The "Israel for Canadians" documentary fundraising campaign on Kickstarter just concluded and, I'm sorry to say, fell well short of its target. So it won't get made. At least not this year and perhaps not exactly as described.

I'm very grateful to everyone who did back it. (Kickstarter being an "all or nothing" platform those who pledged through it won't get charged; you don't need to do anything. And I'll be in touch with those who contributed through other channels about refunds.) I'm also grateful to all those who worked to help publicize it, through social media and otherwise.

Over the next few months I'll be giving some thought to why the funding effort failed, from flaws in the fundraising campaign to defects in documentary design and presentation. I'm convinced the cause is important so I'm not by any means giving up on it. But I apologize to those whose hopes were raised by a project I wasn't able to make happen, at least this time.

Again, thanks very much to everyone who did back and help promote it. 

"I beg you to believe in the most ridiculous of all superstitions: that humanity is at the centre of the universe, the fulfiller or the frustrator of the grandest dreams of God Almighty. If you can believe that and make others believe it, human beings might stop treating each other like garbage."

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in a 1970 commencement address according to "Thought du Jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail June 11, 2003

"Know Thyself"

The inscription on the temple at Delphi "ascribed to Apollo himself" according to Juvenal

"an open mind, to be sure, should be open at both ends, like the foodpipe, and have a capacity for excretion as well as intake."

Northrop Frye The Great Code

"Of course, like Nietzsche, the most famous of God’s assassins, he [Ivan Karamazov] ends in madness. But this is a risk worth running, and, faced with such tragic ends, the essential impulse of the absurd mind is to ask: 'What does that prove?'"

Camus "Absurd Creation" in The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays

 "There is no significance to the sound and fury of his [man’s] life, as of a stage tragedy, unless something is being affirmed by the complete action."

Richard Weaver Ideas Have Consequences p. 20.

In the modern view "With the Enlightenment… World history was finally brought to its climax, its real new beginning, not in Jerusalem but in Western Europe and America, not in the first century but in the eighteenth. (We may perhaps be allowed a wry smile at the way in which post-Enlightenment thinkers to this day heap scorn upon the apparently ridiculous idea that world history reached its climax in Jerusalem two thousand years ago, while themselves holding a view we already know to be at least equally ridiculous.)"

N.T. Wright The Challenge of Jesus