Reb Sones: Baseless Hatred......and......Idols of Excess

 

From Baseless Hatred to a World at War: Reversing Tisha B’Av

The uncanny parallels between the fall of Jerusalem and the spark that ignited the Great War

It began, as world-changing events sometimes do, with a single act of violence on an obscure side street. On June 28, 1914, in the provincial city of Sarajevo, a young Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip fired two shots, killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The act was local, fueled by a bitter ethnic grudge against an imperial power. Yet, it was the spark that lit the fuse of a global powder keg. Within weeks, the intricate web of European alliances had pulled the continent’s great powers into a catastrophic war that would redraw maps, topple empires, and claim more than 16 million lives.

Historians have meticulously documented the political and military blunders of the July Crisis that followed—the rigid ultimatums, the failed diplomacy, the inexorable march of mobilization schedules. But to view the outbreak of World War I solely through a modern political lens is to miss a deeper pattern that reveals an historical pattern.

For those who track the rhythms of history through a different calendar, the date of the assassination was not just another summer day. It was the Ninth of Av, or Tisha B’Av, the most solemn day of mourning in the Jewish calendar, the anniversary of calamities that have befallen the Jewish people. Among them: the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Roman Empire in 70 C.E.

That the first shot of the “war to end all wars” was fired on this specific day of remembrance is a “coincidence” that Jewish thinkers have long found significant. It suggests an echo, an historical resonance. Jewish sources that describe the fall of Jerusalem reveal a chain of events that bears an uncanny resemblance to the spiral of 1914. It is a cautionary tale, preserved for two millennia, that seems to have played out again, on a global scale, in the capitals of modern Europe.

Continue reading on Jewish Home News by Mordechai Sones

Idols of Excess: How Cheap Obscenity and Hyperbole Are Breeding a Violent, Soulless Society

Why 'literally' has literally become a four-letter-word in the new age of absurdity

Something is broken in the way we talk, think, and feel. It is a subtle fracture, a deep cultural decay that manifests in a series of seemingly unrelated, bizarre phenomena. A satirical headline is flagged as “misinformation” because it sounds too plausible. The President of the United States’ casual profanity barely raises an eyebrow.

This is not just sloppy speech; it reflects a poverty of expression, where speakers compensate for limited vocabulary or nuance by co-opting a term of precision for exaggeration. Dictionaries have actually adapted (surrendered?) to this shift: Merriam-Webster, for instance, includes a secondary definition acknowledging “literally” as an intensifier equivalent to “virtually” or “figuratively,” based on widespread informal usage.

These are not isolated quirks; they are symptoms of a semantic apocalypse, a moment where the symbols and language that structure our reality have become unmoored from anything real.

Continue reading on Jewish Home News by Mordechai Sones