeks ago I uploaded what is UNDOUBTEDLY the most amazing and incredible video uploaded to date.
I kept it private, unviewable by anybody until just yesterday when I released it to my trusted supportive friends alone.
Describing or summarizing this video can not do it justice. It is what I moved to Egypt for.
And it, along with future videos like it here in Egypt, have the real potential to change EVERYTHING in the Middle East.
It is nothing more, and nothing less, than a conversation between friends.
If you are a supporter and friend I don't have to convince you to trust me. It is below the upcoming paywall fold.
If you are not yet a supporter and friend and the reason is an absolute inability to send me even $36 worth of support PLEASE KNOW that this does not mean that you can not be a full trusted member of Yadidya.
It's true that I need serious financial support to thrive but I am not a pay-to-play friend. If you have the resources to support me and don't do so then obviously we aren't friends, but if you do not have those resources you are invited to become a supporter, friend, and member at any amount that you can afford.
You can email me at moshejrudner@gmail.com or donate even a token amount through paypal (or any other option) and be as loved by me and respected on Yadidya as every other member.
So whether you have the ability and desire to help me in a major way, or only want to demonstrate that you are a friend through a smaller contribution, you are very very appreciated.
PayPal: https://paypal.me/Mafimushkeleh
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ydydy
Other options: Zelle, Venmo, CashApp, Google Pay (moshejrudner@gmail.com)
To become more substantially involved I’m inviting you to contact me immediately: moshejrudner@gmail.com
Below this line is the indescribable video with the potential to change the world for the better, yet which, so long as I lack the security resources of money and fame CAN ONLY be shared with trusted friends alone.
I'm not just saying that. AI refused to discuss the video with me due to “security and sensitivity concerns in a volatile region”.