7fatcow.com

Motty Borger's father speaks out.http://www.chofetzchaimusa.org/requestfromshmuelborger.mp3

hat tip to Vicki Polin

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Shmuel borger - in costume or au naturale?

For a while, i've preferred quietly bowing out to dramatic public announcements, not wanting to endlessly retire like an aging rock band. But now, a solid three years into the exciting creation and invitation of theis forum into being, i'm stepping down formally, from any inolvement with 7fatcow, unconvinced that it exists at all.

No bitterness. Dissapointment would imply expectations, and all my hopes and expectations for this blog where satisfied right away, constantly, along with all my concerns and suspicions, re: the inevitably difficult nature of True Expression and Engagement. That was understood from the beginning to be OK. Sometimes, when you talk with people, a lot of bullshit comes out as cushion for any insight and genuine heart-of-self that might be revealed, and that condition was understood from the beginning: along with the genius in our wider community of not-quite-ex/not-quite-ohs is a multitude of protective layer of ego and dogma; of noise and principle, of assumption and of flawed language, furious at the implication that it must be probed to be understood. That's OK, as much as any of the troublesome nature of our world is to be called OK, it's part of who we have been, and how we have expressed.

All that said, it's boring now, because maybe we've gone as far as any of us wanted to go. One of our founding members has moved beyond interest in the conversation here, as a funner life beckoned where the wit was expresseable and the company close enough that trying to blog in a noise filled room of cheesy links and ironically repressive vulgarity became uncompelling, especially once the Twitter and Facebook Status update was given unto us, to let the impulse sound more immediately, without need for context, or consensus. And so, the chance to say just a few things here was all he needed.

Another founding member has tried to give up so many times, and the clamor of each dramtic farewell, combined with the unelaborated links and occasional disavowels of entire identities for fear of Who May Be Listening, and Who May Be Judged along with him, often prevented the depth of his insight from being expressed. He erased all his posts, psuedonym after psudonym, and tried to convince somebody that he was somebody, and not actually somebody. And in that noise, his genius is silenced, and a certain unconfrontational decadence tried to grow around him; alas, woe unto those who think their sacrifices will provide security, money, or love.

And around that, behind that, so much genius was expressed.  Zoroastro/IslamoYid's and Atgate231's Scholarship, Class and Humor, Shitalpin's withering and ultimately humanist hot/cold sarcasm-masking-authenticity, Hashemsucksdick's marriage of post-religious concience and artistry, Mohammed's strange and shocking form of concience, Anivaho's Mercurial genius to let words permute into sublime association (even as any conceit towards divine synchronicty was despaired of) Yalhak's Majestic magnimamity and wholeness of vision/purity of impurity of perspective (along with the  lucid clarity of Yesod, Aisav, and the other maaminim he brought) and the writers we never even really identified, who bought so much class, genius, and perfect kvetchery to the conversation (who was Hiavrom anyway? he was brilliant! I hope he's OK.)

All the Neo-Nazis who stopped by to let us now what was going on, all the feminists and fetishists, all the excited Chabadskers, all the grieving relatives– so much got circulated, and maybe so little was heard, who knows? who knows. Who knows how much we ever hear from each other that we weren't ready to chap. But I feel like a lot of rare expression and relative taboo was aired here, and i'm really proud of that. As proud as one can be of something that one just let happen.

All the martyrs and all the victims; all the heroes and all the wimps. All the Faggotry and all the ugly, ugly Charedi shock-porn. All the piety and simple faith. Everything but the bullshit, and the noise, and the hiding of ourselves inside of our conceptions. It really has been a great ride, and I can only pray that some of this survivesinto the annals ofHistory, the story of how the Jewish Problem was, if only for a moment, touched upon, if not successfully adressed, from within, rather than just from without. God bless you all, to move on, and see how easy it is just to start up a crazy fucking conversation in this great, wide future of accessible interests, may we one day merit to see it to it's end.

Shana Tov, and i'll see you at the Jubilee

Yoseph Leib,

AKA Yhosephus,

AKA the guy that fucked your sister, back when she was still cute.

FEUDALISM
You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.

PURE SOCIALISM
You have two cows. The government takes them and puts them in a barn with everyone else's cows. You have to take care of all the cows. The government gives you a glass of milk.

BUREAUCRATIC SOCIALISM
Your cows are cared for by ex-chicken farmers. You have to take care of the chickens the government took from the chicken farmers. The government gives you as much milk and eggs as the regulations say you should need.

FASCISM
You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take care of them, and sells you the milk.

PURE COMMUNISM
You share two cows with your neighbors. You and your neighbors bicker about who has the most "ability" and who has the most "need". Meanwhile, no one works, no one gets any milk, and the cows drop dead of starvation.

RUSSIAN COMMUNISM
You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the government takes all the milk. You steal back as much milk as you can and sell it on the black market.

PERESTROIKA
You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the Mafia takes all the milk. You steal back as much milk as you can and sell it on the "free" market.

CAMBODIAN COMMUNISM
You have two cows. The government takes both and shoots you.

DICTATORSHIP
You have two cows. The government takes both and drafts you.

PURE DEMOCRACY
You have two cows. Your neighbors decide who gets the milk.

REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY
You have two cows. Your neighbors pick someone to tell you who gets the milk.

BUREAUCRACY
You have two cows. At first the government regulates what you can feed them and when you can milk them. Then it pays you not to milk them. Then it takes both, shoots one, milks the other and pours the milk down the drain. Then it requires you to fill out forms accounting for the missing cows.

CAPITALISM
You don't have any cows. The bank will not lend you money to buy cows, because you don't have any cows to put up as collateral.

PURE ANARCHY
You have two cows. Either you sell the milk at a fair price or your neighbors try to take the cows and kill you.

ANARCHO-CAPITALISM
You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.

SURREALISM
You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

OLYMPICS-ISM
You have two cows, one American, one Chinese. With the help of trilling violins and state-of-the-art montage photography, John Tesh narrates the moving tale of how the American cow overcame the agony of growing up in a suburb with (gasp) divorced parents, then mentions in passing that the Chinese cow was beaten every day by a tyrannical farmer and watched its parents butchered before its eyes. The American cow wins the competition, severely spraining an udder in a gritty performance, and gets a multi-million dollar contract to endorse Wheaties. The Chinese cow is led out of the arena and shot by Chinese government officials, though no one ever hears about it. McDonald's buys the meat and serves it hot and fast at its Beijing restaurant.

We gatta protest Apple generally and the i-phone specifically.

http://tr.im/tjVC

hat tip to Ben Atlas

From "The Regal Way: The Life and Times of Rabbi Israel of Ruzhin" [aka "Derech haMalchut"] by David Assaf (Stanford U.P. 2002), notes to Ch. 4, p. 361 n. 16 — paraphrasing from "Der Rebbi von Sadagora" by Arnold Hilberg, printed in "Die Gartenlaube," Leipzig 1870, no. 28, p. 473:

"Hilberg […] recounts that when visitng his followers in nearby towns, Rabbi Israel always went to the local bathhouse, and that a heretic approached him there one day and aggresively attacked Hasidism. Shocked by the man's audacity, the zaddik ordered him thrown into the boiling water, which was immediately done. The heretic was then pushed with pitchforks into the furnace until he was cremated. Rabbi Israel, who witnessed the murder, returned to Ruzhin the same day."

Up through the ashes of Babylon, Cannibus Chassidus shall rise — Jah!

So "7FATCOW" was the first to break the story of "the-trial-of-the-millennium" between Dov & Woody - pix, interviews, even T-shirt sales. http://7fatcow.com/2009/04/29/we-are-giving-away-free-woody-allen-rebbe-t-shirts/#comment-31983

But now when Dov suddenly chickened out & paid out of his ass for more than an actual me'aneys would pay for trenning Rebbetzin Soon-Yi (as if anyone would want to) — suddenly the activists for free speech & farshpreyten chasidic vibe on the L.E.S. are shah-shitl. Not a peep out of them.

There are still many questions to be answered in this anti-climactic case, most notably, WHY DID DOV PULL OUT (of the case, that is)???

Also, is he even paying the 5 mill, or is his insurance company???

& many more questions.

We all hoped for a majestic "Didan Notzach." But these fraye yidden, they have no mesiras nefesh, no emuneh in their heiliker rebbes or that "Yad hachasidim al ho'elyoynah." It's all just about fucking Mamon. (Come to think of it, not unlike some chasidishe hoyfn these days).

But I can understand Dov's dilemma somewhat: Can you imagine the Lubavitcher Rebbe suing Dovid Nachshon for putting up a picture of Him under the words "Der heiliker Moshiach"???

PS: Will anyone wearing the T-shirts also be sued by Woody?

Cleaving unto the depths of heresy is only in the manner of “to and fro” according to the mystery of “And the living creatures ran to and fro like a flash of lightning” (Ezekiel 1:14).

D’vekus be-omek ha-kefirah hu rak al derech ratzu ve-shov, be-sod “ve-ha-chayos ratzu ve-shov ke-mareh ha-bozok.”

(Reb Shmuel Zanvil of Chechnovitz - Tz’vochin Af Oksin, 231)

The emergence of criticism of death camp trips from the Religious Zionist camp - or, more accurately, from the right wing of this camp - comes as a surprise to many. Criticism until now has come almost exclusively from the left. Dovish critics have taken issue with the way such programs pair the Holocaust and Jews as victims with flag-waving Israeli nationalism.

The reasoning behind the unlikely convergence of opinion against the Poland trips between some on the left and some in the Religious Zionist camp could not be more divergent. The trips that some consider too Zionist are, for the rabbinic critics, the antithesis of Zionism.

In the run-up to Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day (April 21), Zalman Melamed, head of the Bet El yeshiva in the West Bank, published an opinion discouraging religious school students from going to Poland. He cited the Talmudic prohibition, echoed by Maimonides and other authorities in Jewish law, that those living in Israel are forbidden from leaving except to perform a religious act.

Until now, many Religious Zionists have argued that death camp visits do, in fact, have religious value and therefore merit leaving Israel. This is the view of the March of the Living's rabbi, Yochanan Fried, and of regular trip leader Yisrael Meir Lau, chairman of Israel's Yad Vashem's Holocaust Museum council, former chief rabbi of Israel and Holocaust survivor.

Fried said in an interview with the Forward that the trip can be seen as a fulfillment of the religious requirement to study history. The trip's educational content, he said, actually could be classified as "learning Torah." Fried also claimed that students on the trip fulfill the religious act of honoring the dead.

But those rabbis speaking out against death camp trips reject this logic. A year ago, Hebron and Kiryat Arba chief rabbi Dov Lior, who is regarded as the leading disciple of Religious Zionist icon Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, cited his teacher in arguing that a desire to honor the dead does not justify the trips.

The argument that the trips are valid as they involve historical study has been challenged by Aviner, who was born in Nazi-occupied France and now heads Yeshivat Ateret Yerushalayim, formerly Ateret Cohanim. "It is certainly a mitzvah to reflect on history," he wrote. "But the intent is not to study historical facts but to observe the hand of God which acts in the world. There is no mitzvah at all to see historical places."

"I do not see educational value in [the trips]," Lior wrote, arguing that people can read books, visit museums and take advantage of other resources available in Israel. He concluded, "To understand what is anti-Semitism and why they hate the Jewish nation there is no need to travel abroad."

Aviner believes that from a pedagogical viewpoint, Holocaust education should focus on content-based learning, not emotion.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1083387.html

Things are not worth arguing over. But whether or not things are worth arguing over is certainly worth arguing over.