I clicked on this Slate piece purporting to be a one-stop-shop for the right guru expecting to be mildly amused at best. Imagine my surprise to find that my guru made the cut! (Scroll to the right and click on the penultimate male.)

(And in terms of his ideal devotee...well, I'm not a computer programmer.)

You all must read this long and terribly beautiful account of a Marine lieutenant colonel's journey escorting the body of a fellow Marine killed in Iraq to his hometown for the funeral.

Make sure you have many tissues handy.

(Link via Instapundit.)

We have lost another great national hero.

I was always most impressed by Tillman's aversion to publicity about his decision. But would anyone capable of doing what he did be doing so for the publicity?

A couple of conversations involving the elder Mini-Manhattan.

1) The Mini-Manhattan has been very interested in the subject of death since my grandfather passed away over the summer. We've mostly convinced her - for now - that death usually occurs when people are old and sick.

Not long after my 30th birthday, she asked about death again and we reiterated the point about death and age. She then asked how old I was.

When told the answer, she said:

"Wow, that's really old! You're going to die soon!"

2) We attended the Mini-Manhattan's nursery class' Chanuka party. Mrs. Manhattan lingered a bit but eventually told the budding Maccabee that she would have to leave, and pointed out that all the other mommies were leaving too. Mini-Manhattan asked: "Why do the mommies have to leave?"

Trying to be politically correct to all, Mrs. Manhattan responded: "Well, some mommies have to go to work. Other mommies have to go home to help take care of other children."

At which point, the conversation was joined by one of the Mini-Manhattan's friends:

"Not my mommy! She goes shopping!"

I don't get as bent out of shape by the NYT's Israel coverage as I used to (such as here and here),for a variety of reasons. One is that the recent moves of the Bush and Sharon governments indicate an acceptance of reality, notwithstanding occasional denial of the same by the NYT editors and reporters.

Another reason is that even certain pieces that seem to be written from a pro-Palestinian perspective, such as David Rieff's profile of Arafat in this week's Magazine section, often backfire and paint the Palestinians in a worse light than may be intended.

Rieff's piece features a studied refusal to provide context for the Israeli moves in imprisoning Arafat in his bunker - you will search in vain for any reference to the orgy of suicide bombings in early 2002 that prompted Operation Defensive Shield and succeeding moves against the Palestinians. (There is one reference to suicide bombings that makes it sound like something the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians, or that it is some natural force unconnected to anything the Palestinians do.) The point of that refusal is clear upon reading the piece, for what comes through - over and over again - is a refusal on the part of the Palestinains who are quoted to accept any responsibility for any part of their own fate.

Such as:

The Israeli government's decision to assassinate Sheik Yassin, the paraplegic cleric who was the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas -- and Sharon's subsequent declaration that Arafat himself should not think he is safe from a similar attack -- only heightened this sense of humiliation. The likelihood that only policy disagreements within the Israeli government, and American opposition to his assassination, were keeping him alive illustrated Palestinian powerlessness to Palestinians in a way that people on the West Bank described to me, over and over again, as unbearable. As one shopkeeper said: ''I have no authority as a father with my children. They know I cannot protect them from the Israelis. And Arafat is our Palestinian father, and the Israelis just toy with him.'' The fading Hebrew-language posters that Uri Avnery's group attached to canisters that serve as a barrier between the Mukata parking lot and Arafat's quarters -- they declare, ''There is someone to talk to'' -- seem from another geologic era.

...Hussain Sheikh, a senior Fatah leader and one of the younger generation that is intensely critical of the Palestinian Authority and in particular of Arafat, put it to me in this way: ''We Palestinians are suffering from two major problems -- Israeli occupation, and corruption. But what outsiders don't seem to understand is that the main obstacle to internal Palestinian reform is the Israeli occupation itself. Reform simply can't be the main item on the agenda while the occupation continues. The national issue has to have priority.''

...Over and over again on the West Bank, I met secular intellectuals and Fatah officials who refused to attack Hamas, even though they made it abundantly clear that the kind of Palestinian state the Islamists imagined was not one in which they would want to live. As one West Bank newspaper editor said, ''You cannot attack Hamas when Hamas is being attacked by the Israelis.''

...In fact, many Palestinians attribute precisely this kind of Machiavellian plot to the Israeli prime minister's decision to isolate Arafat. Above all, they say they believe that it is a way of making sure that American and European demands for reform within the Palestinian Authority never have a chance of being met. One senior Palestinian official, a reformist and a former Arafat loyalist, analyzed the situation in the following way: ''We want internal reforms, but no group can go into battle'' for them. To do so, he said, inevitably means criticizing Arafat. ''But the president's position is now so delicate that you can't criticize him. Arafat has been transformed into a holy icon. Anything that tarnishes his reputation, even for the sake of reform, would be thought of as playing into Israel's hands.''

Mentioning suicide bombings, other than as something that is "foreclosing Palestinian options" with no mention of who is actually conducting such bombings - i.e., giving context to why Israel has been doing what it is doing - would interfere with the chosen narrative of Palestinian helplessness. Rieff may think that his piece is showing the Palestinians in a positive light, but the emphasis on Palestinian passivity and fatalism is the best argument possible against a Palestinian state. For even if such a state were to come into being tomorrow, it would still have Israel as its great opponent and as an ever-present excuse not to implement internal reforms. (Those who persevere with such reforms, such as Palestinian Finance Minister Salam Fayyad, deserve ten times the media coverage and support given to Arafat and Hamas).

Also, the piece somehow omits mention of how Arafat, notwithstanding his imprisonment, found time to conduct the "political assassination" of the best recent hope for Palestinian reform and salvation, Abu Mazen.

With the context kept in mind, it is hard to read the piece and not be reminded of what Benny Morris has called

a perpetual Palestinian whining—that, I fear, is the apt term—to the outside world to save them from what is usually their own folly. And the whining, more often than not, has been accompanied by mendacity. Thus it was in September and October 1936, half a year into the Arab Revolt, when they secretly appealed to the monarchs of the Arab states to save them from British suppression by issuing a call to the Palestinians to "graciously" halt their rebellion. Thus it was in April and May 1948, when they pleaded for the Arab states to invade Palestine and save them from the Jews (whom they had attacked between November 1947 and March 1948). Thus it was in September 1970, when they called upon the Arab world to save them from the Hashemite regime in Jordan, which they had just assailed and tried to subvert. And thus it is today, when Arafat and his minions, having unleashed terror on Israel's cities, desperately appeal to the West and to the Arab states to save them from Israel's wrath.

Attempts to cover up Palestinian agency in their own problems only increases the likelihood that those problems will continue and worsen.

UPDATE: Great minds think alike! Andrew Silow-Carroll, currently guest-blogging at Protocols, writes at his day job:

The pro-Palestinian movement is perhaps the most patronizing political cause the world has ever known. In the minds of the pro-Palestinian Left, the residents of Gaza and the West Bank are always objects, never subjects. They are passive characters in a drama being staged by Israel and the United States and bear no responsibility, or even ability, to make decisions that will better their own lot. So when Ariel Sharon takes a stroll on the Temple Mount, it was “inevitable” that the “street” would explode. When a youth is denied a livelihood because of security closures, it is “inevitable” that he will strap a bomb to his chest.

Thanks to such inevitabilities, the pro-Palestinian movement has succeeded in nothing over the past 56 years of Israel’s existence but in infantilizing the Palestinians and adding to their misery — and the rest of the world’s.

As long as we're citing Slate pieces, check out this authoritative piece by Dave Cullen on the motivations of the Columbine killers (picked up by David Brooks in his NYT column earlier today). Most of what you thought you knew about the massacre is probably incorrect.

Lee Smith writes an important piece on Slate about Arab anti-American sentiment:

Of course, Arab displeasure with U.S. leaders hardly started with the Bush White House. As Noam Chomsky pointed out two years ago—or well before anti-Americanism reached its current heights—President Eisenhower talked about the "hatred against us [in the Arab world]" way back in 1958.

...[I]n 1956 the United States handed Nasser his greatest—indeed only—unqualified triumph at Suez.

After Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, the Israelis, along with the French and British, attacked Egypt. Nasser would have lost the war and almost certainly his life had President Eisenhower not ordered those three American allies to back down. Arranging a victory of that order for Nasser—a victory that made him the Arab world's greatest modern hero—would seem to be about as pro-Arab as you can get, and yet only two years later, Eisenhower was wondering why the Arabs hated us so much. One obvious reason is that by chasing out the two Western powers that had been the region's hate targets for over a century, the United States became a kind of surrogate for anticolonial sentiment, regardless of whether or not it had the same imperial ambitions as France and Britain. In other words, pro-Arab U.S. policies don't seem to put much of a dent in Arab anti-Americanism.

All true. Some more excerpts:

Is Arab anti-Americanism just an irrational phenomenon manufactured by presidents-for-life, kings, and military dictators who rule their countries without legitimate political authority? Yes, but there are also really bad U.S. policies in the Arab world—none of which seem to trouble most Arabs.

...Of course, it is because of Washington's ostensibly unbalanced support of Israel that the United States is genuinely loathed in the region. To be sure, the United States maintains that the state of Israel has a right to exist. At different times, as when the international community recently mourned the deaths of two Hamas leaders whose explicit goal was the destruction of Israel, it is not obvious that the rest of the world believes Israel has a right to exist. Similarly, the Arab and European outrage over President Bush's announcement that Palestinians have no "right of return" suggests that many people outside of Israel and the United States do not really believe in a two-state solution, even if they say they do. When much of the world seems not to mean what it says, U.S. policy cannot help but seem to be totally biased toward Israel.

Read the whole thing, of course.

The last excerpt is especially important: when nothing short of building crematoria in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv will establish the U.S.' bona fide "neutrality" in the Arab world regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is it possible for the U.S. to avoid seeming "biased" towards Israel?

Much, much more on the topic later.

I heard this joke at my rabbi's table over Passover:

When the Jews were in the wilderness after leaving Egypt, God created the manna to eat. It miraculously tasted like anything the person eating it could wish for [according to rabbinical tradition].

It featured many different products, all of which looked very different. But miraculously, they all tasted exactly the same.

Well, something had to inspire me to post regardless of how crazily busy things are.

Megan McArdle asks:

The word mitzvah is often translated loosely as "good deed". Some things that observant Jews consider to be mitzvahs, however, would not ordinarily be classified by gentiles as "good deeds", such as saying certain prayers over food.

My question is this: does the reverse hold true? Are their things that could be classified as "good deeds", but that would not be mitzvahs?

The answer to Megan's question is actually a relatively simple "yes," because the premise is incorrect.

"Mitzva" is better translated as "commandment," not "good deed." (Loose translations...never trust 'em.) As a theological matter, Judaism makes no claims that the list of commandments that qualify as mitzvot (613 of them) is an all-encompassing list of all possible good deeds.

To make it more complicated, not all obligations observed by observant Jews are "mitzvot." Some may not meet certain criteria that must be met in order to be classified as one of the 613 "mitzvot." (Analyses of those criteria were the subject of many great rabbinic debates and scholarship about 800 years ago, and not everyone came up with the same list. Here's one version, which I haven't checked for accuracy.) Some are a lesser level of obligation, based on rabbinic decrees rather than explicit Biblical requirement - or, more technically and commonly, rabbinic extensions of biblical obligations. (Not all obligations are created equal. Think of it as a "first-level" obligation as opposed to a "second-level" obligation.)

Megan's example of food blessings is actually a pretty good one: most of them are not Biblical-level and thus do not rise to the level of "mitzvot," but they are still obligatory.

You may be asking: "well, aren't those second-level, rabbincally based obligations..less obligatory?" Sort of, as best illustrated with respect to Sabbath prohibitions: all prohibitions can be violated in situations of life-threatening danger, but you can take liberties with the "second-level" rabbinic prohibitions when faced with lesser levels of exigency. So you really need to know what is prohibited on which level in order to know what you can permit in what circumstances. Rabbinics isn't a full-time profession for nothing.

Finally, on a meta-level, the question of whether the universe of Jewish obligation (on all levels, not just the 613 "mitzvot") encompasses all conceivable "good deeds" is...a good question. The mysterious master of the "Four Questions" conspiracy once published an article on the subject, whose conclusion was essentially "It depends on how you define your terms." But it is at least conceivable that the answer is "no."

So Megan's question has a one-word answer: "Yes."