Full-Page Ad In The Jerusalem Post - “Instead of spending money to keep bochurim out of the army, let’s invest in finding ways to support their Torah learning while in the army.

 

The Abraham Accords Were Never More Than A Trump Photo-Op!

 

West Bank annexation could end Israeli normalization hopes, Saudi crown prince warns - KAN

 

This comes after a similar warning from the UAE, which stated that any annexation would be a red flag that could lead his country to exit the Abraham Accords.

Israel’s annexation of the West Bank would end any chance of normalization, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) said on Saturday, according to a report by Israeli public broadcaster, KAN News.

MBS's comments came during a meeting with UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ) in Riyadh, according to the report.

MBZ previously issued a similar warning, stating that any annexation would be a "red flag" that could lead to the Gulf country exiting the Abraham Accords.

The two leaders agreed in Riyadh that if Israel moves forward with West Bank annexation, then withdrawal from the Abraham Accords would be a real possibility, according to a source in the Saudi royal family cited by KAN.

The source added that annexation would also kill the chances of normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. He further noted that by taking such steps, Israel is playing into the hands of Iran and Hamas, whose interest is to block ties between Israel and Arab states.

 

Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (L), President of the United Arab Emirates, stands for a photograph with Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz (R), in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia September 3, 2025. 

 

UAE, Saudi Arabia push for a Palestinian State

 

The report also specified how Saudi Arabia’s endgame goal seems to be the recognition of a Palestinian state and a two-state solution to the conflict.

On Wednesday, MBZ wrote on X/Twitter: "In these challenging times, the UAE sends a clear message: annexation is a red line, and peace through a two-state solution must remain the path forward."

The Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and the UAE in 2020, were signed on the basis that Israel would forgo applying sovereignty in the West Bank in exchange for normalized relations.

Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan are also signatories to the accords, which were signed during the first term of the Trump administration.

 

https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-866569?

And these "guardians", who refer to themselves as the "eini ha'edah" or the eyes of the community, have gone blind!

 

The UOJ Perspective - As relevant today as ever!

A Time to Cry - A Time to Learn What is Genuine and What Are Lies!

The # 1 Most Widely Read Post of all 2011 

The events of the past several years, very obviously demonstrate the way you and your leaders understand our cultural history. But for the few of us that truly understand our history, as I do, untangling some of its complex strands has practical and intellectual consequences.

In my own case, the hardest - and the most challenging - is my never-ending research of Judaism's core values. I had to unlearn what I thought I knew, and was forced to shed presuppositions I had grown up with and taken for granted internally and intellectually.

This type of introspection, difficult to the extreme, has given me the depth of understanding of the Jewish doctrines to which is part of my very being, embedded in my DNA, and has assisted me in determining, at least for myself, what is divine and what is human.

For those who will never experience my struggle, there is no contradiction at all to the divine and human perception, the challenge is integrating the two. They are not diametrically opposed to one another as your ignorant rabbis would have you believe. They rule out that learned and spiritually inclined Jews, have always sought to discern spiritual truth via their intuition, reflection, senses, and creative imagination.

The rabbis that will deny you your God-given intellect, to experience on your own what humankind was destined to evolve into, a mirror-image of the beauty of what could and should be the Divine will of chochmat ha'briah; the understanding of the evolution of the intellect to adapt to today's realities of truth and practicality. What they would want you to forget, that only with the shedding of the "Church" as the arbiter of truth and morality in the U.S. Constitution, a mere couple of hundred of years ago, was then civilization, at least the United States, able to remove its intellectual shackles burdened and encumbered by nonsense, cruelty, ignorance and hell.

We've developed more in the last few hundred years, than we have in the last untold thousands. That does not come without a price, however. But that is not the thrust of this post.

Rabbis who will deny such experiences, can teach us anything they choose to about God,and have always identified themselves as our "guardians" of the ancient traditions, or Mesorah. They will preach with fire in their eyes and bimah-banging that it is only they that can determine your faithfulness - by your ability to abide by their interpretation of what was handed down from ancient witnesses -- never adding or subtracting anything unless you consult with them first. And these "guardians", who refer to themselves as the "eini ha'edah" or the eyes of the community, that this view of their role expresses appropriate humility; and it vests them and them alone of the Divine Truth, with God's own authority.

These so-called leaders, of course could not ban the imagination entirely, but they effectively channeled your religious imagination to support their opinions, no matter how cruel and ignorant they may be. Everything you are, they teach, is because you are merely an extension of them, not individuals who have the ability to know right from wrong. And if you stray; like Heaven forbid, do not consult with them if an ongoing series of heinous crimes and cover ups are transpiring under your noses, by the very rabbis that will have you consult with them only, than it is you that is the heretic, the maskil, the sheigetz, the oisvorf and the menuvel.

But in fact, these "heretics" having left the intellectual Jewish ghettos of New York, have impoverished the very system that they outgrew. These "heretics" often walk alone - despite the fact that the spiritual inquiry that they undertook, forcing them to leave their ghettos of origin behind, have become primary sources of inspiration to tens of thousands, and eventually their ideas to the vast majority of Jews, because ultimately I pray "right makes might"!

What such people seek, however, is NOT a different set of rules and obligations to their faith, but rather insights or intimations of the Divine, that would validate themselves in experience. Some who have engaged on this path pursue it in voluntary solitude; others participate in various forms of worship, prayer and action, or a combination of the above.

Engaging in such a practice requires the highest form of faith, or belief, but it also involves so much more; the trust that enables us to commit ourselves to what we hope and love. We have the knowledge and experience to declare boldly; "THIS IS NOT SO, I DO NOT ACCEPT THAT!"

The sociologist Peter Berger points out that everyone who participates in tradition today chooses among elements of that tradition. We survived thousands of years BECAUSE we were able to relive, reinvent, and transform what we received.

This act of choice - which the term heresy originally meant - leads us back to the problem that Orthodoxy meant to resolve; how can we tell truth from lies? What is genuine and thus connects us with one another and with reality, and what is shallow, self-serving, or evil? Anyone who has seen foolishness, sentimentality, delusion, and murderous rage disguised as God's truth, knows that there is no easy answer to this dichotomy. Orthodox Judaism distrusts your capacity to make such discrimination and insists on making them for us. Given the often notorious human capacity for self-deception, we can thank your so-called rabbis for this. And the many of you that wish to be spared hard work, gladly accept what these rabbis tell you.

But the fact that we do not have a simple answer, does not mean we should evade the question. We have also seen the hazards - even terrible harm - that sometimes result from unquestioning of religious authority. Rabbi Elchonon Wasserman's tyrannical, unforgivable conduct during the Holocaust comes immediately to mind. Thousands went to their death upon instruction from him. How many hundreds of thousands of "modeh ani l'fanechahs" will forever remain unsaid every morning from the mouths of children?, perhaps only God knows, but I suspect that He does not know either.

Many of us, however, sooner or later, at critical points in our lives, will have to make our own path where none exists. And that, done correctly, is a good thing. As for me, I am resolute, passionate in my beliefs, non-yielding to any ideological foe that crosses my path. I live in my head and in my contemplative soul. Any setback I view as temporary and a challenge to outhink my opponent. I never concede to evil, never...and I never will. My children and your children are counting on me, whether they know it or not.

And so are you....

As the posuk in יְשַׁעְיָהוּ Isaiah - 10:13 says, "The light of Israel will be fire and its Holy One - flame, it will burn and consume its thorns..."

There is a lot more to be said about the Israel-Palestinian conflict, but the essence of it remains in 2025 what it was in 1947: the Arabs said no.

 

There Never Will Be a Palestinian State. So What’s Next?

By Elliott Abrams

October 7 was not Palestine’s independence day, but the final nail in the two-state solution’s coffin. Is confederation with Jordan all that remains?

Late this month, and exquisitely timed to coincide with Rosh Hashanah, the United Nations General Assembly will meet and, addressing it, the president of France will recognize “Palestine” as a state. France will be the 148th country (by most counts) to recognize a state that does not exist and never will—a “state” with no borders, no government, no economy, and no control over its claimed territory. Norway, Spain, Ireland, and Slovenia recognized Palestine in May 2024 in a clear reward for the Hamas terrorist onslaught in October 2023. The United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia will join the French, as may a dozen or more other countries. These acts of “recognition” do nothing to help Palestinians. Their effect and their usual objective is to harm Israel, both by blaming it for the Gaza war and by making an end to that war more difficult to achieve. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in August, “Talks with Hamas fell apart on the day Macron made the unilateral decision that he’s going to recognize the Palestinian state.” 

President Emmanuel Macron’s move, and those of Prime Ministers Keir Starmer of the UK and Anthony Albanese of Australia, are largely domestic policy matters—responses to low approval ratings and large Muslim populations. It seems to have escaped their attention that they are contributing to a Palestinian conclusion that only brutal violence will produce a path forward. In an effort to defend himself from such criticism, Macron stated “there is no alternative” to Palestinian statehood and announced in July that, “in light of the commitments made to me by the president of the Palestinian Authority, I have written to him to express my determination to move forward.”

What were the Palestinian Authority’s solemn commitments to the president of France? “To fulfilling all its governance responsibilities in all Palestinian territories, including Gaza, to reforming fundamentally, [and] to organizing presidential and general elections in 2026 in order to enhance its credibility and its authority over the future Palestinian state.” Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney told CNN that “Canada intends to recognize the state of Palestine . . . because the Palestinian Authority has committed to lead much-needed reform.” Albanese talked of “major new commitments from the Palestinian Authority” and proclaimed that the “president of the Palestinian Authority has reaffirmed these commitments directly to the Australian Government.” Similarly, while the so-called “New York Declaration,” adopted on July 30 by the entire Arab League, the European Union, and more than a dozen other countries usefully condemns the October 7 attacks and calls for Hamas’s removal from power, it calls for a Palestinian state under a reformed Palestinian Authority (PA) that will “continue implementing its credible reform agenda.”

It is difficult not to laugh at all those “commitments” to a “credible reform agenda” by the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, who has made them and others like them over and over again during his nearly twenty years as head of Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the Palestinian Authority. The PA is no closer to ruling Gaza than it has been since June 2007 when it was expelled from there by Hamas, nor any closer to fundamental reform. Macron also stated that “we must build the state of Palestine (and) guarantee its viability,” and it apparently never occurred to him to suggest that Palestinians must “build the state of Palestine and guarantee its viability.”

Why, after 80 years of efforts to partition the Holy Land, has a Palestinian state never been created? Why am I persuaded that this objective will never be achieved? Scores of new countries have been created since the Second World War. What is unique about the struggle for “Palestine” that has doomed it, and what are the alternatives? While my particular focus here is on the West Bank, most of the analysis that follows applies just as well to Gaza.

I.

The “two-state solution” is an offshoot of the older idea of partition—the division of the Palestine Mandate held by the United Kingdom into Jewish and Arab lands. Transjordan, a separate British mandate and now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, came into being in 1946, and the UN General Assembly voted in November 1947 to create two more new states, one Arab and one Jewish. The Jews said yes and the Arabs said no.

There is a lot more to be said about the Israel-Palestinian conflict, but the essence of it remains in 2025 what it was in 1947: the Arabs said no.

Daniel Pipes has commented on this many times, writing of what he called the Palestinians’ “genocidal rejectionism.” Why haven’t peace and Palestinian statehood prevailed? In the early years, Pipes wrote, “The local population, which we now call Palestinians, didn’t want them there and told them to get out. And [the Zionists] responded by saying no, we are modern Westerners, we can bring you clean water and electricity. But Palestinians engaged in rejectionism, and said, ‘No, we want to kill you; we’re going to drive you away.’” Over a century ago, the Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky explained that this is the response the Jews should expect to such offers of economic advancement, although he believed the attitude would change in the fullness of time. But little has changed, as Pipes writes:

It hasn’t worked because it can’t work. If your enemy wants to eliminate you, telling him that you’ll get him clean water is not going to convince him otherwise. What’s so striking is that the Palestinians have retained this genocidal impulse for such a long period. I would argue, as an historian, that this is unique. No other people have ever retained that kind of hostility for such a length of time.

Such views can be, and have often been, attacked as those of a Zionist and conservative. But Pipes’s conclusion has now been given support by an unexpected source: Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, who have written a book called Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine about their decades of efforts, individually and together, to promote Palestinian statehood. Agha was a trusted confidant and key negotiator for Yasir Arafat. Raised in Beirut, now holding a British passport (after previously having Lebanese and Iraqi citizenship), a member of Fatah from 1968, educated at Oxford and associated for 25 years with St. Antony’s College there, the wily and charming Agha advised the Palestinian leadership and participated in talks from the Madrid Conference in 1991 through those with John Kerry in 2014. Malley, son of a far-left and anti-Zionist Egyptian Jew, was special assistant to the president for Arab-Israeli affairs during the Clinton administration and then a key Middle East adviser and negotiator for Barack Obama. Malley and Agha worked together, each for his respective team, to prepare for the Camp David Summit in 2000, and then collaborated on a famous New York Review of Books article in August 2001 that defended Arafat and rejected the view (advanced by President Clinton and most other U.S. participants) that Arafat was to blame for the failure of the peace effort....

 

READ ALL OF IT: https://ideas.tikvah.org/mosaic/essays/there-won-t-be-a-palestinian-state-in-the-west-bank-it-s-time-to-reconsider-the-j

Tens of thousands of young Haredi men refusing to serve while hundreds of thousands of Israelis—right wing and left, religious and secular—risked their lives for their country.

 The Upside of Down

The single issue that unites most of Israeli society and will influence the next Israeli election.

Michael Oren Sep 2

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Haredi demonstrations in Jerusalem

Amid the rising number of our soldiers who have fallen, the unbearable suffering of the hostages and their families, the endless international condemnations, and bitter divisions within Israeli society, it’s difficult to find positive aspects of almost 700 days of war. And yet, in certain ways, the war has changed Israel for the better and contributed substantially to its future survival.

The most obvious “benefit” of the war is the lifesaving lesson learned, albeit at an excruciating price, regarding the buildup of massive terrorist forces along our borders. Never will the Israeli government ever let that happen again. Never will we forfeit the need for deep buffer zones along all our frontiers. Never again will the IDF favor a defensive over an offensive strategy—Iron Dome over tanks and armored personnel carriers—and rely almost exclusively on technology rather than soldiers to guard our land. Never again will our reservists go years without training or go into battle without even the most basic gear.

In 2021, in an article in the American Jewish magazine Tablet, I called for an end to American military aid to Israel. Receiving such aid, I argued, was undignified for an affluent, sovereign country like Israel and enabled our critics to blackmail us by threatening to cut off support if we didn’t act as they wished. Aid also made us dependent on the U.S. for crucial types of tank and artillery ammunition. That dependency, I warned, could prove very dangerous in a war over which American and Israeli leaders disagreed.

Today, four years later—and nearly two years after 10/7—Israeli policymakers agree that Israel must never again be ammunition-dependent on the U.S. or any other foreign power. They understand that the old arrangement of “Israel begs and America gives” must be replaced by a new partnership in which Americans and Israelis participate as equals in strengthening their mutual security.

These security results of the war, however beneficial, pale beside its most transformative outcome. If, before the war, the questions of Haredi military service and integration into the economy were important but still open to debate, today that discussion has ended.

It ended thanks to the sight of tens of thousands of young Haredi men refusing to serve while hundreds of thousands of Israelis—right wing and left, religious and secular—risked their lives for their country. Today, perhaps no single issue unites most of Israeli society and will have the largest impact on the next Israeli election.

If not for the war, the Haredi communities would have grown to be the largest single block in the society, while contributing almost nothing to it economically. In time, that society would have collapsed. The war has been deeply traumatic for Israel. The healing process will take many years. But in certain crucial areas—in defending our borders, arming our troops, and ensuring the survival of our society—the war has not been beneficial; it may well have saved us.

This article was originally published in Hebrew on Ynet on August 27, 2025.

 

To My Fellow Advocate And Dear Friend Rabbi Yosef Blau

 

Dear R’ Yosef Shlita,

I read your open letter. To be blunt — it shook me, not because you don’t have the right to criticize, but because of how and where you chose to do it. You’ve always been a courageous voice, but this time your words are being waved around by people who are the farthest thing from lovers of Israel or Torah. That’s the danger: when you stand shoulder to shoulder with the fringes, you don’t just speak your truth — you lend them your credibility.

I know your intent was not to weaken Israel in a time of war and uncertainty. But perception often matters more than intent. Right now, our enemies are expert at twisting rabbinic voices — especially one of your stature — into propaganda. The result isn’t nuanced debate within our community; it’s headlines in the outside world that delight in showing “Orthodox rabbis” turning against Israel.

Yosef, if you truly want to rebuke, do it inside the house, not in the street where the haters are listening. (In these perilous times for Yiddishkeit)

I say this with the loyalty of decades of friendship: your integrity is unquestioned, but integrity also requires foresight. In moments like these, our people desperately need critique rooted in love, delivered in ways that strengthen, not gift-wrapped to those who wish us harm.

Please take this as chizuk from someone who cares about you and about Klal Yisrael. I respect your courage — but I beg you to weigh how your courage is used by others.

Wishing you and our entire family of Klal Yisroel

כתיבה וחתימה טובה

Warmly,

Paul Mendlowitz 

 

 REPUBLISHED:

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/to-my-fellow-advocate-and-dear-friend-rabbi-yosef-blau/

Reb Shraga Feivel carried the dialectic within himself: charisma and humility, passionate activism and hisbonenus, intellect and emotion. A gadol who saw himself as a regular person, “Mr. Mendlowitz” shunned all honorifics and trappings of kavod.

 

In Love with Everything Holy

 

 Rabbi Judah Mischel, executive director of Camp HASC

Maybe it was ordained On High that I should have to take a circuitous route to meet my rebbi — that I should first be required to survey the vast landscape of Yiddishkeit.

I grew up on Grove Street in old Monsey, our family the only Modern Orthodox baalei teshuvah — perennial outsiders in a predominantly yeshivish neighborhood. We were raised to be open, accepting, and respectful of all. My parents chose their Jewish destiny; we were always made very aware of our responsibility to think for ourselves and “do our own thing” in avodas Hashem. Our background allowed us the opportunity to explore the Torah’s many different pathways.

After a year in Eretz Yisrael, when I was trying to learn Torah seriously for the first time as a student at Yeshiva University, the challenge of “finding my place” in avodas Hashem was real. I was drawn to chassidus, engaged intellectually with Modern Orthodoxy, enamored of “the yeshivah world,” and ideologically at home in religious Zionism. There was so much beauty and opportunity in the diversity of Jewish communities. Yet so much seemed scripted, and the search for self, more like deciding which box to fit into, which set of cultural norms to adapt. As aspiring bnei Torah, did we really have to choose one way to the exclusion of all others?

While perusing old copies of the Jewish Observer between classes on the fifth floor of the YU library, I got my answer. I finally met the tzaddik who would become a formative influence and inspirational force in my life: Reb Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz ztz”l. A tribute marking Reb Shraga Feivel’s 35th yahrtzeit penned by Rav Yitzchak Chinn, a close talmid, took my breath away.

The piece described an episode that took place in 1943, just a couple of blocks from where I’d eventually grow up in Monsey. Reb Shraga Feivel was sitting outdoors with a group of yungeleit, and asked one to turn over a large stone embedded in the ground. As he did, swarms of insects scurried about in every direction.

Said Reb Shraga Feivel: “Do you see those creatures? For their entire existence under that rock, they believed the world to be a dark, dreary place. By overturning that stone, you have revealed a whole new world, filled with light and beauty. In exposing them to the sun and sky, you’ve introduced a new dimension of reality into their lives.

“That is our mission in this world — to roll the heavy stones off souls and reveal the Yiddishe neshamah, to allow the ohr haShechinah to shine. When we have moved the boulders, we can lift our eyes to the Heavens, behold our Creator, and know our Yiddishkeit.”

In meeting Reb Shraga Feivel, I felt as though a stone had been lifted — and a new ray of light was shining in.

Reb Shraga Feivel defied definition and categorization; not tethered to any specific one of the shivim panim laTorah, he embodied the infinite expansiveness of Yiddishkeit. Reb Shraga Feivel’s way of learning Torah revealed its awesome unity: plumbing the commentary of Rav Shimshon Raphael Hirsch to explain challenging passages in Tanya — and vice versa. Chassidus, mussar, nigleh and nistar — for Reb Shraga Feivel, it was all One.

Even while quoting freely from the writings of Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohein Kook, Rav Shraga Feivel maintained a close friendship with and deepest respect for Reb Yoelish, the Satmar Rebbe. At Torah Vodaath and Beis Medrash Elyon, classic yeshivah learning was complemented with shiurim on Tanach and tefillah, the teachings of Reb Tzaddok HaKohein of Lublin with insights on the intricacies of biblical grammar. Rambam’s Shemonah Perakim and Rebbe Nachman’s Sippurei Maasios, Chovos Halevavos, Ramchal and the Tzemach Tzedek.

Fusion implies bringing together of separate, individual parts to form a complete whole. Reb Shraga Feivel didn’t “fuse” discrete parts; he was drawing from a higher source.

“The Tree of Life was in the center of the Garden” (Bereishis 2:9). Reb Shraga Feivel taught: No matter how disparate the various ideas and approaches in Torah that we learn may seem to be, they are all different approaches to the Eitz Chayim. As long as the Tree of Life is “b’soch haGan” — and Torah is at the center — it can be approached from all directions.

Reb Shraga Feivel carried the dialectic within himself: charisma and humility, passionate activism and hisbonenus, intellect and emotion. A gadol who saw himself as a regular person, “Mr. Mendlowitz” shunned all honorifics and trappings of kavod. A public figure, constantly surrounded by talmidim, who relished privacy and quiet. An idealist with two feet firmly on the ground, Reb Shraga Feivel upheld unwavering fidelity to his Hungarian upbringing, while attuning his incredible sensitivity to the needs and realities of the postwar American Jewish community.

Uncompromising in his dedication to truth — at a time when ideology mattered — Reb Shraga Feivel was unabashed in voicing staunch opposition to innovations he felt threatened tradition, but still managed to maintain respectful working relationships with those he vehemently disagreed with.

“Hashem sefasai tiftach” — in asking the Ribbono shel Olam to open our mouths and sing His praise, we aim to emulate His infinite nature, to be big, expand our boundaries, open our borders. As Reb Shraga Feivel would say: “Der seichel iz elastish” — the mind is elastic. If we are intellectually honest, it can be stretched from one extreme to another. Hotziah mimasger nafshi.

Reb Shraga Feivel’s natural expansiveness validated drawing from approaches in Yiddishkeit that seemed to conflict: “Some souls drink from Tanya. Others from the Ramchal. Still others from Rav Hirsch. I drink from all of them, though at any given time, I might drink from one in particular.” From Reb Shraga Feivel came “insider” confirmation that the search for truth and the fulfillment of ratzon Hashem is more about “a Torah perspective,” as opposed to “the Torah perspective.” “Taamu u’reu ki tov Hashem,” for a searching Jew, Reb Shraga Feivel catered a fresh, bountiful, and spiritually healthy smorgasbord of theological opportunity.

Reb Shraga Feivel’s open heart felt the joys and pain of Klal Yisrael, burned for Torah, and was deeply connected to Eretz Yisrael — in love with everything holy. Sensing the Divine vitality that pulsates through all of creation, he was a baal avodah who heard all of nature singing Hashem’s praise. Reb Shraga Feivel enjoyed spending time in nature, and often looked toward the sky, davening from what he called “the siddur of David Hamelech.” When a talmid inquired of his rebbi’s preference of davening next to a window: “He thinks I’m looking out, but actually, I’m looking in.”

Reb Shraga Feivel’s singular focus on “looking in” — on living a life of penimiyus, nurturing the inner worlds of others, and encouraging in-depth limud HaTorah — inoculated against superficiality. Every Jew can be an “insider.” With Torah at the center, we are all equally close.

Reb Shraga Feivel suffered a heart attack when he heard that the Old City had fallen into Jordanian hands during Israel’s War for Independence. Doctors warned him against learning Baal Shem Tov al HaTorah — Reb Shraga Feivel’s excitement when learning the heiliger Baal Shem made his sensitive Jewish heart race dangerously.

“V’hasirosi lev ha’even v’nasati lachem lev basar.” In the end of days the Navi Yechezkel promises that Hashem will remove our hearts of stone and restore our natural hearts of flesh — a fleishige heart that senses that every moment in this world is revelation of Hashgachah pratis and an opportunity to draw close to Hashem. Or as Reb Shraga Feivel would say, “Der grester glick fun leben iz leben alein — the greatest fortune in life is life itself.”

Again and again I have returned to Yonoson Rosenblum’s masterful biography of Reb Shraga Feivel; it is a book that changes my life at each new stage I reread it, each time feeling a deeper yearning for Reb Shraga Feivel’s guidance, his expansive heart filled with ahavas Hashem and ahavas Yisrael, nuance and complexity.

Working in the Jewish community, I am privileged to see the absolute best of Klal Yisrael. But even when everyone has only the best of intentions, things can often get personal, and worthy mosdos of different stripes step on each other’s toes. Dedicated professionals and volunteers, even rebbeim and menahalim, passionate for their specific cause, can get territorial over donors, programs — even social services. It’s hard not to get caught up in all of it. Business is business, people are people.

Asking myself, “What would Reb Shraga Feivel do?” invariably leads to clarity and magnanimity, ayin tovah and expansiveness. Reb Shraga Feivel was never confined or defined by where he worked — even by the yeshivos he founded, nurtured, and led. When the fledgling Yeshivas Rabbeinu Chaim Berlin was struggling with recruitment, Reb Shraga Feivel transferred some of his most prized talmidim there, sending his best guys to join “the competition.”

It wasn’t that Reb Shraga Feivel was so confident in his yeshivah that he was unafraid of competition; he simply saw that in the world of truth and penimiyus, there is no competition. Ovdei Hashem are all working for the same Boss, at different points in the Garden, facing the same Center. Reb Shraga Feivel would remind his talmidim — in and out of yeshivah — that regardless of our professional identity, we are all “sheluchei d’Rachmana,” messengers on a mission from G-d.

As Reb Shraga Feivel’s 70th yahrtzeit approaches on Gimmel Elul, I am thinking about the tzaddikim hatehorim described by Rav Kook — the purely righteous who do not complain about darkness, but instead increase light. Now more than ever, how desperately we crave Reb Shraga Feivel’s purity, righteousness, and encouragement, to lift the stone that covers our hearts, weighing us down and blocking out the light.

I’d grown up literally around the corner from that tree under which Reb Shraga Feivel sat with his talmidim decades earlier, feeling like a perennial outsider. Maybe my not being born to a particular derech with set minhagim and clear mesorah was Hashem’s way of setting the stage for the unlikely kesher I feel with Reb Shraga Feivel. If in our search for meaning we are motivated l’Sheim Shamayim, then we are all insiders.

When we aspire to live each moment with penimiyus, we will find our place in the Torah world, cleaving to the Eitz Hachayim, the Tree of Life at the center of our lives.

Enough complaining about our generation and all that is lacking! “L’oro neilech” — the time for us has come in our search for dveikus to do the heavy lifting, for the ohr haShechinah, for Soul-Glow.

Tzaddikim b’mitasam nikra’im chayim — Reb Shraga Feivel zy”a, chai v’kayam! —

https://mishpacha.com/in-love-with-everything-holy/

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 722. Rabbi Judah Mischel, executive director of Camp HASC and former rebbi at Yeshivas Reishis, is a popular teacher of chassidus and founder of Tzama Nafshi, an organization dedicated to fostering Jewish education and inspiration. He lives with his family in Ramat Beit Shemesh, where he is a talmid muvhak of mashpia Rav Avraham Tzvi Kluger and translator of his works.

The July 27 hearing included testimony from alleged victims, now adults, regarding abuse they had experienced as children, primarily in the ultra-Orthodox and national-religious communities in Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, Haifa, Safed and elsewhere. Several women alleged that religious and community leaders had participated in the abuse..

 

Horrifying testimonies seek to lift shroud of silence around ritual sex abuse claims

 

Survivors tell Knesset lawmakers of organized assaults on children by those claiming mantle of religion, alleging longstanding phenomenon made worse by official indifference

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Police have opened an investigation into multiple allegations of organized ritual sexual abuse after accusers relayed harrowing testimony of torture, rape and other horrors to lawmakers late last month.

The July 27 hearing included testimony from alleged victims, now adults, regarding abuse they had experienced as children, primarily in the ultra-Orthodox and national-religious communities in Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, Haifa, Safed and elsewhere.

Accusers recounted tales of gruesome sexual abuse they experienced as children, usually by groups of people, involving ritualistic, religious rhetoric and iconography. The abuse took place in schools, synagogues, private homes, warehouses, cemeteries and forests, they alleged.

Police have opened an investigation into multiple allegations of organized ritual sexual abuse after accusers relayed harrowing testimony of torture, rape and other horrors to lawmakers late last month.

The July 27 hearing included testimony from alleged victims, now adults, regarding abuse they had experienced as children, primarily in the ultra-Orthodox and national-religious communities in Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, Haifa, Safed and elsewhere.

Accusers recounted tales of gruesome sexual abuse they experienced as children, usually by groups of people, involving ritualistic, religious rhetoric and iconography. The abuse took place in schools, synagogues, private homes, warehouses, cemeteries and forests, they alleged.

Several women alleged that religious and community leaders had participated in the abuse. One woman named Yael Ariel testified that she had heard accounts from several women alleging that “doctors, educators, police officers, and both former and current Knesset members” took part.....

 

READ THE HORROR: 

 https://www.timesofisrael.com/horrifying-testimonies-seek-to-lift-shroud-of-silence-around-ritual-sex-abuse-claims/?

On Teshuva - Flat-Earthers are embedded in the rabbinic structure of Charedi Judaism - Mental illness leading to pedophilia, child-rape and other crimes against children are still deemed by this group of peasants as something that "repentance" or teshuva can heal.

CLICK:
 https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-orthodox-jewish-community-has-not-conceded-that-mental-illness-is-illness/

Poisonous Kool-Aid --- he alleged that the Israeli government seeks to abolish Torah study for yeshiva students. (avoid cholent on weekdays Posek)

Leading  Kool-Aid rabbi: 'We are suffering great troubles'

 

Ahead of Elul term and following recent arrests, Rabbi Yitzhak Zilberstein calls on haredi yeshiva students to learn Torah constantly, avoid cholent on weekdays, and avoid idle talk.

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HaredimDraft LawRabbi Yitzhak Zilberstein

• 1 minutes

Yitzhak Zilberstein

Rabbi Yitzhak Zilberstein, a member of the Degel Hatorah party's Council of Torah Sages, published a letter of support to yeshiva students ahead of the month of Elul, sharply criticizing the current draft policy.

In the letter, he alleged that the Israeli government seeks to abolish Torah study for yeshiva students.

"We are currently in great distress, as they want to remove the yeshiva students from their Torah study, and even take some of the yeshiva students to imprisonment."

Quoting Rabbi Dov Lando, a leading Lithuanian-haredi rabbi, he added, "The Exile is increasing its burden on us, and it is a great trouble that Jews are persecuting Jews because of Torah study."

Related articles:

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• Rabbi Zilberstein: The government has respect for the Torah'
• Haredi Rabbi on Holon attack: 'The Sabbath has been desecrated'

Rabbi Zilberstein called on the yeshiva students to strengthen themselves during this time, urging: "Be strong and courageous, do not let your hearts soften, and begin this term with all your strength and desire. Engage in Torah at all times and hours, without idle talk, and through this, you will merit to be the true protectors of the entire Jewish nation."

He ended his words with a blessing: "And may we soon merit to be saved with eternal salvation, and may all the evil decrees be nullified for all of Israel."

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/413698

 

A cholent crisis? Rabbi’s ruling against Shabbat stew on Thursday nights briefly roils Israel

The rabbi ruled that weekday consumption should be avoided “so that one can delight in it on Shabbat as is proper.”

https://www.jta.org/2025/07/11/food/cholent-crisis-a-rabbis-ruling-against-shabbat-stew-on-thursday-nights-briefly-roils-israel

Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetsky, the sage of American Jewish life in the past generation, told me that it is wrong to impose an elitist education on the masses. But that is exactly what we are doing.Generally, in our current religious society, legends, fantasies and inaccurate nostalgia are taught as facts....

Who’s Afraid of Change? Rethinking the Yeshivah Curriculum

Rabbi Berel Wein

 

 

We are all aware that the basic Jewish curriculum has been set for us by tradition and appears in Avot. Mikra (which includes Chumash, Nach, Hebrew language and linguistic skills), Mishnah, Talmud, and works of halachah are the basic components of the Judaic studies curriculum in our day schools and yeshivot. However, for various reasons the implementation of this basic and vitally necessary curriculum has had varying results.

It is no secret that many of our day school and yeshivah graduates are not very literate in Hebrew language, know little Nach, are unexcited by the study of Mishnah and Talmud and are therefore in jeopardy of becoming children at risk. Though the problem is widespread and well known to all in the educational field and certainly to the parents of these children, it is not widely discussed in terms of curriculum emphasis and adaptation. I am not an iconoclast nor am I here to criticize certain educational practices in the Jewish religious society. But there are significant points and issues that are worthy of consideration and serious thought that I feel should be brought to public attention. I have been troubled by these issues for decades, and I feel that somehow these problems are intensifying as time passes.

Part of the difficulty in Jewish education today is that formal schooling practices are rarely inspirational. There is always a tug of war in a classroom as to whether the transmission of knowledge–facts, pages covered, subjects and units covered, et cetera–takes precedence over inspirational lessons and the building up of the identity and self-worth of the student. Schools by nature tear down self-confidence in students. Tests and grades are competitive by definition–there can only be one valedictorian, and even the best students experience disappointment due to the very nature of the system.

Under the current classroom difficulties– overcrowding, minimal physical facilities, very demanding parents, an outside culture that is deeply inimical to traditional Jewish values–the classroom teacher is faced with a herculean task of imparting knowledge and somehow inspiring the student to appreciate that knowledge and to desire more of the same.

A student who has never studied Sefer Yechezkel, Sefer Iyov or Tehilim is unprepared for the omnipresent problems of Jewish national, or of his own personal, life.

I recently read a Hebrew book of memoirs of leading Leftist and secular Jews of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all of whom were raised in religious homes and attended religious schools. Without exception, they all attributed their disenchantment with and departure from traditional Judaism to painful educational and personal experiences that they suffered in those schools. They rejected God and Torah not out of philosophical contemplation but rather because of sadistic teachers, curriculums taught by rote and the overemphasis on imparting Torah knowledge and not Torah values, history and perspectives.

Teaching mikra properly is the foundation of Jewish education. The rabbis taught us that ein mikra yotzei midei peshuto–the simple, literal meaning of the words is the ultimate truth of what the verse teaches us. Even after exploring remez, derash and sod–the other levels of understanding the verse–peshat, the simple meaning of the verse, still remains valid. The tendency today is not to teach Torah in this fashion. Midrash is taught literally and oftentimes is substituted completely for the peshat of the verse. There are places in the Torah where the derash is the peshat, but that certainly is not a general rule, and Torah should not be taught–especially to young children–in that fashion.

Generally, in our current religious society, legends, fantasies and inaccurate nostalgia are taught as facts. Fanciful stories that appear in current Orthodox newspapers and periodicals are believed as being factually true by children who are completely unaware of the simple meaning of the verses of the Torah that they have allegedly covered in school. To say that this may create a distorted view of Torah and Judaism is an understatement.

The study of Tanach is almost an oxymoron statement regarding our schools. During my years as the head of a high school yeshivah and beit midrash program, I discovered that most students who graduated from excellent elementary and high schools could not even name the twenty-four holy books of the Jewish canon. Students revealed amazing ignorance about the Hebrew language and all of the grammar/dikduk statements of Rashi and the other Biblical commentators were never covered in the classroom. There was no love or feeling for the beauty and nuance of the Holy Tongue, and thus there was little appreciation in the study of Talmud of the methodology used by Chazal to derive the Oral Law from the written word.

A student who has never studied Sefer Yechezkel, Sefer Iyov or Tehillim is unprepared for the omnipresent problems of Jewish national– or of his own personal–life. He is also cheated out of the beauty of the poetry and the sublime values that lie in the weekly haftarot and will therefore often find that portion of the Shabbat services irrelevant to his life. Many times, the so-called People of the Book have little or no idea what book they are talking about. I attended a yeshivah where my rebbe taught us Tanach every day with the same fervor and detail that he exhibited in teaching Talmud. We covered all of Neviim Acharonim and the Five Megillot in our high school years. In my beit midrash years we covered Iyov, Mishlei, Tehilim and Ezra and Daniel. My grandchildren may feel themselves to be greater Talmudic scholars than I am; nevertheless, they have never received such an education.

Mishnah is certainly the forerunner to proper study of Talmud. Plunging into the sea of the Talmud without learning to first swim properly in the pool of the Mishnah is oftentimes selfdefeating. It is interesting to note that the rabbis cited in Avot were of the opinion that five years’ worth of Mishnah study should precede the study of Talmud. Someone who is truly competent in Mishnah will almost invariably do well in the study of Talmud as well. A child or adult who knows Mishnah well is already a scholar in Jewish terms. It can also be inspirational to the student, even though the subject matter at first glance appears dry and pedantic.

I met a woman thirty years ago in Israel who recited to me from memory a mishnah in Bava Kama that she learned in afternoon Hebrew school in the early 1940s (my father-in-law, newly arrived from Europe and not yet established in a proper rabbinic position, was her teacher). She said that this mishnah somehow inspired her to have a Jewish home and eventually move to Israel where all of her descendants are observant Jews. When I related this story to my father-in-law, who was then the head of the Orthodox rabbinate in Detroit and no longer teaching in afternoon Hebrew schools, he told me: “I put as much effort and prayer into teaching those children a mishnah as I do now in attempting to resolve a difficult halachic or communal issue.” Again, education is imparting knowledge but it is also, as importantly, the transmission of tradition, values and Jewish inspiration.

The Judaic studies program in our boys’ schools is very heavily Talmud oriented from fifth and sixth grade onwards. The Talmud is a difficult subject to study. The differing fonts on the page, the complicated logic, the back and forth discussions, the questions and answers, the Aramaic language which has to be mastered, the correct use of Rashi’s commentary, the difficulty of the dialectical reasoning of Tosafot, and the lack of true punctuation of the text all combine to make this subject a great challenge for the average ten- or eleven-year-old boy.

In previous generations in Europe and the early years in America, the study of Talmud was reserved for superior students and certainly not for the masses. All of this has changed in our current generation. The study of Talmud is widespread among adults and mandatory for our boys and, in some circles, even for our girls. There are currently many educational aids to the study of Talmud that did not exist in previous generations, though not all schools are willing to avail themselves of those aids for various ideological reasons.

Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetsky, the sage of American Jewish life in the past generation, told me that it is wrong to impose an elitist education on the masses. But that is exactly what we are doing. The danger that all of us are aware of–it is the unspoken elephant in the room–is that a child who dislikes the study of Talmud at the age of ten is more than likely to dislike it even more at seventeen, and this leads often to tragic results, both personally and religiously. There are many causes for the current curriculum situation–the destruction of the Jewish infrastructure of Europe in the last century, the terribly hostile general environment to Jewish values and behavior in today’s hedonistic and liberal society, the affluence of Jews and the attendant erosion of spirituality that this has entailed and a teaching staff whose expertise lies in Talmud over all else. Nevertheless, the realities of today’s curriculum in Jewish schools should not be ignored. We should not be afraid of reform, change and practical improvements. We can prevent many cases of children at risk before they become children at risk.

A further element concerning curriculum in Jewish schools should be an accurate and inspirational presentation of Jewish history. A generation that has little knowledge of our past is always blindsided by current events. A student of Jewish history, even a cursory one, will realize that the problems that we face today are not new ones. The names, countries, issues and details that surround these problems certainly change from generation to generation, but the root problems–anti-Semitism, divisions and violence within Jewish society, a broad spectrum of religious observances, the survival and maintenance of individual and national identity as a small minority, acculturalization and assimilation, political and ideological infighting, types of formal education, competing societal value systems, et cetera–remain the same. Knowing this is in itself a comforting thought. It is what King Solomon taught us: there really is nothing new under the sun.

Jewish history is a sourcebook for faith and hope, for inspiration and tenacity. But Jewish history that is fanciful and false–stories that have no factual basis, inaccurate and hagiographic biographies, the portrayal of the past in the light of current political correctness– is a false and ultimately uninspiring and self-defeating educational venture. I think that false history, a form of poisonous insidious propaganda, is perhaps worse in the long run than no history at all. The history of our people was transmitted in the past by means of the family and the society. Today it is through books and lectures, media and computers. Schools can integrate history into all of the subjects in their curriculums. But we should remember that truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more healing and inspirational as well.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, education comes down to personnel. Teachers in Jewish schools are underpaid and harassed by parents, administrators and educational and financial boards. Wall Street, even in its present woes, is still more attractive to the best and the brightest in the Orthodox Jewish world than teaching is. The exploitation of young Jewish women just returning from seminary to teach at coolie wages is a scandal. The lack of stability and tenure in the Jewish teaching profession translates itself into educational problems for the young in our classrooms.

Instead of dissipating our energies and funds on all sorts of marginal projects in the Jewish world, holy and charitable as they may appear to be, we should concentrate our efforts on better schools, stronger teachers, improved curriculums and a return to the basics of balanced and value-laden Torah education. Jewish children should know Hebrew well before indulging in Arabic, and understand Maimonides before concentrating on Milton. Jewish education knows of no free lunch or time-saving shortcuts. For Jewish education is the source of life for us and the length of our days.

 https://jewishaction.com/religion/education/

Our president doesn’t understand that when Putin says to Ukraine, in effect “Marry me or I’ll kill you” - that Zelensky needs more than just an American marriage counselor

 

Ukraine Diplomacy Reveals How Un-American Trump Is

Listen to this article · 8:41 min Learn more

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I am really trying to be fair in analyzing the Trump-Putin-Zelensky-Europe drama that has been playing out the past few weeks. I am trying to balance President Trump’s commendable desire to end the murderous war in Ukraine with the utterly personalized, seat-of-the-pants, often farcical way he is going about it — including the energy that everyone involved has to expend feeding his ego and avoiding his wrath, before they even get to the hellish compromises needed to make peace.

For now, the whole thing leaves me deeply uncomfortable.

I have covered a lot of diplomatic negotiations since becoming a journalist in 1978, but I have never seen one when where one of the leaders — in this case Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky — felt the need to thank our president about 15 times in the roughly four and a half minutes he addressed him with the press in the room. Not to mention the flattery that our other European allies felt they needed to heap on him as well.

When our allies have to devote this much energy just to keep the peace with our president, before they even begin to figure out how to make peace with Vladimir Putin; when they have to constantly look over their shoulder to make sure that Trump is not shooting them in the back with a social media post, before Putin shoots them in the front with a missile; and when our president doesn’t understand that when Putin says to Ukraine, in effect “Marry me or I’ll kill you,” that Zelensky needs more than just an American marriage counselor, it all leads me to ask: How is this ever going to work?

Especially when every bone in my body tells me that Trump does not get what this Ukraine war is truly about. Trump is unlike any American president in the past 80 years. He feels no gut solidarity with the trans-Atlantic alliance and its shared commitment to democracy, free markets, human rights and the rule of law — an alliance that has produced the greatest period of prosperity and stability for the most people in the history of the world.

I am convinced that Trump looks at NATO as if it’s a U.S.-owned shopping center whose tenants are never paying enough rent. And he looks at the European Union as a shopping center competing with the United States that he’d like to shut down by hammering it with tariffs.

The notion that NATO is the spear that protects Western values and that the European Union is possibly the West’s best modern political creation — a vast center of free people and free markets, stabilizing a continent that was known for tribal and religious wars for millenniums — is alien to Trump.

Indeed, I agree with Bill Blain, a British-based bond trader and economic analyst, who wrote on Monday: “However much European leaders pile on their flattery of Trump, it’s clear the fundamental bond of trust that underlay the 80-year success of the trans-Atlantic economy, that served the U.S. so favorably for decades, is now ruptured. The end of the trans-Atlantic economy will change the global economy utterly — favoring Asia and new trade relationships.”

So, it is also no wonder to me that Trump doesn’t feel any gut need to bring Ukraine into the West or understand that Putin’s invasion was just his latest march to break up the West as revenge for its breaking up the Soviet Union.

How do I know that Trump is deaf to all that? Just listen to the interview that his special envoy to Putin, Steve Witkoff, gave to Tucker Carlson in March, after Witkoff’s second meeting with Putin in the Kremlin. Here is just an excerpt:

Carlson: “What did you think of him?”

Witkoff: “I liked him. I thought he was straight up with me …. By the way, how would we settle a conflict with someone who is the head of a major nuclear power unless we establish trust and good feelings with one another?

“In the second visit that I had, it got personal. President Putin had commissioned a beautiful portrait of President Trump from the leading Russian artist and actually gave it to me and asked me to take it home to President Trump, which I brought home and delivered to him. It’s been reported in the paper, but it was such a gracious moment. And [Putin] told me a story, Tucker, about how when the president was shot, he went to his local church and met with his priest and prayed for the president, not because he was the president of the United States or could become the president of the United States, but because he had a friendship with him and he was praying for his friend. I mean, can you imagine sitting there and listening to these kinds of conversations?

“And I came home and delivered that message to our president and delivered the painting, and he was clearly touched by it. So this is the kind of connection that we’ve been able to re-establish through, by the way, a simple word called communication, which many people would say, you know, I shouldn’t have had, because Putin is a bad guy. I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy. That is a complicated situation, that war and all the ingredients that led up to it. You know, it’s never just one person, right?”

It gets worse. Trump is so deluded as to Putin’s nature that during his summit with European leaders on Monday he was overheard on an open microphone telling President Emmanuel Macron of France about Putin: “I think he wants to make a deal for me. Do you understand that? As crazy as it sounds.”

Can anyone identify a single U.S. diplomat in Moscow or C.I.A. analyst who is advising Witkoff and Trump today? My bet is there are none, because no serious analyst or expert on Russia would tell them: “We have concluded that you are right and all of us have been wrong: Putin is not a bad guy, he just wants a just peace with Ukraine — and when he tells you he went to church and prayed for President Trump, you should believe him.”

Sorry, if Putin really prayed for Trump’s life, it is because he knows that no other American president could possibly be manipulated as easily as Trump has been. Putin is not and never has been looking for “peace” with Ukraine. He is, as I have written before, looking for a piece of Ukraine — in fact the whole piece if he can get it.

That is both the “root cause” of the war in Ukraine, to borrow one of Putin’s favorite phrases, and the “root cause of Trump’s meandering and floundering efforts to arrange peace in Ukraine — his inability to understand that Putin wants not peace but victory,” Leon Aron, a Russia scholar and the author of “Riding the Tiger: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Uses of War,” said to me. “Putin must have Ukraine for all sorts of ideological and domestic political reasons. And he will not stop seeking it and sacrificing for it — unless the West makes the cost of the war prohibitive, militarily and economically.”

So, I end where I began: Trump and Witkoff are not wrong to want to stop the war and all the killing. And it is not wrong to be in regular communication with Putin to do that. I am all for both. But to stop this war in a sustainable way, you have to understand who Putin is and what he is up to. Putin is a bad guy, a coldblooded murderer. He is not the friend of the president. That is a fantasy that Trump chooses to believe is real.

Once you understand those things, they lead you to only one conclusion: The only sustainable way to stop this war and prevent it from coming back is a massive, consistent, Western commitment to give Ukraine the military resources that will persuade Putin that his army will be chewed apart. The United States also must provide the security guarantees that would deter Russia from ever trying this again and encourage our European allies to promise that Ukraine will one day be in the E.U. — forever anchored in the West.

Putin’s punishment for this war should be that he and his people have to forever look to the West and see a Ukraine, even if it is a smaller Ukraine, that is a thriving Slavic, free-market democracy, compared with Putin’s declining Slavic, authoritarian kleptocracy.

But how will Trump ever learn that truth when he basically gutted the National Security Council staff and shrank and neutered the State Department, when he fired the head of the National Security Agency and his deputy on the advice of a conspiracy buffoon, Laura Loomer, and when he appointed a Putin fan girl, Tulsi Gabbard, to be his director of national intelligence?

Who will tell him the truth? No one.

No one but the wild earth of Ukraine. In the trenches in the Donbas, there is truth. In the 20,000 Ukrainian children that Kyiv says Putin has abducted, there is truth. In the roughly 1.4 million Russian and Ukrainian soldiers killed and wounded as a result of Putin’s fevered dreams of restoring Ukraine to Mother Russia, there is truth. In the Ukrainian civilians killed by Russian drones at the same time that Trump was laying out the red carpet for Putin in Alaska, there is truth.

And the longer Trump ignores those truths, the more he builds his peace strategy — not on expertise but on his hugely inflated self-regard and his un-American anti-Westernism — the more this will become his war. And if Putin wins it and Ukraine loses it, Trump and his reputation will suffer irreparable damage — now and forever.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/opinion/trump-russia-ukraine-putin.html