"Brilliant or Tasteless?" (Title Linked To Original Post)

As hard as saying "tasteless" is, I have to say "tasteless". Also, as I said before, Hitler (Y'Sh) did have an abusive mother (and, might I add, an abusive stepdad), and that's what adds an element of tastlessness to it. Abuse begets abuse; hurt begets hurt, and evil begets evil. Some of the other most-vile people who ever lived were also subject to abuse by vile people (who were also probably abused). I can only hope that someone who has abused and/or is abusing a child suddenly has the thought that his or her child may turn out like (G-d forbid) Hitler (Y'Sh) and Stalin (Y'Sh). 

Abuse certainly doesn't excuse abuse, but abusers do affect abusees to be abusers in return if the abusees do not get what help they need. 
Also, some of the comments wishing that what happened in the commercial took place are actually against Tanakh. "As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways" (From Ezekiel 33:11). Meanwhile, while we're getting into counterfactuals, just imagine that someone could've saved Hitler (Y'Sh) from his abusive household and/or gotten him help--then what? Would the Holocaust have happened if a victim of abuse had not turned into a vile and ethnocidal totalitarian?
We're supposed to be about tikun ha'olam here, and wishing that an abuse victim had been killed when he was a child instead of wishing that he had gotten what help he needed is not in the spirit of tikun ha'olam.

My Response To "Taking My First Trip to Ukraine, Under the Watchful Eyes of Jesus"

Firstly, I think that brushing away the "holy water" was unnecessary. Unless one puts meaning behind an item or object, the item or object is just the said item or object--at least in cases where the object is not inherently signified or set apart as something. Secondly, when Malina wrote about how her "dad stood slouching in a back corner pew", I was reminded of my own Crypto-Jewish granddad falling asleep in the back of the church that he had his family attend (about which I was told by my aunt Mary--who was, although we are Ashkenazi, named for both of her then-living grandmothers [Mary Trudnak Czarnecki (z"l), the granddaughter of Mária Nagyová Trudnyaková; and Marysia "Mary" Rusnak Gaydos, a Levite and a granddaughter of Mária Nováková Rusznáková]. She distinctly remembers that Pop-Pop would fall asleep in the back of the church while Grandma would Dad and Aunt Mary with her in the church service.).

Thirdly, I relate to Malina's point about how "this is not how I envisioned my first trip to the country where my maternal grandmother... and her entire family fled during pogroms". As someone who just discovered that I'm Jewish and a bat-Anusim a while back, I myself am trying to recover of much of my Jewishness as possible (I was honestly raised to believe that my dad was fully Slavic [Polish, Lithuanian, and Czechoslovakian--I had no idea that he was an Ashkenazi Jew and Matrilineal Levite.]). Granted that I personally believe that one is still Jewish when he or she believes in Jesus (as I myself do), but I agree that a Jew is (to say the very least and maybe understating at least a little bit) remiss to have a Vaticanist ("Catholic", "universal") wedding. I also had to convince my sister and her to-be husband to incorporate some Messianic Jewish traditions into their to-be home (Granted that their officiant will be a Messianic Jewish pastor, but the wedding will still be traditionally Protestant and not Messianic Jewish--and as much as I love my to-be-in-law brother, I was hoping that my sister would find a fellow Jewish believer to marry.).