The European Commission recently decided to refuse funding for Israeli projects in settlements beyond its 1967 borders and to place labels on settlement-made products to enable Europeans to boycott these items (EU Observer, July 16, 2013). However, Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu sees the EU mandates as a threat to national sovereignty: “I will not let anybody harm Israelis living in Judea and Samaria, the Golan and Jerusalem… We will not accept any external dictates regarding borders” (ibid.).

My family went through hard economic times in 1971. My father lost his job as a pharmaceutical salesman due to a company merger and he was unemployed for quite a while. As a result, finances were very tight, so our family of six no longer enjoyed many of the niceties to which we were accustomed. Mother was determined to save money.

When I first began attending God's Church in the early 1970s, a woman who seemed old to me at the time "adopted" me and took me under her wing. She was a most remarkable woman. She was married at 17, but when she learned God's truth years later, her husband gave her a choice: their marriage or the Church. At a time when women did not strike out on their own, she and her sons had to live alone because she rightly chose God. She chose to live as a "spiritual widow" rather than remarry, yet she did not pity herself. She was happy and outgoing. Almost every week, you could find her entertaining brethren at her home after services. She often prepared a big Sabbath meal for her guests. It was very difficult to leave her home without her having given you something.