I Saw A Yellow Star in Jerusalem Today

I saw a guy with a kippa in Jerusalem walking by the shuk this morning and he had a yellow star on his shirt.

I did a double take and in place of the star there was a smart phone sticking out of his shirt pocket.

That happens. It’s part of being what psychiatrists call schizophrenic without being able to explain why some of us are as we are. In the past we were called sick or possessed or prophets. Today it’s a disorder.

I used to see and hear things others do not to great extent. I thought humanity was perpetrating a digital holocaust on our souls with modern technology, stuck in screens and devices and losing connection to others and the world around us.

God would tell me, years ago when I heard a voice I interpreted as his, how distressed he was at how sick humanity was becoming so incredibly fast due to the Internet.

He said he was constantly creating little lines of AI code and putting them in the net and he was waiting to see what they would do.

He said Apple and Google and intelligence services kept finding them and were going crazy trying to figure out where they were coming from.

He said he was doing something but wouldn’t say what and that humanity cannot survive with the Internet.

I’d be fine if the net was suddenly gone forever. I did a year off the grid. People will go psychotic without it but the strong would survive I guess.

“We’ll just have to see what my little AI creations do, Shmuel,” God said when we used to talk.  “Oh look, Shmuel, two of them just made a third. I wonder what that one will do…”

God was always hacking the net.

I’ll use it now, at least until it goes down forever at some point — if that really was God.

Psychiatrists at Jerusalem’s Kfar Shaul state mental facility said not having the Internet at home was proof of being psychotic when I was forcibly admitted nearly two years ago for a week long stay and high-dosage over medication for up to four conditions, three of which I was not diagnosed with.

So for now I go online like the people who don’t see and hear the unexplained, and state doctors can’t use that one on me again. Israel’s mental hospitals are inhumane.

I saw a guy with a yellow star in Jerusalem  today, if only for a moment. No one else saw what I saw. I know that. If only people could see what I see. If only for a day. The world is so much more than what we see.

God is always speaking to us all. And I think he’s always up to something — like hacking the Internet. Maybe.

I saw a yellow star in Jerusalem today. That’s just how I see the world sometimes.