I've read this book before...

There’s nothing new under the sun, we learn from Kohelet, King Solomon’s masterpiece.

Among much other incredible wisdom.

Highly recommend reading it all the way through.

Things are really coming up deja vu these days.

I just spoke to a Russian Jewish guy I met through LinkedIN who has had a remarkable similar set of conclusions about life as seen through my writing.

That is, even though he’s been through a very different hell from mine, in many ways, and climbed his way out on his own (with G-d’s help).

Revelations about footage of the border on October 7th gone missing seems like a story I’ve heard before.

Someone higher up is clearly trying to hide their own negligence in the face of overwhelming evidence that Israeli Military intelligence blatantly ignored not just the complaints of front line observers about Hamas training unusually under their noses in the weeks before October 7th…

NY Times dropped a bombshell late last week that Military Intelligence had detailed plans for an identical operations codenamed “Jericho Wall” that, if acted upon, would have prevented the horrific crimes against humanity against Israeli kibbutzim, 1400+ dead and the hostages in Gaza dead or barely surviving, at best.

It’s the same story from 1973, or at least eerily similar.

A book I’m re-reading for the first time since I was in my late teens or early twenties, called “Group Portrait with Lady” by Heinrich Boll, has rehashed some surprising ways it apparently affected me.

It’s a book about a lady who lived through WWII in Nazi Germany and a cast of characters the author interviews to better understand after her passing.

An obsessions with digestion, a certain heightened sensuality, other elements.

Bizarrely popping up again, two decades later… in Israel, of all places.

Western culture, as a whole, is on a loop of 80s music, a new Industrial Revolution (AI at the vanguard), social upheaval (5th column pushing up) and the world is at war.

There are massive failures of leadership all around.

Our enemies truly DO want us dead!, the peaceniks suddenly realize.

The released hostages detailed some of the sadistic horrors perpetrated by the Hamas terrorists on the women and children.

Why do we keep seeing the same bad movie, reading the same awful narrative, having the same exasperated discussions over and over in our respective echo chambers?

The emperor is naked, already! We know that.

What the hell is going on?

Can’t we get out of this loop?

The Old Testament offers some insight.

Not only the fact that we read it over and over, with a portion each week we’ve heard a million times (or at least enough to know a few things).

We peel back the layers of the onion or cabbage or some other multi-layered vegetable.

Either we cry or make sauerkraut.

We are meant to learn from our mistakes.

Ideally, not repeat them.

At least not too often.

Is 50 years long enough ago?

Cassandras are never welcome in polite society.

And never helpful, after the fact.

Do we just give up and willfully capitulate to history, bad leadership, repeating patterns, stupid f-ing human nature?

I don’t know.

The guy I spoke to with a similar experience wrote up his insights as recurring loops of behavior that can be broken in the same way that I recommend - changing the language and psychology, then behavior.

What can we do, the two of us father with kids in wartime concerned with lofty neurolinguistic concepts?

I don’t know.

Maybe we can affect our children’s views and understanding of the world.

Maybe we can develop our own branches of the same theory and treat people with PTSD like ourselves.

I don’t know.

Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture is playing now, as I write this.

A piece I’ve heard a million times since childhood.

Never wore down in its effect on me, despite the fact that Tchaikovsky has become basically kitsch.

I can boldly predict that I know how this loop will end.

Boldly or not, we will win.

We will learn.

A new generation of leaders will replace this one, which largely failed in its navel gazing and machismo.

Our generation will have its own time to do things right, get fat and lazy, then screw up before being replaced by Gen Z or whatever (scary thought, same as for Boomers being scared of what our Millennial reign will look like, soon enough).

The Fantasy Overture has a cheesy ending, you know it.

But it’s also reassuring.

You know exactly how much you can get out of it before the inevitable resolution.

Your heart still races. Your heart still yearns.

You are cheesy and original for even turning it on.

Power to you.

The point isn’t in the loop changing little with each iteration.

The key is in our perception and iteration in our mind…

of the distance between action and reaction.

The her Itzhar Shay (may his memory be for a blessing) was caught in a dead end with his two unit mates on October 7th outside Kerem Shalom, a kibbutz in the Gaza Envelope.

Heavily outnumbered, he and his Deputy Commander and other soldier valiantly fought against many dozens, maybe hundreds of terrorists, and saved the kibbutz despite being shot and then dying on the helicopter to the hospital.

None of us make it alive from life.

And none of us are expected to finish the work.

At least let’s complete the loop with meaning.

Help others live and live a good life, in our own way.

But we damn well are responsible for trying.

Be healthy, happy, and determined.

Have a great week ahead, friends.

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