Blog/November 2018/Nov 9th

November 9th

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This week:

• We had dinner with Sarah, in Tel Aviv. It’s always fun to spend time with her!
• Daniela and Jeremy’s twins are starting to scoot; pretty soon, no place in their house will be safe…
• The US mid-term elections made some people crazy, for real.
• It was discovered that at least some encrypted hard-drives have serious faults.
• We got a (whole) turkey for Thanksgivikkah.
• Esther found a novel way to disable her computer.

On this last: my lovely wife was having lunch, and decided her computer needed a drink. So she gave it soda-water, which seems to have disagreed with it rather severely. I disassembled it and have put it on a 12-step program to “dry out” before we see if it survived the ordeal.

In discussions with our guests from this past shabbat, we tried to ascertain why they were building rural communities in the US rather than doing mostly the same thing here in the Land. In particular, I am always interested to hear why religious Jews would eschew living in the Land when there’s a clear obligation to do so.

Their primary objection to living here seemed to be concern about the lack of a Constitution; in particular, the lack of a “2nd Amendment” right to bear arms. Among their other objections were: the high tax rates and excessive bureaucracy.

While one could argue ad-infinitum about the validity of those objections, I would argue instead that they are irrelevant. Rambam (Maimonides) codifies the Talmudic law that, “One should always live in the Land of Israel, even in a city which is mostly inhabited by Gentiles, rather than live outside the Land of Israel, even in a city which is mostly inhabited by Jews”. No mention of taxation or the right to bear arms or escaping bureaucracy. The obligation pertains even if the Land is not under Jewish control! The Land is the only location on this planet which is specifically deeded to us; everywhere else, we live on sufferance; and suffer is all too often the operative word.

Of course every person’s situation is different, and there are indeed valid reasons for not living in the Land. However, the reasons they put forth are excuses, not reasons. I pray that my fellow Jews elsewhere open their eyes and hearts, soon.

On the “8th” front, I’ve been adding more functionality. Built-in matrices, more array operators, and a new “graph” data type. Fixing bugs as they’re reported, posting on the Social Media Outlets of the Interwebs, keeping busy and off the streets.

Weather’s been fine; we had some rain, will be getting more in the next week. The temperatures have been below-average, but will plummet mid-week. “Plummet” by Middle Eastern standards, that is.

We’re back to basics this shabbat. The three of us are looking forward to:
red lentil soup, milanesa con pure, roasted veggies, chopped liver, “asado” cholent, and brownies (or something).

Until next time,
shabbat shalom!

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