I feel like I’m supposed to write a kaddish for Qaddafi. And I’m having a lot of trouble doing so. What I want to do is defend him somehow. Say that he’s been maligned for decades. Tell you about the jokes Tunisians (Libya’s neighbors to the west) used to tell about Qaddafi, all the way…
Tag: Tunisia
daily kaddish: el shehadah
My business trip to Paris continued, and fortunately Mira bailed me out for a night by doing this recitation of the Muslim prayer “El Shehadah” and the Jewish Mourner’s prayer “Kaddish.”
daily kaddish: mohammed bouazizi
Mira dedicated this kaddish to Mohammed Bouazizi, whose humble reaction to bureaucratic humiliation set off the revolution in Tunisia, which set of revolutions in Egypt and Libya.
daily kaddish: for those who die in bondage
On Erev Pesach, a Kaddish for those who don’t escape bondage—for those who have died in bondage, recently and throughout history, and especially for those who have died in the recent uprisings in Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Tunisia…
daily kaddish: all that unrest in the Middle East
When even a Middle East expert chains them all together like that, it’s no wonder I feel overwhelmed, and my problem is embarrassingly trivial next to the problems of all those people who are trying to live through all this. And then there are all those people who are not living through all this—who are dying in all this.
A Kaddish for all of them.
the little country that could — a kaddish for mohamed bouazizi and ibn khaldun’s oscillation of elites
Once upon a time there was a little country. It hadn’t always been a little country, but it had for the most part been an outlier in the larger scheme of things. It prided itself on being the ‘breadbasket of Rome’ but if the Punic wars had gone otherwise, Rome might have been the breadbasket…