Laughing and Crying

This morning my wife called to my attention two news items. First you laugh and then you feel the sadness and THEN you ponder a little more deeply and realize that G-d truly has the last laugh, and boy does He have a sense of humor.

The first item was that the lights are being symbolically turned off for Earth Day, the ultimate celebration of the politically correct, at the park named after the undead former prime minister Ariel Sharon. It is a restored former garbage dump.

I'm letting you recover from that. Now on to the second item.

Aguda activists in New York cancelled their planned protest against the draft in Israel because of ... security considerations. The first thought after you stop laughing is Jews are safer in Eretz Yisrael because we have an army, but that is what the secular Jew thinks. The religious Zionist Jew will say that it is because there are an increasing number of Jews in Eretz Yisrael who are conscious of the fact that they are doing the mitzvah of defending their fellow Jews as a nation in that army, something you can't do anywhere else in the world. The merit of this mitzvah remains despite those on the political level who hold our soldiers back from doing the fullest of what they could do to defend us, as well as using security forces for non-defense and anti-defense purposes.

Once again credit to my dear wife both for seeing these two items and for being the inspiration for the thought after them.