What Makes People Tick?

How can we make the world a better place? How can we ever make it better? How can we fix what we have done to this world, to its people? How can we, you and I and regular human beings like us, just living our lives, actually make this world a better place? War. Famine. Destruction. Poverty. Hatred. Illness and disease. Some living in riches while others suffer in poverty? How can those of us whose lives are relatively good, without war, destruction or famine, be okay with so many of our fellow human beings living in poverty, dealing with the ravages of war every day, being subjected to the harshest of what life can give? How can we, living in relative safety and security, be okay and just live our lives, worrying about trivial matters like what person x said about person y, about clothes, about make-up, about fashion, about which cars we drive, about brand-name clothing, about what others think of us and the like, while so many of our fellow human beings live in war-torn nations, deal ...

 The concept that we are all interconnected, that we are all one, is something I'm being confronted by quite a bit lately. It makes me think. Not just about how yeah, we're all stuck on this big rotating ball together and how everything on this big ball is connected and has the power to influence each other. When a message keeps reappearing, keeps coming back, it makes me think that I need to do something with it.  All = one One = all One. Me. An individual.  All. Many individuals together. Together as individuals. But also together as a whole, as a bigger 'one'. One person in a country of many people. The many people make a bigger country of ones. One individual in an aeroplane. Many ones make the all of the aeroplane. And everyone in the aeroplane is again a bigger 'one' with a similar path, a shared destination, the shared wish that the aeroplane will arrive safely and that the passengers will get to their destination. But it is more than that, less mundane a...

  This is what broke me.  Silly fool me, I figured I'd 'catch up' on what's happening in the world by checking Twitter (I mean X) before heading to bed, a few days ago. I saw this report on how women had been raped by the Hamas terrorists on October 7th. Not just one rapist, but many. Not just a man or multiple men using their body parts to do the rape, but evidence that they used other things as well. I believe the report mentioned knives, and other things too. Evidence that women were alive when that happened, or alive for at least part of it.  It broke me. It made me scared to go to sleep in my own bed. Scared because I was worried that I'd have nightmares based on what I'd read, and scared because being asleep means being unable to run from possible attackers. No, I'm not in Israel. But I'm still a woman, and there are fanatics the world over. Fear isn't necessarily rational, it just is. Let me be honest: As a person and as a human being, this re...

  Last weekend, on Saturday the 7th of October, a great number of people got together to cross a border. Some flew over using gliders. Others toppled a fence in a lot of places. Through the breaches in the fence came people. Men. In cars. On motorcycles. They didn't come through that fence to find freedom, or to flee from persecution. They didn't cross the border hoping for a better life, for the fulfilment of a dream. The men who crossed the border, they came to kill, to murder. To shoot people in their homes. To kill babies and children in their beds. To go into communities full of people, civilians, and indiscriminately shoot everyone and everything. To go to a festival where people were dancing, enjoying themselves, and to shoot, kill, rape those people. The stories of the survivors are horrifying. Stories of people rushing for their cars, driving, being shot at. Stories of people running, being shot in the back. Stories of people hiding, being found, finding new places to ...

Never Again... What does that actually mean in today's world? This What Makes People Tick? blog post looks at what I learnt about the Holocaust as a child, as a teenager and as an adult; it examines my current views on Judaism and it explains why I believe that it is still vital to educate everyone about the horrors of the Holocaust. Writing a post earlier this month about The non-Jewish Nanny who educates the world about Judaism , I realised that I also wanted to write about my own history of learning about Judaism. As writing about a sensitive topic like the Holocaust doesn't feel appropriate when also gushing about a young woman's social media pages, I figured that a separate post was in order. I was born in the early eighties and growing up in Europe, much of what I learnt about Jews and Judaism had to do with the Second World War. Back when I was in primary school in the nineties, we learnt a lot about the War. And back then, my grandparents and many others of their g...

 I'm quite certain that I'm not the only one who's recently learnt about Adriana Rosie's social media channels where she writes about being a non-Jewish nanny for Jewish families in Florida in the US. It was an article from the Times of Israel ( ‘Non-Jewish Nanny’ to Orthodox kids gains TikTok fame with cute culture-shock videos ) that got me reading about what she does. And honestly, I've really enjoyed going through this young woman's Every Single Instagram Post. Check it out for yourself:  Adriana Rosie @nonjewishnanny .  While I usually prefer using Instagram to check out photos as opposed to videos (one of the reasons I'm not on TikTok...), I have to admit that I've just been eating up the content, and have really enjoyed learning about all her experiences. This is someone who's respectful of a community with many customs, rules and regulations that may not make sense to, or seem strange to outsiders, and opens up that community to the wider wor...

 In the past few weeks I've been watching all the Marvel superhero movies, starting with 2008's Iron Man. Two night ago I watched Avengers: Endgame. It feels like the cycle is complete right now. While I don't want to give away any spoilers, for those who do know the movie/the story I hope you will all agree: The ending is poignant and bittersweet. After watching that ending, I needed some time to process. So, on coming home from work yesterday, I chose to watch the season 2 finale of Star Trek: Picard instead of starting on the next movie in the Marvel universe. The next movie is a Spiderman story. Strangely enough, I've never really been a Spiderman fan. The X-Men? Yes, definitely! Batman too. Superman, of course! I loved the Captain Planet stories featuring teens from all around the world getting together to make the world a better place. Xena. Hercules. And then of course there was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Sarah Michelle Gellar's Buffy gave me a regular superhe...