Garuda is an Indonesian national airline with a horrible safety record (though much improved in the past decade).
A friend of mine flew it in the 1990s and saw the Garuda steward steal money out of the wallet of a sleeping passenger. My friend reported the theft to Garuda who had no interest in hearing about it, not even when she reported it to the Garuda head office in Australia.
This week’s Torah portion follows the giving of the Ten Commandments.
* Growing up as a Protestant, I heard all the time from clergy about the Bible teaches this and that, and almost none of these clergy were fluent in Hebrew. If you take the Bible as your guide book, you might want to make sure your guides to the Bible are fluent in the languages of the Bible.
* God is still talking to Moses as the portion begins, “And if you buy a Hebrew slave.”
When the Torah says, “If…”, it is usually not happy with your choice. As in, “If you lust for meat.”
The Torah is not outraged by slavery. It is outraged by Jews being slaves to goyim.
A Jew can become a slave if he is a pauper, a debtor or a criminal. This strikes me as a more moral system than allowing people to take welfare or declare bankruptcy or commit crimes without repayment.
A slave can always run away and he can’t be forcefully returned to his master, so you better treat your slaves well.
“Slave” is a problematic translation because the Hebrew word “eved” also means “servant” or “bondsman.” Moshe is described as an “eved” of God. Was Moshe God’s slave?
A lot of Jews are shocked when I point out that Judaism is a system of dual morality — there’s one morality for how you treat your fellow Jew and another morality for how you treat everyone else. WASPs, on the other hand, have a universal morality. There’s one moral standard for how you treat everyone. The first verse of this week’s Torah portion outlines the differences in how you treat a Hebrew slave vs a gentile slave.
* There is no separate realm of religion in Torah. Torah covers everything. So how do Orthodox Jews deal with falling short of the Torah’s commands? They have much less guilt about it than Christians. Living in an Orthodox community, they will try to keep their sins quiet. They accept that they fall short of the mark.
If Torah covers all of life, including business dealings, then you might expect Orthodox Jews to be more honest and upright than most people. If they are not, whose fault is it? Torah’s or their’s?
Artscroll says that “justice in monetary affairs is a prerequisite to Israel’s national security.” Isaiah 1:27: “Zion will be redeemed through justice, and its captives through righteousness.”
* Ex. 21:16. You can’t kidnap people and sell them into slavery.
* Ex. 21:18. If you fight with a guy and hurt him, you have to pay his medical bills and lost wages.
* If you kill your own slave, you are put to death for murder. If you maim your slave or knock out a tooth, your slave is set free.
* Ex. 21:23. Abortion is not murder.
* I’m not sure how I think about the morality of slavery. The Torah accepts it, so why should I get haughty about it? So long as the slave is free to run away and cannot be forcibly returned to his master, then I don’t think I have a problem with it.
* A Jewish woman (as opposed to a child) can’t become a slave for reasons of sexual morality.
* Did you watch the Super Bowl?
* Exodus 23:25: God says, “I will remove illness from your midst.” Has this ever happened?
Leanne:
Just in case you don’t want to fly Allahu Air.
I would not be thrilled if my pilot were named Mohammed. Frankly, I’d rather not have a woman pilot experiencing PMS.
When I can’t sleep, I watch Mayday: Air Crash Investigations. In episode 8 of season 15, we learned about the crash of Garuda Indonesia Flight 200 because of the recklessness of its captain.
I was struck in this episode by how an Australian security officer who survived the crash was pulling people out of the burning plane while the Indonesian rescue workers stood off to the side confused and incompetent.
The safety of a country’s airlines are a good indicator of its competence. Unsurprisingly, Africa’s airlines are the worst.
The oldest airline in Indonesia (founded in 1949),[6] Garuda Indonesia had received a number of criticisms in the months surrounding the crash. According to Australian aviation experts, Garuda Indonesia had one of the worst safety records among the world’s national carriers.[7] Since 1950, Garuda Indonesia has had 13 major accidents. The most recent was in 2002, when Garuda Indonesia Flight 421 ditched in the Bengawan Solo River due to engine flameout caused by excessive hail ingestion, killing a flight attendant.[7] The worst accident was in 1997, when Garuda Indonesia Flight 152 flew into a wooded mountain on approach to Medan, killing 234 people. The managing director of the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation, Peter Harbison, stated that the major accidents in Indonesian aviation history were all caused by the combinations of airports’ and fleets’ low safety standards and the poor weather conditions in the area, including severe thunderstorms and other forms of inclement weather.[7]
Following the crash of Flight 200, the European Union banned Garuda and all Indonesian airlines from flying into the EU…
At 6:58am local time (UTC+7),[12] the captain attempted to land at Adisucipto International Airport in Yogyakarta, despite a faulty approach with excess speed and steep descent, and the resulting warnings of copilot and flight system.[13] The aircraft touched down 860m beyond the runway threshold[14] at a speed of 221kt, 87kt faster than the normal landing speed.[15] According to passengers, the aircraft shook violently before it crashed.[16] The aircraft overran the end of the runway, went through the perimeter fence, was heavily damaged when it crossed a road, and stopped in a nearby rice field. A fuel-fed fire raged, which could not be reached by airport fire-suppression vehicles. While most passengers were able to escape, a number of passengers perished inside the burning fuselage.[17]
The pilot, Captain Muhammad Marwoto Komar, initially claimed that there was a sudden downdraft immediately before the flight landed, and that the flaps on the aircraft may have malfunctioned.
Because I feel that Trump is on my side, I don’t mind his character flaws so long as they are part and parcel of a package that acts in my group’s (white Americans) best interests.
If I felt that Trump was not on my side, I would hate his character flaws and use them to demean him. But I like Trump’s agenda, so when he is nasty and economical with the truth, I don’t mind much because he’s on my side.
Of course Trump gets annoyed at the antisemitism question. Because we won’t accept the answer, so he can’t give it: That there is rising antisemitism, in part, due to our behavior. But we won’t listen to the answer. Not a chance. And he’s not going to humor us with usual blame it on the goy nonsense.
* Yeah, on some level it seems not even to have occurred to the media that if it goes quite deliberately into a relentless attack on Trump, and even announces to the entire world that that is what it’s going to do (because they “must not normalize Trump!”), then they will be helpless before an equally relentless and direct counterattack by the most visible person in the world, in which they are accused of ginning up Fake News and phony controversies and acting as if they are the opposition party.
It’s actually almost funny to see the media now taking terrible offense at the idea that their attacks are contrived, that they don’t deserve to be treated like a genuine press with standards of objectivity, that they aren’t serving the American people but only their own fanatic partisanship.
You have to believe that many in the media know in their hearts that they’ve completely forfeited the right to be regarded as an honest broker of the Truth for the American people. Anybody taking even the most cursory glance at recent front pages of the NYT sees any claim to balance or objectivity as ludicrous on its face.
I think it depends on how much he contributed to your life. We tend to miss people who have enhanced our life and we tend to not miss those who did not contribute.
If you are on a floor at work, and somebody obnoxious leaves, you don’t miss him. If somebody leaves who would clog up the frig with smelly food, you don’t miss him. If somebody leaves who helps out other people and usually maintains a cheerful demeanor, you miss that person. The more they contribute, the more you miss them.
I think this same thinking should apply to groups. Those groups that contribute the most to America would be the most missed if they left. Those groups whose contributions are outweighed by their harms are not missed. In fact, they are in danger of the majority eventually acting in their self-interest and forcefully expelling or killing them.
