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The Radish: December 2013
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Sunday, December 29, 2013. Normally, I force myself to take a deep breath and write my thoughts as a way of getting full value from my experiences, but this trip has been a frantic squeezing of every possibility into the mere 24 hours of a day on Earth. I haven't had time to just think. Life is good and my waistline is growing. David J. Steiner. Tuesday, December 24, 2013. Blogging as a way of staying awake. Today was a great start to our trip. Snait's husband, Yaron, runs a farm on Kibbutz Givat Bre...
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The Radish: December 2011
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Friday, December 23, 2011. Hanukkah: A Time we made for Optimism. While each of these stories warms our hearts, spinning the nice parts of our history, believing that God intervenes in history and celebrating light in its absence, there is something wildly absurd and beautiful about it. The question I’d like to raise is whether this is an inherently good thing. Is it good to delude ourselves about our historical narrative? If [we] are only for ourselves, what are we? And if not now, when? Hanukkah: A Tim...
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The Radish: November 2010
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Thursday, November 11, 2010. An important message from my 10 year old son Itamar. My name is Itamar Steiner. I am writing to you to seek help for two friends of mine who walked to Israel from Sudan where they were born. Poogy and Deng left their country to escape the war. Their dog was killed by a robber in Sudan before they came to Israel. It was too dangerous to live there. Deng’s family is pretty much the same. Their older brother’s have to work many hours as well as their parents....As their good fri...
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The Radish: Poogi
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Wednesday, January 15, 2014. Is an eleven year old boy who became a refugee in the first year of his life. His mother, Theresa, was also a refugee who left her native Unity, now part of South Sudan, when she was eight to live in Khartoum where she met her husband Galuak. Both Theresa and Galuak are from the Dinka. Tribe and are practicing Christians. Galuak is a minister in the church. David J. Steiner. Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom). There was an error in this gadget. Subscribe To The Radish.
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The Radish: May 2011
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Monday, May 30, 2011. The headlines made it nearly impossible for me to pass the opportunity to address my feelings about the school system in Israel. “Netanyahu, officials launch highly anticipated education system reform.” Wow! David J. Steiner. Saturday, May 21, 2011. Lag B’Omer 5771 and the doomsday prophecies. Lag B’Omer 5771 is a gleeful irony of history. Why? Because holiness exists outside of geography. The only thing close to being holy in the Bible is the land of Israel, and even it is made...
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The Radish: The Day After
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Saturday, November 8, 2014. The morning after Yitzhak Rabin was killed, I woke up in my bed in Tel Aviv, three blocks from the site of the assassination, looked at my infant daughter and remembered that the world is still a place of hope and then deliberated whether I wanted the newspaper to tell me that the assassin was Jewish or Arab. The Mishna goes on to give examples. “What is a machloket for the sake of heaven? Like the machloket of Korach and his congregation. (5:17)”. The assassin of my prime min...
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The Radish: May 2012
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Friday, May 25, 2012. When I first heard this story, I was appalled. As an American, I always took seriously our Declaration of Independence when it states, quite emphatically, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”. As a Jew, I don’t have to read far into the Torah to understand that, “God created man in his image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” It’s right there in Genesis one, verse twenty seven. Take a census of all the congreg...
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The Radish: January 2012
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Sunday, January 15, 2012. Some thoughts about 'Why should Jews care about the rights of Israeli Arabs? In his book about the life of Mahatma Gandhi, Louis Fisher (1950) writes,. This is a very difficult quote to read, and it needs parsing out. I am guilty of previously not doing the work necessary to reach Gandhi’s intention and have taught this as a call for Jews to go, “as sheep to slaughter.” I think I have done my students a disservice. I]t will ensure complete equality of social and political rights...
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The Radish: July 2011
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Sunday, July 31, 2011. Of Tents and Tea Parties. Living with a dual identity, American and Israeli, I naturally compare the two countries. In Israel, a tent revolution, how natural for a people who lived in sukkot as they traveled from slavery to freedom. In America, a tea revolution, also natural given the historical source of the name, but unfortunate in that it is far from the idealism that inspired the break from the British monarchy. David J. Steiner. Saturday, July 16, 2011. David J. Steiner. Wrote...