Turning water into whine

It's no surprise that I am intrigued by some of the parables and sayings of Jesus that do not have common currency. One of the parables that contains the most useful psychological wisdom about human beings is The Children in the Marketplace, found both in Matthew and in Luke.

"To what then will I liken the people of this generation? What are they like? 32 They are like children who sit in the marketplace, and call one to another, saying, 'We piped to you, and you didn't dance. We mourned, and you didn't weep.' 33 For John the Baptizer came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, 'He has a demon.' 34 The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, 'Behold, a gluttonous man, and a drunkard; a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' 35 Wisdom is justified by all her children."

Less colorfully put: There's just no pleasing you people.

The Pope's visit to Israel aka The Zionist Entity. As Cardinal Ratzinger in the 1980's, the current Bishop of Rome was a great source of grief to me. On the other hand, he wonderfully focussed my mind and I made some big and difficult decisions then that I now know to have been right. Were it not for him, I might have put them off and suffered mightily for that.

At any rate, now that I stand at some two decades distance from direct participation, I see his role differently and am inclined, if not always to support him, at least to see that he is acting in the role for which he was elected.

So he goes to Israel, having to make nice both with Jews and Muslims. Good luck.

At an interfaith meeting, an unscheduled imam takes the mike and delivers an anti-Jewish tirade. Visibly unhappy, the pope waits til he is done and then...walks out. When was the last time a pope walked out? When JPII frowned at angry nuns or shook his finger at priests working for communists, the picture was all over the place. Now B16 walks out of an anti-semitic tirade and.....You won't find it in the press that much.

On the other hand, his speech at the Holocaust memorial gets a C from the curator because it was not sufficiently clear, contrite, properly phrased, et.

I am pretty much a Judeophile and a Zionist. But I have experience with victim groups of all types who don't know when to stop complaining. And inside every victim is the shadow of a tyrant. They are like bad wives whose husbands have failed them somehow and when the guy comes back and apologizes, he gets clawed again for not using the right words. Tell me, ladies and victims, how enthusiastic will he be to apologize to you next time? The insatiable whining of folks like this is part of what has made me a Righty.

One of the 3.5 kinds of Jews who get my goat are the ones who want to use the Holocaust to make me feel bad. I gotta tell ya, Bnai Israel, you should consider laying off a bit. The Holocaust was a horror of the first magnitude, but people who show good will to you and sadness about what happened don't like to feel endlessly manipulated and then downgraded for not dancing and dirging to your script. It engenders a kind of resentment that leads to...anti-Semitism.