6 September—KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON was a public relations campaign of His Majesty’s Government—i.e., the Brits—in 1939, the days leading up to WW II. Many posters were printed, few were actually posted, fewer are known to exist. But, since 2.45 million were printed, there’s likely a huge trove just waiting to be discovered.

In all events, with the United States currently under the Democrat thumbs of feckless Joe Biden, nasty Nancy Pelosi, self-serving Charles Schumer, and hopeful Kamala Harris, Americans would do well to keep calm and carry on till non-Trump Republicans gain rational control of at least one of the houses . . .

5 September—According to Friday’s Republican-American and Chabad Lubavitch of Litchfield County Inc’s website (chabadnw.org, in case you’re interested; it’s not a bad website), since there haven’t been any killings across the street for a couple of months, the local klavern will actually be holding High Holiday services at the Methodist synagogue this season. In fact, according to the website, a sabbath service was to have been held Saturday morning at 10 a.m. That’s an ungodly hour to be out, especially on a day of rest, so I can’t confirm the service actually was held.

You may recall that the Chabad management didn’t show up for the grand opening of its crumbling Litchfield blockbusting campus in June, using the killing in the Cramer & Anderson parking lot as an excuse. Without bothering to notify the few poor schmucks who did show up. But let’s assume that the Chabad management did show up yesterday and will actually show up for the High Holidays

If one is to believe the klavern’s website, this year’s festive Rosh Hashana-Yom Kippur season will be the real McCoy, with services and sermons by the goniff momzer kludd-kleagle in the Methodist synagogue starting Monday evening; a shofar performance on the green by the goniff momzer kludd-kleagle; symbolic drowning of sins; and a performance of the Kol Nidre, a traditional Aramaic recitation—not a Hebrew prayer—made famous by Max Bruch’s musical setting. (Bruch wasn’t Jewish, by the way, though he could have passed.)

And the highlight of the festivities is a ceremony, the day before Yom Kippur, called kaporos (kaparot in Sephardic, the currently fashionable Hebrew pronunciation), the torture and murder of chickens. That’s right, chickens are abused, tortured, and killed in the name of the lord. Men twirl roosters over their heads, women twirl hens. Don’t be surprised if the senseless slaughter is perpetrated on the green. Because it’s religious and religions get away with anything.

And then comes Yom Kippur, the dreaded Day of Atonement. Dreaded because the atonement includes fasting and not wearing fancy (or even normal, comfortable) clothing when the observant Jews and Jewesses attend holiday services. In addition to everything that’s not supposed to be done on the sabbath, of course, like driving, cooking, and handling money.

Litchfield’s Chabad klavern certainly has a lot to atone for corporately and severally, but don’t count on its management or parishioners doing the right thing. Ever. The Jewish annual atonement travesty is pretty much like the pro re nata Roman Catholic sacrament of confession: the sinners confess, are shriven, then go right back to what they were confessing about, while promising not to do it again. With the full expectation—and even intention—of doing it again.

And may we expect the Cross of David that at this writing still stands proud atop the decaying Methodist synagogue’s handsome steeple to be there to ring—or blow—in the Jewish new year and bear witness to the meaningless, hypocritical atonement rituals?

4 September—It’s time for a brief, superficial lesson in botany.

The little things in the pictures have been falling from maples trees since late spring. They’re commonly called keys, helicopters, whirligigs, wingnuts, and maple wings, among other things. But they’re technically called samaras. And, since we’re being technical, samaras are fruits.

The seeds are contained in so-called nutlets, which are attached to the flat wings, which allow them to be dispersed aerodynamically, individually or in conjoined pairs, by the wind. All maples produce samaras, but red, silver, and Norway maples tend to produce the largest quantities. Samaras are also produced by the sycamore maple (Acer pseudoplatanus), not to be confused with the American sycamore (Platanus occidentalis), whose fruits are those spiked balls that are considerably less resistant to gravity than samaras.

And, to confuse things even further, elm seeds are also called samaras.

3 September—A few days ago, I received a couple of emails from Price Chopper or Market 32, or whatever it’s called at the moment. The subject of the first email was “L’Shana Tova Tikatevu”; the subject of the second email, received about an hour later, was “Correction – L’Shana Tova Tikatevu.”

The contents of the emails were identical:

“Rosh Hashanah is a two-day Jewish Celebration celebrated this year on September 6th through September 8th. In Hebrew, Rosh Hashanah means, literally, “Head of the Year,” and as its name indicates, it is the beginning of the Jewish year.

“There are many food items that are used in traditional Jewish meals, many of which can be purchased at Price Chopper and Market 32! These include Kedem Grape Juice, Golden Blintzes, Streit’s Egg Noodles, and more! You can find all of these products in our stores at great prices.”

Then followed pictures and prices of the grape juice, blintzes, and noodles.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I venture up to Market 32 (or Big Y, for that matter) in Torrington only for exceptional promos, of which there are fewer and fewer these days. But that’s for another time. And, for the record, I don’t make a big deal of any new year.)

So, after thanking the nice folks at Golub corporate, the chain owner, in Schenectady for their good wishes, through their website, I asked, “Why did I receive an email wishing me a Sweet (Jewish) New Year? Has that same email been sent to all customers?” (I didn’t ask why any place would be called Schenectady, which always requires extra effort to type.)

I explained, “My loyalty-card profile doesn’t indicate a religious preference—and had I been asked, I shouldn’t have given one—so is there an algorithm that culls out Jewish-sounding names, which may or may not in fact belong to Jewish people? And if not an algorithm, and if the email in question isn’t sent to all customers, just what criteria are used to determine the lucky recipients of the Rosh Hashanah greeting?”

I’m still waiting for a reply. I’ll report when—if—I receive one.

And Price Chopper doesn’t even know my middle name.

Now, Rosenberg is usually construed—in this country, anyway—as being a Jewish name. It’s actually a German word meaning “mountain of roses.” Some Rosenbergs, for whatever reasons, became Rosemont or Montrose, or even Rose or Ross. One, an Oklahoman born Aryeh Leonard Rosenberg, became Tony Randall.

But you don’t have to be Jewish to be a Rosenberg. Case in point, Alfred Rosenberg, sometimes called Hitler’s intellectual. He’s the thoroughgoing scumbag who’s largely responsible for the Holocaust. He was tried at Nuremberg, found guilty on all counts, and executed in October 1946. Not soon enough. And not Jewish . . .

2 September—The big news from Cambridge—the one in Massachusetts—is that Harvard’s and MIT’s 40 chaplains, representing more than a score of religions, have unanimously chosen a new chief to coordinate whatever it is they do. More than 20 religions, even in Cambridge, is big news. Forty chaplains agreeing on anything is bigger news. “Jesus!” you’ll probably exclaim.

The bigger news still is that the new chief of chaplains is Jewish. And the biggest news is that he’s not only Jewish, but a Jewish atheist. That certainly merits a wholehearted “Jesus Christ!” Hopefully, the Rapture is not upon us.

Come again? Say what?

First off, the Anglican communion, primarily in the UK, is well-known, if not notorious, for tolerating—some say encouraging—priests who may have problems with God with a capital G. Something like 15 percent of active, practicing Church of England clerics are uncertain about God and at least two percent believe that God is nothing more than a human construct. But the Jewish communion? Didn’t Jews invent the god concept as it’s preached and practiced today?

Anyway, second off, rabbis aren’t really priests at all. Jewish priests—kohanim—are supposed to be descendants of Aaron, Moses’ big brother, who was a prophet and high priest back in the day. It’s not terribly unusual for orthodox Jewish men nowadays to adopt the name Cohen (or something like it, kohen being the singular of kohanim), to give the impression they’re priestly, which in truth they can be only by birth. There are others who simply claim to be descended from Aaron. There are self-serving reasons for this purposive misrepresentation, which we won’t go into here. Who’s to know? Who really cares, anyway? And a kahuna isn’t the same as a kohen.

Then there are the Levites (after Levi, one of Jacob’s dozen sons), who were essentially servants to the priests—musicians, guards, what have you. Levys and Levines hark back to them and have some privileges denied to commoners, but are nowhere near as special as kohanim.

But, to drum it in, rabbis aren’t Jewish priests at all. Unless they have the right ancestry, of course. Rather, rabbis are teachers and spiritual leaders. The word itself means my master, as in my teacher. Rabbis are ordained within their sects—and there are lots and lots of those—only after what’s normally pretty rigorous courses of study.

Ordination in most societies serves the primary purpose of permitting rabbis to perform marriages and do things only clergy and other authorized people can do. But kohanim—Jewish priests—can’t do those things unless they’re ordained, like ordained Christian priests. On the other hand, a learned Jew may be a rabbi—rav, in Hebrew, which is also an honorific—but not necessarily ordained, in which case, he (or she, or even they, these days), has no special secular competence.

Thanks to the First Amendment of the Constitution, by the way, virtually anyone can found a religion and ordain whomever and do whatever they bloody well please—and get away with it.

That finally takes us to Greg Epstein, the atheist rabbi and chief chaplain in Cambridge, who is not abusing the First Amendment. Greg calls himself a Jewish humanist. The humanist part is nice but irrelevant. What’s relevant to his being a rabbi is his degrees in theology and lots of study. He likely found No-God the same way others thought and think they’ve found God. And he’s ordained in the bargain, of course, so he can do the dirty.

What does it all mean, then? Greg Epstein maintains that you don’t have to be religious to be spiritual, a step in the right direction, to be sure. But what’s so great about being spiritual? Reading between the lines of Greg’s bestseller, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe, we can infer Rabbi Epstein knows full well that religion was created as a means of political control, with an omnipotent god merely as the ineluctable enforcer.

And then there’s Ethical Culture, a rational, secular, humanistic moral tradition, that many thoughtful godless Jews and gentiles espouse because they feel they must belong to something. It’s a religion without a god, if you will. Thus, you’d expect Greg Epstein simply to have become an ordained leader in the Ethical Culture movement. But you’ve got to give him credit for becoming a godless rabbi instead . . .

1 September—The Litchfield Monitor, being a views medium, doesn’t ordinarily scoop the local news media, such as they may be, what with severely reduced reportorial resources. But when serendipity strikes, why not? And, in case you’ve forgotten, I’ve done it before.

So now the current scoop:

Last night, at a special meeting of the Borough of Litchfield Board of Warden and Burgesses, Warden Dirk Patterson announced his forthcoming resignation and well-deserved retirement. (Dirk’s surprise retirement announcement wasn’t on the agenda of the special meeting, but it’s the big news.)

Dirk had courageously volunteered to take on the unenviable task of guiding the borough through especially tough times—i.e., the Chabad aftermath—several years ago. And it’s due to his persistence in adversity and skillful negotiating that borough taxpayers aren’t paying Chabad of Litchfield County Inc’s predatory lawyers anything like they had originally tried to squeeze out of innocent taxpayers.

After Dirk Patterson’s departure, the acting warden will be Senior Burgess Gayle Carr, who, although only recently elected to the board, has demonstrated impressive familiarity with borough affairs. As well as equally impressive political skill, of course.

During the meeting, a visitor, who may well have been a Republican candidate for town office, popped in for a few minutes, probably to learn how a meeting should be conducted. Since masks were de rigueur, no one present could positively identify the shiny-headed anonymous visitor.