Rosh Hashanah
Almost every night, late at night, I watch documentaries about the biggest event in the history of the world, World War II. This was not that long ago. I was still alive in its closing months since I was born in November 1944.

As the documentaries show me, every day until Hitler finally blew his brains out, thousands of Jews were murdered by the Nazis. There were days when 10,000 Jews a day were murdered by the SS and the Einsatzgruppen and their friends.

Children, old people, women, men. Often put to work briefly as slave laborers, then shot or gassed in the horrific gas chambers by Zyklon B, a close cousin to today’s household and agricultural pesticides.

I’ve been in those chambers. I’ve smelled the poison. Another brilliant, German invention. Make cyanide into a gas.

Jews lived and died in terror and agony. Small children and old people died of typhus or of beating or bullets or being buried alive — such as the Russians are even now doing in Ukraine. (And is it not a disgrace to the GOP that much of it is against further aid to the most important people on the planet right now — the Ukrainians fighting for freedom and the rule of law?)

But yesterday, I went with my dear friends, Mike and Nancy Visser of Calgary, and my nurse, Raul Espejon, to the nearby Beverly Hills Hotel for lunch. One of the smaller synagogues in Beverly Hills had rented the main ballroom for “High Holiday Services” because the crowd for these days is far larger than what their shuls can accommodate.

Services were just getting out. The sidewalks and the driveway were jammed with worshippers carrying their prayer books. Alex — not Jewish — and I had prayed at home.

I was overwhelmed by the sight a few blocks from our home. Smiling, laughing Jews not in fear, not in hiding, not choking on cyanide gas in the free air of the greatest gift of God man has ever been given: America.

Over and over in my head, I sang “God Bless America,” God’s miracle on earth: America. And if the American ‘liberals’ are too stupid to get it, my wife and I are not.

GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!!

Monday
In the summer of 1864, as part of ongoing fighting between the forces of the Confederacy under Gen. Jubal Early, known as the Valley Campaigns, and far more numerous Union forces under a brilliant Cavalryman named Sheridan, Southern soldiers crossed the Potomac. They circled north of the District of Columbia through Silver Spring, Maryland, my hometown, and bivouacked for the night.

They raided a restaurant and broke into the manor house of Union postmaster general, Montgomery Blair — for whom my high school was and is named. They ransacked Gen. Blair’s lavishly stocked wine cellar. They drank their fill, got drunk and ill. Then they passed out and got up the next morning to attack nearby Fort Stevens, an important part of the ring of forts guarding D.C. from Confederate invasion.

It was an interesting battle. Abe Lincoln rode out wearing his stovepipe hat. A Confederate sniper shot at him and put a hole in the hat.

The Union commander in the sector shouted, “Get down you fool. Do you want your head blown off?”

The Southerners were short of food and ammo and soon withdrew.

But as I noted, it was an interesting engagement. There was an actual attack on the Capital City. Many shots were fired. I do not know what the total casualties were.

I do know that there were no prosecutors called. No indictments were issued. And it was all soon forgotten except for the soldiers on both sides, the Union soldier who had called Lincoln a fool (Oliver Wendell Holmes), and it all disappeared into history.

Now, with no shots being fired by any soldiers, one fatality caused by the local police, the nation is still transfixed as if an attack from the Third Reich were happening in front of our eyes, God forbid.

Drama is queen now. Not history.