Holte's Corner

The Jewish Mourning day of Tisha B’Av is marked today. It is a fast day, and a sad one for Jewish People. It marks times seperated by hundreds and thousands of years. The destruction of the First Judean Temple by the Babylonians. The destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans. And according to various stories the day of numerous other tragedies. Such as the first outbreak of the Blood Libel in Good King Richard’s and Robin Hood’s England. The edict of expulsion in Spain. All these things seemed to occur in this month of Av. Probably because that is the height of the fighting season for most of human history. That AMIA bombing I mentioned earlier is only one of the more recent.

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http://www.jta.org/page_view_story.asp?strwebhead=AMIA+bombing+anniversary+marked&intcategoryid=2

Ten years ago, on July 18, 1994, the AMIA in Buenos aires was destroyed by a car bomb. This event, along with other similar horrendous events marked an ongoing war against Jews that began before World War II and has not yet ended. This war, aided and abetted by people who see, even efforts at self defense as acts justifying terror, reached it’s apogee for Argentine Jews with this tragedy. Their central Synagogue, the AMIA, and the Isreali Embassy were destroyed within weeks of one another by car bombs.

Unfortunately there is more to this story than simply the death of 85 people and the wounding of 200. At the time of the attack, the press reported that there was the death of ‘innocents’ — non jews, and of Jews. Since the attack, anti semites have made attacks on the investigation.

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On the surface alienation and detachment might seem to be describing the same thing. In both cases one is putting some sort of distance between “self” and “object.” But the difference is that “detachment” is a positive process of recognizing the distinctions between “self” and not-self. But “alienation” represents opposition. The alienated individual or group no longer appreciates, values, or wants to be associated with some other group that is in actual fact materially connected to him/her or them. Thus, alienation while it might function similar to detachment is in reality it’s opposite. The alienated individual is tied all the more thoroughly to the something that he is “alienated” from, and those ties are precisely the kind of negative ones that “detachment” is aiming to sever.
Let’s bring this from the abstract to the concrete by example….

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