The Problem with Orthodox Christianity

My spiritual journey to Orthodox Christianity had much to do with the liturgical changes in the Catholic Church after Vatican II. Vatican II, despite good intentions attributed to “the Holy Spirit,” ruined a perfectly good Church in so many ways. Prior to the Council, Catholic convents and seminaries were filled to capacity; after the Council, thousands of priests and nuns left what they thought would be a permanent calling. This fact alone should be enough to damn the Council that was all the rage in the 1960s. As a boy at that time, I recall reading the Jesuit magazine America, where articles praising the Council promised a ‘new springtime’ for the Church. I felt only dread reading these pieces written by revolution-happy Jesuits who sanctioned everything in that revolution as “the work of the Holy Spirit.” How convenient: make a radical change, modernize to the extreme, and then call it the work of the Holy Spirit. I left the Church at 19 when the hybrid-transition Mass was in full swing. This was the era of quick changes, when each Sunday brought another liturgical revision or addition. The last straw was when they turned the altars around to have the priest face the people like a performer on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Years of agnosticism finally brought me to a spiritual crisis in my early 20s. I then gave Catholicism another try, and my first Mass after a long absence was in a new Norbertine church on Philadelphia’s Main Line where they had an altar-in-the-round and burlap banners in place of mosaics and statues. I knew instantly that this was not the same church I had been baptized into. I found comfort in the Traditional Latin Mass for a season, but these Masses in Philadelphia were never stationed in one parish for long, even though traditional parishes were established outside the city. In the city, Catholics were either too liberal or apathetic to liturgical abuse and innovation. They went with the flow, believing, as the Jesuits of America did in the 1960s, that all radical reform, was the work of the Holy Spirit. And to question the Holy Spirit was a sin. I had known about Orthodoxy since I was a teenager. The beauty of icons, the majesty of the liturgy of Saint Basil or St. John Chrosystom, the splendor of Mount Athos. In Orthodoxy, there was never any talk of revising the liturgy or making it more pleasing to Protestants. Orthodoxy was inflexible; a living “museum” with muscle, where liturgical tradition doesn’t change with the times. And so, I became Orthodox, although the priest who received me into his Philadelphia parish did so without any ceremonials. He was a former Roman Catholic, as was his wife, and as were many people in the parish. Nearly all had left Rome because of Vatican II. Was this exodus the work of the Holy Spirit? Yet Orthodoxy, despite its beauty, did not seal the deal for me. I came to realize Catholicism was in my DNA. Getting used to priests with wives and families (a house divided; personal attention split in multiples) was odd and off-putting; getting used to priests who worked part-time as lawyers or contractors - most Orthodox priests have dual careers – or priests who never went to seminary (they are not rare in Orthodoxy) were also disturbing factors. Since becoming Orthodox, I’ve noticed that many of the young men converting from Protestantism or agnosticism knew little about Catholicism when entering Orthodoxy. Many of them did a hop-skip-and-jump over Catholicism and went straight to Orthodoxy. Many of them, as I would learn, were afraid to consider Catholicism because of “the pope thing.” Years of childhood brainwashing perhaps had made the pope somewhat of a boogeyman. One young guy from a Mennonite background told me he would consider becoming Orthodox before Catholic because of all the negative things he heard about the pope growing up, and because he thought that Catholics “overdo” their veneration of the Blessed Virgin. “The Orthodox are way up there with the Catholics when it comes to the Virgin Mary, but they are not as bad,” he said. His comments made me want to return to the Catholic Church, bad liturgy notwithstanding. Perhaps it’s the twisted secular age we live in, but since I’ve been a member of this Orthodox Philadelphia parish, I have never heard a sermon on what constitutes a sin in the Orthodox Church. Our good priest will talk endlessly about the importance of going to confession, but he never talks about the heavy sins one may commit that need confession. I can only conclude that he assumes everybody in the parish knows them already, even the “rush through” Protestant converts, but is this really the case? I’m not talking about excessive, fanatical fire and brimstone sermons, but occasional loving reminders that might align to a specific gospel reading. One former priest I know said he never talked about serious sexual sins during sermons because of the possibility of confusing children in the congregation. What he did do, however, was add an occasional ‘Pastor’s Note’ essay to the parish bulletin reminding parishioners of the Church’s official stand on matters of morality. Catechesis should be an ongoing thing. (The priest I am referring to was not Orthodox but an Anglican Catholic priest who spent four years in seminary.) During the 12 or 13 years I’ve been attending this parish, the only sins I’ve heard mentioned from the altar have to do with slander and gossip. Okay, well and good.

But why not abortion? There’s been not one word about pornography, abortion, unmarried couples living together, homosexuality or divorce. Is this because these issues have all become political? Was our good priest told by a higher Church authority to avoid these topics because they have all become politically charged and it might make some liberal parishioners angry? To be woke and Orthodox seems like an outrageous oxymoron, but they do exist (cafeteria Orthodox). As my former Anglican Catholic priest friend did, why can’t a discussion of these matters – ongoing catechesis – be included in a pastor’s note inserted inside the parish bulletin when a particular gospel reading may warrant a reminder on the more serious sins everybody seems afraid to talk about?

As troubled as the Catholic Church is at the moment, there are still Catholic bishops who dare to deny Holy Communion to politicians who support abortion, but that almost never happens in the Orthodox Church. Or if it does, it is rarely reported. Ironically, the Orthodox Church can be intense on externals like the importance of fasting – there are more fasts in the Orthodox Church than in all of Christendom – but it seems to remain silent on the great sins of the age, at least on the parish level. The good priest at my parish likes to sermonize about converting the woke, far left millennial population surrounding the parish, but he never specifies how this is to be done. He thinks that by opening up the church grounds with festivals and neighborhood friendly church events, the agnostic neighborhood women with blue hair who have had 2 abortions and think God is any far-left Democrat candidate running for office, will want to become Orthodox. In a certain sense, people like this would be good conversion candidates, especially if they didn’t know about the sins that are never talked about when it comes to confession. Thom Nickels

Liberal Women Ruin Museums

In 2023, the New York Times ran an article entitled, “Increasingly, Women Are Running the World’s Great Museums.” Some of the museums mentioned were the Louvre, the Vatican Museum, and the National Gallery of Art. But it’s not only museums where women dominate. Other arts and cultural institutions seem to be on a permanent trajectory to hire women as CEOs. On the surface, this shouldn’t be a problem. Qualified women should certainly take their place at the top if they are the best candidates for the job. But…. There seems to be a troubling common denominator here. The vast majority of the women in these positions fit a certain mold. They come pre-stamped and processed. They are monochrome, feminist, left-leaning women schooled in the progressive agenda.

That agenda might be summed up this way: they are the products of left-leaning universities where life is seen through a lens of oppressor and the oppressed. Feminist and gender ideology is also a big part of the mix, and so suddenly you have heretofore great cultural institutions like the Athenaeum of Philadelphia bowing before the latest left-wing craze to come down the pike. The Athenaeum used to be a unique place. Once an institution of great cultural impact, it has now been “democratized” in a weedy grassroots way — thanks to the death of many of the classically educated old white men on the board and the institution’s takeover by a board of political progressives, all inspired by female leadership. What happened to the Athenaeum of Philadelphia reminds me very much of what the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has turned into: a museum too focused on “oppressors and the oppressed.” The Athenaeum’s cultural offerings — lectures and receptions — has a largely woke focus. An author like Lionel Shriver, who wrote “A Better Life,” a novel about migrants who destroy a New York American family, would never be invited to speak there. That’s because there’s an ideological test every author and speaker must pass before being given the chance to appear before an audience there. This is cancel culture hiding behind a polite female smile; it’s censorship in the name of programming. One Athenaeum offering slated for December is a talk by Bench Ansfield, an Assistant History Professor at Temple University who uses “they” pronouns. On videos Ansfield appears to be of indeterminate sex — the slanted little bun on the top of “they’s” head and “they’s” choice of intricately designed shirts suggest female, but the voice suggests otherwise.

Now, I am no enemy of androgyny. The hyper-masculine male culture in the 1970s needed a huge dose of David Bowie, Mick Jagger, and Lou Reed theatricality, but that’s not what is happening today. Today, the fun theater of Bowie has been exchanged for gender polemics as serious as Marxism. By leftist standards, I’m sure the quality of Ansfield’s work is noteworthy. (Ansfield’s book won the Athenaeum’s Literary Award for Nonfiction.)

One must not forget that these prize-winning works are all judged by leftist literary standards, so if you are on the wrong editorial page, you’ll never be on their list to win an award. (Ansfield’s area of expertise in “their” latest book, “Born in Flames,” is a look into “late-twentieth-century transformations in race and capitalism.”) While progressive, white liberal women are having their moment in the sun, the damage they often do in the institutions they control has negative consequences. This brings us to the 162-page report issued on July 4 by the White House Domestic Policy Council, which accused the Smithsonian museum of being “subject to institutional capture by a radical, activist ideology that is fundamentally opposed to telling the noble, honest story of the great country we know and love.” The council faulted the National Museum of American History with downplaying the Founding Fathers and early colonial and Revolutionary history. It also charged that the museum engaged in “anti-white,” “illegal alien,” and transgender activism, and accused the museum of trying to “indoctrinate” teachers and students through its exhibitions, programming, and teaching resources. This is what progressive museums under the direction of leftist female academicians do, and it should come as no surprise to anybody. During a heated House DOGE subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill, Rep. Nancy Mace pressed Smithsonian Director Dr. Anthea Hartig on whether men can become women, what defines a woman, and how many genders there are. Like most progressive women when they are asked such questions, Hartig refused to answer Mace when pressed on these questions. Throughout it all, Hartig was amazingly poker-faced and kept repeating the all-too familiar lie that the Smithsonian is a non-partisan institution, while neglecting to explain why a 2020–2023 exhibit there included a diary from a 13-year-old girl exploring issues including gender identity. Gender identity, along with ICE and immigration, are the two chandelier issues of the left. For her part, Hartig seemed to have no knowledge of the gender exhibit and stated that she’d have to check into that. Shortly after the Capitol Hill hearing, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, wrote a letter in support of Hartig: We stand with Dr. Hartig…. The Berks remain steadfast in its commitment to inclusive feminist historical scholarship and the collaborative networks that make this work possible. If only it were possible to bring the House DOGE subcommittee hearings on Capitol Hill to Philadelphia to get institutions like the Athenaeum of Philadelphia to answer a few questions.

NAILING BLACK TEEN TERRORISTS

The genesis of the so-called “teen riots” happening across the country began as “flash mobs” in cities like New York and Philadelphia. These flash mobs were composed of mainly black teenagers who organized through social media to meet at a certain location where they could then create their special brand of havoc: fights, window smashing, and large-scale shoplifting. This was especially true in 2003, the year when New York City’s first official flash mob ransacked Macy’s.

The year 2009 saw Philadelphia’s first flash mob on South Street, where crowds of rowdy black teens put the fear of God into local businesses, especially as gunshots were fired above the crowd. “A few dozen outliers in this adolescent crowd turned violent, ransacking a convenience store, pulling drivers from their cars and, in the most serious incident of the evening, assaulting a cyclist and leaving him unconscious and bleeding in the street,” researchers Christian DuComb and Jessica Benmen wrote about the Philly 2009 riot. It was local media, by the way, that coined the term flash mob. Philadelphia’s South Street had been a countercultural enclave of head, leather, New Age crystal and tarot card shops, restaurants and small theaters. By 2009, the street had been discovered and marked as a hangout by unsavory riffraff, which included disproportionate numbers of minority youth. In 2011, a smaller but more vicious flash mob on South Street attacked a group of whites, where they broke the leg of left-wing journalist, Emily Guendelsberger, and seriously injured a number of her male friends. In the days of Mayor Frank Rizzo, this sort of behavior would have been nipped in the bud. School kids, although minors, would have been hauled into jail and then turned over to their parents, or maybe the parents would have been arrested. The candy-coated, velvet glove “Ah, come on, they’re just kids” treatment would not have played out in Rizzo’s Philadelphia. In 2009, many left-wing voices made excuses for flash mob behavior. There were Op-Ed editorials calling for more “after school” programs. The assumption was that the government was responsible for keeping these kids busy so they wouldn’t turn into rabid animals. Voices calling for the arrest of the students or their parents were criticized as being “racist” and “cruel.” But where is it written that any kid, be they Asian, Italian, Irish, African American or Indian, can team up with ethnic or racial peers and hold a city hostage? The phenomenon of violence-prone black teens running wild through the city seemed to abate for a time, but in 2017 that flame reignited when hundreds of black teens caused a disruption along 15th Street and City Hall, where several people were injured. That same year a flash mob of over 500 black teens threw bottles at police and jumped on cars in the Germantown section of Philly. WHYY’s Billy Penn, reporting on the City Hall flash mob, stated the riot was the “fourth such flash mob in 2017.” The article raised the question of why these incidents continue to plague Philly. Billy Penn did not, however, use the term ‘black teens’ but referred to the rioters as “hundreds of teens,” making it seem like the rioters were an even match of white and black individuals. The term ‘teen takeover’ is now standard among the legacy media when describing the latest incarnation of flash mobs. The term is an exercise in blatant avoidance of the truth, as many of the people who comment on these stories in print or online make cryptic comments like, “the usual suspects are responsible.” Occasionally, photos will be published of the culprits which make it obvious that nearly 100% of the rioters are black. Matt Walsh, in a podcast titled, “Teen Takeover Unpacked,” quoted one black lawmaker defending the black teen rioters by comparing them to white skateboarder groups in the early 1990s, whose main offense was not creating riots or destroying massive amounts of property, unless you consider scratches to sidewalks and retaining walls as major social disruptions. The white skateboarders, while certainly annoying, didn’t attack people, jump on cars, vandalize stores or break the legs of left-wing journalists. In 2026, media headlines regarding ‘teen takeovers’ make no mention of what kind of teen we’re talking about here, although some news pieces will mention the race of the individuals involved towards the end of the report, perhaps to thwart serious inquiry regarding just who is behind this mess, because it’s surely not the white curly-haired stoner kid who is a fan of Kurt Cobain. A May 2026 edition of Newsweek had the following headline: “Map Shows US Cities Hit by ‘Teen Takeovers.”

Newsweek cited Orlando’s Icon Park, Tampa, Buford, Georgia, Edmond, Oklahoma, Henrico County, Virginia, Detroit, Chicago, and New Rochelle, New York. A headline in the Tampa Bay Times in June 2026 read: “1 Shot after teen takeover at Clearwater Beach.” The conspiracy to not use the word ‘black’ in any article describing these riots has been going on for so many years it has now become a normalized practice, which makes it much harder to criticize or undo. James Fishback, a fourth-generation Floridian running to succeed Ron DeSantis as Florida’s next Republican Governor, came down hard on the Clearwater riot, “…It’s quite fitting that members of the media…had no issue calling the events of January 6th a violent insurrection, when in fact no one was charged with insurrection. One thing we have to confront is that black youth violence is a problem in Florida. The truth of the matter is that the group here on Friday night was almost exclusively young and black. “ Fishback nailed it when he added, “There’s something to be said about the root causes that lead a 12-year-old who was arrested here on a Friday night to riot without parental supervision.” The question is: why are children—black children and not white children – coming together in swarms to attack and rob pedestrians, and trash downtown businesses? Conservative critics point to the high numbers of fatherless/single mother children in black urban communities as proof that liberal policies have never really served black families. The king of divisive black politics himself, Barack Obama, once even admitted that absent black fathers continue to be the number one problem in Black America. As Fishback pointed out, “72% of black kids born today will be born to an unmarried mother.” That’s a major part of the problem.

Thom Nickels: Euthanasia’s slippery slope is already here

I view a lot of YouTube videos, but when a friend sent me a You Tube of a grandmotherly type smoothing out what looked to be a large piece of clear plastic wrap to dorky game show music, I knew something perverse was up. Like a goal-inspired Martha Stewart, the smiling “grandmother” was precise in the way she folded over the plastic so that it came to resemble a hood. When she put a large adhesive tape along the border of the hood and inserted a nodule or a tube connector at the bottom of it, she flashed the camera an extra large smile. Finally she held the finished product in front of her face and told viewers to imagine the plastic hood over her head, with the tube connector hooked up to a helium tank. Let me say for starters that we’re not talking about deep-sea diving here. Our homey grandmother was making a do-it-yourself suicide kit, although she made certain to mention that those who wanted an already assembled “self-deliverance” kit could send a mere $80 to a mail order house in La Mesa, California. As writer Derek Humphry states in his best-selling book, “Final Exit”: “…Waiting 30 minutes to have the bag removed is not necessary – if anoxia (zero oxygen) is complete with a properly closed system and no leaks due to faulty tubing, the brain stem will have died in 15 minutes. The cause of death is severe brain damage, not suffocation….”

Mr. Humphry, who founded the Hemlock Society in 1980, died in January 2025 but not by suicide; he passed away peacefully from congestive heart failure while under hospice care in Eugene, Oregon, at the age of 94. In his book, ‘Final Exit,’ he maintained that the hood system is a “legally, safe procedure.” The hood-helium system, in fact, has been responsible for hundreds of successful suicides. Humphry wrote that the procedure is absolutely painless. “The user simply falls into a deep sleep in about two minutes. Everybody has their own style of approaching death and the way of handling their own dying event. It’s called choice,” Mr. Humphry wrote. The “self deliverance” kit for the terminally ill is marketed as a device for those who do not wish to spend months or years withstanding the painful and sometimes devastating effects of medical treatments that often do nothing but cause more pain and agony while prolonging the inevitable—death—and making doctors and insurance companies rich. The kit contains a clear plastic hood with tubing sewn in an adaptable elastic collar. There’s also a vinyl T-junction to connect the two tunes to the helium tanks. Potential customers are advised to go to a toy store and ask for a “party balloon kit” in order to purchase the supply tanks. The truth is, once you normalize euthanasia, people will be put under social and cultural pressure to kill themselves. Most people know someone who has chosen to end their own life. Growing up, the father of a high school classmate of mine killed himself in his house garage with carbon monoxide. In the 1970s a college friend of my brother’s shot himself while a brilliant student at William and Mary College. Many years later, the same student’s mother committed suicide. In the 1950s an uncle on my mother’s side hung himself in a motel room. Even as euthanasia is legal in eleven countries in the world, and in thirteen states in the Union (all blue states, by the way), the stain of suicide continues to haunt the media and in most obituaries. ‘Died suddenly’ in obituaries is often an indirect reference to suicide. “Cause of death is unknown” can be another hint, especially when there are no medical follow-ups related to the death. This became especially apparent to me almost a decade ago when I wrote a story for the Huff Post about a suicide in Center City. A friend of mine was dining in XIX (Nineteen) atop the Bellevue when he told me there was a couple, a man and a woman, in their sixties. At some point the woman got up to go to the ladies’ room, and as soon as she left the man left the table, walked over to the restaurant’s huge balcony window, and jumped out onto Broad Street.

My friend told me that after the man jumped, a waitress fainted on the floor. “I’m a wreck,” he said. “I haven’t been able to sleep ever since.” At the time I checked all the local news venues and found nothing on the incident. A man jumps from a Center City restaurant shortly after Noon, on Broad Street nonetheless, and not a single bit of information about it in the media. How is this possible? Years ago, I had heard stories about the suppression of suicide stories because of their unpleasant nature. Some news outlets don’t want to upset readers but yet they think nothing of publishing stories about mass murders and serial killers. The Center City suicide was a very public event, however. The man in question chose a public venue in the middle of the day in a crowded, popular restaurant, and he chose to jump into Broad Street, which has thousands of people and vehicles moving up and down from north to south at any given time. The choice of Restaurant XIX was also a dangerous choice because of the possibility of pedestrians on the sidewalk. What if the man had fallen on top of someone? What if his suicide led to other deaths or permanent injury? No doubt this unfortunate man wanted to create a sensation of some kind.

At the time I called Restaurant XIX to see if management would confirm that a patron had jumped from one of their windows but I didn’t get very far. “We have no comment, sir,” I was told. When I made a second call to hotel management, I was told that a man was found dead on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, but there was no mention of his having jumped from the restaurant. There can no doubt that for surviving loved ones a death by suicide generates more emotion than do so called ‘natural’ deaths. Ending one’s own life is a terrifying act. Granted, it might be foolish, rash and even sinful, considering that many of life’s problems have a way of disappearing over time. But what does one say to a terminally ill person who feels that he or she has no other way? “Life is meditated suicide,” Susan Sontag once wrote. If this is true, then the person who smokes, drinks or uses drugs against specific doctors’ orders is fashioning their own homespun helium hood. Is a suicide that takes five years any different from one that takes 20 minutes? A protracted suicide may not be as dramatic as the twenty-minute exit; it may even give the impression that the person in question is being “attacked” from exterior forces, rather than “harming” themselves. Meditated suicide is also socially acceptable. How many times have you heard a person with a whisky/cigarette laden voice say (between coughs), “Oh, nobody gets out of here alive, you gotta die some way!” I’m reminded of all the men I frequently observe at my neighborhood Wawa obsessed with buying chewing tobacco. Smokeless tobacco exposes one to 25 cancer-causing chemicals, according to the American Cancer Society. Chewing tobacco is also the direct cause of throat and esophageal cancer. This is a form of meditated suicide, for sure. Some religious people affirm that suicides go directly to hell or have to pay for their transgression in the afterlife in unusual ways, but no truly spiritual person would dare pretend to know the “mind” of God in each and every case. While I generally loathe the idea of suicide, for one terrifying day back in 1994 when my mother lay dying of lung cancer, our family had to decide whether or not to follow a doctor’s advice — to give her a huge dose of morphine so that she could pass quickly and painlessly, rather than endure more torturous days. As we debated this issue amongst ourselves and prayed that “this cup would pass,” we were spared making a decision when, six hours later, Mom died in her sleep.

GOD BLESS THE SSPX, the true Catholic Church

On the Holy Land (The Garden Tomb is a Protestant Invention)

When I was in Israel eight years ago, I traveled with a group of seven female health and wellness journalists. They wrote for spa and fitness magazines. I was approved for the trip despite the fact that my travel writing at the time had nothing to do with fitness or analyzing the attributes of body massages. Massages are something you do, not write about. I wanted to see the Holy Land, float in the Dead Sea, maybe bring back some rock salt from Sodom and Gomorrah, while imagining myself 2,000 years ago on the Sea of Galilee. I also wanted to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I never got the rock salt because our press bus whizzed past the site of Sodom. We were at least able to smell the scent of sulfur, which penetrates the Dead Sea area; sulfur is also known to be the scent of Lucifer. Our tour director didn’t dare guess as to where Lot’s wife may have stood when she was changed into a pillar of salt. Certain aspects of that Israel trip hit me as significant long after I returned home. This was the harmonious relationship between Israelis and Arabs we encountered as we traveled about the country. It seems no matter where we went – restaurants, roadside cafes, farms that doubled as hotels, and even in the Dead Sea spas where we received those mud massages – there always seemed to be an evenly mixed number of Jews and Arabs living together and getting along peacefully. We never asked one another after a visit to a particular spa, “Were you massaged by a Jew or an Arab?” Then there were the children of these mixed marriages: a large swath of the population identified as Israeli-Arab. This was especially noticeable in many of the restaurants we frequented, where the waitstaff generally came from this group. This pointed to tremendous possibilities for a permanent peace among the two groups. At least the scent of peace was in the air. At the time of the trip — 2018 — there were high tensions between Israel and Middle Eastern countries. The Israel-Palestine conflict of 2018, or the Land Day Protests, began on March 30. The clash resulted in the deaths of 32 Palestinians and thousands of injuries (Israelis included) at the Gaza border. Two years prior, in 2016, there were multiple-armed attacks in Tel Aviv, including shootings and stabbings. Our press group was briefed on possible international friction during our ten-day sojourn. Some journalists who originally signed on for the trip opted to cancel at the last minute. One woman from Dallas told the group she had to keep the trip a secret from her family. Had they known she was going to Israel they would have done an intervention along the lines of “handcuffing” her to a chair. We laughed when she told us the story, but we weren’t laughing when our tour bus traveled along the West Bank, then the location of a lot of violence. We were told to sit on the left side of the vehicle should somebody from the Arab settlements — these consisted of shacks on land dotted with broken machinery, bicycles and burnt automobile wreckage — throw rocks or bombs. Other tour buses had been hit in the past but, as our illustrious Jewish tour guide explained, “Our driver is p-a-c-k-i-n-g.” At the Western Wall, I donned a white skullcap and stood in the male line. Separation of the sexes at the Wall was implemented soon after the Six-Day War in 1967. I was there not as a worshiper but as an historian. I was fully aware that the Wall was not part of the original temple destroyed in 70 AD by the Romans, a destruction that was prophesied by Christ when in Matthew 24:2, He said, “See ye not all these things? there shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” Even Josephus, the Jewish historian and eyewitness to the event, recorded that the Romans who destroyed the temple left so little behind that anyone who came to the spot afterwards would hardly know that the area had once been the site of a great city. The Western Wall, in reality, was a retaining wall, built as a landscaping and anti-erosion tool when King Herod expanded the complex that included the Temple. The retaining wall has nothing to do with the temple of Solomon. The holiest site in Judaism is really the Temple Mount, the site where Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son, Isaac. In my white skullcap (which looked more papal than Jewish), I went to the Wall without a note to slip into the cracks but studied the crevices in the rocks, thinking of the 17-year-old survivors of the Roman siege who were sent to Egypt as slaves. Confession: I’ve always thought of myself as Jewish in spirit. When I was 20 years old nearly everybody in Boston assumed I was Jewish. These comments were frequent enough that I eventually went to my German great-aunt and asked her if we had any Jewish relatives on the Nickels side. She hesitated, hesitated some more, and then admitted she didn’t know. After visiting the Wall, I returned to the large area where the tour guide was waiting for me. We chatted a few seconds when suddenly I noticed a pair of flailing arms behind me. Accompanying the arm motions were a series of grunts and frog-like sounds. For a second I assumed it was one of the women journalists playing a joke on me, but when I saw the worried look on the tour guide’s face, I knew it wasn’t. “Don’t turn around,” she whispered, cautiously. The flailing arms then twisted into snake-like patterns, coming very close to touching my body. I quickly turned to see a chubby Israeli schoolboy, probably 12 or 13, who reminded me of the original Spanky on The Little Rascals. He wore a school uniform of sorts and a small knapsack on his back. I humored him at first, smiling – a signal that I was cool and could take a joke – but then I saw that his smile had twisted into something else. He went on like this, dancing around me in circles, his arms now enveloping the air above me, ascending and descending in great swivels as if he was performing a ritual. I backed away from him, after muttering a few phrases like “What’s up?” or humoring him further with comments like, “I feel like dancing myself,” when the vibe changed to something vaguely threatening. Not for a second did I think a chubby schoolboy like this could be a danger to anybody, but when he would not stop and actually began body bumping me, the tour guide and I moved a good distance from him. Thinking Spanky had had his fill of harassing tourists, when he followed us with his little snake dance, the tour guide yelled at him and called security. Even this didn’t stop the little bugger, although when security arrived (in less than a minute), he retreated in fear. What caused this schoolboy to react to me the way he did? I’ve thought about that many times since the incident. Although I had a small gold Russian Orthodox cross around my neck at the time (the cross was hidden under my shirt), at best he could only see the back of the chain at the nape of my neck. For all he knew it could have been the Star of David. Or an Aleister Crowley pendant. I recently did a bit of research about strange occurrences at the Western Wall and came up with quite a number of so-called anti-Christian incidents. The bulk of them seem to have happened from 2023 onwards, and perhaps my 2018 experience was a precursor to them. What has come to be a common occurrence, according to an article in Christianity Today, are encounters between Jewish radicals and evangelical Christians at the Wall. These confrontations are usually accompanied by chants of “Go Home!” What struck me as interesting about these reports is that the “Go Home” chanters are usually very young people, some as young as 13. If I had a chance to talk to Spanky today – imagining him as a mature, intelligent adult – I would tell him that even I have a beef with evangelical Christians, rather than Christians in general. “They invent stuff,” I’d say. “They invented the Garden Tomb, which they say is the burial place of Jesus Christ. It is not. The only reason they invented the Garden Tomb is because they don’t like the fact that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Christ died and was buried, is on the site of a Catholic and Orthodox church. The evangelicals couldn’t stand this fact of history, and so they did what evangelicals do best: They make stuff up. “I’d tell people like that to go home too!”