Points of View for the Shabbat Goy 11/16/23

Since my return from the Land of the Dead, my friends have been phoning to hear my voice. They all say I sound better than before and this afternoon Big Abe called from $7th Street to say that he had seen an advertisement online for a Shabbat Goy ie that is a gentile to turn on the lights and anything else during the weekly Holy Day. I laughed and he asked, if I had any clients selling jewelry for the upcoming goyische holidays.

"Zal zeyn." Maybe was a better answer than no, which was more the truth.

"You get someone I'll cut you in."

"I get someone, I'll get the stone from you and I'll give you a piece." I had to find new customers. Most of my old clients thought I was dead and my new young friends had no interest in diamonds, since their only possessions were their cellphones and the attached apps. As for their clothing they wore sacks so they looked like beanie bag furniture.

The conversation with Benjo immediately vectored to Israel's response to the October 7 Hamas attack. It had been over a month since Hamas overwhelmed the sleeping IDF in the Negev.

"I don't want to hear any history. There are only three possibile outcomes; occupation of Gaza, genocide, or re-set."

"We have to right to defend Israel."

"Yes, but there is not one Hassidim serving in the IDF."

"I'm religious and not Hassidim." He had never lifted a gun in his life.

"I know this, but this does not affect the outcomes. The IDF had given up occupying Gaza in 2005. It was too expensive and deadly for the young troops trained only for shooting civilians."

"The IDF is the best army in the Middle East."

"Except that Shin Bet has instructed them to shoot stone throwers instead of fighting 20,000 gunman." The border troops had been stripped by the PM before October 7 and the Hamas fighters armed with ak47s and RPGs had flooded the Negev to wreak bloody havoc.

"Now the IDF will teach them a lesson."

"Zal zeyn." "Yesterday troops had occupied the al-Shifa hospital and found fifteen AK47s and computers with Arab videos of October 7.

"There were no fighters in the tunnels."

"Never again."

"The Holocaust, no. Never, but one of the solutions and Netanyahu's options is to destroy Gaza's infrastructure and march the Palestinians en masse into the desert where they will perish in the winter like how the Turks exterminated Armenians in 1915."

"What?"

Abe like most people Abe's limited view of history had been sculpted by his beliefs. Everything was colored by the Holocaust, one of the many attempts by the Gentiles to unsucccessfully exterminate the Christ Killers.

We would never do that."

"So occupation and genocide are out, leaving only reset."

"Reset?"

"Yes, start from the beginning. Before October 7, the Infatidas, the wars, back to before the Partition of Palestine and redraw the land. There are more than two people, so create one nation with rights for all people. Peace is the only outcome. Humane outcome, but no one wants peace now. So it's back to genocide."

"The wisdom of the Shabbat Goy, feh."

"I am also a sheygutz." It was a perjorative term for a goy, but also offered the connotation of a wise starker or tough guy. Before my transplant operation I had been both. "Gedenk tat." I intoned a South Shore accent with a touch of Yiddish.

"That you are."

Shalom." The word meant peace in Hebrew and Arabic. Every language has a word for peace.

I hung up hoping for a customer or a G, which meant Goyim on the street. Peace was my mission. It was an impossibility in most Americans and Zionists' eyes, but so had been my chances for life a year ago. Gut glik far ale. It was the only way to go.

The Bliss of Fake Bling - BET ON CRAZY

Tiffany's on 5th Avenue has a very special return policy for its jewelry.

"Go down to 47th Street to sell it."

Many other people seek to transform jewelry into cash on the busy block between 5th And 6th Avenues. Some are in possession of estates or family heirloom. A few are thieves, but many are ex-engaged women, whose beaus have proven themselves to be frogs rather than princes, although the men were gracious enough to leave their former loves with their engagement rings, which under New York Law should be returned to the beau, since it is part of a contract to get married.

Most men are happy just to see their exs go without any further conversation and at least once a day a failed bride enters our exchange with a no longer magical diamond ring. Most are looking for fair value. We give it to them. Diamonds are a commodity.

Yesterday a 30ish blonde female executive came into the exchange. She showed a ring. The stone looked like a 2-carat. Diamonds have their own language of sparkle and this stone was dull as wax.

"How much can I get for this?" The woman asked with expectations of paying off a few bills or going shopping.

"This stone is not for me."

"Why not?" She sounded like a lawyer.

"I don't deal in this material."

"My boyfriend bought it at Tiffany's."

"The ring is Tiffany, but the stone is a CZ." I didn't even need a diamond tester. It looked fugazi or fake.

"CZ?"

"Cubic Zirconium." Someone had to tell her the truth.

"It can't be."

"It is."

"Sorry."

"How do I know that you're just telling me that to buy it cheap?"

"Miss, I don't have the time to waste try to hustle you. I like to deal straight. It saves me lots of problems, but you can go check it out with another dealer or the GIA."

"Maybe you switched the stone?" She was definitely a lawyer. They don't trust anyone.

"Miss, I'm not a magician." I handed back the ring.

"I want to speak with your boss."

"No." I shook my head. "I am the boss, so please leave before I call security."

She left in a huff and Manny joined me at the counter.

"Good work. Next time just tell her nothing. Most people can't stand the truth."

And I had to agree, because Manny is 100% right at least 3% of the time.

THE VALUE OF IGNORANCE - BET ON CRAZY by Peter Nolan Smith

The 2013 Christmas season had been a disaster on 47th Street.

Back in the 1990s I usually sold close to a quarter of a million in jewelry and my commissions provided a healthy six-month cushion for the winter, however in 2013 my sales from Thanksgiving to the Winter Equinox totaled less than $25000. After Xmas Richie Boy didn't need my services and my commish would carry my expenses only into the second week of January. He needed money and a lot of it, for his firm along with most ground-floor stores in the Diamond District were adrift in dangerous waters.

After New Year's Manny, my octogenarian boss, complained that the lack of sales was due to how we set up the window.

"You have to spread out the rings. Show people what we have." Manny roamed the street looking at other firm's windows. Any shop with customers inside it had to be doing something right. Our exchange was a morgue. We had very few diamond rings in the case.

No one-carat stones for the common man.

Everything was a big ticket item and the rich weren't shopping on 47th Street.

n y before New Year's I came into the city from Brooklyn to drop off pearls. I met Sammie at Richie Boy's counter. I gave him his goods and he returned my memo.

"I've never seen a Christmas like this." Sammie had been in the business over thirty years.

"The jewelry business is dead." I had been working on the street since 1990.

"Why do you say that?" asked a Hassidic Rebbi. Sol was renown for his wisdom. Many of his followers were diamond merchants. He must have heard their moans.

"Prices went up. Customers don't want to come into the city. They see the ads for Zales and Jared and hit the malls, but mostly people shop online. For everything. No one even knows 47th Street exists." I had excuses galore for the collapse of our industry.

"That's rubbish," grumbled Manny from his desk. He regarded idle talk as a waste of time. "Hard work is what makes a business flourish."

"How do you hard work yourself out of this hole?" Sammie was seriously seeking an answer.

"It won't be easy. The street has to advertise itself. Our old customers are dying off. We need new blood, but most people under forty never buy jewelry, because they can't commit to a relationship. All they have are their smart phones and smart phones don't need diamonds."

"You don't know nothing," smirked Manny. He had been in the business for over sixty years.

"Have you ever seen it this bad?" Sol demanded in a quiet tone. The rebbi didn't want anyone to know what he thought of the economic climate.

"I got robbed for a half-million dollars. That was a bad time during a time of good money. All we have to do is make one good sale and everything will be fine." Manny waved his hands in the air like he was trying to conjure a rich customer from thin air. The exchange remained empty. "But when that is, I don't know."

"What do you know?" The Rebbi stepped closer to the counter.

"I know nothing," Manny admitted in an unexpected display of honesty.

"Then you are the smartest man on the street, for anyone with all the answers hasn't heard all the questions." The Rebbi blessed Manny and walked into the cold winter air.

Sammie and I looked at each other.

"So ignorance is a blessing?" Sammie buttoned his jacket. He had to go to see a pearl merchant in Chinatown.

"Socrates said, to know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge."

"Sounds like Greek bullshit to me." Manny waved for us to leave. "I have work to do, not bullshit to hear, you beatnik bums.

"Happy New Year, Manny." I wished the old man. Manny and I went back in the years. Many of them had been good and I hoped for more to come, if we were lucky. He slipped an envelope filled with $100 bills across the counter.

"I wish it was more."

"I wish I had sold more." For his sake as well as mine.

"Maybe 2014 will be different, but what do I know?"

"Nothing. Just like me." Ignorance was always easier to achieve than enlightenment.

"Exactly. Come back later and we'll have a drink. Maybe two." My boss dug into his pile of papers. The answer to his problems wasn't in his bills, but it was better to look where it wasn't than where it was with only one day left in 2013.

Nothing really bad could happen in that time, especially when ignorance is blessed by a rebbi.