A book I read once by Victor Frankl, a Viennese psychologist who survived Nazi concentration camps, said that people who had a purpose in their lives were much more resilient in the face of suffering, adversity and privation than those who didn’t.

As the fumes from the various campaigns leading into the Israeli election leak slowly into my field of awareness, I’m struck by the fact that none of the major parties seem to represent any sort of vision or idea of a national purpose.

I mean, if you were to ask Bibi, Ganz, Yaalon, Gabai, etc-”why are we Jews here? What are we here to do? Why do we need this country?”-they would probably mumble something about the Holocaust, never again, etc. …

I often find myself writing Node projects which use MySQL databases. I do not deal with the database directly, preferring to use an ORM. Generally, I prefer Bookshelf.js, which allows me to drop down into the Knex query builder and use its methods both for queries and for seeding and migrations as necessary. But how do you test methods which rely on an ORM?

One approach is using mocks. There is this great article by Joan Ortega on using Mock-Knex with Bookshelf. …

Had a Torah conversation about demons with a Nahmanically oriented coworker today.

He quoted, via the Arizal, an Aggadah from the Talmud about Adam having begat demons in the 130 years prior to the birth of Seth. The Aggadah says that these demons didn’t have a form, and came from Adam’s nocturnal emissions.

I quoted Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed on this subject. Maimonides says that “form” means a certain human quality of intellectual perception, not the actual physical shape of one’s body, and says that these “demons” Adam begat were wicked human beings, who misused their intelligence and judgement for evil. …

An interesting detail:

There are some indications that the Scythians came from some of the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel.

The Scythians appear in history for the first time shortly after the Assyrian Exile. The place they appear, around the Black Sea, is not very far away from Israel, and directly North. The prophets refer to the Lost Tribes as being in the North.

The Scythians’ own ethnonym was Saka/Iskuzai/Askuzai. “Zai” means “descendant of” (we see this in many Pashtun tribal names) Asku/Isku may be a reference to Isaac.

King Yoshiyahu (Josiah) was mentioned in the Book of Chronicles as having the tribes of Efraim and Menashe (who had been exiled) bring gifts to the Temple. Roughly around this time, the Scythians had overrun the Middle East and come up to the border of Egypt. Herodotus says they didn’t harm anyone in Israel while doing so. …

I do not understand Jews who complain about the Arabs.

Let’s imagine for a second that we had returned from exile to find the Land of Israel occupied by a totally different nation. A cultured, technologically advanced, progressive nation. A people who would never think of throwing rotting trash on their front lawn, routing their raw sewage down a pristine wadi, or burning tons of garbage daily to avoid the minor expense of proper disposal. People who treat their women better than livestock, who would never murder their daughters or sisters for objectionable behavior. People who would find the idea of throwing a molotov cocktail into the car of a Jewish family driving by, or of stabbing Jewish infants, or sending a suicide bomber to blow up a bus, repugnant and dishonorable rather than praiseworthy. A nation of conscientious workers, scholars, scientists, not bumbling incompetents with bought diplomas doing third world quality work. …

A relative of mine went to Uman a couple of years ago.

He came back and said that he could have found whores and drugs right here in Israel.

Well, I don’t know about all that.

But I do know that God is big and scary and far away, and the Torah is hard to keep. And what is truth, anyway? “God took truth and threw it to the ground”…

Jews want some protektziya-want to get the hookup.

If all I have to do is to go to a tzaddik’s grave on a certain day and he’ll take care of things for me, isn’t that better than looking for truth, which is scattered on the earth in shards? Isn’t it easier than talking to a God whom I can’t even conceptualize, and who fills me with awe at His greatness and my own insignificance, and hoping for something I can’t even imagine? …

https://youtu.be/3uu8VjYxqbA

Incredible documentary. Highly recommended for anyone who speaks Russian (unfortunately, I couldn’t find a copy online in English-I guess they banned it-could try the Torrents.)

A summary can be found here.

In short, this guy Nekrasov set out to make a movie about how the Russian cops stole a fund belonging to a businessman named Bill Browder in order to commit fraud to the tune of a quarter of a billion dollars, then tortured a guy named Magnitsky, the company’s lawyer to death for daring to accuse them of theft. …

Just so people know, what’s going on in South Africa is ethnic cleansing of the Afrikaner population. The people who are doing the ethnic cleansing (through a steady campaign of rape, murder, torture, robbery, etc.) do not have any historical or moral claim to the land that precedes that of their victims, since most of the Bantu arrived in South Africa around the same time as the Boers. What they do have is the adulation of the progressive “international community,” which secretly roots for them as they exterminate the Boer for their crime of being white.

Harvard, the New York Times and the State Department pressured South Africa to hand over the reigns of power to the Bantu elite, and now are silently complicit when that elite uses the Bantu underclass to exterminate the whites. They knew it was going to be the inevitable result, because all their saints like Mandela always turn out to be ogres when given power. …