BOOKS: Power, Faith, and Fantasy by Michael Oren

Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present by Michael B. Oren

My rating: 5 of 5 stars






This was a fascinating book! Here are just a few thoughts I had about this incredible book:

1. I was appalled by the Armenian massacres. It was disturbing that the Turks were focused on genocide and their killing methods seemed to be a chilling precursor to the Jewish Holocaust. (such as Armenians packed into railroad boxcars and deported to execution sites). As an ally of Turkey during the First World War, Germany would have known of these things. They also would have witnessed the rest of the western world, while horrified by the brutality of the massacres, refusing to get involved in stopping the killings.

2. I was surprised at the huge amount of interest that Christian missionary thought had over American policies in the Middle East, especially in the State Department. It was also surprising to see how many important people were influenced more by One Thousand and One Arabian Nights than with reality when dealing with the Middle East. It's no wonder our government had so many difficulties in that region!



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My Scooter and Me

I had a lot of fun today learning how to drive my new scooter around the Albertson's parking lot. I was starting to make it up to 15 mph! LOL. We mostly worked on my cornering and braking. My husband has an awful lot of patience sometimes!

MOVIES: The Shoah

You rated this movie: 3

Average of 35,700 ratings:

3.9 stars

I've read a lot of books about the Holocaust since I was a kid. Each book seemed to contribute another small piece of horror to an already overwhelmingly horrible database of knowledge. This film, through the eyewitness accounts, has shown me some things that had really seemed inconceivable to me in the past.

There are two different interview that come to mind. The first involved some Polish farmers around either Chelmo or Treblinka (I've forgotten which one). The second involved some Polish townspeople near one of the extermination camps.

The interview with the Polish farmers was in Part 1. The part of the interview that really disturbed me (besides the horror of the killings that went on there) was the attitudes of a few of the men they interviewed. They talked about how horrible it was, etc. but their facial expressions and general attitudes were happy. They were saying the right things, but they were smiling and laughing with each other as they remembered the trains pulling up with people waiting to be killed. It doesn't seem possible that someone would be able to smile and joke around as they remembered this.


The second interview that disturbed me was one where some Polish townspeople near one of the extermination camps (maybe Chelmo?) where gathered around a survivor who had returned to the area. They were happy to see him and talked about his beautiful singing as a boy and how wonderful it was to see him. Then at the end of that part of the interview, as they are still standing around him, the interviewer asks them why they think the Holocaust happens. Then, as this survivor continues to smile uneasily, the townspeople start going on about how the Jews died in the Holocaust because they had killed Jesus. One man told a "true story" about how a group of Jews were gathered in the village square and while they were waiting for the Nazis to take them away, their rabbi announces that they deserved this because they had taken the blood of the innocent Christ on their heads. This man really believed this story was true. The people really believed the theory behind it was true. And, the whole time that they're talking about this, the survivor is standing and smiling uncomfortably in the middle of them. It is bad enough to read about this stuff and wonder how people can possibly believe some of the ridiculous, yet very dangerous, things about the Jews. It is another thing altogether to actually listen to people spouting off these things that they obviously believe deeply. And all this is after witnessing some of the most horrible things people can witness.

BOOKS: God in Our Relationships by Rabbi Dennis Ross

God in Our Relationships: Spirituality Between People from the Teachings of Martin Buber by Dennis S. Ross

My rating: 4 of 5 stars




I really enjoyed reading this book. I was totally confused by Martin Buber's I and Thou, but this book helped clear up some of the confusion. I really liked the stuff about relationships.

One of my favorite passages starts on pg. 92:
"Maintaining an I-Thou relationship is an ongoing effort, not a final destination." (That seems true for most of the Jewish ideas I've been reading about lately!) "It is a process, not a product; a risky way of living but the only honest life............The only security in I-Thou is in continually accepting the insecurity, making peace with the risk."

The idea that struck me most from reading this book was that I am much more comfortable with an I-It relationship than with an I-Thou one. Anyway, there were a lot of great ideas in this book about relationships and dealing with the Real World that just made a lot of sense. I'm going to have to give some of this stuff a lot more thought. 




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