Another amusing blog -- Merde in France.

Spent the last two days going to Rosh Hashanah services -- today was a treat, because we got to hear the shofar blowing (omitted yesterday because it was Shabbat). I would have liked to hear more of that call to "wake up! examine your life!" Some spiritual moments during the musaf service, especially during the Unetanneh Tokef and Kedushah. It's hard to focus and pay attention to the words -- so easy to get distracted by thinking about one's neighbors in the adjacent seats, about the rabbi, about the class I have to teach tomorrow, about the impression one makes on others....all the minutiae of life.

A sermon yesterday on new grandchildren, today on changes and newness -- interesting to hear what "traditions" people get used to and resent having changed. My synagogue a couple of years ago adopted the new Conservative prayerbook (an updated version of Sim Shalom) -- finally changing from the Silverman siddur. Of course, the Silverman itself contained some remarkable changes from the traditional liturgy, such as the elimination of mention of animal sacrifices and the prayers to reinstitute the Temple service in Jerusalem -- but we got used to those changes long ago, and now what exercises people is trying some gender-equity in the English translations....

Rosh Hashanah begins tomorrow night -- the new year of 5764 (since the creation of the world, according to the Jewish reckoning). Gershon Baskin, the director of IPCRI (Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information) sent these New Year's wishes:

To all of us and all of you we wish that this New Year coming before us is better than the one closing.
May this year be the year when we all come to our senses, when logic overcomes emotions of hatred and revenge
When we all understand that no violence is acceptable or tolerable
When we decide that we have had enough
When we all rise and stand up to say "no more!"
When we make peace a reality
When we decide to make it happen
When we no longer sit on the sidelines and just complain
When our hearts, minds, and actions rally for justice
When we can answer the question "how are you?" with a direct answer and with no reservations
That is the year we hope for.
Happy New Year and Peace to us all.

I'm listening right now to a special program on NPR for the Yamim Noraim (the Days of Awe, from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur), and they are discussing the meaning of forgiveness and of repenting of one's evil deeds.

What is repentance?

Rabbi Kalonymous Kalmish Shapira, in his Esh Kodesh, the record of his homilies from 1939-1942, which he gave to his Hasidim in the Warsaw Ghetto before his death at the hands of the Nazis, has this to say about repentance (teshuvah):

When a person repents only of a sin, whether it was committed, God forbid, in thought, in word, or in deed, he still finds himself back in the state he occupied before he committed the sin, when he was not engaged upon any great spiritual journey. So what if he is merely relieved of this particular sin? The chief principle of repentance, however, is "Return, O Israel, to God your Lord." Lest you think that contrition for your sins is all you need, the prophet cautions that the repentance must continue all the way, until you reach God, ". . . for in your sin have you stumbled." Only then will you be completely elevated, in holiness, in purity, and worship of God.

(from the English translation of J. Hershy Worch, Sacred Fire: Torah from the Years of Fury 1939-1942, edited by Deborah Miller [Jason Aronson, 2000]).

Shanah Tovah -- a good and sweet New Year.

An incredibly mealy-mouthed defense of the Washington Post's refusal to call Hamas a "terrorist organization" or to call its suicide bombings "terrorist acts." Apparently Al Qaeda can be called a terrorist group, but Hamas, which calls for the destruction of the state of Israel and tries to enact that destruction by murdering children, is not a terrorist organization. The thing that really gets to me about this article is its incredibly smug assumption of superior judgement. The Post's ombudsman says:

Making a general point, The Post guidance also says that "terrorism is real and identifiable, and we can identify it when that is appropriate." When it comes to the Middle East news report, however, that word is mostly used when describing one side's assessment of the other, and usually not in the descriptive voice of a reporter.

So apparently we are to wait for the Post to "identify" terrorism "when that is appropriate." Is only the Post (and other newspapers who refuse to call Hamas suicide bomb attacks "terrorism") authorized to decide that something is appropriately called terrorism? So reporters write or report only "descriptively"? They never write evaluatively, even in a strictly news story? Only when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict....

They attempt to justify the way they refer to Hamas in this way:

Critical readers also attempt to equate the U.S. battle against al Qaeda with the Israeli battle against Hamas. There are, however, differences. Hamas conducts terrorism but also has territorial ambitions, is a nationalist movement and conducts some social work. As far as we know, al Qaeda exists only as a terrorist network. It is composed of radicals from several Islamic countries. The Palestinian resistance is indigenous. Al Qaeda launched a devastating surprise attack on the United States. Israelis and Palestinians have been at war for a long time. Palestinians have been resisting a substantial and, to Palestinians, humiliating, Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since they were seized in the 1967 war. That resistance has now bred suicide bombers. These are terrorist acts, not to be condoned. But the contexts of the struggle against al Qaeda and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are different. News organizations should not back away from the word terrorism when it is the proper term. But as a rule, strong, descriptive, factual reporting is better than labels.

So even by their own admission, suicide bombings are terrorist acts -- then why don't they label them as such in their news reports, and call their perpetrators "terrorists" rather than "militants" or "activists"? (My idea of an activist is someone who organizes for a particular political point of view -- not a murderer!). Even the European Union is prepared at this point to call the political wing of Hamas a terrorist movement! I have often been tempted to write on this issue but have refrained from doing so because it seemed like a minor point, in the face of real news about people dying from terrorist attacks, but this editorial piece is so outrageous I feel that I must write something.

I write not as a partisan of "Greater Israel" or a supporter of the settlement enterprise, but as a supporter of a two-state solution and opponent of the separation wall/fence now being built by Israel. I do not think that Israeli soldiers humiliating people at checkpoints and cooping Palestinians up in their towns and cities is the way to make peace. I believe that it is possible to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and the sooner the better, or we will end up with the results decried by both Thomas Friedman and Avraham Burg in recent editorial comments. My political beliefs are probably best described (with some modifications) by the founding principles of Brit Tzedek v'Shalom (although I think that they are still overly mealy-mouthed in their denunciation of Palestinian terrorism). However, whatever my opinions on what the solution to the conflict should be, I think that it is essential to call things by their correct names -- and Hamas and Islamic Jihad are terrorist organizations, regardless of any salutary social work they might engage in, and suicide bombings are terrorist acts, regardless of what the Washington Post thinks they are.

Here is an absolutely impressive article by John Burns, NYTimes reporter in Iraq --"There Is Corruption in Our Business". He says,

We now know that this place was a lot more terrible than even people like me had thought. There is such a thing as absolute evil. I think people just simply didn't recognize it. They rationalized it away. I cannot tell you with what fury I listened to people tell me throughout the autumn that I must be on a kamikaze mission. They said it with a great deal of glee, over the years, that this was not a place like the others.

I did a piece on Uday Hussein and his use of the National Olympic Committee headquarters as a torture site. It's not just journalists who turned a blind eye. Juan Antonio Samaranch of the International Olympic Committee could not have been unaware that Western human rights reports for years had been reporting the National Olympic Committee building had been used as a torture center. I went through its file cabinets and got letter after letter from Juan Antonio Samaranch to Uday Saddam Hussein: "The universal spirit of sport," "My esteemed colleague." The world chose in the main to ignore this.

For some reason or another, Mr. Bush chose to make his principal case on weapons of mass destruction, which is still an open case. This war could have been justified any time on the basis of human rights, alone.

Amen. That is why I still believe we were correct to overthrow the Ba'athist regime. It is positively bracing to read someone who speaks the truth as he saw it in Iraq and who doesn't engage in foolish moral relativism.

Lots of good links at We remember September 11 on Kesher Talk.

A good article (Lore shapes the 'Tablets') on the different translations & versions of the so-called Ten Commandments (aseret ha-dibrot in Hebrew -- the "ten sayings" or the "ten utterances"). (Pointed out by Paleojudaica).

In my old neighborhood in Jerusalem, on Emek Refaim St. in the German Colony, there was a suicide bombing today--At least 6 dead in suicide attack in Jerusalem cafe. I just got home and spoke to a friend on the phone who asked me if I had heard from friends in Jerusalem yet -- which I hadn't, since this was the first I had heard of the attack. It's too late now to call anyone. A couple of years ago there was an attempt to bomb another cafe on Emek Refaim, Caffit -- an attempt that was foiled by alert customers and waiters. That was when it truly came home that my closest friends could be murdered. And then last summer Ben Blutstein, a student at the Pardes Institute and son of friends of mine from Harrisburg, PA, was killed in the bombing at the Hebrew University Frank Sinatra cafeteria. This time the security guards tried to get the suicide bomber out of the cafe, but then he blew himself up in the entrance. Will this killing ever stop? "The unmentionable odour of death/ Offends the September night."

An update, from 9/11/03 -- All seven victims of Jerusalem bombing identified. Their names are:

Dr. David Appelbaum, 50, and his daughter Nava, 20, were buried Wednesday at 10:00 in Jerusalem. Applebaum, born in Detroit, raised and educated in Cleveland, was head of the emergency department in Shaarei Zedek Hospital and founder of the Terem 24-hour emergency clinic in Jerusalem. Nava Applebaum, a volunteer with children suffering from cancer as part of her national youth service, was to be married Wednesday evening. She and her father were celebrating their last night together before the wedding.

Applebaum, well-trained in treating bombing victims after years working as a hospital emergency room director, was usually the first to report to the hospital after a bombing. There was no sign of him Tuesday night.

"It was clear to me from very early on that David Applebaum - when he didn't show up and I knew he was in Jerusalem and he hadn't called - that a terrible tragedy had occurred," said Shaarei Tzedek Hospital Director Yonatan Halevy. "Confirmation of my suspicions came shortly." A paramedic on the scene recognized Applebaum, and notified the hospital. The nurses and doctors, shocked and grieved, kept on treating the stream of casualties. "Thousands of Jerusalemites owe Dr. Applebaum their lives," said Halevy. "This is a terrible loss."

"Dad dedicated his life to saving others," Applebaum's eldest son Natan told the web site ynet. "Dear Nava should have been married today. They went out for a last night before the wedding to talk."

Alon Mizrachi, 22, Jerusalem. Alon was the guard on duty at Hillel coffe shop at the time of the attack. He attempted to bodily prevent the terrorist's entrance to the Cafe. His brother-in-law, Avi Levi, said he "had a soul of a hero."Following his army service, as a mechanic in the IAF, Alon became a guard at Hillel coffee shop, where he had worked for the past three months. "He loved his job," Levi told ynet. "Alon always had a smile on his face. Even when things were hard, he always laughed He was everybody's friend." Alon left behind him parents, three brothers and three sisters.

Shafik Karim, 27, from Beit Haninah. Karim was a waiter at Cafe Hillel, and a friend of Alon Mizrahi.

Gila Moshe, 40, Jerusalem. A mother of two, Gila was out with a friend on the night of the attack. Her worried son asked Gila to stay home, but "in a moment's decision she decided to go out and have fun," said her sister, Orna Ben Yishai. Gila's relatives spoke of a woman who "loved her family so much." "She was a devoted mother, full of life. She used to play with her children as if she were their own age," her sister said. Gila left behind a husband and two sons.

Yechiel Emil Tubol, 52, from Jerusalem. Yechiel owned a building business. "He had hands of gold," said his brother, Chaim. "He was very hardworking, and was always looking after his family." Alona Angle, an architect who worked with Yechiel, called her friend's death "terribly ironic. A man who built and worked with Arabs, to be killed like that. It's so easy to ruin, in a split second, everything this man spent a lifetime building. He was intelligent and gentle, a man of wisdom and honesty. Everybody trusted him." Yechiel left behind a wife and three children.

David Shimon Avizadris, 51, from Mevaseret Zion. David was the eldest of seven and, when his father died, took his siblings under his wing. "The entire family was dependant on him," said his brother, Eli. On Tuesday night, David and his wife, Hadas, were sitting with friends in the cafe. "He was such a friendly type," Eli said, "and in the cafe he got up to say hello to some friends. At the moment of the explosion he happened to be standing between the terrorist and his wife, and she was miraculously saved." David left behind a wife and three children.

In this article, The Hidden Roots of 9/11, Robert Wistrich lays out the anti-semitic roots of Al Qaeda and argues that we ignore it them our peril.

The 11th of September was, of course, a blow against America and its symbolic citadels of power: Wall Street and the Pentagon. But the violent anti-Americanism which the mass murder expressed was also strongly colored by antisemitism, largely suppressed at the time by the Western media and downplayed ever since. Even in Israel there is insufficient awareness - despite the suicide bombings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad - of how closely linked terror, "holy war" and genocidal antisemitism have really become.

For Mohammed Atta, the Egyptian mastermind of 9/11, it was self-evident that the Jews control the global media, international finance and the politics of the infidel West. In his eyes, they were to blame for the American crusade against Saddam Hussein, the Russian war in Chechnya, the world-wide assault on Islam, permissive morals and decadent "Westernization" in his native Egypt. The dream of Atta and many other Islamists was to create a Muslim theocracy from the Nile to the Euphrates, "liberated" from any Jewish presence. To achieve this goal, the Al-Qaida fanatics based in Hamburg struck at New York City, the "center of world Jewry" and the "Jewish-controlled" international financial system. In this ideological sense, they showed themselves to be direct heirs of Hitler and his genocidal mind-set. The failure of so many people, including Americans, Jews and Israelis, to grasp this crucial fact about the motivations for 9/11 is a stunning example of how little has been learned from history.

Anyone who has read bin Laden's diatribes against the "Jews and Crusaders," which he outlined several years before 9/11/01, knows that for him (as for Hamas and Islamic Jihad) anti-semitism is key to his ideology.

Last night when President Bush spoke, I found it troubling that he referred to Iraq as the "the central front" in the war against terrorism. Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Iraq is currently the location where terrorists of all kinds can most easily strike at American troops, UN aid workers, and ordinary Iraqis -- but it's not the source of Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups. I think we are deluding ourselves if we think that bringing peace and prosperity to Iraq will stop anti-US terrorism. It is a very worthwhile goal in its own right, and I am still very glad that we overthrew Saddam Hussein, but rebuilding Iraq is not the same thing as fighting Al Qaeda.

In response to the NYT story about the new footage about 9/11, here are some personal stories posted on the little green footballs weblog about people's memories of 9/ll -- 9/11 Stories.

I don't agree with everything they say, but little green footballs is wonderful in their insistence on remembering September 11.

Did you know that, according to Abdel Rahman al Tamimi, director of a Palestinian hydrologists group, in a Boston Globe article published today (USAID Palestinian funds frozen), "USAID is the largest aid provider for the Palestinians." USAID has recently begun to require Palestinian groups receiving US aid to sign "an agreement with the US government committing themselves not to provide resources to individuals or groups identified as terrorists by the US State Department." Most groups are refusing to sign this agreement.

"This demand has become the personification of the US policy of regarding the Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence as a form of terrorism," said Dr. Rabah Muhanna, chairman of the Union of Health Work Committees in Gaza. "USAID wants to control our NGOs and civil society after it has controlled completely the political Arab system."

In addition to his nongovernmental organization work, Muhanna is a member of the politburo of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist group devoted to the destruction of Israel. Israelis tracking the issue say the Palestinians' refusal to commit themselves to avoid working with the listed groups demonstrates that they condone suicide bombings and other deliberate killing of noncombatants as legitimate tactics in the Palestinian struggle to end Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

The antiterrorism agreement is part of a broad US government effort to choke off funds and other support for terrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. USAID grant applicants around the world are being asked to sign it.

The agreement states that as a condition for receiving a USAID grant, the recipient organization "certifies that it has not provided and will not provide material support or resources to any individual or entity" that it knows is sponsoring, planning, or engaging in terrorist activity. All the leading Palestinian groups that dispatch suicide bombers and launch attacks on civilians -- Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine -- are identified as terror organizations by the State Department, as are other Middle Eastern extremist groups such as Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Al Jihad.

This is very depressing, I must say. Even when the U.S. government is trying to do the right thing (fund Palestinian NGOs that actually help ordinary Palestinians), it runs up against the refusal by Palestinians to condemn the killing of innocent Israeli civilians.

An amazing new video of the attacks in New York on September 11 -- A Rare View of 9/11, Overlooked. A Czech immigrant videotaped both planes going into the World Trade Center towers, entirely by accident, as he was making a "video postcard" for family and friends back home.

I don’t know about any of the rest of you, but my mind is very much on the fact that September 11 is coming up next week. Next Thursday, to be exact. Do any of you remember that incredible blue sky? The blue sky to which it seemed nothing bad would happen? The clear blue sky all up and down the eastern coast of the United States?

Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
(W.H. Auden, Sept. 1, 1939)

To me, September 11 is ineluctably connected to the beginning of the academic year. This year I’m teaching a course I last taught two years ago – ancient and medieval Jewish history. I’m looking at the old computer files, trying to see if they’re useful for this year’s version of Jewish history – and I see the ones saved on September 10. That year, I taught the course on Mondays and Wednesdays. How sweet that September 10 was, when I tried clumsily to explain to the students about Jewish sectarianism in the Second Temple period.

The next morning, in my Hebrew Scriptures class (where I assure you we did not discuss the Hebrew Scriptures, although just reciting a few Psalms would probably have done some good), one of my students asked me who Osama bin Laden was. You see, she had heard the name vaguely at some time in her high school years, but she had never had to remember the name as something useful to know. I did my best, with my limited knowledge, to explain who he was, and also where Afghanistan was, and who the Taliban were. I felt it necessary to explain to my students that if we were going to invade a country, they should at least know where it was and who ruled it.

This year, since September 11 falls on a Thursday, and since I’m also teaching ancient and medieval Jewish history on Tuesdays and Thursdays this year, I wonder if I should say something to my students about what happened two years ago. I’m sure many of them will also be thinking about the date. Is there a relation between ancient and medieval Jewish history and the September 11 terrorist attacks? Or is there only a relation between modern Jewish history and the September 11 attacks?

In the course this semester, we will eventually talk about the Crusades – should I mention to the students that Osama bin Laden proclaimed a couple of years before the terrorist attacks that he was fighting against the “Jews and Crusaders”? A strange juxtaposition for anyone who knows even a bit of medieval history, since the Crusaders and the Jews assuredly did not fight on the same side then. What amazing permutations of history have occurred to allow someone to put Jews and Crusaders together as allies! In this respect, bin Laden certainly belongs to modern Jewish history and not to medieval, since the anti-semitism he espouses has its roots in the modern world, and not in the medieval Islamic world, which put both Jews and Christians into the status of dhimmi, protected peoples – a second-class status that protected them from extermination, at the very least.

Well, tonight I am weary of thinking about death. It seems sometimes as if that is all our world offers. I do not want this "war on terrorism" (however well or badly conceived) to last as long as the Cold War did. Isn't it ever possible for we humans on this earth to figure out how to struggle with each other without violence?

I keep forgetting to recommend this book, but Adele Reinhartz has written an excellent book on a Jewish response to the Gospel of John -- Befriending the Beloved Disciple: A Jewish Reading of the Gospel of John. Using the techniques of reader-response theory, she sketches out four possible Jewish responses to John -- a compliant reading, a resistant reading, a sympathetic reading, and an engaged reading. I recommend it for anyone who is interested in a more indepth grappling with the issues of Christian anti-Judaism and Jewish responses to it than the discussion arising from Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion.

In Beliefnet.com, the Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine makes some very good points about the response to critics of Mel Gibson's movie. In The Reaction to Mel Gibson's Jesus Movie, Passion, May Be Anti-Semitic Itself, she says

What I notice from the media coverage of this controversy is that once again "the Jews" are being blamed--only this time "the Jews" are a scholarly panel and "the truth" is a Hollywood script.

The media have minimized the Catholic scholars' participation and emphasized the Jews'. They've also downplayed the fact that the panel was convened by a Catholic group. Some examples:

* "The Washington Post" (July 7) speaks of criticism by "Catholic scholars at the Anti-Defamation League" (emphasis mine).

* "The Christian Science Monitor" (July 10) speaks of the "ADL and an ad hoc group of Jewish and Catholic scholars"(note the order).
* The Catholic news agency "Zenit" (30 May 2003) reports: "The ad hoc scholar's group... comprised a mix of nine Jewish and Christian academics [note again the order]. One of the signers, Amy-Jill Levine of Vanderbilt University, describes herself as 'a Yankee Jewish feminist.'" The description comes from my website, but the article uses it mockingly; I am, by the way, both the only group member described and the only member with a clearly Jewish name.

Next, the media deemed this committee untrustworthy. The Wall Street Journal (7/25) insinuated the scholarly committee members "have an agenda" and repeated Michael Medved's accusation in the July 22 USA Today that the committee went "beyond honest evaluation of the film's aesthetic or theological substance." (Mr. Medved, incidentally, also focuses on the ADL--not a joint committee convened by Catholic bishops--issuing "critical statements" about the script.)

Our scholarly panel's "agenda" was hardly sinister: We were concerned with biblically fidelity, historical accuracy, and the avoidance of anti-Semitism. While I have not seen Mr. Gibson's film, I have seen a script that has anti-Jewish components. Here are three examples that are already part of media coverage:

* Jesus' cross is manufactured in the Temple. This unbiblical and a-historical scene is analogous to asserting that the ovens of Auschwitz were constructed in the Vatican itself under the watchful eyes of Pius XII.
* The Roman governor Pilate--who, like all Roman governors of Judea, had the authority to appoint Jewish high priests--is intimidated and manipulated by a luxuriously garbed priest Caiaphas. Analogy: Those poor Nazi occupiers of mid-20th century Rome could not resist Vatican pressure to rid the city of Jews.

The problem with lumping all first-century Jewish leaders together is illustrated in Linda Chavez's August 6th CNSNews.com commentary. She said, among other things, that "Christ's death on the cross may have been ordered by Pontius Pilate at the urging of the Pharisee Caiaphas--following the judgment of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish religious court that judged Jesus guilty of blasphemy..." Any "New Testament 101" student knows that Caiaphas was not a Pharisee; he was, rather, part of the priestly aristocracy in league with Rome. That the Pharisees are the group who give rise to Rabbinic Judaism and ultimately the Judaism of today only makes her mistake worse. As for Pilate, he could not possibly have cared less about blasphemy: he executes Jesus as a political threat, the presumed "King of the Jews" as the inscription on the cross reads.

* Jews repeatedly and spontaneously torture Jesus, whereas the Romans need Satan's prompting. This is tantamount to saying that "the Jews" in Dachau tortured fellow Jews just because they felt like it, whereas the Nazis needed supernatural incitement.

I hadn't seen these details of the movie before -- they are really quite appalling. Gibson and his production are certainly being disingenuous in claiming that this movie intends to follow the historical record strictly!

More on the Mel Gibson Passion controversy. In an interview with the Jerusalem Report, The Gospels Agree - Jesus Was Killed by Rome, Eugene Fisher, "associate director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and Consultor to the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews," reiterates current Catholic teachings:

Jesus really was killed under the authority of Rome, on the cross, which is not a Jewish way of doing things. But a gospel isn’t meant to be a newspaper. Look at Genesis 1 and 2, where you have two different versions of creation. Some Christians think the purpose of Genesis is to give us a cosmology. But it’s meant, rather, to teach us that God created the universe. It’s in a sense like asking whether a joke is true or not. Who cares? The Gospels were not primarily written to provide a historical record, but to provide understanding of humanity and of salvation.

It's interesting that he is very specifically refuting here some current notions that view the Bible as a whole as a kind of "newspaper," meant to state scientific and historical truths. When I teach about the Hebrew Scriptures it is often very hard to get students away from this way of reading the Bible -- for example, I have had students who have wanted to find a scientific explanation for all the plagues. It seems to me a curiously modern way of reading the biblical texts -- trying to make them "scientific" and "historical" to match the scientism and historicism of the modern world.

Well, that time of the year has arrived -- the beginning of the fall semester. I definitely feel a pang that I will soon have very little time to do anything except prepare for classes and organize and go to Jewish Studies events....although I think my classes this fall will be good: Hebrew Scriptures (despite the name, we're reading the Tanakh in English translation), and Jews in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (from 586 B.C.E. to 1492 C.E. in 14 weeks!). I was just looking over some readings on the Cairo Geniza documents and the world they describe. I think I'll have my students read excerpts from Amitav Ghosh's wonderful book (In an Antique Land), which links his experiences doing anthropological field work in Egypt with his researches into the life of the Indian slave of Ben Yiju. One of the details about the book that particularly fascinates me is that when Ghosh starts to do research on the Geniza documents (many of which are written in medieval Judeo-Arabic -- i.e., colloquial Arabic written in Hebrew characters), he doubts very much that he'll be able to understand the documents he's interested in reading. He's skeptical that the modern spoken Arabic of Egypt that he's learned will help him much with the medieval language. He finds, much to his surprise, that much of what he learned, including various idioms, is very useful in reading the Geniza documents. Fascinating to see the persistence of the vernacular language.

More on the bombing in Jerusalem early today. This one is even more painful to read about than usual because of the number of children killed and injured.

JERUSALEM, Aug. 19 — A Palestinian suicide bomber killed at least 18 people, including children, when he detonated an explosive packed with ball bearings tonight aboard a city bus crowded with families, some of them returning from Judaism's holiest site, the Western Wall.

The blast resounded across Jerusalem as it peeled up the roof of the bus and blew out its windows, smearing human remains on a preceding tour bus and opening a deep wound in the American-backed peace effort.

More than 100 people were reported hurt, many seriously, in one of the deadliest attacks in almost three years of conflict. Men carrying blood-spattered children raced toward approaching ambulances. On a street strewn with broken glass and bloodied sheet metal, a man knelt near the shattered bus to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a toddler.

Later, in a hospital here, Yaacov Bahar, 35, held his hands in the air in front of him, as though he were still carrying an infant, as he described helping bring four children from the bus. "In my eyes, I'm still seeing the nightmare," said Mr. Bahar, who was being treated for shock. . . .

In Gaza City, the Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, told reporters, "I declare my strong condemnation of this horrible act that doesn't serve the interests of the Palestinian people." Mr. Abbas said he offered "my real sorrow" to the families of the victims.

Israeli officials noted that Israel had recently softened its own demands on the Palestinian leadership, insisting only that it supervise the people Israel considers terrorists and prevent them from committing new attacks, rather than putting them in jail. The bombing tonight appeared certain to renew Israeli and American pressure on Mr. Abbas, to take more forceful action against militant groups. Mr. Abbas said he had ordered his minister of security, Muhammad Dahlan, "to immediately investigate this attack and to take the necessary measures regarding its perpetrators."

Mr. Abbas and Mr. Dahlan have resisted taking action against militants, seeking instead to persuade them to abide by a unilateral suspension of attacks on Israelis declared on June 29. The bombing tonight occurred as Mr. Abbas was meeting in Gaza City with leaders of Islamic Jihad in an attempt to extend the cease-fire, which was to last three months. Mr. Abbas was scheduled to meet on Wednesday with leaders of Hamas, but he canceled that meeting after the bombing. . . .

To call Abbas's meeting with Islamic Jihad at the exact time of the bombing ironic is to stretch the meaning of irony.

Fireworks burst over Hebron tonight as Palestinians there celebrated the bombing. . . .

There were many children aboard the bus this evening, survivors said. Zvi Weiss, 18, a seminary student from Borough Park, Brooklyn, said he was sitting in the second row, squeezed in with three children. One of the children had been left in a vacant seat by his mother, who then pushed the baby carriage toward the back of the bus, he said. "His mother was in the back, so I think — I don't know what to think," Mr. Weiss said. He said he leaped through a window and ran as the explosion enveloped him in "smoke, noise, the smell of fire." He was being treated in Bikur Holim hospital for shrapnel wounds to his arms, which had stained his white shirtsleeves crimson. He was having trouble hearing, a common difficulty of bombing victims.

Yehiya Luria, 38, said the bus was "so full that you couldn't have put a pin in there." He said he was seated at the far back, and also escaped through a window. "There was a lot of blood on me — blood, bits of flesh, teeth, hair," he said. He was being treated for shock. "It was a miracle," he said of his survival. "I prayed at the Western Wall today."

Nearby, a 2-year-old boy lay in another hospital bed, holding a white blanket and a foil bag of snacks as he sucked on a red pacifier and silently watched the bustling ward. His aunt said he had been riding in a sedan that smashed into the back of the bus, and that he was slightly wounded. She said his name was Abraham.

Initial reports by the authorities were that five children were among the dead. The police reported removing 18 bodies from the bus. The bodies and body parts were enclosed in black or white plastic bags, which were placed in a traffic circle among three small trees. Investigators opened the bags to take photographs of the dead to identify them.

Generators hummed as emergency workers in the harsh white glare of portable lamps scoured the red-and-white bus for the remains of the dead. In the shadows, hundreds of young men in the white shirts and broad-brimmed black hats of the devoutly religious gathered on the sidewalks and rooftops, outside a police cordon, to survey the scene.

Three hours after the bombing, a spokeswoman for another hospital, Haddassah Ein-Kerem, said no one had claimed a month-old baby boy brought from the scene, raising the possibility that his parents had been killed.

"He is a very sweet 4-week-old baby boy," the spokeswoman, Yael Bosem-Levy, told Israel Radio. "He has light injuries. He has impact wounds to his stomach, and the entire time he has been here he didn't cry even once."

I find it really difficult to know how to respond to this attack. I could try to say something political, but I really don't know what I would say. To say that one condemns the terrorist murder of children seems so obvious -- but after a while, it is just mere words. Grief is the only first reaction. All I can think of are the children of my friends in Jerusalem, and how I would feel if one of them had been on that bus.

I wrote a poem a while ago that expresses some of the feelings I have each time I hear about such violence. (I know it's risky to present one's own amateur poetry, but please bear with me).

My brother’s blood calls from the ground
and earth will swallow him up.

God called to Cain: Where is Abel your brother?
Cain said to God: your earth will take him,
he is like the rebels who followed Korach;
their fate is to lie in the earth,
buried alive and not dying.
God called to Cain: You are cursed from the ground which gaped open its mouth to take the blood of your brother Abel.
Cain said to God: And your people, O God, your people? They are scattered over the face of the earth and we pursue them to their deaths. Do not speak to me of curses.
God called to Cain: The shedder of human blood, by humans his blood will be shed.
For humans are made in the image of God.
Cain said to God: We have shattered the image like so much broken glass on the city street.

I cradle my brother’s head in my arms
his blood has soaked into the ground and he lies still.
Where is your image O God on this earth?

The "hudna" seems to have conclusively fallen apart today: Several Children Among the Dead in Bus Bombing in Jerusalem.

A suicide bomber blew himself up on a bus packed with ultra-Orthodox Jews on Tuesday, killing 20 people, including at least three children, and wounding about 100 in one of the deadliest bombings in the past three years of fighting....

The militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad both claimed responsibility. Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas condemned the bombing as a "terrible act."....

The blast went off shortly after 9 p.m. Tuesday, as the crowded tandem bus -- which has two passenger sections -- drove along a main thoroughfare in Jerusalem and another bus pulled in front of it, witnesses said....

Several children also were among the wounded in Jerusalem.

"It was the No. 2 bus that came from the Western Wall," said a motorist, Jacob Bitnovsky. "I heard a huge blast and when I turned around I saw parts of the bus flying everywhere. I got out of the car and ran. There was a lot of smoke and running, saw a child on the ground gasping for air."

The bus had started out at the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest shrine, and was headed to an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood.

One report said among the passengers were members of a family who had celebrated a Bar Mitzvah, the Jewish rite of passage into adulthood for boys, at the Western Wall.

A second bus passing nearby when the explosion went off was also badly damaged, with windows blown out. Rescuers had to use blow torches to get out some of the wounded.

"What is clear is that it was a very big bomb," said Jerusalem fire chief Amnon Amir.

Shocked survivors, including several crying children with blood-smeared faces, were led away from the scene. A paramedic cradled a little girl in his arms, and two others led away an elderly woman.

So much for the claim that Hamas or Islamic Jihad (both of which claimed responsibility for the bombing) are only interested in establishing a Palestinian state in pre-1967 West Bank and Gaza Strip. And so much for the claim that they only fight against the "Zionists" -- most of the dead were probably ultra-Orthodox Jews, many of whom are opposed to political Zionism.