Kaddish: General Kaddish 5768

This early week blog intends to reflect upon common sources, roots or mixers between Kahal Israel (the Community of Israel) and Christianity at a special level on the eve of the Yom Kaddish klali - General Kaddish Day on the 10^th of Tevet 5768 / December 19, 2007.

With regard to our personal lives, politics, economics, emotions, psychology, the mida, time passes and disappears with "no return". Let's take the example of death: we live with deadlines. They could be goal points. But deadlines imply a final ineluctable end, period. In Hebrew, we love to say at the present: besofo shel davar = finally; nobody would speak of a betechilato shel davar (to begin with). We can't wait for things to start, and still know that there is an end and no comeback. In 1975, at the end of the wars in Cambodia, Lao and mainly Vietnam, I met a lot of Asian refugees. Thirty years have passed and some even became Israeli citizens. A lot settled in North America and Europe. Along with the Tibetans, they allowed the world to become more Tao (the Way), Kungfu, Shiatzu or Tantric (Tibetan Buddhism). Some women and children refugees had been raped by pirates who attacked their little overcrowded boats. Women would even avoid being interviewed by men officers and were lighting candles in churches, certainly not in a pagoda (temple).