There are some conditions that association is necessary to retain the characteristics that you admire, that those characteristics would get minced. The characteristics that you loved in one generation 1/2 from practising, require the association and the urge to justice that is both personal and beyond the individual.

The objectivist approach to justice, dissolves. It loses its personal reference. "Love thy fellow as thyself".

Beyond the characteristic as goal, there is the purpose of Judaism as goal. Which to be a priestly nation. Even with a path for others to join that obligation, to be a priestly nation, the importance of that mission continues, and the characteristics serve the mission.

In some ways I see your argument with Zionism as potentially a question of how to continue that mission, at least if you regarded it as important to pass that on, maybe to adopt some children (even at your advanced age).

We've been brought up to value "freedom from" primarily, moreso than freedom to … . I include freedom to write, to speak, to assemble in that "freedom to", but also in more meta terms, "freedom to serve, freedom to heal, freedom to associate for the purpose of our dual nations".

Assimilation is dilution, and dilution is not so great. But, the marriage of a self-inquiring Jew with an acquiring Jew would also be an assimilation, a dilution of what is great.

And, a marriage between a self-inquiring Jew and a self-inquiring Quaker will hopefully pass on self-inquiring (but no children alas).

That was that you ignored and effectively apologized for Hamas resuming shelling of Israeli civilians, and escalating that shelling to larger and cosmopolitan cities like Beersheva.

Your responses to my and even Gideon Levy's comments, were to ONLY comment on the blockade.

I speculated whether you got marching orders from Norman (you know, a friend of the blog).

Having said that, I think the question for anyone would be, which are you first – a human being, or a member of a tribe? If the answer is human being, tribal identification seems pretty irrelevant in the final analysis.

There is also a third option, beyond tribal identification or assimilation. That option being for each of us to allow our own uniqueness to unfold independently of any group or tribal identification, and to be guided by that rather than relying on outside influences for our sense of who or what we are.

My own perspective, which arises from my own spiritual philosophy, is that we are all tiny sparks of divinity and our separateness is an illusion that we have chosen to believe (for many good reasons), but ultimately we are no more separate from each other than a drop of water in the ocean is separate from the ocean, but at the same time, each of us is also a totally unique expression of that divinity.

I object to you using the word shelling when referring to Quassam rockets fired from Gaza. It is dishonest:

Shelling – the heavy fire of artillery to saturate an area rather than hit a specific target; "they laid down a barrage in front of the advancing troops"; "the shelling went on for hours without pausing"

Rockets that killed one dozen people since 2000 cannot be said to be a "shelling" of anything.

More people died in that area in road accidents since 2000 than from Quassam rockets.

This is Judeofascism 101: the rules that apply to everyone else, don't apply to Jews. (And they wonder why they're singled out).

Let's see. The Judeofascists don't want to interbreed in order to uphold Hebrew miscegenation laws; they don’t want to proselytize in order to keep non-Jewish blood out of their “religion”; they obnoxiously engage in some of the most totalitarian political movements known to man (left-liberalism/Communism in the diaspora; ethnic nationalism in Israel), which winds up getting a lot of them killed off as a blowback result of totalitarian murderousness…

So because of their own actions and ideological attitudes, there are relatively few Jews walking the earth today — which makes them go ballistic on Jews that assimilate.

C’mon. Is this the behavior of a rational, sane people?

Here in Britain, Muslims get berated for not doing enough to 'integrate', yet people seem to be fine with Jewish isolationism.