Respect thy forefathers' accent

Sure, it feels good to speak Israeli Hebrew. To read Maqor Rishon, or Maqor Chayyim. To pronounce Tav without a dagesh as Tav. To go from L'hoidois to L'hodot. Maybe it feels better to daven the local Sephardi pronunciation as well.

Sure, all other languages are not holy and mundane. We are living in Geula (not Geula the part of Jerusalem).
Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the author of the modern Hebrew grammar, was so happy to be here that he, paradoxically, severely beat his family members when they slipped and spoke a word of Yiddish!

The pronunciation is not worth family violence here. There is no holiness in changing one's accent just to comply with the politically correct trends.

The straight and honest holocho menayseh is that ashkenoizim must keep their pronunciation. The saintly and revered, the Israeli R. Shlomo Zalman Auerbach said so, V'olehu Lo Ibul, Part 1, Opinion 44.

Sliced Pita, Salami and Babylon

Noah bore Japheth, or Yafeth (יפת), and Japheth bore Javan, or Yavan(יון) . The seed of Yafeth, so intimately connected to the Hebrew contemporary concept of beauty (yofi), may even be the ancient name for Beauty itself. Indeed, the offspring of Yafeth, Yavan, is Greece, which is the meaning of Yavan’s name in Hebrew. Greece is an undisputed cradle of all concepts beautiful (and discussion of which can be enjoyed at Heaventree, which have been inspired by the worship of Greek idols.

This chain of inheritance has lasted even till now – we see that even politics, with all of its incredulously variegated and combined spectra, can be fashionably beautiful. Over at Supernaut, their motto is I whore for art. This is the most loyal testament to the preservation of Japhetic faith: how reminiscent it is of the ancient Greece, when each idol had its own temple, and within it contained temple prostitutes that whored for all things beautiful.

This gracefully beautiful sword has been hanging over us through the somber pages of history. It is just too convenient not to fall back on Peres.

Switch to, or to the spiritual realms of Shem’s heritage, to the world of beauty in hidden meanings, of ( מנא מנא תקל ופרסין ) manei manei tekeil ufarsin.

There it is again, in the stubbornly Hebraic fashion of hiding, taunting, jumping forth from the long-faded history, the reminder, the root P-R-S ( פ-ר-ס ). In Hebrew it means slice, sliced, divided. Ask for לחם פרוס (lechem parus) in Israel and you will get sliced bread.

Peres is there to do the same - to continue to divide the people. The man of no straight answers, of yes and no, the man who has always wanted to install the most beautiful peace through so many nebulous and contrastingly ugly compromises, that people called him a loser. Though elected to be just a nodding figurehead, he sounds like he has won the title of the Prime Minister.

Thanks to Jewlicious, we can enjoy some of his gems :

There's nothing to be proud of in Jewish History (UNESCO Conf. 1994)

Jewish Youth should divorce themselves from our past. (UNESCO Conf. 1994)

-spoken as a true Master Assimilator.

Give me peace, and I'll forgo Israel's nuclear capabilities (4.1.96)

Bombing the Iranian Nuclear Reactor was a mistake (24.12.95)

-this is the Babel itself, where the Belshazzar was told that his kingdom has already been sliced.

There is no antisemitism in France (27.2.02)

Olmert is one of Israel's best Prime Ministers (17.3.07)

If it were up to me I would remove History from the school curriculum (11.4.07)

To dance the tango, you need to close your eyes and let the romance flow...peace is a romantic process.

I declare that the [Palestinian-Israeli] conflict is over! No finger will ever again touch a trigger.

100 years of terror are over, and now start 100 years of peace and coexistence. (13.5.95)

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I think am a lot better prophet than PRS.

Potemkin's Light Rail

The hilariousness of the light rail construction in Al-Quds is more than laughable. Someone else would say, "sad." I find it entertaining. Even to a person totally unfamiliar from civic engineering, watching the whole project would suggest that it is run either by nincompoops, or by a cohort of corrupt contractors.

Nobody can even guess why the Al-Quds Municipality totally ignored the possibility of using electric trolley buses. Instead, they went for a bare-bones light rail line running a pathetic fleet of Alstom's sleek, sexy Eurodesign short trains.

The Herzl Avenue that is already suffering from the fate of continuous excavation (for the ever-incomplete sewer, main, and cable rework), the circus on the supposed terminus of the line at the Mount Herzl can be described as a dig-pour cement-pour another layer-drill and insert rail fasteners-install rail track-uninstall-scrape the top layer of cement-wait procedure.

The continuous traffic jams are exacerbated by the construction of the Calatrava Bridge, which seems to be tinkered with by another team of contractors, that could have been the Keystone Cops moonlighting as construction company. They found a hugest crane in Israel, had it hoist the pieces of the curved bridge, paint it all white, only to cut it with blowtorches in places different from where the original pieces were welded. This whole construction show can teach an ignoramus how not to build bridges and railroads.

Maybe all of this is caused by a government bureaucrat driving around in car bought for him with the 120% new car tax, and due to his MS Outlook being full of X-rated, interoffice PowerPoint slideshows.

On top of it all, the municipality is all huffed up and proud of the pygmy rail line propelling the Al-Quds into the futuristic vision of socialist-dreamed up 22nd century.

I will wear a wide-brimmed hat while walking to Beit Hakerem, 15 minutes or so, along the route of this dog-and-pony show. Helicopter are buzzing, F-15 are roaring.