Modern Folly, Ancient Wisdom
By ROGER COHEN
NYT
NEW YORK — I took a short break for my daughter’s bat mitzvah, Israel killed nine activists on a Gaza-bound ship in international waters, and its bungled raid prompted international uproar and Jewish soul-searching.
And so the last 10 days of my life were shaped by Middle Eastern rage, churning through 24-hour news cycles, and private joy framed in millennial Jewish tradition. I’ll try to sift through them here.
Often our outer and inner worlds diverge. We do our best to reconcile them, the daily juggle. Seldom have I felt the ugliness of the political — Yeats’s “weasels fighting in a hole” — and the consolation of the spiritual with such clarity.
Israel’s bloody interception of the Mavi Marmara and its motley crew was crass — another example of the counterproductive use of force — but nothing about it could justify the Turkish prime minister’s outrageous statement that the world now perceives “the swastika and the Star of David together.”
(Original here.)
NYT
NEW YORK — I took a short break for my daughter’s bat mitzvah, Israel killed nine activists on a Gaza-bound ship in international waters, and its bungled raid prompted international uproar and Jewish soul-searching.
And so the last 10 days of my life were shaped by Middle Eastern rage, churning through 24-hour news cycles, and private joy framed in millennial Jewish tradition. I’ll try to sift through them here.
Often our outer and inner worlds diverge. We do our best to reconcile them, the daily juggle. Seldom have I felt the ugliness of the political — Yeats’s “weasels fighting in a hole” — and the consolation of the spiritual with such clarity.
Israel’s bloody interception of the Mavi Marmara and its motley crew was crass — another example of the counterproductive use of force — but nothing about it could justify the Turkish prime minister’s outrageous statement that the world now perceives “the swastika and the Star of David together.”
(Original here.)
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