yes. we escaped.  nothing to do until September when the courts take up the question of reasonableness.  So I thought I might find something in Thoreau.  Right? He’s the one who knows about civil disobedience.  

but it doesn’t work here.  Take for example his idea of not paying taxes.  Well, taxes are taken off at the source.  Salaries are paid with taxes already taken out.  So – what- stop working?  Hmm – impossible in today’s prices.  Buy less?  the business will go broke.

Then there’s his theory: 
“After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?-“

Well we have a divided conscience.  I’ve got a friend whose conscience says we can’t be good Jews until we make sacrifices in the Temple.  Unfortunately, ruins of the temple are beneath the Mosque of Omar.  So he’s really into the new laws.  But of course my consience takes me the opposite way.  

Anyway today is Tisha B’Av – the fast day in memory of the destruction of the temple.  And we are celebrating our anniversary is Mitzpeh Yamim – a vegetarian spa north of Rosh Pina – where there is almost no news, and the heat keeps us indoors.  So I know about massages, pools, dining hall, gorgeous views.  Nothing real.  

And Thoreau is a fiction that’s fun to read.  I go to sleep dreaming of his lugging his laundry from his hermit shack to his mother’s every week.