Main Idea

As an English teacher, one of the things I have to make sure my students can do is to understand what is the main idea of the text.

This is more than a literature, or reading comprehension skill. It's one of the life skills for survival. Too many times we get bogged down in unnecessary details and detours and forget where we're going. Last summer, a cousin and I went to see a cousin of ours in a place we weren't familiar with, so he got driving instructions from the internet. They were very detailed, from exit, exactly how many miles to turn-off to this highway and that. But in actuality, most of the instructions could have had been found on easy to follow road signs if we just looked for the main landmark before our destination.

Instead of carefully keeping track of how many miles from exit to exit, as detailed on the printed papers I was constantly shuffling in my nervous, we just had to follow those simple road signs for most of the trip. If only we had just read through everything carefully beforehand looking for the general direction to a large international airport. It was only after that landmark, when we had to use the specific instructions. If the directions had really been good, they would have said: "Follow roadsigns to --airport, then..."

Too often we get bogged down in unnecessary and wasteful things, sometimes actually contrary to our main aim. In a sense, that's what's going on here in Israel. The "leaders" are trying to pretend to be some other country, as if we were secure Switzerland or Canada. They are totally ignoring that we're a country being threatened with annihilation. Those countries would never do what we're doing.

Why is the Defense Minister giving work permits to 13,000 more Arabs, who are best Trojan Horses? At the same time everyday the Arabs launch kasaam rockets at us, landing near Ashkelon, Sderot, kibbutzim and other places in Israel.

But whom is the government restricting and attacking? Jews, of course, patriotic Israelis. Arabs are allowed to build where and what they want, but not Jews! We also are punished for expressing our feelings.

Something's very wrong in the State of Israel. We're being dragged by a government which doesn't understand to where we're supposed to be going.