Friday October 20

{Preface: I have decided not to comment on this article, other than to state that during the Trump years, I was very happy that my dual citizenship status allowed me to represent myself as a Canadian, because I would never want to be represented by such a despicable idiot. But today I am proud to be an American, for the exact same reason.}

I’m happy to report that my friend in Chicago received numerous messages of support in response to his posting (see yesterday’s update), and his hope is that by raising awareness of the lies and double-standards applied to Jews and to the state of Israel, more people will be willing to stand up and call out colleagues and the media for repeating and enforcing them. Obviously with the work I’m doing here, my hope is the same. So I wanted to offer you a good news example of what can happen when the media is called out for “stating it” to “make it so” -- though I admit, the deeper issue out of which it arose (the bulk of today's post) is not a feel-good story.

In January 2013, as happens occasionally, Jerusalem was blanketed in a thick layer of snow. Schools were closed, roads were blocked, and Israeli and Palestinian children alike were photographed playing in the heaps of white stuff, making angels and snowpeople all over the landscape. But in this particular snowfall, someone also built a replica M-16 rocket out of snow on top of the Temple Mount. A cold war, indeed.

It comes as no surprise that out of all of the contested territories in Israel, the Temple Mount leads the pack. Home to the ancient Jewish Temples as well as the Muslim Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque, religion, politics, and nationalist identities rarely come together so monumentally in one single spot. This site, one would think, unequivocally belongs to all concerned in the region. Figuring out who should get control or authority over it, should be a difficult decision.

On October 8, 2015, the New York Times foreign editor Rick Gladstone published an article titled “Historical Certainty Proves Elusive at Jerusalem’s Holiest Place.” I’ll reproduce the first two paragraphs here:

Within Jerusalem’s holiest site, known as the Temple Mount to Jews and the Noble Sanctuary to Muslims, lies a historical question about what may be the world’s most contested piece of real estate.

The question, which many books and scholarly treatises have never definitively answered, is whether the 37-acre site, home to Islam’s sacred Dome of the Rock shrine and Al Aqsa Mosque, was also the precise location of two ancient Jewish temples, one built on the remains of the other, and both long since gone.

To anyone with even the most rudimentary grasp of history, of Judaism, or of world affairs, asking the “question” of whether the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is “the precise location of two ancient Jewish temples” is like asking whether bagels have holes. Where was this attempted snowjob coming from? How did such a snowball get launched at the Jewish people, seemingly out of nowhere? Was there really any question as to whether Jewish temples stood on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem?

The NYT received many incredulous responses, including a fairly restrained one from a colleague of mine which was printed on their Op-Ed page:

As a result, the article was reworded so that the question was “where,” rather than “whether,” and a short editor’s note, published October 13, clarified that “the headline and a passage in the initial version of the article implied incorrectly that questions among scholars about locations of the temples potentially affected Jewish claims to the site and Israel’s broader assertion of sovereignty over Jerusalem. In fact, as the article was later corrected to clarify, the scholarly debate is a narrower one, focused on the precise location on the Temple Mount where the long destroyed temples once stood. All versions of the article should have made clear that the archaeological and historical uncertainties about the site – unlike assertions by some Palestinians that the temples never existed – do not directly challenge Jewish claims to the Temple Mount.”

Perhaps it was an innocent mistake – these things do happen. But I'm not convinced that the NYT would have run an entire article in which an author indulged the question of where precisely the Jewish Temples once stood; call me skeptical, but I have a hard time believing that the NYT would consider such a question newsworthy. Ultimately, it's the reference at the end of the editor’s note that fuels my natural cynicism, and which points to the importance and newsworthiness of the original question raised in the article before the backlash. The importance of this question was highlighted the following year by UNESCO’s resolution that, while acknowledging the "importance of the Old City of Jerusalem and its walls for the three monotheistic religions," referred to the Temple Mount compound in Jerusalem's Old City only by its Muslim name, Al-Haram al-Sharif -- "the Noble Sanctuary" in English, a name given to the compound in the 13th century under the Mamluks which continued through the subsequent Ottoman period (until 1917). Welcoming the passage of this resolution that omitted any reference to the Jewish Temples and the centrality of this site to Jews for 3000 years, Saeb Erekat, the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, stated why he thought this was a win: “Through an orchestrated campaign, Israel has been using archeological claims and distortion of facts as a way to legitimise the annexation of occupied east Jerusalem.”

What did he mean by this? Well it seems that when we were all looking the other way, there were a variety of little snowflakes falling in different places, developing into squalls that somehow fell under the radar. It started with the omission of Jewish claims to the Temple Mount by Muslim propaganda post-1948, and by the year 2016, the repetition among Palestinian supporters that there never was a Jewish Temple on the site had so completely replaced any historical understanding, that as far as the PLO was concerned, any assertion to the contrary was a “distortion of facts.”

Once again, we see how stating it makes it so. This campaign of "Temple denial," as it has come to be called (in conscious parallel to "Holocaust denial"), began in 1948 when the state of Israel was declared. But such denial was easy to dismiss as just more anti-Israel propaganda -- obviously everyone knows that the Jewish Temples stood there. Why bother refuting a claim that is so preposterous? 

Seventy-five years on, though, there are entire generations of Muslim Palestinians, as well as many Muslims outside of Israel & the territories, who were raised to believe that any Jewish claim to the Haram constituted more Jewish lies and propaganda. (This video is pretty enlightening in that regard - the whole thing is interesting but the segment I'm referencing here starts at about 3:30.)

So what is the actual history of this site?

Without the ability to excavate the Temple Mount, it has been difficult for historians and archaeologists to ascertain whether or not Solomon built a Temple there (note: there is actually no archaeological evidence for the existence of Solomon himself; and we've already seen the tenuous evidence for the existence of David. All we have to go on, with respect to the historicity of these kings, is the biblical account, which is fraught with problems as a source for history, especially for this early period; happy to give references to anyone who is interested in more info here). What has been established is that the hill itself was inhabited long before the Israelites would have arrived, and as far as the Bible is concerned, the First Temple was part of a much larger royal complex including a royal palace and a variety of other buildings. Significantly, the Bible's descriptions of these buildings, and especially of the Temple itself, match the site plans of other temples that have been discovered in ancient Israel during the same time period as the Bible situates Solomon's temple, as well as site plans for contemporary temples that have been discovered in the Phoenician world. This both increases the likelihood that the descriptions in the Bible are accurate reflections of buildings on the Temple Mount (because building styles, especially for temples in the region, changed over time), and also makes it important that the Bible describes hiring Phoenician architects and masons to build the palace and Temple in the 10th century. Such parallels between the biblical descriptions and what we know from other sites and ancient documents comprise the only kind of evidence we can have for the Temple's existence, which is circumstantial, but strong.

That's why Magness can state with certainty that, although we can't find remains of the actual First Temple in a proper archaeological excavation today, all serious scholars agree that there was one there; if not as early as the 10th century, then certainly by the 8th century BCE (I won't get into why, as I can see your eyes glazing over with all this history already, but if you're interested I can send references!). Whenever it was built, the First Temple was destroyed in 586 BCE by King Nebuchadnezzar II of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, and the bulk of the Judeans living in and around Jerusalem were exiled.

When Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered the Babylonians in 538 BCE, the exiled Judeans were granted the right to return to their homeland and rebuild their temple. The Second Temple was completed in 516 BCE, on the original site of the First Temple. This Second Temple was expanded under the Hasmonean Dynasty (the descendants of the Maccabees of Hanukah fame who managed about a century of Judean self-rule in the land for the first and only time since pre-586 BCE - there wouldn't be Jewish self-rule in the land again until 1948) in the 2nd century BCE. When Herod the Great was granted the right to rule as king over Judea by the Romans, starting in 19 BCE he further expanded the Temple Mount, more than doubling its size, and greatly enhancing its prestige. Descriptions of the marble and gold splendor of Herod's Temple drew Jews from around the Mediterranean world in pilgrimage. You can see a reproduction of it at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem today (below left), and I'm also pasting in a drawing that gives a sense of the size, scale, and details (below right):

This glorious Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70CE, as a result of a disastrous Jewish revolt against Roman rule. It was never rebuilt. The Arch of Titus depicts the Romans bringing the Temple spoils, including the menorah, back to Rome in victory. Other remains of this Second Temple survive in the stone piles that were left at the southern foot of the Temple mount, but the most famous remains are of the outer courtyard wall on the western side of the Temple Mount, known today as the Western Wall (note: this is not a wall of the actual Temple, but of the outer courtyard - so in the photo of the reconstruction above, it is the wall on the other side of the columns in the background of the Temple itself). This is the only wall of Herod's construction that remains of the Second Temple, and has become the holiest site in Judaism.

Especially in the wake of the failed Second Jewish Revolt under the presumed messiah Bar-Kosiba (known to his followers as Bar-Kokhba, "son of a star") from 132-135 CE, Jewish access to this site was limited, and would continue to vary depending on who was ruling Jerusalem. The Emperor Hadrian built a temple to Jupiter there, but it was destroyed in the 4th century by the Emperor Constantine I after he converted to Christianity. 

A fourth-century text by an anonymous pilgrim from Bordeaux describes what he saw on the Mount: "There are two statues of Hadrian, and, not far from them, a pierced stone to which the Jews come every year and anoint. They mourn and rend their garments, and then depart." Because at the time Jews were only permitted into the city on the 9th of Av, the day on which the destruction of both Temples was (and still is) mourned by Jews everywhere, it is assumed that this pilgrim witnessed such a mourning ritual, directed toward "a pierced stone" considered to be a remnant of the Temple.

Once the Roman Empire split into an Eastern and a Western half, the Eastern Byzantine Empire took control of Jerusalem and it became a predominantly Christian city. In 610 CE, the Persian Sassanid Empire took over, and they gave back control of Jerusalem to the Jews; they were permitted to set up a vassal state of their own. It lasted five years, after which the Persians gave control back to the Christian population, who tore down the beginnings of a Temple rebuild that had been attempted by the Jews, and turned the Temple Mount into a garbage dump. Persian Jerusalem was then re-conquered by the Byzantines, but the garbage dump remained.

Islam originated in 610 CE, and quickly united the peoples of the Arabian peninsula, who by 632 turned outward and began to conquer surrounding lands in the name of Islam. In 637, Arab Muslims besieged and captured Jerusalem.

Although there are no contemporary accounts of the Temple Mount's capture by Muslims, early on it was considered that the  large "Pierced Stone" that they found on the Mount (recall the Bordeaux Pilgrim's account above) was the Foundation Stone of Solomon's Temple. It was called the Pierced Stone because of a small hole in it that enters a cavern beneath the rock known as the Well of Souls. For this reason, this large rock came to be housed in the Dome of the Rock by the end of the 7th century. After the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem -- a city which early Islamic sources refer to as Bayt al-Maqdis, an Arabic cognate of the Hebrew term bet ha-miqdash, or "the Holy House," a term used to this day in Judaism to denote the Temple --  in 638 Caliph 'Omar ibn al Khatab ordered the site cleaned (recall that it had become a trash heap under Christian occupation) and granted Jews access to the site, acknowledging their connection with it as their holiest place. And then, things got interesting.

The Caliph identified the entire Temple Mount as the place that the Qur'an describes only as "the furthest place of prayer" - or in Arabic, al-Masjid al-'Aqsa, translated most commonly as "Al-Aqsa (the furthest) Mosque," as the place where Muhammad had been miraculously transported during his Night Journey, and from which he then ascended to heaven to receive the pillar of five daily prayers. For this reason, in addition to building the Dome of the Rock to house the Foundation Stone (later interpreted as the stone upon which Abraham nearly sacrified his son Ishmael, the Qur'an's version of the story in Genesis 22), the Caliph also ordered the building of Al-Aqsa Mosque. While the Qur'an mentions neither the location of this "furthest place of prayer," nor does it mention Jerusalem, after initial debates in the aftermath of Muhammad's death, and after the conquest of Jerusalem, the Umayyad dynasty -- a rival of the Abbasid dynasty that ruled Mecca and controlled the Ka'aba, Islam's holiest site -- identified the Temple Mount as the "furthest place of prayer" and built the al-Aqsa Mosque in 715 as a pilgrimmage site along with the Dome of the Rock. Later (13th century), under Turkish rule, the term "Noble Sanctuary" or "al-Haram al-Sharif" came to be applied to the entire area surrounding the Foundation Stone under Turkish rule. The Dome was covered in gold in 1920 by a generous donation from King Hussein of Jordan and now forms the centrepiece of many postcards from Jerusalem.

Given that all of these early sources in Islam never question the existence of a Jewish Temple on the Mount, and in fact such belief leads to the enshrinement (literally) of the stone considered by Jews to have been the foundation stone of Solomon's Temple, how are we to understand the now-widespread phenomenon of Temple denial in the Arab world?

We can actually trace the exact moment in history when revisionist accounts began to take hold, and I don't think any of you will be surprised to learn it. 

A Brief Guide to al-Haram al-Sharif was published in 1925 by the Supreme Muslim Council, the organization established by the British authority to administer religious sites in Mandate Palestine. It stated, "The site is one of the oldest in the world. Its sanctity dates from the earliest (perhaps from pre-historic) times. Its identity with the site of Solomon's Temple is beyond dispute. This, too, is the spot, according to universal belief, on which 'David built there an altar unto the lord, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings.' (2 Samuel 24:25)." This statement, and others like it, was stripped from all Muslim guidebooks and references in 1948.

Now you may not think that what Muslim authorities have to say about the historicity of the Temple Mount matters after 1948, because Israel becomes a state at that point and can write its own guidebooks. So indulge me a little longer with this history lesson and I'll explain why it matters (beyond the obvious fact that as of 2016 the Palestinian lobby has been successful in erasing the Temple Mount from the UNESCO resolution on the sanctity of this site - more below).

Many people don't realize that despite Jerusalem being central to the modern state of Israel, the Temple Mount itself is not under Israeli control, and never has been. 

The UN's Partition Plan proposed that the city of Jerusalem would belong to neither the newly-created Israel nor to the newly-created Palestine. Rather, it (along with the city of Bethlehem) would become a corpus separatum under UN administration, a separate entity, for a ten year period, after which time the residents were to decide on their government by referendum. But this never happened.

The Jews accepted the Partition Plan in its entirety, but as soon as the British withdrew and Israel declared its statehood, all neighboring Arab states attacked with the intention of wiping out any Jewish state in their midst. The Jews won the war though, and with their victory, ended up claiming more land than had been allocated by the Partition Plan -- including the western half of Jerusalem. Jordan also gained territory, capturing East Jerusalem - including the entire Old City, Temple Mount and all -- along with the West Bank, and held both until 1967.  Under Jordanian rule, Jews were expelled from their homes in the Jewish Quarter and Arab Palestinian refugees from the war were resettled there (until in 1966, when the Jordanian authorities relocated 500 of them to the Shua'fat refugee camp as part of their plans to turn the historic Jewish quarter into a public park). Jews were denied access to their holy sites there, many of which were destroyed or desecrated. Synagogues were either razed or converted to stables or hen-houses, and the Mount of Olives Jewish cemetery that had existed for thousands of years was desecrated, with 38,000 graves destroyed, and gravestones used to build roads, latrines, and Jordanian army fortifications. Restrictions imposed on the Christian population that remained there led many to leave the city. The Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque were extensively renovated. For their part, in West Jerusalem, Israeli authorities neglected to protect the tombs of the Muslim Mamilla cemetery, creating a parking lot and public lavatories there in 1964. 

In tensions leading up to the Six-Day War, as Egypt kept closing maritime passages to Israeli shipping while also mobilizing Egyptian military into defensive lines along the border of Israel and signing a defense pact with Jordan, Israel announced that further closures to Israeli shipping would be taken as a declaration of war. In May 1967, Egypt announced that the passages would again be closed to Israeli vessels. On June 5, 1967, Israel launched airstrikes against Egyptian airfields, along with a ground assault into the Sinai and Egyptian-occupied Gaza. Jordan and Syria joined the war against Israel, during which Jordan and Egypt attacked Israeli-held West Jerusalem. By the time the dust had settled on a ceasefire on June 9, Israel had managed to seize Syria's Golan Heights, Jordan's occupied West Bank - including East Jerusalem - and Egypt's Sinai, along with the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip.

In an exchange for peace and normalization, Egypt took Sinai back but refused the Gaza Strip. Israel retained control of Gaza until 2005, when it unilaterally withdrew, after which Hamas took over. The West Bank, a geographical region that contains the oldest Jewish areas of settlement -- according to the Hebrew Bible and archaeology in the region, this was the heart of ancient Judea and Samaria -- has been divided into three zones, the largest of which is ruled by the Palestinian Authority. (For more on this, see this post.)

The re-unification of Jerusalem in the wake of the 1967 war was a watershed moment for Jews everywhere. For the first time in over 2000 years, Jews controlled their holy city once again. The religious ones among them saw the re-capture of the Temple Mount as a miracle, and some heralded the immanent coming of the messiah. In the aftermath of the war, hundreds of thousands of Jews flocked to the Western Wall in the first mass Jewish pilgrimage to the site since the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE. 

But the Jews did not take over administration of the Temple Mount -- a very important fact that many people don't know. Jews still do not have authority over the Temple Mount. Rather, it is administered under the Jordanian waqf.

Under Islamic law, a waqf is a property that has been donated to the public for charitable or religious purposes. During the British Mandate, such properties came under the authority of the Supreme Muslim Council that the British appointed to administer Islamic law in the region. The Temple Mount, the entirety of which was considered to be a mosque by the Muslims there, is the best known waqf in the region. In 1948 when Jordan took over the West Bank and East Jerusalem, it took over administration of the waqf properties there, including the Temple Mount. When East Jerusalem was conquered by Israel in 1967, defense minister Moshe Dayan granted ongoing administration of the Temple Mount to the Jordanian waqf under the agreement that Jews would be allowed to visit it, but not to pray on it. This was not as upsetting to most Jews as you might think - a longstanding rabbinical consensus had been that Jews should not set foot on the Temple Mount for fear of desecrating the site where the Temple's holy of holies (the innermost chamber where God's presence was understood to dwell) had stood. According to the Hebrew Bible, no one was permitted to enter the holy of holies except the High Priest, and he only once a year on Yom Kippur.

And so it was agreed that Israel would be responsible for security of the site's perimeter, while Jordan would continue to be responsible for what happens within the compound. Obviously, this has been a less-than-perfect match, with many tensions and conflagrations ignited over the years by actions on both sides (most recently, the foolish provocations of Ben Gvir in May and July of this past year - he is part of a new movement in Orthodox Judaism that allows Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount after all). This informal arrangement was signed into the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan in 1994, with one difference: up until then the Grand Muftis of Jerusalem had been appointed by Jordan. After 1994, they came to be appointed by the PLO ruling in the West Bank. (More detail here, if you're interested.)

Although excavation of the site has never been permitted for obvious reasons, in 1999 the waqf illegally bulldozed under the Temple Mount, ostensibly to expand prayer space in the mosque. Thousands of tons of debris were dumped in the Kidron Valley. Archaeologist Gabriel Barkay and his student Zachi Dvira illegally excavated this dump (for which they were arrested, until they were able to obtain permits to excavate), and although there were countless artifacts and layers of history that had been destroyed and irrevocably removed from contexts that would have helped in their interpretation, the Temple Mount Sifting Project has made lemonade by finding evidence of continued use of the Temple Mount going back 2500 years. You can read more about what they did, and what they have found, here.

Although references to the Temple Mount and Jewish claims to the site disappeared from waqf pamphlets as early as 1948, it wasn't until 2000 that the fact of "Temple denial" became evident to anyone outside of the Palestinians in East Jerusalem, and Muslims who came there on pilgrimmage and received the updated pamphlets. But in 1998 -- just before the sudden need for renovations under Al-Aqsa that he ordered be done by a bulldozer under the site -- Ekrima Sabri, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, stated to an Israel newspaper that he "heard that your Temple was in Nablus or perhaps Bethlehem." And in an interview with Die Welt in January 2001, Sabri called for the Jews to "go back where they came from," claiming that "there is not the slightest sign of the previous existence of the Jewish temple on this site. There is not a single stone in the entire city that refers to Jewish history [...] It is the art of the Jews to deceive the world. They can't fool us with that. There is not a single stone in the Western Wall that has anything to do with Jewish history. The Jews have no legitimate claim to this wall, either religiously or historically." As far as I can tell in my online research, at the time no one in the mainstream press really took him too seriously.

Yet, at the Camp David Summit between President Clinton, PA President Yasser Arafat, and Israeli PM Ehud Barak in 2000, Arafat informed Clinton that "Solomon's Temple was not in Jerusalem, but in Nablus." In 2003, Arafat informed a delegation of Arab leaders from northern Israel that the Jewish temple was in fact in Yemen, where he himself had visited and been shown its exact location.

In 2002, the mayor of East Jerusalem claimed that Solomon had in fact reigned over the Arabian Peninsula, and that's where his temple had been constructed. And in 2015, Sheikh Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, told Israel's channel 2 that there has never been a Jewish temple on the Temple Mount - the site has been home to a mosque "from the creation of the world."

Revisioning religious history is nothing new. All religions re-imagine and re-interpret over the centuries in order to keep ancient ideas alive and relevant in ever-changing circumstances. This is the dynamic history of religions -- without such revisioning and reinterpretation, for example, no one who holds Leviticus' injunction (11:8) not to touch a pig's corpse could ever play football, and no one stones to death misbehaving sons (Deut 21:18-21). No one other than the religious practitioners themselves are usually affected by the changing of meaning that is normally entailed in religions' growths and developments. But revising history is different. Like Thompson's equation of modern Palestinians with the ancient Canaanites that the Bible claims (falsely, according to archaeology and DNA analysis) were displaced by the ancient Israelites (according to a biblical version of history that Thompson doesn't think holds any historical validity, but no matter), revising history to suit a political narrative has dangerous consequences. 

But the snowflakes were landing and accumulating, and the cold war was not allowing them to melt. In 2016, the UN's cultural heritage wing UNESCO, passed a resolution that referred to the Temple Mount multiple times throughout the document only by its Muslim name, al-Haram al-Sharif. Not once in this lengthy admonition to Israel over their treatment of Palestinians and Muslim holy sites did they refer to the Temple Mount as anything other than belonging to Islam.

And again, we see that stating it has made it so. The naming of the Temple Mount site exclusively by its medieval Muslim term al-Haram al-Sharif is a tacit acknowledgement by UNESCO that this is a Muslim holy site and not a Jewish one. (Resolutions in 2017 and 2023 also declared Hebron and Jericho to be Muslim World Heritage sites, ignoring the centrality of both to Judaism and Christianity.) By adding the UN's considerable weight to this revision of history, the UN takes yet another step forward in its ongoing denial of the legitimacy of a Jewish state by a variety of means (see my discussion of the UN's biased record against Israel here, and UNRWA's overt complicity in denying the legitimacy of a Jewish state here). It is one thing for the waqf to omit references to a Jewish temple on the Mount in its guidebooks, or for a Mufti or PA President to mis-state historical information; it is quite another for the international governing body of the UN to enshrine this revisionist history into their resolutions. 

And it's not just UNRWA and UNESCO. The UN's ESCWA (Economic and Social Commission for West Asia), adopted the term "apartheid" in 2017 as a valid descriptor for Israel's relationship with "the Palestinian people" (forgetting, it seems, that Israel doesn't rule Gaza or most of the West Bank), and in 2022, a report was submitted to the UN Human Rights Council that also equated Israel's control (sic) over the West Bank and Gaza Strip to apartheid. A similar report in 2022 recommended that the UN develop "a plan to end the Israeli settler-colonial occupation and apartheid regime" in the "occupied Palestinian territories." 

And so here again is my broken record plea. Naming places and events -- from "apartheid" to "al-Haram al-Sharif" -- is a way of stating it to make it so. Constant repetition of ideas like "settler colonialism" and "ethnic cleansing" alongside constant omissions of Jewish historical claims to sites belonging to their ancestors have brought about an entire generation of students who not only sympathize with the plight of Palestinian refugees (laudable on its own), but will repeat the genocidal slogans taught to them by an international terrorist organization on behalf of these refugees, and plunged a substantial part of the world into the alt-history of feeling legitimate in denying the right of Jews to a state in their ancient homeland. Complicit in all of this, as I keep repeating, are those of us who teach, and those of us who publish on the topic for public consumption. Because if we don't bother correcting these errors when they first appear, or to shovel the snow right back onto our neighbors lawns when it gets dumped on ours, the snowflakes accumulate and harden and come roaring down the mountain at us, growing and expanding until we are shocked that we are being knocked off the mountain by the "sudden" appearance of an enormous avalanche of hate.

{Post-script: I am exhausted from writing continuously about all of this for the past almost 2 weeks straight. Although I am no less inspired to continue doing so by the ongoing misinformation and hatred circulating in my newsfeed and the inexpressible pain of how much suffering has been inflicted in its cause, I think I will take a cue (for once) from Jewish tradition and take tomorrow off as a day of rest. Please know that if I don't post anything until Sunday (no promises) I'm still alive and still angry, just taking a little break.}