THE TOY THAT’S WREAKING HAVOC ON THE SOUTH

Up until recently, kites were a symbol of joy, innocence and beauty for residents of Kibbutz Kfar Aza. That was until March, when some of their neighbors across the border in Gaza began using kites as a weapon, sending dozens into their community, scorching their crops and causing serious damage to their agriculture.

“For us, the kite is very symbolic,” Kfar Aza resident Ayelet Shachar-Epstein told The Jerusalem Post over coffee just outside the kibbutz on Monday. She explained that every Rosh Hashana (the Jewish new year), “when the weather is beautiful and there are strong winds coming from the west, we have a kite event. Each family builds their own kites, we put them up in the air and it’s one of the most beautiful occasions... of peace and appreciation of life. It’s a community event – we have a very strong community.”

Saying Kaddish for Hamas

arutz\On May 16, about 50 Jewish activists gathered in London’s Parliament Square and, in a public display of phoney grief, davened Kaddish.

This gathering was less about a genuine empathy for dead Palestinians. It was more an exhibition of Jew hatred for the Jewish state.

How do we know that? Well, these people proved they are not equal opportunity grievers. They did not gather to mourn the 1242 Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists since the year 2000. Instead, they collected together to publicly show their support for Palestinian terror. Of course, these useful idiots would protest vehemently at such a suggestion but what other conclusion can we reach when it was announced, from the Palestinian side, that at least 53 of the 58 rioters shot by IDF soldiers were, in fact, either members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad.

So, in mid-May, we had the spectacle of Jews meeting in the heart of British democracy to pray for the souls of those that were prevented by Jewish soldiers from slaughtering Jews

An American 13-Year-Old, Pregnant and Married to Her Rapist

ny times

Dawn Tyree was 11 years old when a family friend began to molest her. A bit more than a year later, she became pregnant from these rapes, and her parents found out what had been going on. But they didn’t go to the police; instead, they found another solution.“It was decided for me that I would marry him,” Tyree recalled.

So Tyree, then 13, was married to her rapist, then age 32. She became one of the thousands of underage American girls who are married each year, often sacrificing their futures to reduce embarrassment to their parents. Statutory rape is thus sanctioned by the state as marriage, and the abuser ends up not in handcuffs but showered with wedding gifts.

Our State Department protests child marriage in Africa and Asia (worldwide, a girl 14 or younger is married every 11 seconds, according to Save the Children), but every state in America allowed child marriages. That has finally changed. Last month Delaware became the first state to ban all child marriages, without exception.

Rav Shlomo Fisher - Maharal's explanations are not part of Mesorah but he created them

otzar forum

Why Rich Kids Are So Good at the Marshmallow Test

atlantic
Affluence—not willpower—seems to be what’s behind some kids' capacity to delay gratification.

The marshmallow test is one of the most famous pieces of social-science research: Put a marshmallow in front of a child, tell her that she can have a second one if she can go 15 minutes without eating the first one, and then leave the room. Whether she’s patient enough to double her payout is supposedly indicative of a willpower that will pay dividends down the line, at school and eventually at work. Passing the test is, to many, a promising signal of future success.

But a new study, published last week, has cast the whole concept into doubt. The researchers—NYU’s Tyler Watts and UC Irvine’s Greg Duncan and Hoanan Quan—restaged the classic marshmallow test, which was developed by the Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel in the 1960s. Mischel and his colleagues administered the test and then tracked how children went on to fare later in life. They described the results in a 1990 study, which suggested that delayed gratification had huge benefits, including on such measures as standardized test scores.

Einstein's letter to mournlng father

Dear Mr. Marcus:

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.

With my best wishes, 
sincerely yours, 

Albert Einstein. 

Mr. Robert S.Marcus
World Jewish Congress
1834 Broadway
New York 23,N.Y.

marriage substitute - therapists

 Aside from cases where therapists give bad advice or continue therapy longer than needed there are cases where therapist gets sexually involved this is also true for rabbinical therapists but there are other issues

I saw man of 35 asked him why he wanted therapy he responded that he had a number of problems and been seeing a therapist in America so thought he should continue in Israel

me "How long have you had therapy?"

patient 10 years!

"That seems a bit long

patient But she said I needed it

Did you see any improvement?

patient No but she said I should keep trying

If you don’t see significant improvement – usually wthin 2 sessions you should try another therapist

But what is your goal from therapy?

patient To get married

But it is obvious your therapist was a substitute for marriage.  no more therapy

Several weeks later he got engaged

I was told a similar story by another therapist. There was a woman of 35 who was depressesd over weight didn’t care about her appearance or life. But once a week for over 10 years she got dressed up and put on makeup – for her weekly therapy session

ן ואילך, ככל הנראה בעקבות ו' ר בכרך, אבר מוצאים את השימוש בניסוי ת תרדה' בתפוצה הולכת וגדלה בקרב בעלי ההלכה. למשל, חרא נמצא מספר פעמים אולר' יעקב וישר בעל 'שברת יעקב', 197 וכעברו מספר דרדרת חרא ורוח למדי אצל מספר ם חשובים בירתו I שתשרברתיד,ם הגיעו לקהילות רבות, כגרן ו' יעקב עמדן 1 198 ו' ל לבוא, בעל ה'נרדע ביד"דה', 199 ותלמידו ו' אליעזר פלקלס, בעל שר"ת 'תשרנה בסור.בה'. 200 במאה ו.תשע עשרה כבד ניתן למצאו אצל בלשון הרבנית כמסבע לשרן שגרד ו ככועס אצל כל הפרסקים ו.גחלים, בייחוד בספורת השאלות רד.תשובות.

בכל ה בבית מדרשו ל ה'נרדע ביד,רדה' נשתגד ד,ביסרי 'דעתי דעת תרדה' אר ו ת תרדה'. אמנם גם ציחף ה לא חרוש שם, והוא כבד ,.,פיע זעיר פה זעיר שם ' הביניים 201 ראחדיד,ם, אך חסה כי תפוצתו במאות השנים הללו במרבה מארד. ה'נרדע ניזזדה' עצמו השתמש בר פעמים ספרדרת, 202 רגם אצל החת"ם סרפד ,.,א נדיר למדי, 203 י בעיקר בלשונות פנייה בבקשת תשרנה לשאלה הלכתית, כאשד המבקש פונה אל ר.נורםק במסדה לשמוע 'ועתר ת תרדה' )בגרף שני אר שלישי!(, אך אצל בן אוצר ו' ה אסאד, א נעשית שכיחה יותר וגרבו השימוש בנוסחה זר בגרף ראשון )'דעתי - ת תרדה'(. 204 בכל המקומרת הללו אין ה אלא שימוש לשרן שבר נרמז כי המשיב מבסא

Dr Brown regarding marriage and Ger

Kedushah: The Sexual Abstinence of Married Men in Gur, Slonim and Toldos Ahron
Kedushah
 Gur: The Ordinances of R. Israel Alter, the Beys Yisroel
Gur Hasidism is a historical offspring of the hasidic groups of Pshiskhe[Przysucha] and Kotsk. Even though Kotsk had its own ideal of abstinence,

there is no indication that this was fostered by Gur until after the Holocaust and certainly not as a norm for the entire community. It was the fourth Gerer Rebbe, Israel Alter (1895–1977), known in Ashkenazi Hebrew as the BeysYisroel (after the title of his collection of homilies, the Beit Yisra’el who brought about the change when he re-established Gur Hasidism in the newly founded state of Israel. Shortly after his nomination as Rebbe in 1948, he inaugurated the Ordinances on Holiness, known in short as the takanot

, and commonly pronounced takunes

They have never been published nor, in all probability, ever formulated systematically. He communicated them to some of his senior hasidim , who later became the community’s first marriage guides (madrikhim ), and they passed them on to the community as “oral law.”The ordinances are known to many, even outside Gur, and, as I was able to verify in conversation with a number of Gerer hasidim , they consist of the following:

•

The couple shall have sexual intercourse only once a month, on leil tevilah (the night after the wife’s immersion in the mikveh at the end of her halakhically prescribed menstrual period).

•

The couple shall refrain from sexual intercourse from as early as the seventh month of pregnancy.

•

After the wife has given birth, the couple shall refrain from sexual inter-course for a further period of six months.

•

During intercourse, the couple shall aim to minimize physical contact. The husband shall wear some of his clothes, including his tsitsit (considered a segulah

—supernatural remedy—against the sexual drive) and will not hug or kiss his wife or engage in any behavior that is not required for the performance of the act of intercourse itself.

•

The husband shall direct his thoughts as far away as possible from the sexual act.

Rivlin: 'We salute the casualties of the Altalena - for not firing back'

arutz7

resident Reuven Rivlin spoke Wednesday at the memorial ceremony for casualties of the Altalena incident of 1948, during which soldiers of the newly-created IDF were ordered to fire on the “Altalena” ship, on which Irgun fighters carried arms to Israel’s shore for the War of Independence. The ceremony took place in the Nahalat Yitzhak cemetery in Givatayim.

The ceremony was attended by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Chairman of the Irgun Martyrs' Association Yair Assiskovitz.

"Seventy years have passed since the command was given, since the lights were extinguished, the light of reason and human discourse, the light of mutual responsibility, and as always in our history when one man raises his hand against his brother, the shock hits the foundations and the house trembles."

"Seventy years have passed and the wound has not yet healed, and that’s a good thing. There are wounds that must remain open, so that we do not think we can just go on," Rivlin added. There was never an incident like the Altalena. An order to our soldiers - to fire on our soldiers? This is inconceivable. We did not think that in the course of a war of survival, they would kill defenders of the land, fighters from among the best of the people, the remnants of the camps who came to fight for the people and the land. Brothers."

"Seventy years later, we must salute the Altalena fighters not only for their devotion, but mainly for the fact that even though they received crossfire, brothers’ fire, they did not respond. They did not meet fire with fire, they did not meet death with death.”

"This was the most important lesson that the young State of Israel, the young Israeli society, learned. The most difficult and painful disputes we will not resolve by force, as Menachem Begin said: ‘My brother, I call you: Do not raise your hand on a brother.' Even today, the lesson of the Altalena is not to stop talking. Brothers have to talk to each other. "

the collective fear of fallible gedolim

to be continued