AdamSmith

P.S. A recipe for haggis... Ingredients 1 sheep stomach 1 sheep liver 1 sheep heart 1 sheep tongue 1/2 pound suet, minced 3 medium onions, minced 1/2 pound dry oats, toasted 1 teaspoon kosher salt 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper 1 teaspoon dried ground herbs Directions Rinse the stomach thoroughly and soak overnight in cold salted water. Rinse the liver, heart, and tongue. In a large pot of boiling, salted water, cook these parts over medium heat for 2 hours. Remove and mince. Remove any gristle or skin and discard. In a large bowl, combine the minced liver, heart, tongue, suet, onions, and toasted oats. Season with salt, pepper, and dried herbs. Moisten with some of the cooking water so the mixture binds. Remove the stomach from the cold salted water and fill 2/3 with the mixture. Sew or tie the stomach closed. Use a turning fork to pierce the stomach several times. This will prevent the haggis from bursting. In a large pot of boiling water, gently place the filled stomach, being careful not to splash. Cook over high heat for 3 hours. Serve with mashed potatoes, if you serve it at all. http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/haggis-recipe/index.html?oc=linkback

Ah. And robokoi.

In PS, what would your H2O bill for this be?

Another expression I overlooked!

New Study Finds Human Beings Were Never Meant To Wake Up From Sleep News in Brief • Science & Technology • ISSUE 49•43 • Oct 21, 2013 BOSTON—According to a new study published in The New England Journal Of Medicine this week, human beings were never meant to wake up after falling asleep, but were rather supposed to remain in a deep, peaceful slumber until eventually expiring. “Our research team of evolutionary biologists conducted an extensive and thorough examination of human physiology, past and present, and determined that human beings were, in their ideal state, supposed to be born, spend a solid 12 hours awake as an infant, and then lie down for a tranquil, dream-filled sleep from which they would then not awaken,” lead researcher Dennis Zeveloff said of the findings, which also suggest that life for early man was not supposed to last longer than one day. “Eventually, after spending three or four weeks lying comfortably in bed, humans were meant to just slide directly into death. In fact, the truly optimal state toward which human evolution aspired was for all individuals to succumb to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome almost instantly after exiting the womb.” The study concluded that, based on these findings, coma patients should be considered among the most highly evolved humans on the planet. http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-study-finds-human-beings-were-never-meant-to-w,34288/

God Reveals He Occasionally Eats Humans News • religion • God • News • ISSUE 49•42 • Oct 18, 2013 The Divine Creator says He enjoys eating a human being from time to time “as a snack.” THE HEAVENS—Speaking candidly during a rare interview this Thursday, God Almighty, Our Lord and Heavenly Father, revealed to the public that He occasionally eats human beings. The Supreme Being, who spoke to reporters today about His dietary habits, said that Homo sapiens don’t comprise a regular part of His food consumption, but noted that every once in a while He “feels like eating a human” and will then pick one out from earth and eat the person alive. “It’s not something I do very often, but yes, I have been known to eat humans from time to time,” said God, claiming that while He didn’t consider human beings “an everyday kind of meal, per se,” they do occasionally make for a decent snack. “In fact, sometimes I’ll suddenly catch myself nibbling on a human being without even realizing it. They’re nice and chewy and bite-size, and there’s always a lot of them just lying around so I figure, hey, why not.” “Sometimes I put the remains back where I found them and make it look like a murder or something,” the Eternal One continued. “But most of the time I forget to do that and the person just disappears.” Saying that He had no personal taste preferences for gender or race, the Maker of Heaven and Earth reported being open to eating human beings from all across the world and remarked that every few years He would scoop His hands across one of the world’s major coastlines and pick out a variety of human beings to eat at once. He Who Commanded Light to Shine Out of Darkness also told reporters that while He once tended to eat human beings who were elderly or infirm, He recently found that eating people in their prime “tasted just as good, so no reason not to eat them too.” “My favorite part is the legs,” The Divine Creator proclaimed. “Usually, when I pick out a human being, I’ll tear off their legs from the rest of their body and eat them first. Then I’ll eat the arms and then the heads.” “If I have more room left then I eat the rest of the body,” He added. “But by then I’m usually full, so I throw it away.” The all-knowing, all-powerful deity also acknowledged that though He doesn’t technically require any form of edible sustenance at all to survive, He simply “enjoys the taste of human beings” and planned on continuing to eat more for the foreseeable future. When asked if He felt any qualms about devouring the very members of creation that He made in His own image, God simply stated, “No.” “Back in the early days of humanity, I definitely ate way more humans than I do now,” said God, remarking that He would regularly eat handfuls of human beings throughout every day of the Middle Pleistocene epoch. “But over the millennia, I’ve definitely eaten my share of human beings…Jimmy Hoffa, Ambrose Bierce, the Lindbergh baby, every dead body that’s ever existed, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, The Big Bopper…” “Hell, I even ate Jesus Christ,” God added. “That was a good meal.” http://www.theonion.com/articles/god-reveals-he-occasionally-eats-humans,34264/

New, Improved Obamacare Program Released On 35 Floppy Disks News in Brief • government • barack obama • healthcare • News • ISSUE 49•43 • Oct 21, 2013 WASHINGTON—Responding to widespread criticism regarding its health care website, the federal government today unveiled its new, improved Obamacare program, which allows Americans to purchase health insurance after installing a software bundle contained on 35 floppy disks. “I have heard the complaints about the existing website, and I can assure you that with this revised system, finding the right health care option for you and your family is as easy as loading 35 floppy disks sequentially into your disk drive and following the onscreen prompts,” President Obama told reporters this morning, explaining that the nearly three dozen 3.5-inch diskettes contain all the data needed for individuals to enroll in the Health Insurance Marketplace, while noting that the updated Obamacare software is mouse-compatible and requires a 386 Pentium processor with at least 8 MB of system RAM to function properly. “Just fire up MS-DOS, enter ‘A:\>dir *.exe’ into the command line, and then follow the instructions to install the Obamacare batch files—it should only take four or five hours at the most. You can press F1 for help if you run into any problems. And be sure your monitor’s screen resolution is at 320 x 200 or it might not display properly.” Obama added that the federal government hopes to have a six–CD-ROM version of the program available by 2016. http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-improved-obamacare-program-released-on-35-flop,34294/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=LinkPreview:2:Default

Aha! hito's true credo revealed... My Kingdom for Some Shoes

Have always loved his art. Bizarre Balthus show reveals artist's fixation with cats and young girlsMore character study than retrospective, the Met's provocative new Balthus exhibition has an unsettling undertone • Click here for more images from the Balthus show Jason Farago theguardian.com, Monday 21 October 2013 09.29 EDT Thérèse Dreaming by Balthus, 1938. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, 1998 © Balthus If current trends continue, in just a few years all of contemporary culture will be nothing but an unending stream of cat pictures. Newspapers desperate to survive will publish only adorable kitten photos; social networks will strain under the weight of shorthairs and Siamese. The art world is already getting in on the act: witness the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis hosting an internet cat video festival (it drew 10,000 viewers in one day), or White Columns, the avant-garde New York gallery, laying on The Cat Show, featuring "purr-formers in residence". The Brooklyn Museum recently rehung its august Egyptian collection in a display called "Divine Felines." Balthus Cats and Girls – Paintings and Provocations Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Until 12 January 2014 Venue details I wonder whether the Metropolitan Museum of Art had our contemporary cat mania in mind when it scheduled its smart, strange exhibition of the Polish-French painter Balthus – a figurative master in an age of abstraction, and one of the creepiest figures of modern art. You may know him as an anti-modernist with a taste for young girls. His love of cats, however, receives less attention, and in this cat-saturated moment that love might become the dominant one. The first painting, on loan from Switzerland, is a remarkable, full-length self-portrait done at the age of 27. Balthus is wearing high-waisted yellow trousers and an abbreviated necktie, stepping forward seductively with his left foot while an obese tabby nuzzles his right. On the floor, a stone tablet bears an inscription in English: "A portrait of HM the King of Cats." He earned the title. In one almost psychedelic work, from 1949, a grinning feline of human proportions sits at a seaside cafe table; a school of fish jumps from the sea on to the cat's plate, trailing behind it a glorious rainbow. In another artist's hands this might feel tasteless. From Balthus, this is par for the course. Cat's whiskers … Detail from Balthus's 1935 self-portrait, The King of Cats (1935). Photograph: Fondation Balthus, Switzerland © Balthus Balthus, born Balthasar Klossowski on 29 February 1908, fell for both art and cats at an early age. At 11, devastated by the disappearance of a stray he'd taken in, the young artist produced 40 memorial ink drawings, each five inches square and done in a forceful black-and-white that recalls the woodcuts of German expressionists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. In the first drawing, the preteen Balthus, wearing shorts, finds the cat, Mitsou, on a park bench. Soon they're snuggling together in bed, walking through the streets (Mitsou prances on a leash), sitting by the Christmas tree. In the final scene Mitsou is gone and the boy is left alone in his bedroom, sobbing uncontrollably. Drawing the line … the final ink drawing in Balthus's Mitsou series (1919, black ink on paper, 6 x 4 3/4 in). Photograph: Private collection © Balthus The Mitsou drawings made it into print in 1921 with a preface by Rainer Maria Rilke, a friend of the Klossowski family and, by the way, one of the lovers of Balthus's mother. Confident, musical, sweet and grim by turns, these drawings – the originals are being shown publicly for the first time, and they're the best reason to see the show – are much more than Balthus juvenilia. They're the pistol shot that began one of the most mystifying, frustrating careers in 20th-century art. He stood at the core of mid-century European culture, a mate of Picasso and Lacan, but despised much of what we now think of as the greatest achievements of modernism. (His brother Pierre Klossowski, subject of a fantastic show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2006, was the more progressive figure.) He was a vile anti-semite, despite his own possible Jewish ancestry. Born into something like genteel poverty, he later styled himself as a count and told Alberto Giacometti that he "needed a château more than a workman needed a loaf of bread". Recipe for concern … The Cat of La Méditerranée by Balthus (1949). Photograph: Private collection © Balthus And, oh, he also had an inordinate fixation on girls who'd just hit puberty. "Little girls are the only creatures today who can be little Poussins," Balthus said late in life, and this show counterposes images of sly, knowing cats with ones of ostensibly innocent children. The Met, not imprudently, has put a plaque at the start of the show that reads: "Some of the paintings in this exhibition may be disturbing to some visitors." Only some visitors? They should disturb us all. Thérèse Blanchard, his first muse (if you can use that word for a child), is shown reclining on a divan with her skirt hiked up, panties clinging to her inner thighs, while a cat sups milk from a saucer. Thérèse is depicted a second time, in bobby socks, splayed out on a bench and losing her balance. One girl is reading a book on the floor, her bottom hiked in the air; another lounges like an odalisque, gazing into a mirror while her bare leg dangles off a settee. The girls are self-possessed and serious, and Balthus always denied any hint of paedophilia. But get real: these are erotic images of children. Some, especially the Thérèse portraits, show real invention and even a little humour that make them difficult to dismiss outright. Others, especially the mannered domestic scenes of his later career, are barely competent acts of voyeurism. Their inclusion here displays a welcome willingness on the part of the curator, Balthus specialist Sabine Rewald, to present the artist in full. More a character study than a real retrospective, this show leaves out many of Balthus's most famous paintings to concentrate on two obsessions that end up rolling into one. Cats may seem anodyne fun to the legions of reblogging obsessives driving today's digital feline explosion. In Balthus's world, though, cats have a much more chilling flipside, and they stay with you long after the latest meme has faded. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/oct/21/balthus-cats-girls-paintings-provocations-metropolitan-review

KyotoYankee! Beautiful.

Is that the new euphemism?

I was going to say Wanda Sykes.

Because it is (1) a cunning adaptation by evolution to advance its extra-human imperatives, (2) given modern articulation by late medieval Provençal troubadours who set themselves literary requirements whose artificial idealisms and complications we have hilariously adopted as real-life templates, (3) overlaid by economically and materially conditioned Victorian-origin societal heteronormativities about monogamy, fidelity (or pretense thereof) and what we now term (with no intended irony!) the nuclear family?

Surely he meant gristly.

Don't read this at the table... http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/20/neanderthals-diet-plants-herbs-stomachs

That's what they all say. Okay, WE.

That IS well & truly nuts.

So, everything not otherwise explained, blame on the '50s! Having been born in 1959, I can say that.

I will just tell 'em you put me up to it. Come to think, with my line of business entailing phoning and emailing and asking detailed engineering questions of manufacturers including many in the Death & Destruction Complex, I am likely marked already.

Not quite, but pretty close. Fascinating if you find atomic weapon history & technology interesting... http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html

Sorry, my (deleted) query about public vs private chat came from Posting Before Coffee. Can't find chat function on mobile version, but switching to Full version on the iPhone works fine. Just tried that out.

Great! Is this on the mobile version too? If not, of course we can toggle over to Full Version on a mobile device.

No clue. I found it on a friend's Facebook page. Somewhere in the 1950s?

This is the sermon by Rosensaft that moved Francis to email him. The Days of Awe and the years of horror By Menachem Z. Rosensaft The Washington Post September 11 at 7:59 am Guest sermon delivered at Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City on Shabbat Shuva, the Saturday between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, September 7, 2013 Exactly 16 years ago, on Shabbat Shuva, the Saturday between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I sat in this sanctuary together with our daughter Jodi. My mother had died the previous evening, only a few hours after the end of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. After being increasingly ill for months, she had finally succumbed to the hepatitis she had contracted at Auschwitz-Birkenau. We then met with Rabbi David Lincoln to discuss her funeral, which was going to take place two days later, on Monday. In the hospital, my mother had been upset that she would not be able to go to the cemetery where my father is buried. He had died 22 years earlier midway between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We had gone to his graveside every year on the day after Shabbat Shuva. I had tried to reassure her that my wife Jeanie, Jodi and I would represent her. As it turned out, my mother was indeed with us at Mt. Carmel Cemetery that year -she was laid to rest beside my father on his Yahrzeit, the anniversary of his death. For the past 38 years, I have been listening to the Torah reading for Shabbat Shuva while thinking first of my father and then of both my parents. It is a deeply unsettling text. In his final substantive address to the Israelites, Moses prophesies a future of misery and despair for the people he has led for 40 years. Emphasizing in Deuteronomy 32:4 that God is “faithful . . . never false, true and upright,” Moses tells the Israelites that they and their descendants would be responsible for all the manifold misfortunes and disasters that would befall them over the course of generations, and describes in graphic detail how their God would wreak destruction on them for their apparently inevitable collective treachery and sins. “I will sweep misfortunes on them, use up My arrows on them: Wasting famine, ravaging plague, deadly pestilence, and fanged beasts will I let lose against them. . . . The sword shall deal death without, as shall the terror within.” (Deuteronomy 32:23-25) And, as Moses takes great pains to make clear, this divine devastation would not be unleashed only on those who had committed transgressions, but on the entire people, young and old, women, children and infants alike, the innocent as well as the guilty. Even more disturbing to me is God’s declaration that “I will hide My countenance” from the Israelites in the moments of their greatest distress, their greatest need. (Deuteronomy 32:20) This is not a new image. “Then My anger will flare up against them on that day, and I will abandon them and hide My countenance from them” we read in the previous week’s Torah reading, followed by “And I will keep My countenance hidden on that day because of all the evil they have committed by turning to other gods.” (Deuteronomy 31:17-18) Both my parents survived Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen. My mother described her 15 months at Birkenau as “a time of humiliation, torture, starvation, disease, fear, hopelessness, and despair.” After managing to escape and being recaptured, my father was imprisoned and tortured for months at Auschwitz in Block 11, the so-called Death Block. What sins could they have committed to deserve such punishment? My parents’ entire immediate families were murdered in the Shoah. My mother’s five-a-and-half-year-old son, my brother, was one of more than one million Jewish children who were killed by the Germans and their accomplices only and exclusively because they were Jewish. Again, what possible transgressions could any of them have committed to cause God to turn away from them? Every year, I am forced to remember my parents in the context of a Torah reading that challenges my ability to relate to God. How, we ask ourselves, can we believe in God in the aftermath of the Shoah? Shouldn’t an omniscient God have had to know that the cataclysm was being perpetrated? And shouldn’t an omnipotent God have been able to prevent it? But then again, isn’t any attempt on our part to want to understand the very essence of divinity presumptive in the extreme? Any exploration of this formidable if not utterly impenetrable topic must, in my opinion at least, be approached with tremendous reticence and humility. In the introduction to his book, Faith After the Holocaust, Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits observed that, “Those who were not there and, yet, readily accept the Holocaust as the will of God that must not be questioned, desecrate the holy disbelief of those whose faith was murdered. And those who were not there, and yet join with self-assurance the rank of the disbelievers, desecrate the holy faith of the believers.” There are those who believe that the brutal annihilation of millions was God’s wish and had a divine purpose. Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, the leader of the ultra-Orthodox rabidly anti-Zionist Satmar Hasidim – whose own life, incidentally, was saved by a Zionist – blamed the Holocaust on Zionists who had refused to wait for the Messianic redemption and instead sought to implement a secular Jewish national agenda. Others went even further. Rabbi Eliezer Schach, a spiritual leader of the non-Hasidic Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox in Israel, declared that the Holocaust was God’s divine punishment for all the perceived heresies committed by Jews under the influence of Zionism, socialism and the Enlightenment. My friend Rabbi David Ellenson, the President of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, has called my attention to a manuscript written after the Holocaust by Rabbi Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg, the last head of the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin and a giant of pre-World War II modern Orthodoxy, in which Weinberg wrote that, “The Rabbinerseminar was destroyed on account of our many sins.” The troubling corollary that follows from this one simple sentence is that the Germans who were responsible for murdering the institutions’ teachers and students were somehow the instruments of a divine vengeance. To his credit, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, categorically rejected this approach. “The destruction of six million Jews in such a horrific manner that surpassed the cruelty of all previous generations,” he declared, “could not possibly be because of a punishment for sins. Even the Satan himself could not possibly find a sufficient number of sins that would warrant such genocide!” In a similar vein, the Talmudist David Weiss Halivni, who survived several Nazi death and concentration camps, has dismissed as “obscene” any suggestion that the Holocaust was “a divine response to the spread of the German culture of Haskalah [the Enlightenment], or secularism, among the Jews.” Any such rationalizations, he wrote in his memoirs, “are theologically offensive . . . . A justification, by definition, means: it should have happened, it’s justice, it’s the fitting course of events. People who make such statements suggest, in effect, that had it not happened, they would have worked to bring it about.” Nevertheless, the Lubavitcher Rebbe insisted that the Holocaust had to have been part of a divine plan, even if human beings could not comprehend God’s reasons. Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer has quoted Schneerson as writing that, “It is clear that ‘no evil descends from Above’ and buried within torment and suffering is a core of exalted spiritual good. . . . So it is not impossible for the physical destruction of the Holocaust to be spiritually beneficial.” In mid-October 1943, during Sukkot, my father smuggled a tiny apple into the Birkenau barrack where the inmates had gathered to pray so that the highly respected Rabbi of the Polish city of Zawiercie, known as the Zawiercier Rov, could recite the Kiddush blessings. Throughout the prayers, my father recalled, the aged Rov stared at the apple, obviously conflicted. At the end of the clandestine service, he picked up the apple and said, in Yiddish, almost to himself, “Un iber dem zol ikh itzt zogn, ‘ve-akhalta ve-savata u-verakhta et Hashem Elohekha . . . .’” And over this, I should now say, “And you will eat, and you will be satisfied, and you will bless your God . . . .” “Kh’vel nisht essen,” I will not eat, he said, “veil ikh vel nisht zat sein,” because I will not be satisfied, “un ikh vill nisht bentchn” and I refuse to bentch, to sanctify God. And with that, the Zawiercier Rov put down the apple and turned away. The Zawiercier Rov never lost his faith in God. Like the Hasidic master, Levi Itzhak of Berditchev, however, he was profoundly, desperately angry with Him, and this anger caused him to confront God from the innermost depths of his being. One evening around the same time, my father and a group of Jews from Zawiercie were sitting in their barrack when the Zawiercier Rov suddenly said, again in Yiddish, “You know, der Rebboine shel-oilem ken zein a ligner,” the Master of the Universe can be a liar. Asked how this could possibly be, the rabbi explained, “If God were to open His window now and look down and see us here, He would immediately look away and say, “Ikh hob dos nisht geton,” I did not do this—and that, the Zawiercier Rov said, would be the lie. The following year, the Jewish kapo – an inmate assigned supervisory tasks by the Germans – in charge of Block 11, where my father had been an inmate for more than five months, wanted my father to conduct the Yom Kippur service. Emaciated, starved, my father chanted Kol Nidrefrom memory in the Death Block of Auschwitz, and then led the prayers there that evening and the following day for his fellow prisoners. As a reward, the kapo gave my father and the other inmates of Block 11 an extra bowl of soup to break the fast. “You have screened Yourself off with a cloud, so that no prayer can pass through,” we read in the Book of Lamentations. And yet it is told that Reb Azriel David Fastag, a disciple of the Hasidic Rebbe of Modzhitz, spontaneously composed and began to sing what has become the best-known melody to Maimonides’ 12th Principle of Jewish Faith while in a cattle car from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka death camp: “I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah; and even though he may tarry, nevertheless I will wait every day for him to come.” A young Jew managed to escape from the Treblinka-bound train, taking with him the niggun, the melody of Reb Azriel David Fastag’s “Ani Ma’amin.” Eventually the melody reached the Modzhitzer Rebbe who is said to have exclaimed, “With this niggun the Jewish people went to the gas chambers, and with this niggun, the Jews will march to greet the Messiah.” Very much in the spirit of the Shabbat Shuva Torah reading, Professor Weiss Halivni has written that, “There were two major theological events in Jewish history: Revelation at Sinai and revelation at Auschwitz. . . . At Sinai, God appeared before Israel, addressed us, and gave us instructions; at Auschwitz, God absented Himself from Israel, abandoned us, and handed us over to the enemy.” Which raises a fundamental question: How can we pray to or have any relationship with God if we believe, in Weiss Halivni’s words, that He abandoned us, and handed us over to the enemy? But maybe, just maybe, Professor David Weiss Halivni, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and Rabbi Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg all looked for God’s presence and power in the wrong place. What if God was very much there during the Holocaust, but not with the killers, with the forces that inflicted the Holocaust on humankind? What if He was in fact alongside and within the victims, those who perished and those who survived? Could it be that God, the true God, did not hide His face from Reb Azriel David Fastag in the cattle car to Treblinka but instead gave him the inspiration and strength to compose his niggun? And could it also be that God was praying alongside my father in Block 11 on Yom Kippur in 1943? On the façade above the main entrance of our synagogue is a relief sculpture of the Polish-Jewish educator Janusz Korczak surrounded by children who are desperately holding on to him. Born Henryk Goldschmidt, Korczak, a secular Jew, founded and directed an orphanage in Warsaw. After the German occupation of Poland, Korczak declined numerous offers to save himself, refusing to leave his children behind in the Warsaw Ghetto. On August 5, 1942, Korczak led the children through the streets of the Ghetto to the Umschlagsplatz, the deportation square, from which they were taken by train to the gas chambers of Treblinka. Abandoned by the world, seemingly abandoned by God, Korczak did not want his children to feel that he, too, had abandoned them. My mother was sent from Auschwitz-Birkenau to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in November of 1944. By that time, her parents, her first husband, her child, her brother and her sister had all been murdered. She was utterly alone and by all rights should have succumbed to despair. Instead, she had used her medical skills at Birkenau to enable countless women to survive, more often than not at the risk of her own life. Assigned to that camp’s infirmary, she had performed rudimentary surgery, camouflaging women’s wounds, sending them out of the barrack on work detail in advance of selections and thus keeping many of them out of the gas chambers. At Bergen-Belsen in late December of 1944, my mother and several other Jewish women inmates took a group of Dutch Jewish children into their barrack. My mother then proceeded to organize what became known as a Kinderheim, a children’s home, within the concentration camp. One of my mother’s fellow inmates subsequently recalled that my mother “walked from block to block, found the children, took them, lived with them, and took care of them.… Most of them were orphans, and she was like a mother to them . . . .” Among them were children from Poland, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. Some had been brought to Bergen-Belsen from Buchenwald, others from Theresienstadt. My mother wrote in her memoirs that she and the other women in her group “had been given the opportunity to take care of these abandoned Jewish children, and we gave them all our love and whatever strength was left within us.” Despite the horrific conditions at Bergen-Belsen in the winter and spring of 1945, despite a raging typhus epidemic and other virulent diseases, despite the lack of food and medicine, my mother and her fellow prisoners kept 149 Jewish children alive until the day of their liberation on April 15, 1945. If God was at Treblinka, I want to believe that He was within Janusz Korczak as he accompanied his children to their death. I feel certain that the mystical divine spark that characterizes Jewish faith, the Shekhina, was within my mother as she and the other women in her group rescued 149 Jewish children from almost certain death at Bergen-Belsen. Perhaps God was also within every Jewish parent who comforted a child on the way to a gas chamber, and within every Jew who told a story or a joke or sang a melody in a death camp barrack to alleviate another Jew’s agony. Perhaps it was the Shekhina that enabled young Jews like Jeanie’s father to take up arms against the Germans in ghettos and forests. Perhaps God was within the Ukrainian farmer who hid Jeanie’s mother and grandparents, and within all the other non-Jews who defied the forces of evil by saving Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. And so it is, as I remember my parents on their Yahrzeit, that I have come to the conclusion that perhaps God did not hide His face from them after all during the years of the Shoah. Perhaps it was a divine spirit within them that enabled them to survive with their humanity intact. And perhaps it is to that God that we should be addressing our prayers during these Days of Awe and throughout the year. Menachem Z. Rosensaft is general counsel of the World Jewish Congress, vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, and a past president of Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City. He teaches about the law of genocide and war crimes trials at the law schools of Columbia, Cornell and Syracuse Universities. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-faith/wp/2013/09/11/the-days-of-awe-and-the-years-of-horror/