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Hello! Chava in Seattle. This will be a painful but necessary course in what is, with rapid motion, a pressing issue of survival and self-determination for the Jews.
I come into this particular course somewhat sceptically. It seems to me basic historical materialism tells us why the Jews are hated, and these can all be found in perfectly plain and straightforward documentation of the Exile. I don’t really think “cosmic” explanations are needed or, really, valid. Nonetheless, I have enjoyed every course I’ve taken from KabU and, no doubt, will learn a great deal through these lessons. Thank you for providing them. Thank you for creating spaces where we all can speak together freely. Am Yisrael Chai!
Thank you so much for offering these Hebrew courses. Please keep them coming! Also — props to your tech team who responded very quickly and helpfully when I had trouble getting started. You guys are so great!
As an example, if I may. I work as a Russian and Ukrainian translator. Sometimes, this work requires me to interpret incredibly disturbing news reports, audio captures, and other direct sources from the warzone that describe rape, torture, and wholesale slaughter: no one is spared — men, women, old and young, animals — starved to death, murdered, and so forth. These events distress me terribly, of the seeming increase of inhumanity as well as witnessing the severest impulses towards evil that people are capable of. They weigh on my mind, even if I personally am not directly affected by them.
I feel this offers yet another sanguine rationalisation of “look on the bright side!”. If we view catastrophic disasters like a tsunami as having a “positive” outcome, because certain wealthy cadres got rich off of rebuilding, for whom is that positive? Does that positivity console the man who lost his family? And as for forest fires — increasingly disastrous, wiping out entire species and destroying entire cities — do we respond to such horrors with neutral indifference because, perhaps, some sort of unforeseen long term result of good might come along decades later? I feel this is the section where I find I’m having the most difficulty. Granted, the problem of evil has troubled theologians since the beginning. But the answer provided here, at least at first viewing, offers a simplistic explanation. Could you imagine consoling someone in a period of extreme grief by saying, “It’s all relative”? How is this different from atheistic systems like Buddhism that teach the world is ultimately immaterial and therefore negligible? Thank you.
