In the Holy Land.

It's Wednesday where we are.
It's Wednesday Night, possibly into Thursday, where my daughter Abby is.

Two days ago, she set off on her Birthright program. By the way, I hate that name, as it implies some kind of genetic privilege, which should be an anathema to any Jew.

Nevertheless, I do understand the intent of the program.

For those who don't know, Birthright provides a free trip to Israel to any kid 17-26, who can show Jewish lineage. Even partial lineage. The purpose is to expose, enlighten and preserve.

My daughter is a Bat Mitzvah and has had plenty of exposure to her religion. She also graduated from a Catholic High School, so she is well versed in other religions as well.

Enlighten? Well, having been raised by a cranky militant atheist father, me, and an on-the-fence agnostic, my wife, there's not much room for enlightenment. As the other campers on the tour will soon discover, my daughter is quite the Nihilist. A funny one, at that.

Preservation is a whole other thing. Some of you less-informed readers might be thinking...

"Jesus Christ, what is with you Jews and your obsession with self-preservation?"

Allow me to elaborate.

That obsession has been earned. Forged in the fire of slavery, de-Judaization, the Spanish Inquisition, the Diaspora, pogroms and less than a hundred years ago, a mass genocide at the hands of people who swore to kill every Jew on Earth. And unless you haven't been to a movie theater in the last 30 years, you'd know they did a pretty good job.

By 1945, they had murdered 1 out of every 3 Jews on the planet.

If you had a family of six it would now be a family of four. Two of your loved ones would have been butchered, raped and slaughtered simply because they believed in a God, the same god who figuratively gave birth to Jesus and/or Allah.

Also, and you'd never know this paging through the credits on a TV sitcom or if you were looking for a lawyer or a good dentist or if you were scanning the list of Nobel Prize winners, but there are only 15 million Jews on the planet today; living, breathing and sending the cold soup back to the kitchen.

In short, every Jew counts.

I'm going to climb down off this soapbox, now.

But before I do, what's with the divider separating the men from the women at the Wailing Wall (see picture above)?

It's hard to maintain the thin veneer of moral superiority when my own tribe is participating in this patriarchal bullshit.

God damn, you religious people are stupid.