A Shabbat thought for you to contemplate:
“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time.
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
We are the change that we seek.”
~ Barack Obama, “A Chorus of Millions” speech
Please note that this is an endorsement of the quote, not the candidate.
(Sourced from Daniel Lubetsky’s Peacworks Blog, with thanks.)
The New Jew 
http://www.debbieschlussel.com/archives/2008/01/obamas_nation_o.html
Obama is an example of how removed we are from reality in today’s world. It is similar to Hitlers spell over the German people. Not that he is a Hitler but he is a candidate that embodies peoples frustrations over the republican parties establishment foundation and support for the upper class. This is the danger of not knowing anything but emoting. Emotion is accumulated feelings but without thought. Sentiment is educated feeling. Emotion is dangerous in politics, because it is the loss of free will. It is abandoning oneself to the collective so generates its own reason. Its a form of hypnosis and that is what Obama is doing. Islam is also a form of hypnosis in that their culture doesnt accept any foreign thoughts. It is all inclusive and this is the danger of Obama. There are many alienated people today and they support Obama. Many young people support Ron Paul is a well known libertanian fascist.
What is obvious and why wars happen is because people forget they are people who are not perfect. They look for celebrities and others to make themselves feel better about themselves and the weaker the person the greater the fan. They forget that Obama is not them but a person with his own thoughts, which apparently include that blacks are the true chosen people and that Farrakan is man of the year.
Jews want to be like everyone else but the holocaust reminds us that nobody accepts this and we need to be who we are the chosen people who brought civilization to the world. we have to stop apologizing for living like so many Jews live to do.
Just to add. Sporting events are opportunities to abandon reason in favor of the emotion of the crowd. It is atavistic return to our primitive selves. Violence is often the result.
Lately we are facing a challenge to our religion. Hamas is reenacting the escape from Egypt in their breaching of the border fence and their threats to move towards Ashkelon and towards Jordan.
Barak Obama’s rhetoric has spiritual and gospel roots but he is an extremist and under the surface there is a similar coopting of the Jewish narrative. We are in big trouble from the left. And I am a socialist.
Sounds like Bill Clinton’s famous speech – “there’s nothing wrong with America that can’t be fixed by what’s right with America”, and his VP, Gore, went to town with a major offensive on government inefficiency and values that ended when their term did. That was a pity. I have used Gore’s work as inspiration for my own, and he website’s formed under his program are still archived and reachable (though dead ).
The Devil’s in the details, though, and if you look at Anita Diamant’s website (I followed the link on her submission there) you’ll see why she supports Obama. Because he’s got “poetry”. That he does – no argument there.
But, as a famous old lady once said in a burger commercial, “where’s the beef”? I want to know what he means by all these wonderfully crafted words, once we set aside the good feelings. The presidency is not just a 4 year chair with a book sitting behind the pretense of a “Big Idea”. Is Obama the next Bill Clinton (our last group hug president), or does his beef have too much filler and not enough substance, resembling in content bologna more than ground chuck?
The selection process for president is out in the open, with clear objectives, and usually does a good job of finding the best person for the job. I hope our faith in the process will prove warranted.
Maya, thanks for this post – is this what you promised before when you said you’d follow the elections if there was interest?
“The selection process for president is out in the open, with clear objectives, and usually does a good job of finding the best person for the job.”
“Usually” is the important word.
Oy.
As I said, or tried to say. this quote is not nor was it intended to be a commentary on Obama as a man, a political candidate, or as a phenomenon. Please feel free to comment, but I won’t be adding in one way or another.
Shai, no, my question at the time was as to whether there was any interest in my starting a politically oriented Jewish blog or Jewishly oriented political blog, but that was when Ami Eden’s Telegraph blog was just starting and it was not yet clear that its mission would manifest in the same direction.
– Link to the post to which you are referring here
– Link to Telegraph blog and JTA elections round-up— note that this post claims that the Telegraph is not a political blog, but all signs (including e-mail correspondence I’ve had with Eden about the Bronfman series) says otherwise. Although technically the JTA’s elections blog claims to source back to December, it seems that the elections blog is now being populated with posts from the Telegraph. This is opinion based on observation, not fact, and in actuality, just details to note in relation to Jewish blogging & politics.
As a rule, I try to keep party politics out of this blog as I think it is too isolating and not on topic for what we are trying to think about here.
Shavua tov l’kulam,
Maya