Miriam Herschlag, Don Futterman and Noah Efron discuss two topics of incomparable importance and end with an anecdote about something in Israel that made them smile this week.
Murder on the Election Express
Who’s to blame for the loss of the center left?
Not That Kind of a Jewish State
Are the very religious parties that will make up half of Netanyahu’s coalition hoping to turn Israel into a Halakhic State?
Keep Your Politics to Your… Students?
For our most unreasonably generous Patreon supporters, in our extra-special, special extra discussion: A college president we’ve got affection for gets himself into hot water by trashing the newly elected government in a letter he sent to all the students at his school. Should academics stay silent when they think the country is going in a dangerous direction?
All that and Tula Ben Ari!
Songs
- Panas haRechov
- Brilho (with Boca de Tambor)
- Ahavat Hadassah
I love The Promised Podcast!
I was heartened that you read the name of each of the victims of the attack on the Savoy hotel.
I was dismayed, that you also read names of the evil murderers. I take seriously the notion of yimach sh’mam, that the names of evil people should be obliterated, or at least on mentioned.
Aside from your having touched that single, raw nerve, let me express again my great appreciation for the show,
Charles (if I may),
I was so glad and grateful for your note. I went back and forth and back and forth about whether or not to name the murderers in the Savoy story. (In fact, it took me a long time to find their names, which were mostly not reported in the Hebrew press after the attack.) Your point is definitely a good one, some people do things that justifies blotting their names out of history, and it *anyone* deserves that, surely people who did not hesitate to murder innocent others, including a kid, deserve that.
What made me decide to do what I did was, well, Kochava Levi herself, who (in the trial of the one surviving terrorist 10 months after the attack) made it clear that she viewed the gang as horrid killers, still, in her diaries and poetry, made it clear that she saw in them some humanity.
I have a fetish about names, maybe because of the old Zelda poem about the Holocaust, and I sometimes wonder if we all wouldn’t be better off if we heard the names of everyone who dies in this conflict, including the ones who are themselves authors of the conflict and cause the suffering and death of others.
What I am so grateful to you for, is reminding me that maybe that is too fancy a thought, and maybe I am wrong about that. Maybe we need vigilantly to distinguish between the innocent and the guilty, honoring the innocent and reviling the guilty.
Which is not so say that I am sure you are right, and I hope you won’t think me a hypocrite if sometime in the future I do the same sort of thing all over again. I am conflicted. And your message helped to remind me again that there is something serious at stake.
Gratefully,
Noah (if I may)