New Horizons by Max Roy

                         Making War! The thought of war gives me indigestion. For two thousand years Jews have been powerless pawns in the plans of others. Jews have served as soldiers when called upon by the leaders of the nations where they lived, their families lived. They have a record to be proud of in terms of the loyalties they showed to their adopted countries. But the issues that prompted Jews to fight were those articulated by leadership groups wherein Jews could only have been a tiny minority. That is not to say that they might have been issues that Jews fully supported. Often they did do so enthusiastically. But, ultimately the decision-making was not in Jewish hands. In our history, too often, in too many places, Jews have directly suffered, were the objects of the aggressive actions taking place. And in most cases they were almost helpless against the forces arrayed against them. They had little in the way of weapons. They had no organization. They were essentially in

                         The Wolf At The Door So, I am constantly looking over my shoulder, not like Yogi Berra, who urged us not to because THEY might be gaining on us. I am looking back over my shoulder because I am afraid THEY ARE gaining on us. I think about Nietzsche, whose writings and thoughts had such a profound effect on the ideas so many of the thinkers who have shaped our views of today’s world. Because the Nazis twisted his words to suit their own ends, he was given a bad name for so many. The Nazis did that. They provided chapter and verse on how to repeat lies often enough that so many in the crowd begin to accept the oft-repeated lies as the gospel truth. (There’s a contradiction in terms, when we know that the Gospels were full of lies.) Today we see the airwaves full of oft-repeated lies by Trump and his minions, those who knowingly abase themselves and submerse themselves in the filth he peddles, just to curry his favor. And as many as one-third of the American p

                           MYSTERIES OF GOOD AND EVIL I am ruminating on these serious and heavy topics. This is not a good time to be considering these subjects, confronted as we are at this time in 2022 with some very serious challenges on a global scale. But it is appropriate at the same time. Evil is not new in this world. Many who were purported to be   godly in human history performed acts of evil, as did men who were evil in conception. I will not attempt a litany. One may surprise you, in that I believe that a man I believed was godly, let us say, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had evil in his heart. I don’t need to mention Hitler, or Stalin, or Pol Pot, or shall I suggest, Putin. We have yet to see about the Chinese leader. I think I know about the one in Iran. I am not interested in their motivations, just their cold-blooded lack of compassion for other human beings, or humans they believed were, or believe are, sub-human. In this time of pandemic, in this context, I have t

                                 Wannabees Why can’t we be what We want to be? When we are young we may want to be just what our parents want us to be, just to please them. When we are older, we may change our minds and want to be whatever we think will aggravate them. Maybe we want to be tall, when we are short, or thin, when we are fat. We want to be musical when we are tone deaf. Be good in math, dance like a dream, have rugged good looks or wavy hair, you name it! There’s no end to the aspirations we may have when we run up against the realities of life that contradict the fate we may fervently desire. But, life, to some extent, at least, is what we can make of it. We can wear high heels or platform shoes to earn those extra inches. Some of us succeed in remaking our bodies through will power. We can devote ourselves to a rigorous education so that we can store lots of information in our heads to substitute for a lack of smarts. We wear make-up to be prettier and work-out to im

       What Is It About The Jews?       The Edge Of Extinction Talking and writing about Jews is always touchy. Jews are immediately on their guard, conditioned into sensitivity by the experiences they have had in their lives. Many are worried that something will be said or implied that will raise negative perception regarding their background. Conditions are very different from what they were when I was growing up some eighty years ago, with quotas applied to Jewish students educational options, and no-go areas for house-buying or renting, even outright bans in hiring in some areas of work. And then we had the Holocaust, aiming to eliminate Jews from existence. So now it is considered impolite to be anti-Semitic, and some words referring to Jews are banned in public. But all over the world anti-Semitism has had a resurgence and being anti-Israel is considered a populist icon. And we know, even though it is under-reported, Jews are being aggressed against every day around the wor

                                     Exercising Judgement I’m looking back. I’m examining my history. Don’t we all   do that? I think we all do that from time to time, don’t we? Maybe, us older folk do that a bit more because we see so much more behind us than we can see ahead of us. Maybe younger folk spend a lot more time looking ahead because they feel they have so much before them left to do. I think it is probably a good idea for each of us to look back because it may give us better ideas about what those future actions ought to be. It‘s all about exercising judgement. Speaking about judgement, I do think a lot about my past judgements. I think about how my judgements turned out. Like you, I made judgements, judgements about my own actions, and judgements about the actions of others. Now we’re touching on a sore point! We’ve all heard the mantra. “How dare you judge me? How can you judge me if you haven’t walked a mile in my shoes?”   Well, some of us, some of us older f

     One Jew’s View Of World History I’m not in any way biased at all, at all. Totally focused on the facts. We know about the Neanderthals and how they were replaced by Homo Sapiens. It is thought that one of the big differences between the two was the latter’s capacity to tell stories. With that comes the capacity to elaborate larger regimes, many supporting the ideas of a leader to elaborate large projects like kingdoms. Archeologists tell us about the ancient regimes, in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. In the latter we know about the Sumerian civilization leading to the Akkadian (Assyrian and Babylonian) supremacy. The Pharaohs of Egypt were to the south. When the persecuted Jews bolted from Egypt, settling ultimately on both sides of the river Jordan, they persisted as a minor ethnic entity at the pleasure of the giant empires of the region. The glue that distinguished them was their devoted monotheism in the surrounding pagan world. Ahkenaton of Egypt offered the Sun Go

                                              VITAMINS! So, we are facing a world of threats to life and limb. We are struggling with a world-wide epidemic. The media are screaming about the threat to continued human habitation on this planet, and the fate of our children and grandchildren. But most of us are taken up with the day to day battle to keep ourselves healthy. Those who want to live forever, line up at the right! My Bride is wading among a multitude of internet presentations extolling the beauties and taste delights of a million concoctions that will test our resolve to pursue a healthier diet. When presented with these offering in the real world, it takes someone with a great deal more courage than I have, bulking up my moral fibre, to raise objections to consuming what’s presented. But calories are not what it is all about in my readings of the literature we seniors are awash in. Yes, surely it’s about a balanced diet which will provide us with the wherewithal to rea

                   Travelling Through Time Have you thought about travelling through time? There have been those who have exercised their minds, dreaming of the capacity to travel to the future, returning to tell tales of what the future looked like. So many of us try to imagine what that would be like. Many of the tales told fail to anticipate how rapidly the present surpasses what we can imagine. Some of us dream of what it could be like to be able to pop into the future, find out what the winning lottery ticket could be, then pop into the present to take advantage of such foreknowledge. What gains we could make with such a capacity if we were knowledgeable about events in the stock market! So far, we have to rely on prognosticators who are wrong as often as they are right. What has been occupying my mind is how we actually can travel through time, only backward, exploring the past events of our lives. In this we can see where we have done things right, and done things wrong. A