Category Archives: JTown Times Articles

The JTown Times: Elections are Coming!

Laugh with us: A JTown Israeli Democracy Exploration

Why Israeli elections again, who is the PM and what is Israeli democracy?

The Israeli government has collapsed. It is parliamentary, with proportional representation and requires a majority of 61 out of 120 seats for a government.

Bibi’s Likud party won the most seats in the last election (4th in 2 years) but Netenyahu couldn’t form a government. This was in part due to the strength of marginal parties of under 10 seats.

The current prime minister, Naftali Bennet, had 7 seats, or 7 people from his Yamina party were elected. Then two left the party so he was governing, after some other changes, a 60 seat then 59 seat minority government coalition at one point, if I’m not mistaken, with only 5 seats out of 120. His party was said to be right wing. People generally dismissed that with the coalition forming .

His coalition partners included marginally small left wing parties Meretz and Labor and marginally small Islamic Movement. Bibi fir example usually includes marginally small religious parties. So Bennet also partnered with Yair Lapid’s Yeah Atid party, said by media to be centrist, others left, the second largest after Bibi’s Likud. Bennet and Lapid have a power sharing rotation. So now the Knesset is dissolving and Lapid will be the “Caretaker” government PM, whatever caretaker means.

See during the 4 elections there was no efficient governing. In effect no real government. Just rotating oligarchy parties continually running for office with legislative officials being given Minister jobs for the duration of the government between elections. So Gantz, who’s blue and white party was the second largest three elections ago with four former IDF chiefs of staff on the roster, who is currently Defense Minister, was also Defense Minister under Bibi when he and Bibi had a power sharing government but Bibi Bibi’s him with a no-budget move that forced elections.

Avigdor Liberman, the Russian anti-religioys party, was also Bibi’s Def Min before the first of the elections of the last five, as was Bennet. Then after the last government was formed he became Finance Minister.

The current Health Minister is from Meretz, a far left party and the head of Labor, Merav Michaelis, who made up her own grammatically incorrect version of Hebrew to turn language feminist and always wears black, is the Transportation Minister although none have formal training in these fields.

Bibi fir instance had United Torah Judaism’s head (a religious party) Litzman, as Health Minister. Litzman got into helping pedophiles trouble but pled out , no jail. So now Lapid will become Prime Minister. His father, who was a vehement racist against Jews of non-European background and Arabs, Tommy Lapid, was a minister with his Shinui, or Change, party, 20 some years ago.

Yair, hos son, never finished high school and did not serve in a combat unit. He started off as a TV personality and then transitioned to politics, like former Labor head Shelly Yehemovich and other journalists who interview politicians until they become politicians. Shelly left the Knesset and now has a radio show.

There are very tight relationships in Israel between news media and politicians. So now we see what Yair Lapid, with no training in anything, will do as PM when any move he makes politically or policy wise or attempted appointments, will be challenged by the right wing opposition via the attorney general, who is basically a babysitter when the Knesset is bad.

The right wing win the majority of seats of the last elections and is predicted to again though Bibi may not be able to firm a government again so we will have elections again after that. The tem election rule says if we go past 10 in 10 years the IDF takes over. No that was a joke.

Israel is legally obligated to have a Constitution but does not so there is an argument to be made that every Knesset is in a way illegal or at the very least not following the law by creating a Constitution.

Years ago when there was a low voter turnout, Tzipi Livni, a legislator and minister, first with Likud them with Ehud Olmert’s Kadima, suggested mandating voting and fining citizens who do not vite. This did not go over well. Olmert was mayor of Jerusalem and became prime minister after Ariel Sharon had a neurological event.

Olmert then bolted Likud to firm Kadima, which means “forward.” He, like former president Moshe Katzav, who raoed someone while in office, served prison time like Shas’s Aryeh Deri for bribary. Shas was a huge Mizrachi religious party and is now marginal. Bibi is on trial maybe for getting cigars or something. I don’t really follow the news often.

He is suing Olmert for saying he’s mentally ill. Olmert is out of prison and gets interviewed by the responsible 4th estate here and there about the Netanyahus.

The Arab parties had a combined list to become the 3rd largest bloc but I believe they don’t now. Some of their members of Parliament have taken heat fir recently telling Arab members of Israel’s security services to throw their weapons away and stop being lap dogs for the Ziomists. Ben Gvir, an MK who is regularly accused of racism, argues with Arab MK and sometimes Knesset speaker Ahmed Tobi, saying on session that he is a tertorist.

So Lapid, who has no GED or university degree takes over as we head into elections. Meanwhile they all make a minimum 60,000 shekels a month with minimum wage around 30 sheks an hour. So I may vote white ballot. It means your vote goes to no party but you affect percentages, hurting smaller parties that require a 3.5% threshold of votes to enter the knesset.

Democracy. The only one in the Middle East. It’s subtle oligarchical anarchy with elections and Everyone gets paid.

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Glitches in Creation and Time in Escoteric Tradition

As Passover approaches what can we learn about the growing phenomenon of “glitches” in our Matrix caught on camera and shared online?

One possible representation of the tzimzum Credit: The Arc of Tomorrow

14.4.22

Greg Tepper

JTown Times

Judaism is not strictly a religion. It is also philosophy, law, escoteric understandings and perceptions of reality.

On Passover at the Seder meal we Jews celebrate our liberation from the whip of slavery in Egypt. We say “We were slaves in Egypt.” But how can that be? How can someone living today say he was a slave thousands of years ago during the reign of Pharoah?

Jewish tradition teaches we all have  “gilgulim(p)” (גילגולים) (reincarnation from past lives). The word “gilgul(s)” (גלגול) comes from “gal” (גל).

The word “gal” means wave as in perpetual motion and “galgal” means tire, as in around and around we go.
Time in Jewish tradition is not linear. It is circular. We say at Hannukah, “in those days at this this time.”

Our understanding of time is that it continues on but also, in a way, repeats.

The only reason we can perceive time, to advance to the escoteric, is that in creating the physical universe God created the “tzimtzum” or “reduction” so that we could have apparently physical and finite appearance and perceptions, because if God were completely present then we as finite beings and our energy being of a part of His, and He being infinite, would not be able to exist as we do.

Think of the tzimzum as a vortex surrounded by an imperceptible infiniteness. Our known universe. So God “hid” himself so to speak.

Clearly there is a paradox. If God is infinite then how could He limit Himself within the tzimtzum? The how is beyond us but the why – in order to remove Himself so that there would be a finite appearance to us and our world.

Understanding this paradox completely is said to be an impossibility and trying to do so a path to madness.

Time. Time, as we know and understand it, does not exist outside of the tzimtzum because outside the tzimtzum is the infinite, or as we say it in Hebrew, ain sofe (אין סוף) or “there is no end.”

Now as we are imprinted and trained to think in a linear manner we may at first associate “there is no end” with “no ending” but in Jewish tradition “ain sofe” also means “no beginning.”

The tzimtzum, or our physical universe, does have a beginning and if God is accepted as the infinite and unknown source of all then there must be an end for nothing can continue infinitely other than God Himself.

If we look to physics and mathematics we also see that the known universe is expected to contract and collapse upon itself as matter, contrary to our understanding of it, somehow disappears if not transformed. But where would it exist if not in a then non-existent universe?

Outside the tzimtzum, though, time, as we know and understand it and to my limited understanding, does not exist.

If the infinite and without form all is one existence prior to Creation was without time, and let’s add space and gravity, while at the same time having all the potential for those things within it, then that state of existence cannot end.

It always has been and will be, including within the tzimtzum, for that state of existence precedes physical creation.

Most of us, says our tradition, cannot perceive that. Some of us, it says, can. Those are people who are not understood. They are called “Shotim” and include schizophrenics and others who see and hear things beyond the perception of 99 percent of the population who cannot but are conventionally considered as “not connected to reality” or “insane”.

So time outside the tzimtzum both exists and does not, but is not perceptible outside the tzimtzum as it is within, where we exist. That said, the imperceptible infinte not-time must also exists in our physical reality.

So we Jews say we were slaves in Egypt.

We believe that all our souls, part of the infinite Source so then still attached to the Source as God cannot be divided for He is one without beginning or end, were all present at Mt. Sinai when God spoke to the entire nation of Israel before giving the Torah.

He spoke the first commandment and all who heard him died. Then He brought them back. He spoke the second commandment. The same occured. Then all begged for mercy and Moses received the rest on the Mountain.

That experience can be said to be a meeting of God within the tzimtzum and from outside it, with us.

Then why didn’t Moses and the prophets die upon hearing God, or today’s Shotim?

In a way a certain level of insanity is necessary to hear God and live, for what is insanity in the escoteric understanding if not perception and interpretation of the imperceptible, inconsistent with the majority?

God created, we learn in tradition, certain people’s minds to function in this way. Back then they had ways of disciplining the mind. Today we do not, as a whole, and these people are put in hospital and given drugs that cut off dopamine, required to “feel.”

The lack of dopamine doesn’t only stop many people from seeing and hearing it also makes them feel as if they have no self, no connection to anything outside of themselves or sense of being or existence.

So we were slaves in Egypt, at this time in that time, as the time is circular, not overlapping but repeating within the Tzimtzum that holds a paradox of God’s infinite and limited self, all one yet divided but not.

I, as one called schizophrenic, have seen quite literal “glitches” as people”phase” in and out of view, walking through what I understand as a hole in space time.

Because this is the fun part: If all that ever was within finite time exists at the same time and same non-existent space as the undefined existence and non existestence of pre-creation then that second exists simultaneously with the first and all other points of time so minutely measurable they are perceptible only to the One who created it.

For creation by the Infinite follows understanding. So we are all at all times and in all places within and not spacetime, irregularities, the very beginning and end of every black hole and quark and thought and anything that ever was.

But not.

So yes, I would argue, there are glitches in the “Matrix” and yes they are being caught on camera.

For as we play more with technology and introduce it more into our minds and surroundings, be it through neurolink or cameras everywhere or the massive collecting of data online, nothing more than imprinted energy resting then released and represented by energy under glass, it would make sense that we see more of these inconsistencies that only some can perceive and who are called mad.

We have an expression, “sofe ma’aseh, tchilat nachsheva,” (סוף מעשה תחילת מחשבה). ” The end (of) action is the beginning (of) thought.”

The architect must envision the building in thought before creation. Elon Musk has envisioned our future on Mars and probably envisioned his rockets prior to creating SpaceX, we can assume.

Thought is itself creation as electricity connects this and that neuro pathway and we translate the thought to sound, verbalizing it to be shared with others as an idea that they then visualize within their minds.

In the beginning God spoke and created. We speak at the Seder, saying , ” We were slaves in Egypt.”

For yes, I was there. And perhaps so we’re you.

There glitches. Enjoy the ride but beware the rabbit hole. Fir there are agents out there.

Na Nach

The Nebi Musa Riots

Fringe History

Zvi Besser
6.4.22
The JTown Times

Nebi Musa riots, Credit: Commons

After a two-week hiatus due to my reserve duty and then followed by my catching COVID-19, we are finally back with a new edition to Fringe History!

Today’s column will be a somber one that fits the current atmosphere in Israel – today we speak about the Nebi Musa Riots.


This day in the year 1920 saw another violent week in Jerusalem, only a month after the Battle at Tel-Hai, disaster strikes again.


April 4, 1920 – It’s the second day of Passover, while simultaneously Muslims are celebrating Nebi Musa, a pilgrimage to the supposed grave of Moses (Musa) according to Muslims. Jews say he has no tomb. Two celebrations are occuring simultaneously.

Only this year the festivities would not pass in peace and quiet.

No one knows for certain what set off this deadly day, but there certainly were catalysts.

Muslim religious leaders delivered passionate speeches against Jews who were returning to Israel, stirring a frenzy in their worshippers. A frenzy so great that it caused them to run out and sack the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City. The riots lasted from April 4th until the 7th, killing 5 Jews and 4 Arabs; while hundreds more (mainly Jews) were wounded.

The bloody week saw a huge setback in Arab, Jewish, and British relations. After the riots a sense of distrust and malice was felt by all sides.

The Arabs and the Jews distrusted the British for essentially abandoning Jerusalem to anarchy. The Arabs and the Jews, given the bloodshed, were set back once again.


At the time, the British Military Governor of Jerusalem was Ronald Storrs, and the following is what he wrote about that fateful week.

“Enough that for the time all the carefully built relations of mutual understanding between British, Arabs and Jews seemed to flare away in an agony of fear and hatred.

“Our dispositions might perhaps have been better (though they had been approved by higher authority), but I have often wondered whether those who criticized us in Europe and America could have had the faintest conception of the steep, narrow and winding alleys within the Old City of Jerusalem, the series of steps up or down which no horse or car can ever pass, the deadly dark corners beyond which a whole family can be murdered out of sight or sound of a police post not a hundred yards away.

“What did they know of the nerves of Jerusalem, where in times of anxiety the sudden clatter on the stones of an empty petrol tin will produce a panic?

“The Police were but partially trained and wholly without tradition. There was no British Gendarmerie: we had not one single British Constable.” (Storrs, Ronald, The Memoirs of Sir Ronald Storrs, 1937, p. 348).


The outcome of these riots left profound change on geopolitics of that time. The British had decided that there should be a civilian administration ruling British Mandate Palestine and not a military one, while also promising that they would not let British Mandate Palestine follow suit to a Jewish majority or be submissive to Arab rule.

The Jews in response formed the Haganah, which not only played a major rule in the liberation of our homeland, but is as well the predecessor to the I.D.F.


Today we remember those who needlessly lost their lives in the violence of Nebi Musa 1920, and still over 100 years later our countrymen are being gunned down in the street for the same reasons.

Cheers, good tidings, and keep your head on a swivel; may we see peaceful days soon.

Exclusive: Israeli man alive after encounter with deadly porcupine

The creature can apparently hiss according to an eyewitness and even shoot needles.

A porcupine whose needles are deadly. If eaten. Credit: Wiki Commons

Greg Tepper

25.3.22

Be’er Sheva – After a struggle of a few seconds Shmuel Tepper got the scoop. Shmuel is also Greg.

Got the scoop. It’s an old Newsies insider thing.

Greg was not mortally wounded as the Israeli porcupine did not attack him though it did hiss like a snake hiding inside of another snake’s mouth hissing from the tip of its tongue.

These deadly beasts can shoot their needles tipped with poison when threatened.

Or so the old desert fable goes.

MADA emergency services did not have to be called and rush Greg to hospital within minutes of being poisoned to ensure that the poison did not reach his eyes causing them to melt within their sockets and his tongue causing it to turn yellow and his vocal cords causing an inability to speak and only scream like Sam kinison.

The porcupines needles are tipped with the deadliest poisons on Earth.

Or so the legend goes.

Nearly extincting these ferocious rodents was one of the first things the Israeli pioneers had to do in order to turn the arid dry wasteland too hot and unforgiving for even Mad Max into a hospitable the welcoming environment that the Negev desert is today.

At least that’s the folklore told by local old timers throughout Be’er Sheva.

We actually think it was a porcupine and not a hedgehog. But it was dark out and Greg’s first thought and other thoughts and subsequent thoughts and final thoughts were to not get shot with poison needles.

A cute little hedgehog which wouldn’t be much of a story. Unless it talked. Credit: Wiki Commons

He did not stop and interview the wild animal regarding its preferred species and kingdom.

By final thoughts we do not mean before death rather before removing the threatening predator, which is said to be carnivorous, from his property.

An interesting fact and perhaps one of the few in this article is that the property is actually not his. It is a rented property.

And all property in Israel is said to only be owned by the owner for a maximum of 99 years after which time property is returned to the state because in Israel you don’t mess with the state.

Or so they say.

The kissing porcupine, thought to be deadly, was scooped in a shovel then by The JTown Times Staffer before being dropped over a low fence.

The editorial staff italicized thought as Greg was acting out of fear. He never put too much thought into porcupines though they make a delicious snack in certain Latin American countries.

Or so he’s heard.

The porcupine’s life was not endangered and in any case they can bounce and roll from tall heights.

Or at least they are claimed to be able to buy a fringe internet page Greg found on a Google search and is now citing but cannot remember the name of or the web address.

Shmuel, who is also Greg, but in the way a person has several names rather than personalities, was concerned it might fire it’s needle arsenal at him so the operation was lickety split and successful.

By concerned we mean he was crying to God in fear.

If it is a hedgehog, which legend has it can burrow underground surviving the temperatures of Earth’s core which rumor has it exceed that of the sun, it, like the T 800, will be back.

And we hope you will be too, dear reader. This has been a Friday no news for Jews in Israel night update.

Because sometimes it’s not the news that tells you what happened that makes it news but us telling you what didn’t happen that makes it not.

Shabbat shalom.

DSM: Psychiatric Criteria for illness are now CRT and non-binary compliant

Greg Tepper

26.3.22

Psychiatry’s DSM for determining mental illness is changing it’s treatment of patients and criteria for diagnosis consistent with statistically minority held ideas for leftist intersectional politically driven agendas.

JTown Times
Greg Tepper
25.3.22

Be’er Sheva – The Diagnostic and Statistical Mental Manual by which psychiatry determines illness and changes criteria for such has gone woke.

The #DSM has changed psychiatric evaluation and terminology to be in course with western leftist intersectional political dogma.

Race and other non-mental or symptomatic factors will now play in diagnosis as well as perhaps sociological thinking out of line with the descriptive parameters of #psychiatry.

Verbalizing opinions inconsistent with certain political thought can now be suggestive of a mind not thinking consistently with defenitions of society, race and gender as accepted by psychiatry.

The understanding of race is along CRT lines with removal of “Caucasian” and apparent differences in diagnosis criteria for different #racialized and #ethnoracial groups.

From DSM with politically driven revisions

I just became familiar with these fringe anthropological categorizations being used by political activists to affect mass social change.

Psychiatry is phasing out gender. Binary defenitions are gone. Race is in line with US census defenitions as opposed to psychiatry recognizing identity as up to an individual.

“Patients”  now must be assigned a race as determined by government and exams will vary according to classification apparently.

Psychiatry is also recognizing race as a “social construct” so it is unclear why a discipline claiming to be scientific and medical is following US federal government defenitions of race which will mow affect diagnosis. 

“Gender dysphoria” as a mental illness is being phased out. Schizophrenia parameters appear to be widened. I have the PDFs. It is absolutely terrifying.

The changes, which affect the profession of psychiatry around the world and treatment of individuals thout of or determined to be mentally unwell by psychiatrists using DSM guidance .

The changes in defenitions, illness and criteria for determining diagnosis were made by ten unnamed people who are said to represent a variety of “ethnoracial” classifications and “nationalities”.

Spell check does not recognize”#ethnoracial and the Facebook hashtag counter has it seldomly used.

According to the Israeli Ministry of Health the American DSM is the main guiding text for the nation’s social healthcare mental health system which has incredible legal powers and little if any oversight.

During the 20th century psychiatry still labotomized patients, used electroshock therapies and incarcerated for life.

These practices have changed with the development of treatments by the pharmaceutical industry that stops presentation of symptoms with such awful side effects schizophrenics, for example, face an up to 55% attempted suicide rate due in large part to dopamine blockers, far higher than the reported 41% for trans people.

There has not been a public discussion regarding the profession of psychiatry’s complicit and partially responsible role during it’s youth in the 20th century for willingly becoming an extermination wing of the Nazi Holocaust, executing hundreds of thousands of Germany’s patients, beginning with schizophrenics.

Psychiatry also took part in mass genocide, the incarcerations and disappearances of people who were I’m opposition to the political establishment from “sluggish schizophrenia” in the USSR and Eastern bloc to hysteria in the US.