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The Reform Rabbi --- "I urge Jews of all stripes to drill down to what keeps them Jewish" --- New York Wise Guy Hershel $chachter - "Judai$m My Way or the Highway"

 

The anguished dilemma of a Reform rabbi - No anguish from Hershel Schachter and his "Orthodox" minions!

 

Jews are a particular people with a universal message – If we abandon our particularity, we risk losing ourselves

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  Hershel Schachter's "jew" Celebrating Xmas After Halachic Fraud
  

  
  
  

  
  

Reform Rabbi - Against the notion that you can have 'Judaism your way'

 

How long do I remain a Reform Jew if the institutions of Reform Judaism stray into territories that are untenable for me ideologically?

This past week, the Reform movement’s seminary, the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, decided to overturn a long-standing ban and barrier and ordain students who are in committed relationships with non-Jews. That decision was not surprising, given the growing tendency of the Reform movement to prioritize universalism over peoplehood and the needs of the individual over those of the larger community.

We, as a movement, have been justifiably embracing of interfaith families. But that does not mean the rabbi should be permitted to be in such a relationship. Rabbis hold a unique role in the community and ought to be models of Jewish commitment, reflecting the endogamous (in-married) custom and law of our people.

This decision by the HUC Board of Governors reflects a historic crisis in the Reform movement.

Judaism stands on a three-legged stool. If you remove one leg, the stool cannot stand. Those three legs are God, Torah, and Israel (the people and the land). (Schachter's Broken Third Leg)

I recently came upon an expression used in a fundraising letter for the Union for Reform Judaism: “Judaism your way.” It’s hard to imagine anything more antithetical to Judaism than “Judaism your way.” After all, it was in the first person plural that our ancestors stood at Sinai and said, “We will do and we will hear!” (Exodus 24:7). To live Jewishly is to be engaged with the Jewish people.

A product of the Reform movement and a practicing Reform rabbi for nearly thirty years, I owe the very basis of my Jewish education from childhood to graduate school and ordination to institutions in which Jewish history, theology, practice (both the dos and the don’ts), and Hebrew were all central. I learned that to be a Reform Jew meant to be an informed Jew, a proud Zionist, and someone seriously engaged with our Jewish community.

“Judaism your way” – further demonstrated by HUC’s decision regarding rabbinical students – causes me to worry about the future of liberal Judaism: placing the ultra-individualism of American society above the essence of Jewishness.

Reform Judaism was founded to stem the tide of assimilation and to form a Judaism guided by Jewish law without always being beholden to it. Despite breaking from religious authority, Reform Judaism never rejected the importance of community and Jewish peoplehood. Although it gave the individual power to make informed choices, the goal was always to be connected to the Jewish people.

The movement has both suffered and excelled because of its emphasis on the individual. Yet today, this more explicit call replaces the communal with the individual – and the individual is rarely expected to find ways to serve the community. Given the current crisis faced by half the world’s Jews living in our people’s homeland, this is precisely the moment to prioritize the needs of the communal over the individual and to return to the three-legged stool of Jewish life.

While visiting relatives in Israel recently, we discussed their granddaughter’s future army service. I was impressed that instead of entering the army for mandatory service immediately after high school, she, like many of her peers, had volunteered to serve the country in a social service capacity for a year and then begin her military conscription. For those who follow such a path, their total commitment to the country increases by three to five years, depending on gender and branch of service. Israeli teenagers assume that serving the state is part of life.

By contrast, we American Jews do not expect the next generation to consider how they will serve their community. Many of us who serve as Jewish professionals tend to spend more time worrying about providing “Judaism your way” than helping or even demanding that individual Jews work their way into normative Jewish life.

I grew up in an era of activism on behalf of oppressed Soviet Jewry. Counselors from my Reform summer camp who had moved to Israel were regarded as heroes. While I knew I was growing up in a Reform milieu, I also knew that being Jewish meant belonging to a people, feeling a connection to our ancestral land, and approaching Judaism with rigor and reflection.

But a shift has occurred in the past two decades. A few weeks ago, a younger colleague referred to me – or at least to my ideas – as “antiquated.” I have come to take that comment as a compliment.

We now live in an era in which many Jewish educators and rabbis highlight universal Jewish values and present them as the driving force of Jewish living – or sometimes even as its only purpose. And so, biblical concepts like “created in the image of God,” “love your neighbor as yourself,” and “justice, justice you shall pursue” become the rallying cry for a form of Judaism that seeks to advance a progressive vision of society. It became commonplace to break Shabbat for an AIDS Walk or a solidarity march with Black Lives Matter. Given that progressive vision, permitting exogamy for rabbinical students becomes predictable.

Some years ago, I delivered a Rosh Hashanah sermon about the need to be better caretakers of the earth. Given that the Jewish New Year celebrates the birthday of the world, I thought it perfectly appropriate to draw connections between Jewish text and the wisdom of grounding our responsible actions in those words.

I would not give that sermon today, not because the earth doesn’t need attention (see: Genesis 2) but because people are constantly hearing that message in their secular lives. Instead, Jews coming to temple need to explore the teachings of Torah, God, Zionism, and peoplehood. While I am not suggesting we abdicate our communal and universal obligations – after all, they are part of the 613 mitzvot – I urge Jews of all stripes to drill down to what keeps them Jewish, how they reinforce their connection to our people, and what can we do as individuals to uplift the whole.

Much the way the National Transportation Safety Board comes in after a train wreck to assess the cause and the damage, Reform Judaism needs to assess what happened to allow our movement to “go off the rails.” Today the Reform movement’s leaders will issue statements about a Supreme Court decision or a presidential executive order but say little if anything when antisemitic demonstrations threaten college campuses. In their silence, they fail to communicate to our congregations and youth – let alone the world at large – our commitment to Judaism, Zionism, and the Jewish State.

The Jewish people are a particular people with a universal message. Our universal message promotes caring about the other and extending love and kindness. Yet our particularity keeps us engaged and informed, loyal and dedicated to the rituals, ideas, beliefs, and practices that reflect our 3,000-year-old covenant with God and one another. The three legs of the Jewish stool are the anchors by which Jewish individuals and families find meaning and bring our heritage to life.

Part of the strength of the Jewish people is believing that each generation could be the last. The twentieth-century Jewish thinker Simon Rawidowicz called us “the ever-dying people.” Indeed, either because of forces from the outside or forces from within, we are seemingly forever on the verge of extinction. A sense of preeminent individualism, disengagement from the Jewish people beyond one’s temple, and the notion that you can have “Judaism your way” – including for clerical leaders – all make for an increasingly thin Reform Judaism, let alone Judaism. I know that I am not alone among Reform Jewish professionals and lay people who share these concerns. Together, we recognize the imperative of embracing the “particulars” that define Judaism and making the Jewish people the centerpiece of our thinking and our behavior. Maybe we, Reform Jews, need to be a bit more antiquated. As long as we do, then a Reform Jew, I remain. 

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-anguished-dilemma-of-a-reform-rabbi/

The Unlikely Founders of The State of Israel | Rabbi Berel Wein

Western civilization is being destroyed by its own decadence! And boy do they want the only decent, peace-exporting country in the whole Middle East – Israel – to fail.

 

 One doesn’t always appreciate what one has until it’s too late. Cheaters look upon their wrecked families and suddenly see that their pre-affair life was comparatively idyllic. Youth is famously wasted on the young, who use their health and energy to binge on toxic substances and attempt to be as miserable as possible.

A similar phenomenon is at play in the politics of the West. We have built the most peaceful, most prosperous, most humane, most progressive civilisation the world has ever known, after centuries of battle – physical, moral and philosophical; carnage and bloodshed.

And now, just 80 years after Auschwitz and 30-odd years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we are apparently already bored of our hard-won liberty and stability. The zeitgeist of the current age is to smash things up while pretending to be building a better world.

Only, as some are beginning to find out, what begins as a performative theory of progressivism ends up in murder, mayhem and misery.

An interesting case study is emerging in Portland, Oregon, where far-Left politics and hard-Left thugs meet violent alt-Righters and skinhead gangs. Once a prosperous city on America’s famously idyllic Pacific north-west coast, it’s become a nightmare that people are leaving in droves.

After the Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd – and the insistence that the police were America’s front-running racism delivery service – Portland’s police force was “defunded”, the city’s top prosecutor refused to press charges for low-level crime, and, in 2021, most drug possession was decriminalised.

The result was not the paradise of “equity” that activists were demanding, but rampant homicide rates, a hugely worsening opioid and drug addiction crisis (deaths from opioid overdoses have tripled), the further sprawl of homeless tent encampments, and a general escalation in violence, with car theft having rocketed (30 vehicles a day are reported stolen, according to a report in the Times), along with car and shop window smashing.

In the name of the “safety” of promoting “anti-racism”, Portland has become such a dangerous place that businesspeople are leaving in droves. “Our stores are being broken into. Our merchandise is being taken,” a local businessman told the city council in November 2022. “Our employees can’t go into the office, even if they want to, because they don’t feel safe.”

Having had something so good, and then, through unforgivable decadence, destroyed it (with the bodycount to match), however, Portland is now changing its tune. The drug decriminalisation law has been reversed, low-level crime is once again prosecuted, and the police have been re-funded.

But I’m not just worried about the harm being done to cities and everyday life by social justice ideology – which in the UK is visible in our scaredy-cat approach to stop and search, lenient attitude towards illegal immigrants from countries known to export terror and for the mistreatment of women, and the refusal to tackle low-level crime and shoplifting.

It’s also our stupidity and hubris on the world stage – our grandstanding about meaningless utterances of “peace” and “provocation”. We are forgetting why it is that the free world managed to triumph in the 20th century.

Last week, Nigel Farage outed himself as deeply unfit for leadership by piping the same line as other populists in Europe and the United States: that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is effectively our fault because, through Nato expansion, we had “poked” the Russian bear (the accurate reading is that Putin was never “poked”, he is a bloodthirsty madman taking advantage of Western weakness to attack and colonise).

Meanwhile, the soft and useless Left that run the vast majority of international institutions have perhaps read too much postcolonial theory and – while they do tend to champion Ukraine against Russia – they also want, in general, to let rogues, dictators and repressive societies be, while opening the floodgates to an unvetted sea of people fleeing those countries.

And boy do they want the only decent, peace-exporting country in the whole Middle East – Israel – to fail.

Whichever way you look at it, the people in charge, or who are trying to be in charge, don’t get it. Too distanced from the horrors of the 20th century; too comfortable in the stable, peaceful and free societies fought for through blood and tears by their forefathers and mothers, they are embracing appeasement, in the name of a “peace” that literally translates into the triumph of those who want to destroy us.

They remain wilfully blind to the very important lesson of 1945: getting tough on baddies is the only path to meaningful peace.

Instead of shoring our civilisation up, and realising that preserving our societies is a constant battle against forces that want to destroy them, we are choosing to bring our best traditions, institutions and culture to the heel of rotten concepts like populism and isolationism (on the Right), and intersectionality (a Venn diagram of victim statuses), white privilege, equity, inclusion, and a ludicrous gender ideology movement venerating a bewildering array of identities on the Left.

The cost of all this foolery is real and it is apparent. The chickens we’ve laid at home and abroad are already coming home to roost.   

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ar-BB1p7LFw

Jewish law has plenty to say about lying — and it certainly does not recommend doing nothing.

"The problem of an unchecked lie matters for all Americans, but it especially matters for the Jewish community — because the big lie of Jewish power, and the antisemitism that often follows it, thrives in an environment where flagrant lies are acceptable."

Trump’s lies are more dangerous than ever — does Jewish law have a solution?

 

After the first presidential debate, it’s clear that Americans must take the threat of a public culture defined by lies seriously

Thursday’s debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump made one thing clear: American citizens must figure out how to define and react to a lie, with a particular emphasis on reaction. 

Two of America’s most seasoned journalists, Dana Bash and Jake Tapper — both of whom happen to be Jewish — failed to respond to egregious lies during the debate, highlighting that lies are our greatest social and political challenge, and that non-response to them has wrongly become a norm. 

Jewish law has plenty to say about lying — and it certainly does not recommend doing nothing.

One of the things it points out: Facing a skilled liar head-on can be tough. And when it comes to facing someone like Trump, whose lies have recently earned him a conviction on 34 felony counts, it’s debatable whether he should have the opportunity to show off that skill set.

“Halakhah (Jewish law) treats ordinary lying as a vice, and lying in court as a crime for both witnesses and judges,” said Rabbi Aryeh Klapper, Dean of the Center for Modern Torah Leadership. “Criminally convicted liars lose core privileges of citizenship such as the right to testify. They may also be prevented from taking oaths, which can put them at a disadvantage in business.”

Yet if anything, Trump’s lies seemed to give him an edge on his opponent; left unconstrained, he was free to perform. 

“I’m not sure I’d ever watched Donald Trump lie so incessantly, extravagantly and unabashedly, and that’s saying something,” Frank Bruni wrote in The New York Times. “On Thursday night he lied about the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He lied about the violence in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. He lied about his relationship with the military, about his concern for the environment — about pretty much any and every subject that came up. He lied with a smile. He lied with a shrug. He lied with a sneer.” 

When Trump twisted the truth until it sounded like Democrats support killing babies on arrival, the feminist writer Jessica Valenti wrote on X, “I’m sorry, but Trump just claimed that Democrats allow “after birth” abortion and the moderators’ only response was “thank you”???”

The problem of an unchecked lie matters for all Americans, but it especially matters for the Jewish community — because the big lie of Jewish power, and the antisemitism that often follows it, thrives in an environment where flagrant lies are acceptable.

So what does Judaism have to say about lying? Plenty.

Trump’s lies and Jewish law

I was interested in hearing more about “core privileges of citizenship” that a criminally convicted liar might lose.

“Being judges,” Rabbi Klapper said. “The ability to take an oath was an essential part of participating in public life, because otherwise you couldn’t defend yourself or your property in many situations.”

At what point do we as citizens believe that lying precludes a person from “participating in public life” — like, perhaps, being featured in televised debates? Or being eligible to run for president?

Jewish law also outlines potential physical punishment for lying in court; “Perjured witnesses can also be given lashes, like most halakhic criminals,” Klapper said. But Rabbi Klapper cautioned that such punishment was extremely rare. And of course, this was ancient law — not modern practice.

There is also the famous and, as Rabbi Klapper put it, “weird” case of eidim zomemim, or witnesses who lie. 

“Eidim zomemim are dealt the very same punishment they intended to generate with their false testimony,” writes Rav Moshe Taragin of Torat Har Etzion, summarizing the views of Masekhet Makkot. “For example, if eidim zomemim conspired to obligate capital punishment, they themselves are executed; if they intended to cause financial loss, they must reimburse their intended victim.” 

It’s one of the most unforgettable parts of Jewish law, which shocked me when I first encountered it as a child: If you go to court and undertake a conspiracy to wrongly bring the death penalty upon your innocent neighbor, you might pay with your life for trying to take away his. This extraordinary expression of the high value Judaism places on the truth also shows that Jewish law believes that a liar who meaningfully harms others in a court of law should be penalized.

Thinking about eidim zomemim reminded me of Trump’s involvement in the infamous case of the Central Park Five. After five Black teenagers were arrested on rape charges — which turned out to be false — Trump took out full-page newspaper ads urging that they receive the death penalty.

Even when it was clearly established that the teenagers, who served 6 to 13 years in prison, had been falsely accused, and even when a serial rapist was linked to the crime through DNA evidence and confessed, Trump faced no consequences. And he continued to bear down, and continued to suggest the Central Park Five deserved harsh punishment. “You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt. If you look at Linda Fairstein and if you look at some of the prosecutors, they think that the city should never have settled that case. So we’ll leave it at that,” Trump said in 2019.

Jewish principles regarding eidim zomemim acknowledge that a lie can be damaging and even lethal to others. The idea is worth considering: Certain kinds of lies are a clear and plain danger to life itself.

That was clearly the case in Trump’s involvement in the case of the Central Park Five; it remains so today, as he amply demonstrated in the debate. Consider his lie, highlighted by Valenti, that Democrats support the “abortion” of babies after they are born; such distortions are a direct threat to the lives of people whose pregnancies threaten their health, as maternal mortality is already on the rise amid a national crackdown on abortion rights. 

Returning to the Torah

It’s worth taking another look at the verses in the Torah that address lying. “Leviticus 19:11 forbids lying and Exodus 23 commands us to go even further and distance ourselves from lies,” said Klapper.

There is a danger to having our public lives so structured by lies and liars — and particularly to having such a pernicious one in our living rooms, on national television, and in the Oval Office. 

In 2016, Trump’s outrageousness was rewarded with the presidency. Over the past four years, many of us have let fade the memory of the profound rot in our culture that followed his first term in office; the sense of rot we felt in our own souls. This time, we cannot treat his lies with the same cavalier attitude. We owe it to the U.S. — and the world — to react.

https://forward.com/opinion/628743/trumps-lies-debate-biden/?

I'll Venture To Guess - The Blind, Short-Sighted Jews At The Agudath Israel Think This Is Great!

 

Oklahoma’s State Superintendent Requires Public Schools to Teach the Bible

 

The state superintendent, Ryan Walters, said the Bible was a “necessary historical document” that must be taught in certain grades.

 

Oklahoma’s state superintendent on Thursday directed all public schools to teach the Bible, including the Ten Commandments, in the latest conservative push testing the boundaries between religious instruction and public education.

The superintendent, Ryan Walters, who is a Republican, described the Bible as an “indispensable historical and cultural touchstone” and said it must be taught in certain grade levels.

The move comes a week after Louisiana became the first state to mandate that public schools display the Ten Commandments in every classroom, which was quickly challenged in court. The Oklahoma directive could also be challenged and is likely to provoke the latest tangle over the role of religion in public schools, an issue that has increasingly taken on national prominence.

The efforts to bring religious texts into the classroom are part of a growing national movement to create and interpret laws according to a particular conservative Christian worldview.

Oklahoma had also sought to be the first state to authorize a religious charter school, which would have funneled taxpayer dollars to an online Catholic school slated to open in August. The Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled against the school this week, but the decision is likely to be appealed.

Mr. Walters, a former history teacher who served in the cabinet of Gov. Kevin Stitt before being elected state superintendent in 2022, has emerged as a lightning rod of conservative politics in Oklahoma and an unapologetic culture warrior in education. He has battled over the teaching of race and gender identity, fought against “woke ideology” in public schools and at times targeted school districts and individual teachers.

In his announcement on Thursday, Mr. Walters called the Bible “a necessary historical document to teach our kids about the history of this country, to have a complete understanding of Western civilization, to have an understanding of the basis of our legal system.”

It was not immediately clear what the instruction would entail, or which grade levels would be included. In a memo to school district leaders, Mr. Walters cited fifth through 12th grades as an example. He also said that the state might supply teaching materials for the Bible to “ensure uniformity in delivery.”

His directive faced immediate pushback, including from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which also sued to stop the religious charter school in Oklahoma and the Ten Commandments law in Louisiana.

Rachel Laser, the president of Americans United, said the group was “ready to step in and protect all Oklahoma public school children and their families from constitutional violations of their religious freedom.”

“Public schools are not Sunday schools,” she said, adding, “public schools may teach about religion, but they may not preach any religion.”

Stacey Woolley, the president of the school board for Tulsa Public Schools, which Mr. Walters has threatened to take over, said she had not received specific instructions on the curriculum, but believed it would be “inappropriate” to teach students of various faiths and backgrounds excerpts from the Bible alone, without also including other religious texts.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/27/us/oklahoma-public-schools-bible.html?

Shnorrers --- Don't Go Home Yet! " In accordance with the court’s decision, this bans government yeshiva funding ‘directly or indirectly’"

 

For the past 40 years these same yeshivas were bleeding Americans blind while receiving full funding -- Now they’re here yelling they need money again? Did they thank the "secular" government when they received billions of dollars? Nobody   believes that their Torah learning and Kollelim are going to win wars. Drive ambulances leidikgeyers, work in the offices, hospitals..enough already with your draft-dodging. After all why should any Jew die for you?

 

*Once full-scale war broke out after the State of Israel declared its existence on May 14, 1948 [CE] Reb Shraga Feivel’s [Mendlowitz] thoughts were never far from Eretz Yisrael.

A group of students saw him outside the Mesivta building one day, talking excitedly with Rabbi Gedaliah Schorr and gesticulating rapidly with the newspaper held in his hand.

“If I were your age,” he [Rabbi Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz] told the students, “I would take a gun and go to Eretz Yisrael.”

SOURCE: Reb Shraga Feivel: the life and times of Rabbi Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz, the architect of Torah in America (chapter 26, page 338) by Yonoson Rosenblum for Artscroll / Mesorah*

"In a letter addressed to the ministries of defense, finance, and education, the Attorney General’s Office also ordered the government to refrain from transferring funds previously allocated to yeshivas for students who were studying in lieu of military service, in accordance with the court’s decision, telling the ministries they can no longer provide such support in any format."

After court ruling, AG tells IDF to immediately start drafting 3,000 Haredi students

 

Notice also orders the military to draw up a conscription plan for enlistment beyond the initial figure, bans government yeshiva funding ‘directly or indirectly’

The Attorney General’s Office on Tuesday instructed the Israel Defense Forces to immediately draft 3,000 ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students beginning July 1, following the High Court of Justice’s ruling earlier in the day that the government is obligated to conscript such men into military service.

In a letter addressed to the ministries of defense, finance, and education, the Attorney General’s Office also ordered the government to refrain from transferring funds previously allocated to yeshivas for students who were studying in lieu of military service, in accordance with the court’s decision, telling the ministries they can no longer provide such support in any format.

The instructions came hours after a landmark High Court decision that determined for the first time that ultra-Orthodox men are obligated to perform military service, since the previous legislative and administrative arrangements allowing for their blanket exemptions have now expired.

“The security establishment is obligated to act immediately to implement the ruling to draft yeshiva students who are obligated to perform military service, in accordance with the needs of the army and its capabilities, and in accordance with its commitment to draft 3,000 recruits,” Deputy Attorney General Gil Limon told the army in a letter to its legal adviser.

There are currently some 63,000 Haredi yeshiva students who, under the ruling, are obligated to perform military service, although the IDF told the court that it could realistically draft just 3,000 in the 2024 enlistment year, which began in June.

Limon pointed out that the 3,000 Haredi men who now need to be drafted must come in addition to the average number of such men who have enlisted in recent years, which the government put at 1,800 in its submission to the court.

His letter said that the military must also present a conscription plan to fully exploit the draft potential from the ultra-Orthodox community and further increase the number of conscripts above the 3,000 figure “in light of the present needs of the army and in order to advance equality in the burden of military service

Additionally, Limon stated in his letter to the ministers that under the terms of the ruling they are banned from transferring any funds “directly or indirectly” to yeshivas who have until now received funding per student who has been studying in those institutions in lieu of military service.

The order stems from the court’s ruling that the funding allocated by law for yeshiva students studying instead of performing military service was directly connected to the law allowing for blanket military service exemptions.

Since that law has expired, there is no longer any legal framework for the provision of those funds.

Limon added that this ban meant that the funding cannot be tacked on to other financial support programs enjoyed by yeshiva students, reflecting the Attorney General’s Office’s concern that the government could seek to circumvent the ruling by reallocating the funds through different support programs.

The Movement for Quality Government in Israel, one of the primary petitioning organizations in the case, said that the Attorney General’s Office’s instructions were “an important first step,” but that the scale of Haredi enlistment should be “substantially broadened” and that all 63,000 students must be drafted immediately.

Later on Tuesday, Likud MK Yuli Edelstein, who heads the Knesset committee that is currently deliberating the government’s ultra-Orthodox enlistment bill, issued a statement saying the legislation will only advance “with broad agreement.”

“Or the law won’t pass at all,” he declared.

According to an ultra-Orthodox activist involved in promoting enlistment, at least 10,000 Haredi men are exempted annually from military service under false pretenses and should enlist per the High Court of Justice ruling.

“It should start with those exempted who only say they attend yeshivot [but actually don’t attend],” Eliyahu Glatzenberg, co-founder of the Achvat Torah nonprofit, told The Times of Israel following the High Court of Justice’s ruling.

Definitions of who is Haredi vary, complicating statistics. Shomrim, an investigative journalism platform, says that by the most liberal definition, only about 1,000 Haredim enlisted in 2019 and 2020, about half of the levels in the years 2013-2018. Statistics for 2021-2023 are similar, an IDF representative told a Knesset committee in February.

“If the 10,000-odd wrongfully exempted Haredim are targeted, there’d be more understanding of it by Haredi community leaders than if the army conscripted actual yeshiva students,” said Glatzenberg.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/after-court-ruling-ag-tells-idf-to-immediately-start-drafting-3000-haredi-students/?utm_source=The+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=daily-edition-2024-06-26&utm_medium=email

 

 

סיום בבא מציעא במעבר רפיח

יוסף חיים שמחי, תלמיד ישיבת הכותל, ערך סיום מסכת 'בבא מציעא' אשר למד במסגרת הדף היומי במעבר רפיח בהשתתפות חבריו למחלקה.

Hesder Yeshiva Boys Making A Siyum On Bava Metzia: Watch The Video and Cry With Joy For Such Boys!(And the rabbis that instructed them to Join The IDF)

https://www.inn.co.il/news/641527

It was widely known in Crown Heights that the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, then age 91, was having surgery at Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital on the day the shooting took place. Halberstam believes Baz got wind of the appointment and staked out the rebbe to avenge the Hebron massacre.

 

Her son was fatally shot on the Brooklyn Bridge. But Devorah Halberstam says the full story remains untold

 

30 years later, she’s still angry, still mourning and still seeking justice — and the truth

 

Devorah Halberstam with a photo of her son Ari, who was fatally shot on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1994.

It’s been 30 years since 16-year-old Ari Halberstam was murdered by a cab driver who shot up a van taking Lubavitcher kids across the Brooklyn Bridge. The gunman, Rashid Baz, died in prison last year while serving a 141-year sentence. 

But Ari’s mother, Devorah Halberstam, wants you to know that the full story has yet to be told. 

“I’m still fighting for justice for Ari,” she said in an interview in her home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where the first thing you see in the living room is a photo of teenage Ari, frozen in time. 

Antisemitism Notebook

“Everything was minimized and contained: I had to fight to have it classified as terrorism,” she continued. “I know all the pieces of the puzzle. And I’ll never understand: Who were we protecting? All the evidence was there.”

Among the “obvious questions” she’s angry that Baz never answered: “How’d you get the guns? Why were you on the bridge at the same time as the van? You just bumped into them? You just happened to be fully loaded with a machine gun, a Glock pistol and a ‘street sweeper’ .380, and you said, ‘Oh, Hasids on the bus, let me shoot them up.’”

And, most important: “Who else was in on it?”

Was there a conspiracy?

Halberstam called the shooting an act of terror from the outset, but it took five years for the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice to classify the case as terrorism. The government still rejects Halberstam’s contention that Baz was part of a conspiracy. But the Anti-Defamation League posted a new $50,000 reward last year for information in the case, saying: “The question remains: Were others involved?” 

I sent a detailed request to the U.S. attorney’s office for comment on this story, but did not hear back.

Why, one might ask, does any of this matter now? Baz is dead. And Halberstam has spent the last three decades getting antiterrorism laws passed. She also co-founded a Jewish children’s museum in Ari’s memory. So what more does she want, this woman who tears up in a nanosecond at the mention of her first-born son — a basketball player who made everyone laugh, a child who taught his Hasidic mother that you can be, in Halberstams’s words, “deeply religious” and at the same time, “an all-American kid”? 

What could she possibly expect from the meetings she still holds with government officials, badgering them about a case they closed the book on years ago? 

What she wants, she said, is the truth: “The truth doesn’t go away. And it needs to be told over and over.” 

FOIA requests denied 

As a Jewish New Yorker myself, and as a reporter who covered the Lubavitcher community — including the Crown Heights riots — for The Associated Press in the 1990s, I’ve followed this case for a long time. I’ve filed Freedom of Information Act requests with various governmental agencies over the years, hoping for answers to Halberstam’s questions. But all I’ve gotten is a few unenlightening pages related to the deportation of Baz’s uncle to Jordan. He and another man concealed evidence by repairing Baz’s shot-up car. 

I thought this year might be different. Why keep things classified 30 years later if the government believes there was no conspiracy?

The reason given: “national security.”

I appealed, arguing that the public has a right to know and questioning the logic of keeping anything secret this many years on. How come I can read all about the government’s failures in preventing 9/11 and the murders of 3,000 people, but a March 14, 1994, cable labeled “Terrorist Threat Warning System in the United States” in an online archive of Halberstam documents remains classified? 

So far I’ve lost my appeals.

“I hope you write that in your article,” Halberstam said. “They’re hiding something.”

Revenge for the Hebron massacre 

This 1999 report from the Department of Justice reclassified Ari’s murder as terrorism. 

Authorities initially characterized Baz’s 1994 attack as “road rage” following a traffic dispute. Then at trial, the defense said that Baz, who was Lebanese, was traumatized growing up during that country’s civil war, and that a “flashback” prompted him to shoot when he saw the boys in the van wearing the black hats and coats marking them as Jews. 

Baz’s lawyer also said he was angry over a massacre of 29 Palestinians in the West Bank city of Hebron, carried out by religious extremist Baruch Goldstein five days before the bridge shooting. Baz’s mother was Palestinian. 

Witnesses testified that Baz heard a “raging antisemitic sermon” at a Brooklyn mosque hours after the Hebron massacre. “This takes the mask off the Jews,” the imam reportedly said. “It shows them to be racist and fascist and as bad as the Nazis. Palestinians are suffering from the occupation, and it’s time to end it.”   

Years later, Baz told the authorities: “I only shot them because they were Jewish.” That admission stands in stark contrast to a police investigator’s comment, early on, that Baz had “no politics and no real religion.” One lawyer described Baz as simply “nuts.”

“But he wasn’t,” Halberstam said. “He was crazy as a fox, as all terrorists are. He did this with intent.” 

‘It wasn’t a coincidence’

Aerial view of the Brooklyn Bridge.

It was widely known in Crown Heights that the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, then age 91, was having surgery at Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital on the day the shooting took place. Halberstam believes Baz got wind of the appointment and staked out the rebbe to avenge the Hebron massacre. 

Halberstam thinks the authorities had an inkling something was up because police stopped by Chabad headquarters the night before, telling people not to follow the rebbe’s motorcade “for security reasons.”

After the rebbe left the hospital, his entourage entered the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel in Manhattan to take him home, and officials temporarily blocked the tunnel to other cars. Baz, driving his cab, “couldn’t get into the tunnel after the rebbe,” Halberstam said, so he headed to the nearest alternate route: the Brooklyn Bridge. “It wasn’t a coincidence that he bumped into this van,” she said.

Halberstam believes Baz targeted the Jewish boys wearing black hats and coats as a substitute for the rebbe. He shot 40 rounds at the van while driving. Ari was one of four boys hit, and the only one to die.

Baz fled back to Brooklyn where his uncle, who owned the car, helped remove the shattered windshield. Where Baz got the ammunition and guns — which he claimed he kept in the cab for self-defense after being robbed — remains unknown. 

Civil rights 

Halberstam said the case of Ahmaud Arbery, the Black jogger murdered in Georgia in 2020 by two white men, “was an eye-opener for me.” Arbery’s mother successfully fought to have that case prosecuted on federal hate crime charges, not just murder.  

Halberstam feels the bridge shooting — which she describes as the “worst attack on Jews in the history of New York City” — should also have been investigated by the feds as a violation of the boys’ civil rights, and not simply a shooting under state law.

Police at a 30th anniversary memorial for Ari Halberstam on the Brooklym Bridge

“My son was murdered because he was identifiable as a Jew,” she said. “So is there a double standard because they were Jews? That’s the very big question in retrospect.” In other words, she believes antisemitism, on the part of investigators and prosecutors, may have influenced how the case was handled. 

But she said she understands why the case wasn’t immediately classified as terrorism: “Terrorism was on nobody’s radar screen in 1994.” The first World Trade Center bombing had taken place the year before, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000, “but they treated that as isolated.” 

Still, at a commemoration held at the bridge on the 30th anniversary of the attack, New York Mayor Eric Adams said Halberstam was prescient in calling the case terrorism. “If we would have listened, there may have been a different approach to Sept. 11, 2001,” he said.

A mother’s grief

Halberstam’s grief is never far away. Sobs caught in her throat over and over as we talked.

“That’s the part that you can’t share with everybody,” she said. “It lives in your heart. It’s in your own private moments. It’s not that people are not compassionate. It’s not that people don’t care. It’s not that people don’t have patience for it. It’s that unless a person’s been there, there’s just no explaining it. There’s no, ‘You’ll get over it.’ There’s no ‘Time will heal.’

“It doesn’t matter what I do,” she continued. “You fill it up, but there’s a hole at the bottom, so it just goes right through. It’s empty.”

Ari had four younger siblings. He’s forever 16, but they grew up, married, had kids of their own. When I asked Halberstam how many grandchildren she has, she said, “Not enough,” because Ari’s are missing.

Ari’s legacy

Ari’s murder turned Halberstam into an activist. She’s credited with helping to write the first laws in New York State against terrorism; she lectures and trains law enforcement on hate crimes, terrorism and antisemitism; and she’s an advocate for victims’ rights, serving, among other things, on a city commission for hate crimes. 

And yet, she said, “If anybody says, ‘Look what you’ve accomplished’ — don’t even go there with me. It’s on the coattails of my son’s murder. I’m still the mother in the corner, weeping for my dead child.”

READ MORE:

https://forward.com/news/629361/devorah-halberstam-ari-brooklyn-bridge-shooting/?

Truth tellers are the Achilles heel of collective denial because they call attention to what’s swept under the rug. Thus another playbook tactic is to hush them up...

 "Time and again, society pressures people not to see, hear or speak about the elephant in the room. To maintain our own “cognitive tranquility,” we tune out, malign and shoot the messenger because they remind us of what we would rather disregard."

We’ve Hit Peak Denial. Here’s Why We Can’t Turn Away From Reality

We are living through a terrible time in humanity. Here’s why we tend to stick our heads in the sand and why we need to pull them out, fast.

We need to guard against lowering our standards for normalcy. When we mentally and emotionally recalibrate to the new normal, we also disassociate from our own humanity.

If it seems like things are kind of off these days, you’re not alone. Recently, more than 100,000 people liked a post marking the start of the pandemic that said, “[Four] years ago, this week was the last normal week of our lives.”

Objectively speaking, we are living through a dumpster fire of a historical moment. Wars are on the rise around the globe, and 2023 saw the most civilian casualties in almost 15 years.

H5N1 bird flu has jumped to cows, several farm workers have been infected, and scientists are warning about another potential pandemic. According to data from wastewater, the second biggest COVID surge occurred this winter. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates at least 24,000 people have died of COVID so far in 2024.

Last year was the hottest ever and recorded the highest number of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. Not to mention that over the past few years, mass shootings have significantly increased, we’ve seen unparalleled attacks on democracy and science, and mental health issues have skyrocketed.

Truth be told, things were bananas even before the pandemic: just think of the Great Recession, the 2009 swine flu pandemic, and Brexit. Academics use terms like “polycrisis” and “postnormal times” to describe the breadth and scale of the issues we now face.

Welcome to the new normal, an age where many things that we used to deem unusual or unacceptable have become just what we live with. Concerningly, though, “living with it” means tolerating greater suffering and instability than we used to, often without fully noticing or talking about it. When authorities tell us to “resume normal activities” after an on-campus shooting or give guidance on how to increase our heat tolerance in an ever-hotter world, we may sense that something is awry even as we go along with it.

But what happens when overlooking and tolerating greater levels of harm becomes a shared cultural habit? Like the proverbial frog in boiling water, we acclimate to ignoring more and caring less at our own peril. In the short term, living in a state of peak denial helps us cope. In the long run, it will be our undoing. Because the danger here is desensitization: that we meet this unprecedented litany of “wicked problems,” from climate change to the rise of fascism, with passive acceptance rather than urgent collective action.

How does this happen? How do we overlook and become hardened to bad things, especially in this scientific and technological age, when we’ve never been more capable of understanding and addressing them? To resist complacency, we must first understand how it operates.

Social scientists have long investigated the social organization of denial or how we collectively achieve reality-adjacent lives in which we do not recognize serious problems or they are made to seem normal. What research has found is that a key way we come to “not see” social problems that should beg for our attention is that disturbing or threatening information is neutralized or evaded.

COVID is a good case study for illustrating the “Collective Denial Playbook” that underpins our new normal reality.

A common strategy to neutralize a social problem is to make knowing about it hard, often by restricting efforts to look into it, like scaling back COVID tracking. In April the CDC ended the requirement that hospitals report COVID admissions and occupancy data, removing one of the last tools we could use to monitor what’s happening. “We now enter the blackout phase of epidemiology” wrote science journalist Laurie Garrett on X, adding: “There will be patients, but their numbers and whereabouts will be unknown….” Disappearing is also accomplished by not alerting the public. For example, during the winter surge, we heard “crickets from the White House.” In fact, as COVID positivity and death rates rose, tweets from CDC director Mandy Cohen decreased.

If the COVID situation is tracked and the public warned, things don’t feel normal. But if we don’t monitor or mention it, then things can feel “back to normal”—fine, even.

Another tactic is minimization. How we describe and measure things shapes how we feel about them. Which is why it’s important to notice when neutralizing language enters the chat. For some time now, turns of phrase like “endemic” and “during COVID” have been common vernacular. So have refrains like “lower hospitalizations than last year.” All of this gives off an “it’s just a cold,” “mission accomplished” vibe, casting the disease into a worry-free zone that’s safely behind us.

This minimization keeps the quiet part quiet: that “the world is still in a pandemic” per the WHO; that more than 73,000 Americans died of COVID in 2023, a higher number than from car accidents or influenza; among those infected, 9 percent and counting have long COVID, a serious and often disabling condition with a disease burden comparable to cancer or heart disease, and an economic cost rivaling the Great Recession, and for which there are no approved treatments. What’s more, each infection is associated with a substantially increased risk of health issues like cognitive dysfunction, autoimmune disease and cardiovascular problems, even for mild infections.

Pre-pandemic, these statistics would have been eye-popping. Now they constitute “back to normal.” We think we no longer have a problem, when actually we’ve just changed the standard by which we deem something concerning.

Yet, to shore up collective denial, we often do more than revise the present; we also rewrite the past. So not only do we reiterate that we are better off now, we claim things were never that bad. This sort of “forgetting work,” or contesting the past to remove unwanted memories, produces a cultural amnesia about the pandemic. And in burying the past, we sidestep accountability for what went wrong and preserve the status quo by failing to implement lessons learned from our own history.

Finally, truth tellers are the Achilles heel of collective denial because they call attention to what’s swept under the rug. Thus another playbook tactic is to hush them up, often by painting them as subversives or deviants. And so those who wear masks are ridiculed, scientists reporting on COVID-19 risks are cast as fearmongers, and those with long COVID are dismissed as having anxiety disorders.

Time and again, society pressures people not to see, hear or speak about the elephant in the room. To maintain our own “cognitive tranquility,” we tune out, malign and shoot the messenger because they remind us of what we would rather disregard.

These tactics are how we get used to so many bad things, from mega-fires to insurrections.

So what can we do about our “Ignore more, care less, everything is fine!” era? We need to stop enabling it. This starts by being more attuned to our “everyday ignoring” and “everyday bystanding”—like that pinch we feel when we know we should click through a concerning headline, but instead scroll past it.

We need to work harder to catch ourselves in the act of staying silent or avoiding uncomfortable information and do more real-time course correcting.

We need to guard against lowering our standards for normalcy. When we mentally and emotionally recalibrate to the new normal, we also disassociate from our own humanity.

We need to demand that our leaders give the full truth and hold them to account. We must stand up for the silenced and stand with the silence-breakers.

To counter the new normal’s assault on normalcy, we must double down on our duty to know, to speak up, and to remember.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/weve-hit-peak-denial-heres-why-we-cant-turn-away-from-reality//

Enough Already With The Shnorrers in Lakewood - Here is someone from Israel you can really trust (Dennis Prager does)

 

  For the past 30 years these same yeshivas were bleeding Americans blind while receiving full funding -- Now they’re here yelling they need money again?
Now they’re here yelling they need money again? Now they’re here yelling they need money again?Again? Again? "Tateles gay shoin aheim"

https://youtu.be/kG3wPyANstM?si=u78VkZBbRa2f_BdL

טאטאל'ע קום שוין אהיים

*****************************************************************************

Uri Geller: Aliens built the Jerusalem Temple, may help Israel during war

 

Israeli mystifier and entertainer Uri Geller claims that aliens built monuments like Stonehenge and the biblical Temple in Jerusalem, and reaffirms the benevolent nature of these aliens.

UFO (illustrative).

Aliens built the Beit Hamikdash, the ancient Jewish Temple of Jerusalem, from biblical times, and those same aliens may very well intervene on Israel's behalf in the event that the war against Hamas would worsen, Israeli-British mystifier and entertainer Uri Geller claimed.

Geller had been responding to an incident in the United Kingdom, where protesters from Just Stop Oil vandalized Stonehenge with orange corn flour, endangering the rare lichen that lives on the stones. 

Representatives from the English Heritage charity that manages sites like Stonehenge expressed their shock over the vandalization. Geller, however, warned in an interview with the Daily Star that the damage could incite extraterrestrials to come to Earth in response. 

Though the monument is shrouded in mystery, many people believe that Stonehenge was constructed by or with the help of aliens. While modern experts disagree with these claims, many people still believe them—including Geller.

"I believe Stonehenge was built by aliens or with the help of aliens, who used advanced technology to help us," the Israeli spoon-bender told The Jerusalem Post. He added his belief that Stonehenge's purpose was to create a model of the Solar System and serve as an alien landing pad. 

Uri Geller seen in front of an Iranian flag and a missile launch (illustrative)

"I totally believe that the explanation is aliens. The site has cosmic and spiritual significance, no doubt about it," he said. 

But Stonehenge isn't the only historic landmark Geller claims was created by aliens. 

Later, in an interview with the Daily Star, the Israeli spoon-bender warned that this may upset some people.

"Many monuments, including Stonehenge, the Beit Hamikdash, and the pyramids were created by extraterrestrials, that's what I believe," Geller said. 

"There are certain cosmic focal points that have some subliminal powers. The Beit Hamikdash is a powerhouse of infinite kinds of energy."

Will aliens help Israel during war?

Geller has long claimed to have knowledge of aliens, and is firm in his belief that they are benevolent. 

In fact, Geller, who recently also claimed to have played a part in Israel's successful effort to thwart the Iranian drone and missile attack on the Jewish state back in April, believes that aliens can also play a geopolitical role in the Middle East.

Specifically, he said they might even take sides.

"I wouldn't be surprised if a bigger war breaks out, aliens might help Israel," Geller said. 

Others have claimed that aliens, should they really exist, play a bigger role on Earth than many realize. Haim Eshed, former head of the Israel Space Agency, made waves in 2020 by claiming that there exists a Galactic Federation that both Israel and the US have been dealing with for years. 

While Eshed has been largely silent on the subject since then - with Geller claiming that he "is scared, he's been instructed not to talk" - the Israeli mystifier has continued to elaborate his claims of aliens being here with peaceful intentions.

"For centuries, aliens have been trying to wake us up to our mission to save our planet and evolve as human beings, and look what's happening around the world. Do you know how many nuclear bombs we have waiting to be launched?" he asked. "I want to believe that extraterrestrials are waiting for us to lay down our arms and create a peaceful world. It's more important than ever to connect with these higher beings."

https://www.jpost.com/omg/article-807477?