yay, israel!
despite a few days of really feeling the absurdity of most-everything here (plus feeling God's anger in the second-day-of-sukkos-rain?), i am finally, as i usually am on visits to the holy land, quite happy to be here. plus, we got to sing for hours with a bunch of people who play intruments in a sukkah. what more could you ask.

but, here's a question (n a long question - i'm wordy in the tired way right now - but bear with me...):

the posters in meah shearim. you know, the ones that take 5 minutes to read for all the "me-az heyotenu legoy...ledaavonenu harabim kamu... anshei beliyaal...laharos...velachen hatsibur mevukash...hatsilu...nishmot benechem...etc." and maybe for 2-3 words, or, in extreme cases, on sentence, mention exactly which satanic threat they are railing against this time. i love reading them as sociological artifacts (and maybe as mussar, too?), often to the point of boring my travel companions as i read every word in my pitifully non-fluent hebrew (sorry oren!). but as a means of communication/centralized idea-shaping, they're just wierd.
where i come from, the goal in making public flyer-type-things is to have a clear message that people can/will pick up even as they rush past the sign on their way to the the store before they have to pick up their kid from cheder, or whatever. so why make a sign that is impossible to skim? (the posters in question often contain bolded phrases, actually, apparently for emphasis, but the specifics of the complaint are almost always buried in the smallest print.)
have the publishers just not thought about maximizing the efficiency of their medium? or is the point sometimes not the specifics of the particular affront to the Torah Way of Life, but the general feeling of "on-guard, the atheists are coming!"?
(possible example to support the latter possibility: apparently Uri Lupoliansky has fallen out of favor in some circles for being to nice to the a-charedi elements of Jerusalem society. posters are up with his name in bold bring that bash him clearly and repeatedly, and assert that "this" is not the first or second, but the third time he has betrayed the Torah community. as to the specifics of "this" - well, there are only vague allusions about "vehayah machanecha kadosh," etc... the point is to be mad a UL in general, not to oppose a specific policy. this brings up a third possible reason for vagueness: especially when it comes to "tsniut," maybe infractins are better left unspecified, lest the posters themselves be a source of contamination...)


ps - for those who may or may not ever read what i write, i am sorry that after a long busy-doing-other-things period, this is all i can come up with for "interesting." maybe i'll fix that shortly...
until then, may our collective fate regarding water, and such, be sealed for the best over the next few days...