There were two orange boys in the litter. The first one was afraid of me. The second one gave me kisses and purrs. His name is now Tigger 3.0 (which, of course, will be shortened to Tig). And geez, what a set of lungs on that boy. He has a very, very loud meow, and he used it on the way home a lot. He actually tried to bite his way out of the cat carrier. And I caught a picture of him doing just that.

He’s upstairs in my office, where I am rediscovering how much trouble a kitten can get into. And how everything—everything—is a toy. He’s yowling for me to come back. I didn’t get a chance to eat dinner until past 9 p.m. He yowled, so off I went upstairs, only to discover that an eight-week-old kitten knows the smell of something tasty when he smells it, and I wasn’t about to give him table scraps to start things off wrong, so the chicken and I came back downstairs. He stopped yowling. He may be sleeping.

Gracie is both frightened and annoyed. Can’t tell which is which. Tig 3 is calling me again, though, so here’s another picture—little bugger is already trying to use my books as a scratching post; must get my extra back from Sarah—and I’m off to spend some time with my new kitten. Who I think I’m allergic to, too. Ah, well.

He looks a lot like Tig did when he was a kitten. Wendy says she can’t guarantee that Tig 3.0 is a Maine Coon, but she thinks he is. We shall see what happens.

One of the famous prophetic events discussed is when God shows the prophet Yechezkel (Ezekiel) a valley of dry bones and asks the prophet if those bones could yet live. In the end God re-forms the bones into living men. There is some debate in the Talmud whether this incident happened or whether it was just a prophetic vision. Still it serves as a powerful metaphor that years of exile would not destroy the Jewish people.To some, the rebirth of the Jewish nation in 1948 was an example of dry bones being given new life. And according to an article, On Eve of Passover, Bread Stirs Deep Thoughts in Israel, by Ethan Bronner in the New York Times, more Israelis are taking the Jewish part of their identity more seriously.

Hametz is bread and other leavened products that many Jews do not eat for the eight days of Passover, which starts Saturday night. The Bible says that when God freed the Jews from enslavement in Egypt, they left in such a hurry that there was no time for their bread to rise, and to mark that circumstance, consuming leavened bread during the holiday is forbidden.The focus of the debate here is a ruling by a Jerusalem municipal judge overturning the convictions of four shops and restaurants for having sold pizzas and rolls during the holiday last year despite a law that many thought prohibited businesses from doing so. The judge said the law barred only the public display of hametz, not its sale inside shops.

While most debates about the painstakingly negotiated public role of religion in Israel line up along predictable lines of observant versus secular, this discussion has been different. And it speaks to a palpable anxiety over the need to define and defend the Jewish nature of the state, even as Israel’s 60th anniversary approaches next month.

In opinion articles and informal conversations, some nonreligious Israelis said that they liked the eight-day absence of hametz, and that it was a small but potent symbol of a unique collective identity.

I don’t agree with everything in the article, but Bronner gives a look at the non-religious religion that exists in Israel. This is decidedly different from the Jew-less Israeli who is the hero of Ha’aretz. Or of Shimon Peres. And it’s a (phony) formulation much beloved by Thomas Friedman. As he wrote ten years ago in “The Morning After”

On the morning after being defeated by Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel’s 1996 elections, the Labor Party leader, Shimon Peres, was asked what he thought happened. ”The Israelis lost,” said Mr. Peres. ”The Jews won.”What Mr. Peres was referring to was his notion that Israel had become divided between ”Israelis” and ”Jews.” The ”Israelis” tend to be secular, with their primary loyalty to Israel as a state and their own individual and material advancement. They see Israel’s future as being in the peace process and in greater and greater integration with the region and the world at large. The Israelis, though, come in two varieties: the dovish, liberal Israelis (49 percent) and the conservative, security-hawk Israelis (25.5 percent). The dovish Israelis pretty much liked Oslo as it was, and voted for Peres; the security-hawk Israelis wanted a better Oslo, and voted for Bibi to make it happen.

The ”Jews”(25.5 percent), by contrast, come from the traditional and Orthodox communities, the West Bank settlements and the religious-Zionist movements. They are devoted to a traditional conception of Judaism and see the Israeli state as a means to fulfill Judaism’s commandments, not as an end itself. The Jews are skeptical of integration, which they equate with assimilation, and they see Israel as fated to perpetually struggle with its non-Jewish neighbors. They were threatened by Oslo and voted for Bibi in hopes that he would kill it.

In some precincts to be Israeli without the baggage of being Jewish is celebrated. But I think that it’s relegated to a certain strata of the “enlightened.” I also think it’s damaging as Jonathan Rosenblum writes:

Nothing better captures the Palestinian game plan than a story that I have told before, related by Palestinian legislator Selah Temari. While imprisoned in an Israeli jail for security offenses, Temari came to the conclusion that Israel was far too powerful to ever destroy. He decided that when he got out of jail he would devote himself to tending his own olive tree and abandon the struggle against Israel. He even began to study Jewish history to gain insight into the perseverance of the Jewish people in the face of so much adversity.Then one night he was looking through the bars of his cell, and he saw his Jewish jailer eating a pita. “How could you be eating bread?” he asked. “Don’t you know it is Pesach?” The jailer answered him: “Do you really expect me not to eat bread, because of something that happened 3,300 years ago?”

That night, records Temari, he twisted and turned all night. By the morning, he reached the conclusion that the Palestinians could expel the Jews. A people that had lost its sense of connection to its past and to the Land could be defeated.

Fortunately, those who deny their Jewishness are a relatively small minority of Israelis. Who better to illustrate this than Dry Bones cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen. In two sharp recent cartoons, Kirschen mocked the Jerusalem court ruling. As he writes.

I am a secular Jew and I live in a non-religious suburb of Tel Aviv and I am outraged at this attempt to assault our culture and to wreck the Jewishness of the Jewish State. It is precisely the “public display” of leavened bread which I find most offensive.

It is heartening to read that it isn’t just religious Israelis who wish to live in a Jewish state. As Bronner reports and Kirschen protests, the Jewishness of Israel is important to quite a large proportion of the Israeli public, no matter what the out of touch elites wish to believe.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Going to pick up an orange male Maine Coon kitten. Eight weeks old. Back in about four hours with pictures.

Jimmy Carter has achieved nothing by talking to terrorists who have said, time and again, that they are going to destroy Israel. Snoopy details the exact quotes of the men that Carter has met with in the last few days, and I have detailed the same kinds of quotes from Khaled Meshaal, Hamas’ leader in Damascus. He is in Damascus because he knows if he comes to Gaza he will be assassinated. (Why Israel hasn’t assassinated Haniyeh and al-Zahar, I’ll never understand.)

His failure is obvious. Hamas has not agreed to stop firing rockets. They have not agreed to stop attacking Israelis. They have not agreed to release Gilad Shalit. If they had, Carter would be trumpeting their willingness to do all these things to the world. Instead, he’s doing his usual speeches: Blaming Israel for failing to give the terrorists what they want, and blaming Israel’s actions. And now he’s calling Israeli self-defense “terrorism”—just like his terrorist buddies do.

Carter said he told Hamas leaders from Gaza that they should stop rocket attacks on Israel, which have prompted deadly Israeli military assaults on the crowded Mediterranean coastal territory. Any “killings of civilians is an act of terrorism,” he said.

The utter depravity of this man knows no bounds—he is equating the accidental deaths of civilians by Israeli forces with the deliberate murder of civilians by terrorists. Because gee, there’s no distinction whatsoever between blowing yourself up in a crowded bus filled with children on their way to school, and an errant missile or tank shell. But he said what the terrorists want to hear, and is now totally holding the Palestinian line.

And notice what’s missing from these quotes:

He said that during his visit to Israel, the first stop on his trip, he saw rockets that had been fired by Hamas and “met with people who lost loved ones.”

“At the same time, if you live in Gaza, you know that for every Israeli killed in any kind of combat, between 30 to 40 Palestinians are killed because of the extreme military capability of Israel,” Carter added.

“Any kind of combat,” he says. Including, apparently, the indiscriminate firing of rockets at civilians, with the especially disgusting practice of launching them during the times terrorists know children are going to and from school—when they are most likely to kill a child.

The word “terorism” does not appear when discussing the deaths of Israelis that actually died due to terrorist acts. Carter met with residents of Sderot, who “lost loved ones” to kassam missiles fired indiscriminately at the civilian population. They “lost loved ones” to acts of terrorism. But the T-word isn’t mentioned directly in relation to Sderot. He uses the word “combat” instead to describe the deaths of Sderot residents to kassam rockets. Carter is no longer just a terrorist tool. He has actively gone over to the other side. And they are extremely grateful. Carter’s visit is useful. It legitimizes Hamas to the world, in their eyes.

“This meeting is a message to those who don’t recognize Hamas’s legitimacy as a movement,” the former Palestinian foreign minister, Mahmoud al-Zahar, was quoted as saying on the Hamas Web site.

And it set a precedent. Watch for other world leaders to insist on including Hamas in negotiations in the future.

Carter has obviously failed in his mission to get Hamas to agree to any kind of peace accord, in spite of his speech to the contrary at American University. And here is how obvious his failure is, and will be:

My hope is that there will be no more rockets coming out of Gaza and that was my primary request to Hamas leaders and I hope they will comply,” said Carter.

That request was made on Thursday. Here’s what happened today:

Three Qassam rockets fired from the southern Gaza Strip on Friday afternoon landed in open areas in the Eshkol Regional Council and in a kibbutz in southern Israel. There were no reports of injuries or damage.

Hamas ignored the request to stop the rocket fire. Hamas has no intention of doing anything other than using Carter as a badge of legitimacy. Carter has actually harmed the cause of peace in Israel—not that I believed Hamas was going to agree to peace, but Carter has delegitimized Fatah even more than they already are.

These are, probably, encounters that nobody, aside of the initiating party, wants or needs and help no one but the initiating party. Here is one:

Carter told an audience at the American University in Cairo that the meeting lasted about three hours. Senior Hamas officials Mahmoud al-Zahar and Saeed Seyam traveled from Gaza to Cairo on Wednesday for the meeting. Carter said the two Hamas officials indicated that they would accept a peace agreement with Israel if the plan were approved through “a referendum of the Palestinian community.”

Missing from the description above is the manner that these officials used to “indicate” their readiness for peace. Probably it was in some secret fraternity jests, because otherwise these two are known for their public utterances that don’t have anything to do with peace. Here’s Mr Seyam:

As well as vowing not to arrest militants for carrying out attacks against Israel, Seyam said Hamas would try to coordinate militants’ operations. “Talks with the factions in the future will focus on the mechanisms, the shape and the timing (of any attacks),” he said. “But the right to defend our people and to confront the aggression is granted and is legitimate.”

And here is his senior colleague, Mr al-Zahar:

Speaking to the Corriere Della Sera newspaper, al-Zahar said Hamas would “definitely not” be prepared for coexistence with Israel should the IDF retreat to its 1967 borders.”It can be a temporary solution, for a maximum of 5 to 10 years. But in the end Palestine must return to become Muslim, and in the long term Israel will disappear from the face of the earth.”

Oh, and speaking about Mr al-Zahar, let’s not forget this:

But we better be quiet: the mega-brain of the Nobel Prize winner is churning out more ideas…

Er… and Happy Pesach everyone.

Cross-posted on SimplyJews.