The problem in the Middle East is not, and has never been, the existence of the state of Israel. The problem is jihadism, Islamism, Islamic extremism, Islamofascism militant Islam—or whatever words you want to use to describe the belligerence and triumphal lunacy of those who take the most pernicious doctrines of Islam too seriously.

 

Why I Won’t Debate Critics of Israel

A note to the Making Sense Community

Sam Harris Jun 5

READ IN APP

Many readers and podcast listeners have been dismayed by my enduring support for Israel and now urge me to debate someone—really anyone—drawn from a growing cast of scholars, grifters, and moral lunatics who have made that beleaguered country their professional or psychiatric obsession. The Making Sense Community seems to have inherited this infatuation, leading to some heated exchanges in recent days. I’ve explained my position on Israel across several podcasts and in my public talks, but it might help to summarize it here.

First, my general attitude: I’m not interested in exploring all the ways that Israel has missed the mark—from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s corrupt alliance with the far right, to the many crimes committed by settlers in the West Bank, to the deaths of innocent noncombatants in several wars—because none of these failings, however grave, will alter my sense that (1) the ethical difference between Israel and her enemies remains vast, and (2) the global preoccupation with the Jewish state, as though it were the worst villain among nations, is contemptible, being the product of perennial lies and delusions.

Next, a simple heuristic: As I suggested in at least one Community thread already, if my intransigence on these matters mystifies you, it might help to understand that, for whatever reason, I think militant Islam is ten times worse than you think it is. When I talk about “jihadists” and their various groups—Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the IRGC, etc.—I’m talking about people who I consider to be worse than Nazis (jihadists being, essentially, Nazis who are certain of Paradise). My views about the conflict in the Middle East will not fundamentally change unless my critics produce evidence that Israel has become as evil as her enemies.

However, you can rest assured that if the IDF morphs into a death cult that uses its own civilian population as human shields (and yet somehow remains widely popular), if ordinary Israelis begin to celebrate martyrdom above every earthly priority, producing generations of bright-eyed, suicidal fanatics, if the residents of Tel Aviv condone the taking of Palestinian infants, old women, and other noncombatants as hostages and then gather in crowds of thousands, baying for their blood—if, in other words, the Israelis begin to resemble the Palestinians, then I won’t care who wins this war. Short of this, there remains a world of difference between the two sides, and I believe that we should focus on how brutalizing it is for any free society to confront enemies that can sincerely claim to “love death” more than everyone else loves life—for this has been Israel’s predicament for the better part of a century.

The problem in the Middle East is not, and has never been, the existence of the state of Israel. The problem is jihadism, Islamism, Islamic extremism, Islamofascism militant Islam—or whatever words you want to use to describe the belligerence and triumphal lunacy of those who take the most pernicious doctrines of Islam too seriously.

I won’t debate the history of the Middle East because it is irrelevant to resolving the conflict there. Of course, many people insist that we must disentangle and reconsider every strand of this history, going back at least a century. The reason I’m convinced that this is a fool’s errand is simple: Palestinians and Israelis have discrepant accounts of the past, and no amount of study or debate will reconcile them.

What’s far more important to understand—and I think it really is the only thing worth considering—is what the current inhabitants of Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the surrounding Arab states want out of life now. (Not what they pretend to want or what a handful of royal families want, while their populations want something quite different.) What do the Jews and Muslims in the region really yearn to accomplish? What are they willing to sacrifice for? What are they willing to die for? And what are they willing to let their children die for?

When we focus on the present this way, if we’re being honest, we must concede that there are two very different realities on either side of this conflict: culturally, psychologically, ethically, spiritually—in every way that matters. Yes, Israel has its religious fanatics too. But they aren’t the same sort of fanatics we find in Hamas or Hezbollah, and they’re far less representative of the surrounding culture. Notwithstanding everything that can be said against Prime Minister Netanyahu, the Israeli far right, and the settlers in the West Bank—and there is much to condemn—I believe the following remains true:

If the Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be peace. There could be a two-state solution; there could even be a one-state solution; it wouldn’t matter. If the Palestinians simply stopped killing Jews and stopped building a culture that celebrates pointless murder and martyrdom as its highest values, there could be a diverse, tolerant, and prosperous society between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. There could have been one eighty years ago. But if the Israelis laid down their weapons, there would be a genocide. This was obviously true on October 7th, 2023. And for anyone who has been paying attention, it has been true on every other day since the founding of the state of Israel.

The truth is, I have never known how Israel should have responded to the events of October 7th. I only know that they, along with every other free society, must ultimately defeat militant Islam. How we should do this is genuinely debatable. But that’s not the point of contention among Israel’s critics, especially on the left. To them, worrying about militant Islam—even in Israel, even in the aftermath of the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust—is just more “Islamophobia.” It’s just more “colonialism” and “racism” (as though that last charge made any sense in the Middle East).

If you want to understand my view of this conflict, simply ask the one question that clarifies everything in the present:

What would each side do if it had the power to do whatever it wanted?

Though many pretend otherwise, everyone knows the answer to this question to a moral certainty.

If Hamas had the power, it would perpetrate a real genocide in Israel. The group has affirmed its commitment to this project on countless occasions, both before and after October 7th. And while it is true that Jew-hatred throughout the Muslim world has been made immensely worse by a century-long fascination with Nazi propaganda and conspiracy theories, this animus isn’t merely a modern phenomenon. For instance, there is a famous hadith which predicts that the End Times will not come until the very stones and trees cry out “Oh Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come kill him.” Unsurprisingly, Hamas cited this hadith in its founding charter.

Most Palestinians know this, and yet Hamas remains popular. For over a decade, Hamas diverted foreign aid that was meant to improve life in Gaza and used it to build the largest bomb shelter our species has ever constructed—hundreds of miles of tunnels—and yet no Palestinian civilians were allowed to shelter there during the war. Why not? Because Hamas was using these men, women, and children as human shields. And when Israel made phone calls and sent millions of text messages urging civilians to evacuate, the loudspeakers in the nearest mosques warned them to stay in place. And Hamas snipers murdered many who tried to move to safety. The Palestinians know all this, and yet Hamas remains popular. Even after all the devastation that Hamas has brought down on its own people, it remains the most popular Palestinian faction, well ahead of its rival, Fatah. This is why there is no peace in the Middle East.

The suffering in Gaza is terrible, and I’ve never pretended otherwise. But the suffering elsewhere—suffering you aren’t thinking about—is just as real. You should ask yourself why you don’t care more about it. This difference, emotionally and politically, is what it looks like to lose an information war.

We haven’t seen all the dead children in Yemen, Syria, or Sudan, where the numbers are far worse than in Gaza, but everyone has witnessed the pornography of misery and death that has been steadily manufactured by supporters of Hamas. You might think that your special concern over Israel is due to the fact that we (Americans) supply many of the weapons the IDF uses to kill Palestinians. But we supplied arms to Saudi Arabia and the UAE for a war in Yemen that has killed an estimated 377,000 people. Where were those protests? Where was the celebrity sanctimony over Yemeni dead? Why didn’t Zohran Mamdani trumpet his opposition to this evil while campaigning to become Mayor of New York? Yemen was the world’s worst humanitarian crisis for years, with American weaponry and logistical support fully implicated, and yet it never became the organizing moral obsession of universities, media institutions, activist networks, or leftwing politics the way Gaza has.

To point this out isn’t to commit the rhetorical sin of “whataboutism.” Rather, it exposes a glaring moral disparity: The world simply does not care when Muslims kill other Muslims—amazingly, it doesn’t much care when they kill Christians either—but it does care, enormously, when Jews do it. The General Assembly of the UN and its Human Rights Council have passed more resolutions against Israel than against all other nations combined, including North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen. A few of these countries have committed actual genocides. None of this makes sense. But this is the world we are living in.

Of the world’s 193 nations, two-thirds were created by map makers who merely imagined their frontiers into being, without much regard for the tribal interests of the people living within them. In fact, more than half were created since 1948, the year that Israel was founded. And yet there is only one whose legitimacy is still debated everywhere. There is only one nation on Earth that must continually argue for its right to exist, even when the very survival of its people is threatened by avowedly genocidal enemies.

This obsession with Israel, and the double standards to which its people are held, now forms the center of mass of that shapeshifting moral affliction widely known as “antisemitism.”

I’ve lived most of my life believing that dangerous antisemitism was behind us, at least in the West. Unfortunately, the response to October 7th has put that assumption very much in doubt. The atrocities committed by Hamas revealed a level of Jew hatred, globally, that shocked even those of us who have been students of antisemitism for much of our lives. Crucially, this hatred showed itself before Israel invaded Gaza. When the corpses of the young people mutilated and murdered at the Nova Music Festival were still being identified, we had students at Harvard and professors at Columbia—and demonstrators in New York, London, Sydney, and Toronto—celebrating their killers.

Why does antisemitism matter? Well, for the Jews, it’s obvious why it matters, but why should it matter to everyone else? It matters because when you look at what antisemites also hate, you find they hate everything that makes culturally rich, diverse, open societies possible. Real antisemites bring with them more than just their hatred of Jews: they bring censorship, political repression, conspiracy thinking, and the politics of dehumanization and scapegoating. So decrying antisemitism is not an act of special pleading. It is a defense of the moral and institutional architecture that makes free societies possible.

Let me close with another general point to members of the Making Sense Community: Many of you have written to tell me that you’ve lost respect for me over this issue (or that you still value my work and are giving me “a pass” on Israel). I reject this framing, and you should too. No one should be a part of Community just because they agree with me. I’m not running a political party, and there is no line for me, or for anyone else, to toe. If I’ve fallen off a pedestal because I said something you don’t agree with, the pedestal was the problem, not the disagreement. Of course, if you think I am lying to you, or that I otherwise lack integrity, you should leave and never look back. But if you just think I happen to be wrong, even about something important—especially about something important—I encourage you to keep showing up with better evidence and arguments. This, after all, is what a real intellectual and moral community is for.

Adirei Torah YU Style.....

 

While Iran bleeds the region, China watches – The American President Shanda

The Chinese Proxy, Iran, Keep Americans Bogged Down In The Middle East While China Plans To Move On Taiwan Before Trump Leaves Office....

The great trick of modern geopolitics is that the most dangerous wars are often not the ones that begin with armies crossing borders, but the ones that drain a nation’s attention, patience, and will. America, once a civilization capable of seeing the whole board, now seems condemned to stare at the Middle East like a man hypnotized by a fire in one room while someone quietly breaks into the house through the back door. Iran understands this. China understands it even better. And together they exploit an American political class that confuses motion with strategy and noise with strength.

Iran is not merely a regional nuisance. It has become the perfect proxy instrument: cheap, fanatical, deniable, and endlessly expandable. Through militias, missiles, drones, terror networks, and constant provocation, Tehran keeps the United States and its allies stuck in a cycle of reaction. Every day spent managing Iran’s chaos is a day America is not spending on the larger civilizational challenge. That is the genius of the arrangement, if one is cynical enough to call it genius: keep Washington exhausted, morally tangled, and strategically distracted.

While Iran bleeds the region, China watches. Beijing does not need to fire a shot to benefit from American overcommitment. It simply needs America to remain busy in the wrong theater. A superpower that is dragged into a permanent crouch in the Middle East is a superpower less able to deter in the Pacific. Taiwan, after all, is not an abstract question. It is a test of whether the United States still means what it says when the stakes are higher than campaign rhetoric and lower than apocalypse. China knows that the window for bold moves opens when Washington is overstretched, internally divided, and strategically tired.

And that is the deeper scandal: not merely that enemies are scheming, but that America keeps handing them opportunities. The same establishment that warns of “escalation” at every turn has spent years manufacturing paralysis. It wants no decisive victory, no clear doctrine, no serious burden-bearing. It prefers managed decline with good press coverage. So Iran is tolerated, China is “engaged,” and the American people are told that prudence means drifting while adversaries prepare.

This is how empires get embarrassed. Not always by defeat, but by distraction. The nation that cannot decide where its real front line is will eventually discover that the enemy has chosen it for him. The Middle East may still be a graveyard of illusions, but Taiwan is where illusions meet steel. And if America remains trapped in one swamp while China studies the next battlefield, the bill will not come due in theory. It will come due in history. 

 

REPUBLISHED

 

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/while-iran-bleeds-the-region-china-watches-the-american-president-shanda/

Abuse, Abandonment, and Autonomy

Be'halot'cha (Numbers 8-12)     

Beha’alosecha 5786: Abuse, Abandonment, and Autonomy

Series: Shabbat Shalom Weekly

 

When children curse their parents for forcing independence, the proper response is silence – not retaliation. This counterintuitive approach, and acceptance of abuse from one’s two-year-old, proves to the child that the parent’s actions are truly for the child’s benefit, not the parent’s ego. Taking abuse without responding demonstrates genuine love because there’s no personal benefit to the parent in accepting such treatment. 

As a senior staff member of a college and rabbinical school, students often come to me for advice on choosing a life path and career. In the last six months, I had two students who decided to end their status as full-time students and – based on their personalities (and for completely different reasons) – I recommended that each of them consider a career in plumbing.

Both took my advice and found themselves plumbing apprenticeships. One lasted exactly half a day; his team was called out to a Taco Bell to clear out a sewage blockage (one can only imagine what that must have been like). After a couple of hours this former student was 100% convinced that plumbing was not for him.

By contrast, the second student found his apprenticeship both fulfilling and rewarding. I asked him if he minded some of the more unpleasant aspects and he said to me, “Rabbi, I am low man on the totem pole and there are some days that I come home in clothes that stink to high heaven, but I just LOVE my job. I work extremely hard and come home exhausted and often smelly, but I would not have it any other way.”

Upon reflecting on their sharply differing attitudes, I realized that the main difference between them was that the first student was just looking for a way to earn money and make a life for himself. He quickly concluded that plumbing was not for him and that there must be a better way to earn money. The second student, however, immediately saw himself as a plumber and thus he quickly found the job itself fulfilling – despite its less pleasant moments. In fact, even coming home smelly just concretized in his mind that he was a plumber.

This week’s Torah portion has a relevant message about self-definition. In fact, it has a rather astonishing statement from Moses regarding the issues of leadership and how he characterizes motherhood.

After yet another litany of complaints from the Israelites about the lack of food variety and their continual pining for the “good ol’ days” of living in Egypt, Moses gets pretty fed up with them and his responsibilities as their leader and he says to God:

Why are you treating your servant so badly? Don’t you like me anymore? Why do you place such a burden on me? Am I their mother who was pregnant with them and carried them in my belly? Did I give birth to them? Why have You told me that I must carry them in my bosom and act as a nursemaid would treat an infant until they get to the land You swore to give to their ancestors? Now they are whining to me to give them meat. Where can I get enough meat to give all these people?
I cannot be responsible for this entire nation! It is too hard for me! If You are going to do this to me, just do me a favor and kill me! Don’t let me stay in this terrible predicament! (Numbers 11:10-15)

The great medieval Biblical commentator known as Rashi explains (ibid 11:12) that when the Almighty told Moses and Aaron to lead the Jewish people and carry them in their “bosom” that He meant they must lead even if/when the Israelites hurl curses, insults, or even stones at them.

This reveals a fundamental truth about parenting: it inherently involves some abuse by one’s children. What is going on here? What kind of definition is this about the responsibilities of parenthood? We must examine the source for the potential antipathy a child might have toward his parents.

Every child experiences trauma at birth – being expelled from the perfect temperature-controlled security of having every need met in the mother’s womb into a cold, demanding world of (albeit, minimal) independence. As parents go on to wean, toilet train, and gradually withdraw support, children naturally feel betrayed and angry. They rage against parents who are pushing them into independence, perhaps even without guaranteeing that they have the tools to succeed. This contentious beginning is one of the sources of the universal parent-child tension that fills psychology offices worldwide.

The modern solution of extended financial dependence only serves to exacerbate this problem. It creates entitled adults who, not having to face life on their own, fail to develop proper coping skills. This lack of personal development and resilience upon failure leads to a much more debilitating issue; the absence of confidence to succeed on their own. As their personal obligations increase, they become ever more reluctant to release their financial dependence on others because they don’t have any proof that they can thrive alone.

Thus, today we have another cultural phenomenon: whole swaths of modern society – yes, mainly wealthy families – support their married children’s lifestyles and life choices, never requiring their children to take responsibility for their own families or financial obligations. Sadly, this has begun to create a welfare mentality even among the affluent.

The true goal of parenting, like leadership, is not to provide perpetual care but to develop independence. Every step in parenting leads to this; birth and forcing a child to breathe on his own, weaning and forcing the child to feed himself, potty-training and forcing the child to take care of his bodily functions and personal cleanliness, etc. Our goal is to push our children – whether they like it or not – to their own personal success as independent beings, one step at a time.

When children curse their parents for forcing independence, the proper response is silence – not retaliation. This counterintuitive approach, and acceptance of abuse from one’s two-year-old, proves to the child that the parent’s actions are truly for the child’s benefit, not the parent’s ego. Taking abuse without responding demonstrates genuine love because there’s no personal benefit to the parent in accepting such treatment.

We find this concept elsewhere in the Torah. In Hebrew the word azov paradoxically means both ‘abandon’ and ‘help.’ True help enables eventual abandonment. Meaning, the only way you know that you have truly helped someone is when they reach the point when they don’t need you anymore. This is like teaching a child to ride a bicycle; in the beginning you hold on to him and the bike, but eventually you have to make a conscious decision to let go. If you continue holding on then he won’t learn to ride a bike. The goal is always to reach the point where support can be withdrawn (i.e. “abandonment”) so that independence can be achieved.

But the only way parents can properly do this is if they define themselves as parents, first and foremost. We have to constantly remember that parenting is hard and yes, it can be a lifelong commitment to helping your children become independent. It certainly comes with challenges, and we must adapt and make adjustments as our children grow.

Parenting can be innately contradicting, like when we spend the first three years of our children’s lives teaching them to walk and talk, and the next fifteen years telling them to sit down and be quiet. It can also feel like running a customer service department for customers who have no interest in following directions or using the product properly. We continuously get performance reviews from customers who can’t find their shoes, insist they put them on themselves, and then get angry when they hurt after putting them on the wrong feet. But we weather it all.

That is, unless we do not define ourselves as parents and resent the responsibilities of parenting. This is when we plug our children into devices so that they won’t bother us and insulate ourselves from taking care of them by hiring nannies and drivers to take them to soccer practice and play dates. We actively ignore every opportunity to spend alone time with them – particularly when their lives are hard and demanding. We prioritize our careers and delude ourselves into believing that providing financial security is more important than being present to support our children.

However, endless financial support does not teach independence. Defining ourselves as their parents and building our children’s self-esteem through unconditional love allows our children to grow confident enough to make own choices. Parental support is not about guaranteeing that our children make the choices we would make; it’s about creating an environment in which children know they are safe to make their own life choices and we will be there regardless of success or failure. We must provide the tools to give them the confidence to make their own choices regarding career, spouse, religiosity, etc.

Most importantly, we must be prepared to let go and – at every juncture – accept the resistance that comes with pushing our children toward independence. This the only way to develop our children into genuine responsible adults rather than perpetual dependents. It is also the only way to be a true leader; like Moses and Aaron.

https://aish.com/behaalosecha-5786-abuse-abandonment-and-autonomy/

Yahrzeit of Moreinu Horav Moshe Wolfson zt"l - 17 Sivan

 

Yahrzeit of

Moreinu Horav

Moshe Wolfson zt"l

17 Sivan

    

R' Moshe ben R' Shmuel Yehuda zt"l

Today, 17 Sivan marks the Yahrzeit of our revered Mashgiach, Moreinu Horav Moshe Wolfson zt"l. The Mashgiach was unique – he was with Yeshiva Torah Vodaath for 93 years! First as a young talmid, then a Rebbe and eventually the Mashgiach of the Bais Medrash.

The Mashgiach told his family that though he imbibed from the kedushah and avodah of many rebbes, the one who shaped him and who was his Rebbe muvhak was Rav Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz, pioneer of Torah in America, founder and Menahel of our Mesivta and founder of Torah Umesorah.

In 1947, as a bachur all of 22 years of age, the Mashgiach was chosen to teach a group of teenage boys who had come to the Yeshivah from different countries in South America. With a combination of love and wisdom, he was remarkably successful with these boys. Shortly thereafter, he was appointed to teach young talmidim in the Yeshiva Ketana, where the Mashgiach was very successful and very beloved.

Eventually, Rav Wolfson was appointed by Rav Nesanel Quinn as assistant menahel. Rav Wolfson occasionally delivered a shmuess to the bachurim, who loved the shmuessen and wanted more. The Rosh Yeshivah, Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky, took note. When the position of Mashgiach became available in the Beis Medrash, it was offered to Rav Wolfson.    

He became Mashgiach and was outstanding in dealing with bachurim and in delivering uplifting shmuessen on emunah, tefillah, the yamim tovim and other important topics. With his clear daas Torah and strict adherence to emes, he guided scores of talmidim, many of whom remained attached to him until his passing.

In 1969, the Mashgiach was offered the position of Mara d’Asra of Camp Torah Vodaath and also served as head of the camp’s Masmidim program. He conducted a tish every Friday night on the front lawn, replete with zemiros, sippurei tzaddikim, and divrei Torah. At some point, the Mashgiach decided to change the Masmidim’s way of davening. The Mashgiach spoke about connecting to the Ribono shel Olam through slow, loud, heartfelt tefillos. The roots of Emunas Yisroel had been planted.

The Mashgiach once said that he felt he was sent down to this world to be machazek the avodah of tefillah. It began in Camp Torah Vodaath and was greatly expanded with the founding of Emunas Yisroel, as the Mashgiach taught generations to daven slowly, loudly, and most importantly, with true feeling and kavanah. What began with a small group of Torah Vodaath talmidim became a worldwide movement of sorts. Rav Shimson Pincus zt”l, who was the Mashgiach’s talmid in first grade, said that Emunas Yisroel’s davening influenced all of Boro Park. Today, with branches in Boro Park, Lakewood, Monsey, Yerushalayim, and Beitar, its influence has spread much further.

The Mashgiach also became renowned for his shmuessen, in which he demonstrated a unique capability of chiddush and incredible power of gematria. His shmuessen were first published in Lashon HaKodesh under the title Emunas Itecha, which today is among the most often-quoted chassidishe sefarim. Recordings of his shmuessen both in Yiddish and English are listened to by frum Jews of all shades and stripes. To date, ten sefarim in English, based on his shmuessen, have been published.

The Mashgiach's desire was to serve the Ribono shel Olam, nothing else mattered. Despite his fame, the Mashgiach remained the same humble tzaddik. Every moment of his life was devoted to avodas Hashem and that included not only tefillah, but also limud haTorah, tzedakah and chesed. Every moment was lived with purpose, with a focus. And yet, along with his great madreigos of avodah, kedushah, and taharah, the Mashgiach was so accessible, so down to earth, so easy to speak with. His words, though measured, conveyed so much love for every Yid but especially for his talmidim.

Yehi Zichro Baruch!

 

For the publication released at the Yeshiva's Legacy Dinner

"HAMASHGIACH​"

TALMIDIM REMEMBER

click here

​​​​​​

For a short biography with pictures that appears in

"AMERICA'S YESHIVA"

click here

Enjoy This Wonderful Composition From Ben-Zion Shenker OBM

 

Golden Oldie :-)

 

Watching Humanity's Descent Into Chaos

 

For the last twenty years, I have had the peculiar sensation that I am living inside a psychiatric experiment designed by people who failed psychiatry. Every year brings another revelation, another movement, another self-appointed redeemer promising to heal humanity while simultaneously making it impossible for neighbors to speak to one another. The modern world suffers from a surplus of prophets and a shortage of adults.

The messianic crazies are everywhere. Some predict the end of capitalism, others the end of democracy, others the end of Western civilization, and still others the end of the world itself. Every one of them claims to possess secret knowledge unavailable to ordinary mortals. They speak with absolute certainty because certainty is the only asset they possess. Facts can be challenged. Evidence can be questioned. Certainty, delivered with sufficient arrogance, can attract millions.

The ancient rabbis understood something that modern society has forgotten: anyone who claims to know everything is usually advertising his ignorance. Yet ours is an age in which humility has become a disqualification. The man who says, "I might be wrong," is ignored. The man who declares, "I alone understand reality," gets a podcast, a book deal, and twenty million followers. Confidence has replaced competence. Volume has replaced wisdom.

Never in human history have so many people known so little while speaking so much. The internet promised the democratization of knowledge. Instead, it often democratized nonsense. Every uninformed opinion now arrives dressed as expertise. Every rumor is presented as investigative journalism. Every conspiracy theory comes wrapped in the language of courage and independent thinking. Millions spend hours consuming content hosted by people whose primary qualification is possession of a microphone and an inflated opinion of themselves.

A civilization that once produced engineers, scientists, philosophers, and statesmen now seems increasingly fascinated by influencers explaining geopolitics between advertisements for dietary supplements and sports betting apps. The old village idiot at least had the courtesy to remain in his village. The new village idiot enjoys global distribution, sponsorship deals, and a devoted audience.

Meanwhile, hatred has become society's most successful growth industry. The political Left manufactures it. The political Right manufactures it. Activists manufacture it. Media personalities manufacture it. Social media platforms distribute it with industrial efficiency. Entire careers are built upon convincing one group of people that another group represents an existential threat. Fear sells. Anger sells. Humiliation sells. Revenge sells. Truth struggles to find investors.

The result is a society increasingly incapable of distinguishing between disagreement and evil. Every argument becomes a crusade. Every election becomes "the most important election in history." Every policy dispute becomes a cosmic struggle between absolute good and absolute evil. Such thinking may be emotionally satisfying, but it is intellectually infantile. A civilization cannot function when every debate is transformed into Armageddon.

The Jewish people have seen this movie before. We have watched societies lose their minds. We have witnessed mass hysteria dressed up as moral virtue. We have observed educated people repeat obvious falsehoods because those falsehoods were fashionable. We have seen crowds intoxicated by slogans, leaders elevated into messianic figures, and institutions surrender their judgment to collective madness. History's most dangerous moments rarely begin with tanks. They begin with lies.

Small lies become acceptable. Large lies become profitable. Eventually, truth itself becomes negotiable. Once that happens, everything becomes possible. The most remarkable feature of modern civilization is not its technological brilliance but its intellectual recklessness. Humanity has invented machines capable of connecting billions of people instantly across continents. We then used those machines to amplify every prejudice, every delusion, every narcissist, every charlatan, and every fanatic we could find.

The result resembles less a global community than a global food fight. Everyone is screaming. Nobody is listening. Everybody belongs to a tribe. Nobody belongs to the truth. The tragedy is not merely that so many people have become dishonest. The tragedy is that honesty itself has become unfashionable. Admitting uncertainty is viewed as weakness. Intellectual caution is viewed as cowardice. Reflection is viewed as hesitation. The loudest voice wins, not because it is correct, but because it is loud.

And so humanity marches forward, armed with supercomputers, artificial intelligence, instant communication, and the emotional maturity of a middle-school cafeteria. The rabbis taught that wisdom begins with recognizing one's limitations. Modern civilization teaches the opposite. It teaches that ignorance accompanied by confidence is a substitute for wisdom.

That lesson may prove to be the most expensive one humanity has ever learned. A society can survive disagreement. It can survive hardship. It can survive political conflict. What it cannot survive indefinitely is the systematic destruction of the distinction between truth and falsehood. That, more than any election, ideology, political party, or public figure, is the real crisis of our age. Not that people disagree about reality, but that increasing numbers of people no longer believe reality has any authority over them at all. The road from civilization to chaos is shorter than most people imagine.

 The first step is not violence. The first step is convincing ourselves that truth no longer matters.

REPUBLISHED

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/watching-humanitys-descent-into-chaos/

Yoel Teitelbaum - The Real History Of This Charismatic Ill Man...

 

How a Leading Anti-Zionist Rabbi Betrayed His Community

The hypocritical actions of the Satmar Rebbe during the Holocaust

READ IN APP

In the frum community, you hear the stories of gedolim (great rabbis) during the Holocaust. They are painted as fearless leaders who marched with their flocks into the gas chambers or miraculously rebuilt from nothing purely on the merit of their unbroken emunah. And some of these stories are true. But if you dig into the actual historical records, the truth is often much darker. Sometimes the revered tzadik (saint) who built a massive post war empire was, objectively speaking, incredibly selfish.

Take Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, the famous Satmar Rebbe. Today, he is venerated as the ultimate unyielding leader of ultra Orthodoxy who built a massive, prosperous hasidus in America. He's also admired by some on the Jewish left for his antizionist theology. But during the Holocaust, his actions were anything but heroic. The historical record reveals a man whose self preservation consistently cost others their lives.

Even before the war, he was known for a relentlessly ambitious personality and a lust for power. When his father the Sighet Rebbe died, his older brother inherited the rabbinate of Sighet. His family exiled the jealous 17-year-old Yoel to Satmar to prevent him from interfering. Years later, when his brother passed away, he considered his family traitors for bypassing him again to appoint his 14-year-old nephew as the successor. He then engaged in six years of bitter relentless campaigns against his opponents in Satmar, whom he slandered both openly and surreptitiously, before securing the position of chief rabbi of Satmar in 1934.

Even after becoming religious leader, his primary concern was himself. When a virulently antisemitic government took power in Romania in 1937, he simply packed up and traveled to Czechoslovakia despite his kehillah (congregation) begging him not to abandon them in a time of crisis. Just a few weeks later, the Romanian king dissolved the antisemitic government. With the immediate threat over, Rabbi Teitelbaum returned home to his community in Satmar. When he got back, he gave a sermon to his congregation justifying his disappearance, making the claim that a Tzadik could only do his holy work if he was safe. This was a harbinger for what was to come.

As the terrifying reality of the Polish extermination camps reached Satmar in 1943, one man attempted to warn the Jewish residents of Satmar about the impending threat and urged them to escape. In response, the Satmar rebbe excommunicated him. Rabbi Teitelbaum himself cautioned his flock against trying to immigrate to Palestine or other countries, preaching that such a move would severely harm their strict Hasidic way of life.

Rabbi Teitelbaum did not just passively fail to help. He actively dismantled the escape routes others tried to build. At one crucial point, roughly forty rabbis recognized the impending doom and signed a desperate memorandum. This agreement would have integrated vulnerable Haredi (ultra Orthodox) Jews into the established Zionist underground networks, which were actively operating systems to help Jews hide and escape across the border. When Rabbi Teitelbaum found out about this life saving collaboration, he immediately stepped in to stop it. He appealed to the Central Bureau in Budapest and aggressively demanded that the Orthodox congregation in Oradea completely nullify the agreement. Because of his rigid ideological refusal to cooperate with Zionists, he deliberately severed a vital lifeline for his own community. He even refused to let other rabbinic leaders organize a public Taanis (fast day) to mourn and pray for salvation, worrying the government would see it as a political protest. He forced his community to stay quiet and reject the underground networks, paralyzing them right up until the moment he slipped away in the middle of the night to save himself.

As the Nazi threat closed in, his followers desperately tried to smuggle him out, but his rigid ego continually got in the way. At one point, a group prepared to cross the border into Romania, an escape route that saved over ten thousand Jews. The organizers sent a vehicle to collect him, but he refused to go, and because of his refusal, the entire plan was aborted, dooming the rest of the group. Another time, a plan was made to smuggle him to safety by train, but it required him to shave his beard and wear goyishe clothing. He refused to alter his appearance, killing that escape plan as well.

When he finally did escape his doomed congregation, it was in a bribed Red Cross ambulance with his wealthy followers. During the chaotic nighttime departure, the very man who organized the rescue and knew the location of their safe house was accidentally left behind. They did not turn back for him. Because they left their guide behind, they got lost, wandered the streets of Cluj, and were arrested and thrown into the Cluj ghetto.

In the horrific conditions of the brick factory ghetto, he showed no leadership or compassion. While regular Jews suffered, he demanded his food be prepared in entirely separate vessels to maintain his strict kashrus standards, despite the ghetto hosting a completely kosher kitchen. He hid from the public, spoke to few people, refused to serve as a chazzan for the makeshift synagogue, and begged his closest associates to pull strings to get him transferred to a more comfortable ghetto.

The most hypocritical part of his story is how he actually survived. He was a virulent anti-Zionist, preaching that collaborating with Zionist institutions was a grave sin. Yet, when the opportunity arose, he eagerly took a spot on the famous Kasztner train, a rescue transport organized and negotiated by the very Zionists he despised. On the train, leaving his community to be deported to Auschwitz, he spent the journey hiding in the corner of the last car behind cloth sheets hung from the ceiling, entirely shunning the other terrified passengers.

When the train was diverted to the Bergen-Belsen transit camp, his entitlement continued. While others suffered the brutal camp conditions, he was exempted from roll calls by a doctor, and volunteers performed all of his forced labor tasks. He refused to daven (pray) with the main camp minyan. In a display of profound arrogance, he even picked a fight with another captive rabbi, accusing him of giving a lenient psak (halachic ruling) despite the fact that they were literally in a Nazi camp!

After his release, he was brought to safety in Switzerland where he lived in a private apartment funded by his American followers. Even in safety, his refusal to play nice cost lives. He tried to track down Jewish orphans hidden with Christian families, but his main goal failed completely because his distaste for non Haredi organizations caused him to alienate the Joint Distribution Committee and Agudas Yisroel. Because of this pointless infighting, he failed to establish a rescue home for those children.

When the war was over, his ingratitude became absolute. He refused to send a single letter of thanks to the people or institutions who secured his rescue. Years later, when Israel Kasztner, the man whose train saved his life, was put on trial, Rabbi Teitelbaum flatly refused to testify on his behalf.

How did he justify all of this to his new followers in America? Well, he didn’t. Instead, he developed a radical theology claiming the Holocaust was God’s direct punishment for the sin of Zionism. He taught that Zionists violated the Shalosh Shevuot (Three Oaths) and that their push for a state was a collective kefirah (heresy) that brought down the harshest divine wrath. He literally wrote that Zionists were descendants of the Erev Rav and Amalek. He even blamed religious groups like Mizrachi and Agudas Yisroel, claiming they shared the guilt for the slaughter of six million Jews. He claimed his own personal survival was a pure miracle through the merit of Yaakov Avinu, while arguing that the Zionists were only saved by the Satan who was trying to glorify himself. He built an entire religious dynasty on blaming others, successfully using a total anti Zionist worldview to expunge his own historical failures and rewrite his cowardice as holy zealotry.¹

All the above details come from “Hast Thou Escaped and Also Taken Possession? The Responses of the Satmar Rebbe – Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum – and his Followers to Criticism of his Conduct During and After the Holocaust” by Menahem Keren-Kratz