The mood music: you won't grind me down !

On the national stage the past few weeks have been pretty unsettling to say the least: several terrorist attacks , an   election with no clear winner , a tragic fire killing many. Today there's been a killing outside of a mosque, which will doubtless lead to more trouble. These are depressing days.

Furthermore  within the community there's been some pretty below the radar  unpleasant hysteria, venom, misquoting, out of context and just plain nasty  toward - although as a former Haredi (ultra orthodox) Jewish woman who was forced out of my family for coming out as lesbian I am not one bit surprised with this -   toward one particular and outstanding Sephardi  Rabbi  , see  some reporting here and here , although these don't show the below the line comments and  nasty social media campaign by what are basically Jewish   fundamentalist  foot soldiers commenting on various blogs to shoot down any rational  dialogues and using petitions etc on what was in effect a reaffirmation of centralist orthodox teaching.

To say that this all pretty distressing and depressing would be an understatement. It also means that as a blog which wants to talk about politics and Judaism , we as writers can get weary of having to explain our very existence to people online (Hannah takes a lot of emails , but you should note this blog is my creation and Hannah isn't responding to the more nasty ones anymore).

However we still keep buggering on as Churchill once said. But it is quite clear or rather two things are clear:

1). You cannot ever argue with fundamentalists (political or religious). You have more of a chance of being transformed into an ant and escaping from a tapped plastic bag.  It's pointless - so note 1 is to not bother.

2). Sometimes real life stinks and sometimes we need some escaping from this and forgets about them. So note 2 is to do some feel good posts.

3). This doesn't mean that one avoids elephants in rooms , but how to deal with them is a different matter. Sometimes humour and irony work better. So note 3 is to use them more.

In short :