When Rabbis Abandon Truth

 

Judaism’s Epistemic Virtue and the Crisis of Rabbinic Authority

There is an uncomfortable question that the Orthodox Jewish world desperately needs to ask: What happens when rabbis stop pursuing truth? Not when a rabbi makes an honest mistake, which is inevitable for any human being, but when rabbinic authority becomes so invested in protecting its own conclusions that facts, evidence, history, science, and even reason itself become subordinate to institutional loyalty. Judaism has an ancient answer, and it is not particularly flattering to those who demand obedience at the expense of truth. The Torah does not tell us to worship authority. It commands us to pursue truth.

The Jewish tradition begins with an extraordinary proposition: “The seal of the Holy One, blessed be He, is truth,” chotamo shel HaKadosh Baruch Hu emet (Shabbat 55a). Truth is therefore not simply a desirable character trait. It is associated with the very nature of God. The Psalmist declares, “Your Torah is truth” (Psalms 119:142). If Torah is truth, then a Torah culture that becomes frightened of facts, hostile to questions, or dependent upon intellectual conformity has created a contradiction at the heart of its own religious mission.

The Talmud should be enough to cure us of the fantasy that Judaism was ever founded upon unquestioning obedience to rabbis. Open almost any page of the Gemara and one finds disagreement: Rabbi Akiva against Rabbi Ishmael, Beit Hillel against Beit Shammai, Abaye against Rava, one sage challenging another, one interpretation being dismantled and reconstructed by the next. The Talmud did not erase disagreement. It preserved it. It did not conceal the arguments of those who ultimately lost the halakhic debate. It recorded them for posterity because the process of thinking was itself part of Torah.

This is one of Judaism's great intellectual achievements, and one of the great ironies of contemporary Jewish life is that some rabbis appear increasingly uncomfortable with it. They want the authority of the sages without the intellectual culture of the sages. They want the reverence without the argument. They want the obedience without the questions. But the rabbinic tradition was not built on the assumption that a rabbi is incapable of being wrong. It was built on the assumption that human beings must struggle with truth.

There is a profound difference between rabbinic authority and rabbinic infallibility. Judaism recognizes the former. It has never granted the latter to every rabbi who acquires a title, a reputation, a yeshiva position, or a large following. A rabbi may be an extraordinary talmudist and know very little about economics. He may be a brilliant halakhist and know very little about medicine, psychology, military affairs, history, or science. There is no humiliation in admitting that limitation. Quite the opposite: the admission is an act of intellectual honesty.

Yet in parts of the Orthodox world, a disturbing doctrine has emerged in practice, even when it is not articulated explicitly: if a rabbi says something, questioning it is somehow questioning Torah itself. This is a dangerous confusion. The rabbi is not the Torah. The rabbi is a student of Torah. He may interpret it brilliantly. He may teach it magnificently. He may possess extraordinary wisdom. But he remains a human being. To transform the fallibility of the human teacher into infallibility is not an act of religious devotion. It is an abdication of responsibility.

Maimonides understood this better than many of his modern admirers. His intellectual world was one in which philosophy, science, logic, medicine, and reason mattered. His famous formulation, “Accept the truth from whoever says it,” captures an epistemological principle that ought to be engraved above every rabbinic study hall. Truth does not become true because a great rabbi says it, and falsehood does not become true because a revered authority repeats it. The identity of the speaker is irrelevant to the truth of the proposition.

That principle is particularly relevant today because modern Jewish communities confront questions that earlier generations could scarcely have imagined. Medicine has transformed. Science has transformed. Psychology has transformed. Technology has transformed. The geopolitical realities of Israel and the Jewish Diaspora have transformed. The Jewish community cannot afford a religious leadership that treats knowledge outside its own narrow expertise as a threat to rabbinic authority.

A rabbi who says, “I do not know,” may be demonstrating wisdom. A rabbi who says, “The evidence is unclear,” may be demonstrating intellectual maturity. A rabbi who says, “There are legitimate disagreements among the sources,” may be teaching authentic Judaism. But a rabbi who cannot acknowledge uncertainty because uncertainty might weaken his authority has a much deeper problem. He has confused leadership with certainty.

There is an even more troubling phenomenon: the deliberate conversion of opinion into doctrine. A rabbi may have a legitimate political preference, historical interpretation, educational philosophy, or sociological judgment. But once that opinion is presented as the unquestionable position of Torah, the discussion changes. The followers are no longer being invited to think. They are being instructed to submit.

This is particularly dangerous when rabbis enter areas in which their authority is assumed rather than earned. Knowing Shas does not make someone an epidemiologist. Knowing Rambam does not make someone a military strategist. Knowing Choshen Mishpat does not automatically make someone an economist. Knowing thousands of pages of Talmud does not make someone an expert on modern psychology. Jewish scholarship is magnificent precisely because it recognizes specialization. The physician consults the physician. The engineer consults the engineer. The historian studies history. The posek rules within his halakhic competence. Wisdom begins with knowing the limits of one's knowledge.

The great Jewish intellectuals understood this. They did not confuse Torah scholarship with omniscience. They understood that humility before reality is itself a religious virtue. The Torah commands, “Distance yourself from a false matter” (Exodus 23:7). The command is not qualified: distance yourself from falsehood when it is politically convenient, when it protects your institution, or when it makes your followers uncomfortable. Falsehood is falsehood.

This is where the modern crisis of rabbinic leadership becomes particularly serious. There is a difference between being mistaken and refusing to correct a mistake. There is a difference between ignorance and willful ignorance. There is a difference between sincerely defending an interpretation and manipulating facts to preserve authority. The first category belongs to the human condition. The latter is a moral failure.

A rabbi should therefore be judged not by whether he has ever been wrong, but by what he does when reality proves him wrong. Does he correct himself? Does he acknowledge the evidence? Does he teach his students that intellectual honesty is more important than personal prestige? Or does he move the goalposts, redefine the facts, attack the questioner, and invoke “Daas Torah” as a shield against criticism?

If the latter becomes normal, the Jewish community has a serious problem. Because once followers are trained to believe that questioning a rabbi is itself sinful, the rabbi acquires something no human being should possess: immunity from accountability.

That is not Judaism. It is clericalism.

And clericalism is particularly alien to the intellectual spirit of the Talmud. The Talmudic sage does not win an argument by shouting louder. He wins by bringing a source, examining an assumption, identifying a contradiction, and answering the objection. The entire architecture of the Gemara is based upon the proposition that claims must be tested.

What a remarkable lesson for contemporary Jewish life: the question is not the enemy of faith. The dishonest answer is.

A Jewish child who asks, “How do we know?” should not be frightened into silence. He should be encouraged. A teenager who challenges an assumption should not automatically be branded rebellious. He should be taught how to argue intelligently. An adult who discovers that a revered rabbi was mistaken should not be forced to choose between intellectual honesty and religious loyalty.

The Jewish people have survived for thousands of years because Judaism gave us an extraordinary intellectual survival mechanism: argument. We survived because our ancestors were willing to ask questions, challenge assumptions, reinterpret texts, debate authorities, and confront uncomfortable realities. The danger today is not that Jews are asking too many questions. It is that some Jewish institutions are producing Jews who are afraid to ask them.

There is a final irony. Rabbis who insist upon unquestioning obedience may believe they are strengthening Torah. They may actually be weakening it. When a young Jew discovers that an authority figure has presented an opinion as absolute truth and later discovers that the evidence contradicts it, the resulting crisis may not be limited to that particular opinion. The young Jew may begin questioning the entire institution that taught him not to question.

Intellectual honesty therefore is not merely an academic virtue. It is a strategy for Jewish survival.

The rabbi who admits uncertainty strengthens his credibility. The rabbi who admits error strengthens his students. The rabbi who welcomes disagreement strengthens Torah. The rabbi who teaches his followers to investigate strengthens Judaism. The rabbi who demands unquestioning obedience may temporarily strengthen his own authority, but he risks weakening the very intellectual tradition he claims to defend.

Judaism does not need rabbis who pretend to know everything. It needs rabbis who know what they know, know what they do not know, and possess the courage to distinguish between the two.

The Jewish people deserve leaders who understand that truth outranks prestige. Torah outranks personality. Reality outranks ideology. Evidence outranks convenience. And emet outranks the ego of the man delivering the sermon.

The ultimate test of a rabbi is therefore not whether thousands of people stand when he enters the room. It is whether he will remain standing when the truth requires him to admit that he was wrong.

That is the rabbi Judaism needs. And that is the rabbi Judaism deserves.

 

REPUBLISHED

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/when-rabbis-abandon-truth/

This Chabad Mother Would Rather Her Child Frolic In The Cult Flag Rather Than Tell Her The Truth!

 

Variants of the Moshiach flag, used by the Chabad-Lubavitch Hassidism.

 Flying the Yellow Flag, My eighth grader asks, ‘Why can’t you believe the Rebbe is Moshiach?’

In the weeks leading up to camp, the Amazon orders always reach a fever pitch. I have been asked to buy everything from fake nails and bedside fans to Polaroid cameras. But this year’s request reached a new level.

“Mommy, can I order a Moshiach flag?” followed quickly by, “Don’t worry, I won’t ask for anything else.” If you don’t know what that is, it is the yellow flag, poster, or bumper sticker found in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights and throughout Israel, with a red crown and the Hebrew word Moshiach emblazoned across it.

To an outsider, the flag stands for the belief that the Rebbe Menachem Schneerson was sent to redeem the Jewish people. But that didn’t explain why my daughter wanted to buy one and take it to camp. In any case, I knew it was supposed to be part of her shtick, the way some girls come to camp with tutu skirts, glitter face paint, hair chalk, or wacky socks; mine would come with a flag. So I said yes. Where I drew the line, however, was when she asked if she could whip it out at her eighth grade graduation. That was an immediate no.

We are shluchim, Chabad emissaries in Atlanta, Georgia, and my daughter goes to a Jewish school that is plain Orthodox, not Chabad. For the past year, she has used Moshiach as her own little rebellion. As a pint-size intellectual, she spends her days poking at her teachers.

“Why can’t you believe the Rebbe is Moshiach? Isn’t there supposed to be a Moshiach in every generation?” Her classmates were happy for the diversion; they were in eighth grade.

She delighted in challenging what she saw as her teachers’ black-and-white thinking—and you’ve got to love a teenager who thinks in color. She was facing a teacher whom all her older siblings had before her, a woman known for coming down hard on the legalistic side of Judaism. The teacher wanted to talk about modest sleeve lengths, and my child wanted to bring in some of the Soul, and she did it the only way she knew how. Who better than the Rebbe—alive, vibrant, and urgent in her imagination—to do this through?

Her father and I have had our share of conversations with her about the Rebbe and Moshiach. We’ve said our view comes from what Maimonides calls b’chezkas Moshiach, which means we believe that someone, somewhere, holds the potential to be the redeemer; however, we hold the question of who lightly. We’re open to any possibility. Just come already!

For her school’s graduation art project, students were assigned cinder blocks on a wall to paint and leave behind as part of a class installation in the basement gym. My daughter painted hers as the yellow flag. Of course she did. Credit to the teachers for letting her.

The flag hadn’t changed, but a new generation had picked it up and transformed it into something else.

When it came time to go to camp, I left said child in New York with her cousins. She was excited to go to camp—she had been before—yet, as with many kids, a familiar knot of nerves tightened in her stomach. The difficult thing she had to do was get herself on the bus for camp the next morning. She assured me she was going to be fine. Ninety-three texts later, between 12:00 and 12:15 a.m., while I peacefully slept in Atlanta, she informed us that under no circumstances was she going to camp. The texts ranged from logical arguments to emotional declarations to the occasional all-caps plea. Whatever alchemy we did as parents, however we maneuvered the situation—this was not our first rodeo, as she is our youngest of eight, and we have been here before—she got on that bus. By herself (surrounded by hundreds of girls, no doubt). Not to mention the two hours I spent on the phone with her while she bought herself an iced coffee and a bagel and loaded her bags. Her last words to me were: "One week. You said one week. I’ll see you then.”

And then I saw the pictures.

A few days into camp, my daughter was glowing like the sun. Yes, the camp T-shirts were yellow. The bunks are painted yellow. The whole energy of the place has a certain brightness to it. But there was an addition to her yellowness in every single picture: She had draped herself in the yellow Moshiach flag. I’d known this mutiny had been ripening for at least a year. I just hadn’t given it much thought.

I was thrilled to see her happy. The flag part? I mean, I let her order the thing on Amazon. Seeing the pictures, I couldn’t help but notice the arc: miserable, then happy. I knew the flag wasn’t what made her happy, but somehow it was part of the joy.

And that was what made me stop and think. To understand why, you have to understand what that yellow flag meant to my generation.

In the 1990s, when the yellow flag was becoming—depending on who you asked—either the ubiquitous or the fringe symbol of Chabad, I would have rather polished my mother’s entire silver collection than been seen with one. I was not one of those people who believed the Rebbe couldn’t pass away. I just hoped he wouldn’t. I was not one of those people who didn’t believe he could be Moshiach. I hoped he was. Moshiach was never simply a doctrine in my childhood. It’s the thing people said after another war, another terrorist attack, another funeral: “Nu. It’s time.” It was less theology than a visceral desire for the world to be better. “We Want Moshiach Now” was our pop song; we sang it at the top of our lungs, feeling its urgency. Our grandparents had been through horrific things; we needed God to give us better.

I grew up in Los Angeles, but at that edge of morning on that dreadful day when we heard that the Rebbe had passed away, I was in New York, on Eastern Parkway. I was sitting in my friend’s car, to the left of 770, the Rebbe’s headquarters, while she was trying to convince me to go out with her brother. We had just come back from the hospital, where we had sat in the waiting room and recited Psalms for the Rebbe’s recovery. We hadn’t gone to sleep yet when my friend’s pager went off. She looked at it and we confirmed the worst. I knew the Rebbe was sick. I knew he was old. But this was not the ending we had prayed for, nor had we ever imagined it in our idealistic teenage brains.

No one braced us for having the ground completely vanish beneath us. I felt the sickening vertigo of an endless free fall. From somewhere inside this abyss, my mother told me I needed to rip my clothing, just like any other mourner. And so we did. My father took a knife and made the initial cut in my linen vest. I took over, pulling the fabric apart with a harsh, stuttering rip until there was a tear about three inches long. I moved in a daze, lost in a tradition I had never practiced, while the rending of a garment broke me, as it does.

Afterward, we sat in my friend’s house, a few doors down from 770 Eastern Parkway, wrapped in a mummy-like silence. It was my first real experience with death. I had lost grandparents before, but they had passed away in New York while I remained safely insulated in California; I had been too young for the grief to reach me. But this was different. At almost 19, the shield of childhood was gone. My friend and I had just been discussing my future and dating for marriage. Now, time had simply stopped.

We never went to sleep that night, but eventually, we poured into the street, where thousands had gathered for the funeral. The casket was to pass 770 before heading to Montefiore Cemetery. It was my first funeral, and I was deeply sad, deeply confused. Standing on the grassy median of Eastern Parkway—the heavy July foliage overhead providing our only shield from the scorching sun—I looked across the pavement. I looked past the black sea of men in hats and jackets. Past the hearse carrying the Rebbe’s casket.

And there they were.

With the world slipping out of focus, I wanted to tell myself I was imagining it. But I wasn’t. Through the sweat and tears stinging my eyes, I saw them: people dancing. People waving yellow flags. Even though the entire moment felt untethered from reality, there wasn’t a single doubt in my mind that what I was witnessing was fundamentally wrong. I had grown up with parents and grandparents (who were Holocaust survivors and survivors of Stalin’s rule). They believed deeply in miracles, in the power of the Rebbe, in the possibility of redemption. They carried plenty of magic inside them. But they were also practical. Grounded. They did not confuse hope with denial.

To me, that yellow flag became the ultimate symbol of discord—a jarring disconnect from the world I knew. Years later, when we moved to Atlanta, Georgia, as shluchim, we understood with absolute clarity that we could not be associated with the Meshichistim. The people who waved the flag. The people in denial. Even if our head shliach hadn’t made this clear, we already knew it in our bones: We would be dead on arrival. Trying to build an in-town community, to teach and inspire, while carrying the weight of that flag was a fool’s errand. Imagine investing your life in introducing people to Judaism, only to spend the first 20 minutes explaining what you don’t believe. I had been raised to define Judaism by what it is, not by what it isn’t. Yet somehow that flag kept forcing me to introduce myself through a controversy that wasn’t mine.

But you cannot always outrun a symbol.

We met a Jewish family at the park, welcomed them into our home for a Shabbat meal, and felt a connection—only for them to decline our Hebrew School. They confessed they feared we were tied to those same extreme ideas about the Rebbe and Moshiach. For years, that yellow flag represented a conversation I never wanted to have. Why should I have to defend something I believed to be so out of bounds, so fringe, and so far from reality? More than that, why did I have to defend myself against it? It was exhausting to watch so much of what I knew to be good, beautiful, and true be completely eclipsed by the shadow of that flag.

Fast-forward from the largely calm aughts to the aftermath of Oct. 7. I found myself at the March for Israel in Washington, standing among thousands of Jews and our allies. We were surrounded by Israeli flags, overwhelmed by a sense of fierce love and camaraderie. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted something familiar. Chabad boys were out in force, whipping out tefillin and wrapping the arms of men for the mitzvah. And somewhere in the crowd, I saw them. The yellow flags.

My daughter inherited the symbol. She did not inherit my baggage.

My immediate thought was a weary roll of the eyes: of course. I figured it was just the fringe Chabad teenagers who’d always done this—waved the flag, made the same point. I kept walking along the less-crowded periphery of the gathering when suddenly, those kids with the flags crossed directly into my path. To my utter surprise, they were not who I expected. There were girls in pants. Boys with longer hair and tiny knitted kippot. One girl had every fingernail painted blue and white. She twirled the yellow flag overhead with those impossibly long nails, laughing with her friends. These weren’t the Chabad teenagers I had assumed them to be. They looked Modern Orthodox. Maybe some weren’t Orthodox at all. They simply looked like Jewish teenagers. Looking at them, I realized that whatever they thought about the Rebbe—and I had no idea what that was—they clearly weren’t carrying the history I had attached to that flag. They were wrapping themselves in a symbol and wearing it with the same unabashed Jewish pride as the Israeli flags draped over everyone else’s shoulders. In that massive display of Jewish unity, which was decades removed from the 1990s and the bitter theological wars of my early shlichus, I found myself feeling something I never expected: I was cautiously charmed.

Later, scrolling through social media, I saw those same yellow flags being waved by Jewish students at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the face of antisemitic encampments. As I kept seeing the flag in the hands of random Jewish teenagers, I felt my own certainty loosen a little. The flag hadn’t changed, but a new generation had picked it up and transformed it into something else.

For this new crop of flag wavers, the yellow flag was an in-your-face expression of raw Jewish pride despite everything—and perhaps because of everything. Stenciled across the front was the word Moshiach, written in bright red. Moshiach is not a flat translation of “Messiah.” It carries the weight of an entire peoplehood and centuries of Jewish longing. It is our specific brand of hope. Our resilience. The dream of a world finally repaired. It isn’t a concept borrowed from an outside world; it belongs entirely to our own story. After all, we have been waiting for Moshiach for thousands of years.

We have been disappointed by false versions of redemption before, but this was different. This was a teenager in my friend’s daughter’s class at a Modern Orthodox school in L.A., wrapped in a yellow flag, saying, I am Jewish. I am proud. I believe there is something better coming. And then, there was my daughter in the photo, that same yellow flag wrapped like a tallis across her shoulders, standing onstage as the color-war captain of the winning team at camp, effervescence splashing onto my screen.

I didn’t conduct a formal study of the kids in Washington, and I haven’t even been able to ask my own daughter; she’s still at camp with restricted phone access, blissfully unaware of my overthinking. But looking at those photos, I know what I see. I realized my daughter loved a symbol I had spent my adult life avoiding.

Sure, there was an element of mischief. But looking at those pictures, I no longer saw a teenager trying to get a rise out of her teachers. I saw a girl who had found a way to wear her Judaism with joy.

Teenagers have a funny way of doing this. They take the things adults have spent decades complicating and ask simple questions. They look past the arguments, the egos, the history, and sometimes even the lunacy. They see what is underneath. My daughter saw something I couldn’t see because she wasn’t carrying the same pain. She inherited the symbol. She did not inherit my baggage. I spent 30 years crossing the street whenever I saw that flag. (Not literally—but emotionally.) My daughter packed it instead of face glitter.

Maybe that is the ultimate gift each generation gives to the one that follows. Younger people hold what we carried, and they look at it with fresh, untraumatized eyes. And sometimes, they remind us why we bothered to carry it in the first place. I have often wondered what parts of the Chasidic milieu my children would inherit from me. The melodies? The recipes? The stories? I never imagined they would inherit the controversies, too—and make their own meaning out of them. But I find myself wondering whether that, too, is part of redemption: not forgetting the past, but refusing to let it have the final word.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/belief/articles/flying-the-yellow-flag?

The U.S. is experiencing its worst measles year since 1991. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro criticized the Trump administration’s rhetoric, saying it is having a negative impact on communities across America.

 

Pennsylvania reports first 2 measles deaths in the US this year, both people unvaccinated

 

 

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Two unvaccinated Pennsylvania residents have died after being infected with measles, the first U.S. deaths this year related to the contagious virus.

State health officials announced the deaths Tuesday. They did not reveal any details about the people who died, other than that they lived in Lancaster County, west of Philadelphia.

“My deepest sympathies are with the loved ones who are facing this unimaginable loss,” said state Health Secretary Dr. Debra Bogen. “Because measles was largely eliminated in the Commonwealth for more than three decades, people are not familiar with this disease and don’t fully understand the potential severity of the illness.”

The U.S. has now seen five measles-associated deaths in the last two years — more than the combined total of reported deaths over the previous three decades — and is enduring its worst year for measles since 1991.

With 2,777 cases as of Thursday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this year already has surpassed 2025’s measles count.

In November, international health officials will meet to determine if the U.S. and Mexico have lost their measles-free status. The U.S. eliminated local measles spread in 2000 by maintaining high vaccination rates, which have fallen in recent years to below the 95% coverage needed to prevent outbreaks.

Doctors have raised concerns that Trump and U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are stoking confusion and hesitancy.

In a media briefing Tuesday, Gov. Josh Shapiro said he had spoken with Kennedy, who offered the assistance of federal health staffers. Shapiro declined the offer, saying Pennsylvania’s health department was able to handle the current situation.

“I was very, very blunt with him,” Shapiro said. “I made very clear that his actions and the rhetoric that’s coming from this administration are having a negative impact on communities across America, particularly right here in Pennsylvania.”

He added: “There’s real-life consequences to scaring people and not relying on actual doctors and actual medical professionals to provide unbiased information to parents so that we can make reasonable decisions for our kids.”

Federal health officials did not comment on Shapiro’s account, but they issued a statement extending condolences to the families and affected communities.

“The MMR vaccine provides the most effective protection against measles and helps prevent its spread,” the statement said, adding that federal health officials will continue to support Pennsylvania’s response.

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Vaccination rates are declining nationwide

Decades of widespread vaccinations turned measles cases and deaths into a rarity, causing people to forget that the very contagious virus can be deadly, said Dr. David Margolius, director of Cleveland’s health department and a leader in a coalition of big city health departments.

He said that some Cleveland residents have expressed irritation with vaccine-promotion campaigns.

“They say, ‘Oh, that’s not a big deal. I mean, do people even die from measles? And, you know, why do you care so much? Why do you keep calling me about this?’” he recounted.

Margolius said the Trump administration has reacted to outbreaks with offers of assistance.

“But the time to prevent measles is before the outbreaks happen,” he said. “And the way to do that is clear and consistent and very visible messaging” about the importance of vaccinations.

The overall U.S. kindergarten vaccination rate inched down last year and the share of children with exemptions rose to an all-time high, according to federal data posted last week.

Lancaster County is known as the heart of Pennsylvania’s Amish community, a religious group that is sometimes reluctant to embrace modern medical interventions such as vaccines. About 88% of kindergartners in the county were up to date on their measles vaccines during the last school year, according to state data.

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Pennsylvania has counted nearly 400 measles cases this year, state officials said.

The state has been promoting measles vaccinations as cases have risen, and about 35,000 people have been vaccinated, up from the usual pace of about 25,000 per month, officials said.

 

https://apnews.com/article/measles-deaths-pennsylvania-16c6c527c13e88ac3cdea57ffdbd2e19

Protecting Torah study requires more than slogans. Those whose Torah study is truly their full-time calling must be able to continue learning without interference. Those who are not genuinely engaged in full-time study should serve the country through appropriate military or national service frameworks.

 

Charedi politics has failed us. It’s time to take responsibility 

 

The established parties have left our community poorer, more isolated and at odds with the rest of Israel. We're building an alternative from within 

 

 

Moti Leitner, chairman of the Haredi Public party, party members and supporters attend the launch of the party’s election campaign ahead of the upcoming Israeli general elections in Beit Shemesh, August 23, 2026

For far too long, the political leadership that claims to represent Israel’s Charedi community has forgotten what representation means.

It was ostensibly elected to protect the world of Torah and serve the needs of Charedi families. Instead, it has become part of the problem. At a moment of profound national crisis, when our community desperately needs responsible and effective leadership, the established Charedi parties have offered little more than detachment, excuses and confrontation.

The war that began with the horrific massacre of October 7 reminded every Israeli of the meaning of responsibility. Thousands of Charedim volunteered, enlisted, delivered supplies and supported families and soldiers.

Yet the established Charedi political leadership appeared to learn nothing.

At the very moment that Israelis were mourning soldiers killed in battle, a party leader danced to a song declaring that “we do not believe in the government of heretics.” This was more than an embarrassing mistake. It reflected a deeper political culture of detachment from both the needs of the Charedi public and the pain of the wider Israeli people.

Every criticism is answered with an accusation, and every difficult question is dismissed or ignored. Extremism is presented as authenticity; failure is repackaged as victimhood and the public is expected to accept that nothing can ever change.

Hundreds of thousands of Charedim refuse to accept it.

Over the past two years, my colleagues and I have traveled across Israel and listened. We met yeshiva students and kollel scholars, working mothers and fathers, educators, business owners, struggling teenagers and young people searching for their place. We spoke with Sephardim, Hasidim and Lithuanian Charedim, women and men.

Again and again, we heard the same message: the Charedi public wants hope, practical solutions and genuine change.

This is why we established HaTzibur HaCharedi, the Charedi Public Party.

Israel is approaching a dangerous confrontation between the Charedi community and the rest of society. This collision is not inevitable, nor is it a decree from Heaven. It is the result of years of political radicalization, neglect and failure.

The established parties allowed small and violent extremist factions to dictate the tone of Charedi politics. Separation became alienation, and legitimate efforts to protect Torah study were replaced by provocation, absolutism and political theater.

The consequences are now impossible to ignore. Tens of thousands of yeshiva students face the threat of arrest, while families are sinking deeper into poverty.

Relations with the rest of Israeli society have deteriorated dramatically.

Most importantly, they have offered no durable or credible solutions.

The current leadership blames everyone else, whether the attorney general, the courts, the media, or secular Israelis. Some of those institutions and other political forces certainly bear responsibility. However, honesty requires us to acknowledge that the Charedi parties have also failed, and failed completely.

Protecting Torah study requires more than slogans. Those whose Torah study is truly their full-time calling must be able to continue learning without interference. Those who are not genuinely engaged in full-time study should serve the country through appropriate military or national service frameworks.

With responsible leadership, Israel should be able to establish not merely one Charedi IDF brigade, but eventually an entire Charedi division, operating alongside a flourishing and expanding world of Torah.

These goals do not contradict one another; they can and should complement and strengthen one another.

Dignified employment

The same honesty is required when confronting poverty.

Poverty is not a Jewish value. Children should not go to sleep hungry. Parents should not have to move from one charitable fund to another simply to feed their families. A father or mother who wants to support a family with dignity must be given the opportunity to do so.

Even many Charedim who work remain below the poverty line because they were never provided with the basic tools needed to succeed in the modern economy.

That must change.

Charedi children should receive strong mathematics and English instruction alongside a serious Torah education. We must expand appropriate educational frameworks, professional training and employment opportunities. We must replace a politics that preserves dependency with policies that allow families to combine a Torah life with dignified employment and economic independence.

This will have a massively positive effect on the economic status of every single Israeli citizen, and help our country meet the economic challenges ahead.

If the established parties were capable of solving these problems, they would have done so already. The painful truth is that many of their leaders are either unable or unwilling to act.

At the same time, solutions cannot be imposed on the Charedi community by populist politicians who know little about our lives and seek to force their worldview upon us.

External coercion will fail, but internal denial will fail as well.

Durable solutions must grow from within the Charedi community, led by people who love Torah, understand Charedi life and have personally experienced the injustices and difficulties facing our families.

Most importantly, those solutions must then be advanced through serious dialogue and cooperation with the rest of Israeli society.

A strong Charedi community and a strong State of Israel are not competing objectives.

Each depends upon the other.

Hundreds of thousands of Charedim no longer feel represented by the existing parties. They are tired of being told what cannot be done. They are tired of slogans without solutions, excuses without action, and fear without leadership.

We will protect Torah study, create suitable pathways for service and contribution, fight poverty, expand opportunity and ensure representation for every part of the Charedi community, including Sephardim and Ashkenazim, Hasidim and Lithuanians.

Others offer an endless collision between the Charedi community and the rest of Israel. We offer responsibility.

For Torah. For our families. For the Charedi public. For the people of Israel in its entirety.

This time, we are taking responsibility. 

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/charedi-politics-has-failed-us-its-time-to-take-responsibility/

A former Republican state lawmaker and close ally of Gov. Ron DeSantis could face the death penalty if he’s convicted of allegations that he sexually battered a child under a controversial law he supported in 2023.

 

DeSantis ally supported death penalty for child abusers. He could now face it. 

 

Palm Beach County Clerk of Courts Mike Caruso appears for an arraignment at the Orange County Jail, with his attorney Jason Weiss, in Orlando, Thursday, Aug. 20, 2026. Caruso is charged with five felony counts related to sexual abuse of a child and was denied bond in the hearing. (Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel)

A former Republican state lawmaker and close ally of Gov. Ron DeSantis could face the death penalty if he’s convicted of allegations that he sexually battered a child under a controversial law he supported in 2023.

But secret grand jury proceedings would have to happen before he’s charged. Under Florida’s rules of criminal procedure, capital criminal charges — those carrying a death penalty — can only be brought through a grand jury indictment. A grand jury hears the prosecutor’s side of a case before deciding whether to hand up an indictment. The grand jury’s deliberations are conducted in secret.

Mike Caruso, whom DeSantis appointed as Palm Beach County’s clerk of courts and comptroller last year, was arrested Tuesday on sex abuse charges related to a young child. He has been charged with kidnapping, molestation, lewd and lascivious exhibition, luring or enticing a child, and child abuse.

Read more at Miami Herald.

California lawmaker criticizes conditions aboard USS Abraham Lincoln

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• Lutheran church leader accused of molesting 2-month-old girl while changing her diaper

  
  

  

  
  
  FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WPTA/Gray News) - A Lutheran church leader from Indiana is accused of molesting a 2-month-old girl while changing her diaper.

  Josiah Junkin, a 27-year-old Lutheran church vicar in Fort Wayne, is charged with one count of child molesting. He is being held at the Allen County Jail and faces a potential prison sentence of up to 12 years.

  The Fort Wayne investigation stemmed from allegations against Junkin in Michigan, in which he allegedly admitted to molesting a 2-month-old girl, according to court records. A woman told police Junkin admitted to molesting the girl in 2024 while changing her diaper.

  The woman reported Junkin had a pornography addiction, including child sexual abuse material, since he was a child. She said he went to therapy and counseling and would tell her almost immediately if he would “relapse,” court documents say.

  A detective investigating the allegations in Michigan said Junkin admitted to molesting the girl in Fort Wayne.

  A man who also spoke to Junkin reported that they had a conversation in which the suspect told him about four times he molested the girl, court records show. The man reported Junkin to authorities in Michigan, and a woman reported the allegations to the Indiana Department of Child Services after learning about the incident.

  During the investigation, police spoke to a person who sent photos of Junkin’s journal from the “7 Pillars of Freedom,” a program for sex addicts. In it, Junkin allegedly checked that his sexual behavior puts him at risk for arrest and that his sexual fantasies included molesting and rape.

  When police attempted to speak to Junkin, he declined to do an interview but said he would turn himself in once there was a warrant for his arrest.

   
• https://www.ky3.com/2026/08/23/lutheran-church-leader-accused-molesting-2-month-old-girl-while-changing-her-diaper/

Not All Secular Jews Are In Awe Of Chabad - Here Is One Of Many....

 

Chabad and the Bondi Shooting

Rabbi Shimshon Gansbourg menorah in London, England, at an event commemorating the shooting in Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia — December 15, 2025 | PA via Reuters

 

By Michael Cohen

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I was sitting in a restaurant and about to sing “Happy Birthday” for a relative when a message came through. I heard my brother’s voice, quivering. He told me not to worry, that he was okay — I could barely hear what he was saying because the line was muffled. I rang him straight back.

Minutes earlier, he had been watching the ceremonial Chanukah getting lit as waves crashed along Bondi Beach. His children had been playing on inflatable play equipment set up for the event when, all of a sudden, the sound of gunfire broke out. Somehow, and I still do not know how, he and his children managed to get away; witnesses have said that my brother was directly shot at and bullets landed near his children. Nevertheless, his quick thinking and swift movement saved them all.

By the time we spoke, his voice was calm enough. He had been changed as a person, but he was still alive. Two other people I’d known were not so lucky. 

This article is written in the shadow of that day. Nothing I say here reflects the views of my brother. He is a deeply religious person with deeply held convictions. In this essay, I speak entirely for myself.

My roots in Sydney and Bondi go fairly deep. My mother was a Holocaust survivor from Poland, while on my father’s side I am a sixth-generation Australian. My great-great-grandfather, Maurice Abraham Cohen, came to Australia around 1893 to help establish the Sydney Chevra Kadisha, the organisation responsible for Jewish burials. 

Through other ancestors, I can trace my roots in Bondi back to the 1850s. 

Furthermore, Jews have lived in Bondi’s Art Deco apartment blocks for just as long the suburb has existed.

Simply put: As much as it is known for surfing, Bondi could be known for its Jewish population. Although it is rarely mentioned, the initial subdivision of Bondi was the work of the Hart family, a British–Portuguese–Jewish family. A surprising byproduct of the recent shooting is that Bondi’s identity as a Jewish suburb has now become firmly established in the international consciousness. Yet despite this recognition, a significant part of Bondi’s Jewish culture is slowly being chipped away.  

Let’s be clear about this: Sydney is not a centre of Jewish culture — far from it. Although economically a highly prosperous community, its cultural output in regard to Judaism has never been much. Nevertheless, the city’s Jewish organic community in Bondi was built on the idea that it was not merely symbolic but a living culture, something to be argued, debated, and discussed.

Once, there was genuine debate within Sydney’s Jewish community about Israel — then Chabad arrived.

For those who may not know, Chabad is a Jewish outreach and education movement usually tied to more Orthodox Judaism. When Chabad took root in Bondi — an area with a Jewish presence but far from a Jewish identity — it introduced an absolutism that largely replaced the previous pluralism. Replacing debate with absolutism inevitably attracts the hostility of competing extremisms. 

I unfortunately became involved with Chabad from a young age, albeit only for a short period. I experienced its disdain for secular education and knowledge, its hostility towards independent thought, and its cult-like conformity.

Nor, in my experience, did Chabad live up to the values it preached. I personally witnessed  serious child sexual abuse while I was involved with them, which they attempted to cover up.

Over the past 40–50 years, this group that I regard as a cult has — synagogue by synagogue and organisation by organisation — taken over much of the Jewish community. It did not happen overnight but over decades. Unlike the development of Bondi’s Jewish communities, there was nothing organic about Chabad’s growth. As it came to control communal institutions, Chabad increasingly excluded those who were not part of the movement — those of us who are more Reformed or secular Jews. Community spaces became effectively monopolised, and viewpoints that diverged from the Chabad worldview were gradually pushed to the margins.

I believe many Jews take part in Chabad for honest reasons, but in practice, I think its influence is often pernicious. Chabad promises outreach and connection, and those it often connects to are Jews struggling with doubt or weighing the complexities of their identities. It takes advantage of the fact that many Jews have become alienated from their heritage — whether religious, philosophical, or cultural —  and it replaces debate with certainty, questioning with obedience, and complexity with easy answers. It substitutes what was once Jewish culture with what I see as the cult of Chabad

No Jew takes pleasure maligning fellow Jews, and I certainly am not implying Chabad is to blame for the shooting, but the larger Chabad movement is something I think warrants skepticism. In my opinion, even its stated goal of increasing Jewish consciousness is largely disingenuous. Ultimately, Chabad functions more like a business than a genuine cultural revival, feeding off Jewish identity while replacing Judaism with shallow, easily digestible garbage.

Judaism is a living, breathing culture. Traditionally, you were Jewish because you lived as a Jew— through language, ideas, customs, argument and shared memory. The people drawn to Chabad believe they are experiencing authentic Jewish culture from Eastern Europe. In reality, it is anything but.

Chabad reduced Jewishness to a technical legal status. Most people are aware of  the prevailing Orthodox view that Jewish status follows the mother. But Chabad elevated that principle into an absolute doctrine, making it the defining feature of Jewish identity. The culture, the intellectual tradition, the debate and the philosophy no longer mattered. What mattered was a single technical criterion: Your mother was Jewish, therefore you were Jewish. In doing so, Chabad transformed a living culture into a technical status, or worse, a kind of lowbrow mystical hocus-pocus.

In time, traditional Judaism was almost entirely replaced here by what I would call Chabad’s McDonald’s Judaism: a Judaism centered not on centuries of debate and scholarship but on the utterances of one man, the Rebbe. Increasingly, Judaism has itself come to be reduced to belief that one man was the Messiah who would one day rise from the dead — or, in the minds of some followers, something even greater.

Whatever creativity and independent thought  had existed in Sydney’s Jewish community was replaced with Chabad’s psychobabble, pop psychology, and lowbrow mystical version of Judaism.

The Chabad Rebbe’s eccentric ideas about what constituted authentic Judaism became the status quo in Australia. The menorah, whose branches had almost always been depicted as curved throughout history, gave way to the baseless and far less elegant straight-branched version simply because the Rebbe believed that was how it should be. To me, the ugliness of the Chabad menorah reflects the ugliness of everything else the movement promotes.

Chabad behaved, metaphorically speaking, like the mafia, taking over institutions, eliminating rivals, and ensuring that everything within the Jewish community, financially and otherwise, benefited Chabad.

Chabad increasingly demands support for the most hard-line settler politics, embodied by figures such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Under its influence, the only acceptable position increasingly became unconditional support for right-wing Zionism, reflecting Chabad’s hostility towards anything progressive or left-wing. In the process, anything progressive — any voice advocating coexistence, peace, tolerance or basic human decency — is gradually pushed out of the community.

In fact, Chabad has openly declared on Chabad.org that the Lebanese, Gazans, Syrians and anyone else targeted by the governments of Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are Amalek — that is to say, worthy of genocide. That is the group now running Sydney.

Synagogues are now heavily guarded by police. Barriers have been erected and security patrols are in place. Meanwhile, Chabad is milking the December shooting as hard as it can, presenting its movement as both innocent victims and the mouthpiece for Sydney Jewry. It is neither. 

In my opinion, Chabad’s hijacking of this community, its hostility towards genuinely progressive values, and its contempt for politics centred on peace or coexistence plays a huge role in this state of affairs. If the Jewish community in Sydney is to continue, it must return to the pluralistic and moderate model it once had. Otherwise, I believe it is destined to slowly dwindle away.

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Michael Cohen is a Sydney-based Australian journalist and writer published across a range of outlets. His work explores culture, identity, politics, history, and contemporary life.

 

https://www.readtangle.com/otherposts/chabad-and-the-bondi-shooting/

Rabbi Berel Wein, zt”l: A Talmid Remembers

 

 

When people think of Rabbi Berel Wein, they often recall his extraordinary ability to bring Jewish history to life. He helped countless Jews feel connected to our rich and timeless heritage. In truth, who else in modern history has transmitted so much of our past to so many?

Through his tapes, lectures, books, videos and films, Rabbi Wein reached hundreds of thousands, some even say over a million. His voice carried into homes, classrooms and shuls, allowing Jews of every background to feel part of the great story of our people.

What made his work unique was not only the medium but the message. Rabbi Wein traveled across the globe, speaking to yeshivah students and federation audiences alike, bridging worlds that were often far apart. Wherever he went, he built connections, opening doors to Torah and history in a way that was approachable, authentic and inspiring.

There is another element of the bridge Rabbi Wein built that feels especially personal to me, something I may be uniquely able to share. He was, for so many, a hashkafic bridge into the world of the Lithuanian yeshivah.

Perhaps this was because he himself was part of the first generation of American-born boys who had the opportunity to absorb the personality and depth of the European yeshivah world and translate it into a language an American could understand. Many of his contemporaries let that connection slip away, but Rabbi Wein rose to the challenge. He discovered a way to bring the richness, relevance and passion of that world into his own life and avodas Hashem. This was something he absorbed deeply from his rebbeim and his family. They themselves were people who had lived within the rich spiritual life of European Jewry and then found themselves in America, struggling to connect with American youth. Not all succeeded, but Rabbi Wein was blessed with family and teachers who did find that way. He would often tell us, with such warmth, about Rabbi Yisrael Mendel Kaplan, who struck a deal with the boys: If they would teach him English through the newspaper, he would teach them Gemara. To Rabbi Wein, this was the perfect example of building bridges.

He also loved to share stories of the great gedolim who would visit Miami, and how he would help them navigate the American scene while giving them a taste of his own world, even as he absorbed theirs. These stories carried with them not just history, but a model of how to stand between two worlds and bring them closer together.

He created a place for so many who might otherwise never have found their way into the olam haTorah.

For me personally, Shaarei Torah was a place that served as a bridge. When I entered Rabbi Wein’s yeshivah in Monsey in eleventh grade, I was very far from understanding what it meant to be a ben Torah and ben yeshivah. My parents and I were able to entertain Shaarei Torah because it had very serious general studies and a diverse student body, many of whom were focused on going to college with SAT prep. In twelfth grade, I took all college credits and finished high school with a year’s worth of credit at Ramapo College of New Jersey.

It was through this opening that I met outstanding rebbeim and a beis midrash full of serious bnei Torah and masmidim. When I began Shaarei Torah, I had only a very basic understanding of the Torah world. After two years of hard work and the dedicated chinuch I received there, I graduated with the special award in limudei kodesh and went off to Eretz Yisrael to continue learning in the most serious of environments.

A sweet example of Rabbi Wein’s teaching approach took place at the end of twelfth grade. Our class graduation trip included a visit to the Kings Dominion amusement park in Virginia, followed by a drive north to Washington, DC, to see the newly opened Holocaust Museum. By that time, I felt I was too frum for an amusement park, so instead I flew down to DC with Rabbi Wein just for the museum portion. On the drive from DC back to Monsey, we stopped in Philadelphia for a baseball game. The class chipped in and bought our rosh yeshivah a Chicago Cubs cap, and there he was, sitting with us in the bleachers, in his suit and tie, surrounded by his talmidim. For me, it was a powerful lesson in how far he was willing to go to create connection. To this day, so many of my classmates feel an enduring closeness to him and to his love of Torah, no matter how diverse their hashkafos and communities have become.

 

Rabbi Wein in center (with Cubs cap) and the author two to the right (in Phillies cap) | Courtesy of Rabbi Yerachmiel Garfield

The main ideological relationship I developed with Rabbi Wein began a few years later, after I graduated from Shaarei Torah. I went to a very Chareidi yeshivah in Eretz Yisrael. While the Torah learning was extremely fulfilling, I could not connect to the hashkafah. I simply couldn’t find a place for myself within the Chareidi world in Eretz Yisrael, and I found the experience frustrating. I took my avodas Hashem very seriously and was learning on an intense level, but I could not embrace the outlook I encountered there.

Around that time, Rabbi Wein made aliyah. A few talmidim arranged a Friday morning Chumash shiur, and it was there that I began to reconnect with him. Through those shiurim, I saw how Rabbi Wein was able to synthesize the values of the authentic Torah world with a hashkafah I could truly connect to. Once again, he helped me build a bridge, this time between being a genuine ben Torah, steeped in Chareidi learning, and the reality of my own life and upbringing.

He never put others down in order to build Torah. Instead, he celebrated so many of our great leaders simultaneously. This gave his talmidim the opportunity to feel connected to the rich diversity of our gedolim without ever feeling distanced from the values they cherished so deeply. He made room at the table for the Ponovezher Rav, the Satmar Rebbe, Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetsky, Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook, and Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, and so many more, to all have a place together. In doing so, he allowed his talmidim to feel that they too belonged at that table, without needing to sacrifice who they were. By emphasizing the shared core values, the chashivus of Torah, and the strength of our mesorah as the central anchors, he created an abundance of genuine opportunities for connection and growth.

Although he was never formally recognized as a leader of the broader masses of Klal Yisrael, in his quiet way he very much was. Since his petirah, countless people have come forward with stories of how he built connections for them to Torah and how his message reached them in personal, lasting ways. He created a place for so many who might otherwise never have found their way into the olam haTorah.

In more recent years, some of the talmidim were zocheh to have regular Q&A sessions with him, where he shared his thoughts on current events. There was one topic on which he became more passionate than he usually allowed himself to be: the responsibility of the yeshivah community to extend a hand to other groups of Jews and engage them fully. He reminded us of Rabbi Yisrael Salanter’s idea to establish a kollel in every Reform temple as a way to combat assimilation, and he implored us to continue reaching out and building bridges so that all Jews could find a path to connect with Torah.

For me personally, I am forever indebted to Rabbi Wein for building a wide and rich bridge that allowed me to cross into the world of Torah, ensuring that I could access the true legacy of our nation and carry it forward to the next generation with kedushah and taharah.

 

Rabbi Yerachmiel Garfield Ed.D. is a proud musmach of Rabbi Berel Wein, zt”l, the Head of School at Yeshiva Toras Emes in Houston, and the author of ArtScroll’s bestselling book When They Were Young (2025). He is also the host of the popular Chinuch Today podcast.

https://jewishaction.com/web-exclusive/gesher-shel-kayamah-the-wide-bridge-of-rabbi-berel-wein-ztl/?

With The World in Utter Chaos, Peabrain Trump Is Focused On His Ballroom

 

Aug 20, 2026 Read online

At the Court On Friday, the Trump administration urged the Supreme Court to pause a lower-court ruling that would halt construction of a new White House ballroom. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the private nonprofit challenging the construction project, responded to this request on Tuesday, asking the court to leave the ruling in place. The matter is now fully briefed, so the court's response could come at any time. On July 27, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on its emergency docket to clear the way for the implementation of President Donald Trump's executive order on mail-in voting. Twelve states later echoed this request in their own application. One week later, the group of 23 states and the District of Columbia challenging the order asked the court to deny these requests. Last week, the Trump administration urged the court to "promptly" issue its decision. Morning Reads Trump tells Supreme Court 'unprecedented' threats make ballroom vital Maureen Groppe, USA Today In its final expected brief at this stage of the White House ballroom dispute, the Trump administration asserted that "[f]inishing the president's $400 million ballroom is a national security 'imperative,'" and that "any delay in the project 'presents unacceptable risk,'" according to USA Today. "When the President, his staff, his family, and the White House complex are not fully secure, time is of the essence," wrote U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer. As USA Today noted, "[u]nless the Supreme Court intervenes, a judge's order halting the above-ground portion of the project while the legal fight continues will go into effect on Aug. 21."