Torah Study For The Greatest Woman I've Known

Contents and Discontents

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I don't know how to speak about Rabbi Machlis. The greatest praise I can think to give him is to say that he is imperfect but that doesn't read quite right.

What I mean in my own mind is that he is such an astonishingly wonderful man and benefactor on this Earth, to me personally and to a million other people, that any objective observer who meets him would need to have known him for decades to notice any distinction between him and an angel.

Nobody expects to meet an angel so I can't promise that your first encounter with him would lead you to believe that you met one, but by your third encounter, if you were truly open hearted and open minded you would reconsider everything you knew about the limits of human goodness and only his insistence on his own humanity would keep you from worshipping him as a god on Earth.

The Torah goes out of its way to emphasize that Moses The Redeemer and Lawgiver was but a human. It's meaning isn't that he was “just another dude”, but that it takes incredible scrutiny to even see his faults. None of the humans who saw Moses' faults in the Bible were correct in their assessments. Similarly, no one but a child of Mordechai's, like myself, can say that he is imperfect. Anyone else who meets him and draws that conclusion with less than years of devotion and love would be wrong. He isn't like the rest of us.

I sought the article I wrote for The Jewish Press some 20 years ago about him and his wife but couldn't find it online (the internet is not forever), oddly I did find an old Blogger page from 2004 where I reprinted an article from the Jerusalem Post about him. Ignore the PayPal link there and any other fossil on that ancient page and just enjoy the article by Sam Orbaum (in blue) describing his own discovery of the wonderful Machlises.

Sam Orbaum was a columnist often quite unimpressed by his Orthodox Jewish fellow Jerusalemites, about whom he complained often. As you can see, the discovery of genuine greatness in one such man and wife rightly bewildered and awed him.

https://machlis.blogspot.com/2004/12/welcome_110396485677941787.html?m=1

I spoke with my friend and father figure a few days ago asking if he would do a video with me about the war. He is - entirely understandable - quite busy at the moment, what with having 14 children including a daughter with special needs, multiple teaching jobs and an open house where he cares for and feeds hundreds of people a week, but is otherwise open to such a discussion in the near future.

His amazing wife Henny passed away at a young age a few years ago and he asked if I would like to contribute my time towards honoring her memory by reading portions of the Tanach (The Jewish Bible - from Genesis to Chronicles) so that, along with others, we could complete the reading of the entire Jewish Bible this week in her honor before her yahrzeit (anniversary of her passing).

I jumped at the opportunity and asked him to give me the various sections not yet chosen by others and so it is that I'm nearly finished reading these sections which by volume account for nearly 10% of the Bible.

The subheading above is contents and discontents.

Regarding the contents I uploaded this video yesterday shortly before the onset of the Sabbath.

The discontents are what I am feeling now as I read through ספר ישעיהו (Isaiah).

For nearly two years I strove to perfect the world, keeping an open mind and an open heart to learning and changing my approach, internally and externally, as necessary.

I do not believe the German sign that hung over the entrance to Auschwitz where much of my family went up and smoke:

Arbeit Macht Frei

Pushing yourself does not free you. I believe in living in a state of eternal Sabbath, or what the Daoists call Wu Wei, and what the Bible analogizes as the beatific state of Adam newly born.

But I was called to fight and struggle and to push myself and I did so.

It's true that by human standards I succeeded. I didn't compromise my integrity and thus the small audience I gained comprise exactly the sort of people I am proud to have: Truly independent minded open-hearted people.

I had to cast a wide net to discover and attract those few people scattered in all the communities and all the lands of the earth who fit that description. They have no other demographics similarities save those.

The king of Judah who wrote Ecclesiastes said that of every thousand men, just one fit that description of an independent individual capable of reckoning truthfully. And of a thousand women, he couldn't find any.

My own experience, doing my ecclesiastical search online, has been that with 80% of my follower being men and 20% women, it took some 3,000 clicks to find just such a man and 12,000 to find such a woman.

I spoke what was right without compromise and found my people.

But I was going for a worldwide restructuring, a world where האמת והשלום אהבו - The Truth and The Complete Good will be loved - and that didn't happen.

I was to resign my activism and publicity weeks ago, on Yom Kippur of the Jubilee Year 5950 so that I could be free again.

Reading Isaiah now feels like being beaten back in to work, into struggle, into learning and adapting again and again until I achieve what no one in human history has ever yet achieved.

The God of the Bible is fine with genocide. A nation where the unfortunate suffer disgusts him and he would rather the whole nation be wiped out than that they exist.

His standard is high, and it is higher for the House of Jacob than for others.

A spartacist revolt by the Have Nots doesn't interest him. Certainly not within the House of Israel. It wouldn't be done in righteousness because even the poor kiss the ass of the powerful and just want their own selves on top rather than a society free from work, one where no man shines another man's shoes just to stay alive.

The Prophets don't preach revolution to the poor and disenfranchised. They preach to the Haves a hundred times as much as to the Have Nots whom they regard as essentially a hopeless class.

And all of their preaching to The Haves hasn't done a lick of good.

Woe unto you wicked lawmakers and unto you lawyers and their clients who draw up contracts of oppression designed to deprive the have-nots of their dignity and to steal justice from my nation's poor, turning widows and orphans into loot!

What will you do on the day of my accounting when the holocaust (שואה) comes from afar?!

To whom can you run for safety and what will your honors avail you?!

You will kneel under prisoners and fall under the dead and even after all this My Anger will not be quieted and my arm will still be outstretched against you.

Well, the Holocaust came, and the rich did indeed kneel to take a bullet in the head and to fall into the pit among the dead, and we are all still writing contracts and lobbying for laws and God is not done with us.

Were I a prophet I would say no more, but if I ever was a prophet I believe I've earned the right now to just be a man. And as a man I say, Fuck That, yes, 90% of the wealthy Jews of Europe were killed but among the poor Jews it was 99%.

I don't know anybody else who has gone to the lengths that I have gone to self abnegate on behalf of saving mankind from itself.

It's no surprise that I have failed when Moses, Amos, Isaiah, Maimonides, (Gandhi, Jesus and Socrates) - all men so much greater than myself that I am of no account next to them - failed so drastically that they have been turned into dead idols in our own day worshipped by masses of hypocrites of the lowest order.

And you, you few of understanding, have you helped me to the best of your ability? Have you even raised me out of Egypt into the light so that I might have a chance to be heard?