Guest Post -Who Will Daven Here

One of the Shuls in this community put out a letter on the vaccination issue.

The letter said that unvaccinated children may not enter the Shul building. The letter was signed by both the rabbi and president of the Shul.

A friend with a young family confided his concern over this policy. He felt the policy to ban unvaccinated childten was detrimental to his family.

The issue is not whether his kids are vaccinated or not. The man is not concerned per se that anyone's kids can or can't attend services at the Shul.

The concern is this: say a family has unvaccinated kids. Say a friend of the family is getting married. There may be a Kiddush or two in honor of the marriage at the Shul. The wedding may be at the Shul.

Kids in an unvaccinated family would not be able to attend those events.

In summary, every Shul has the right and obligation to set hygienic standards. But in the process of banning unvaccinated kids, the kids are essentially banned not only from the Shul but from the Jewish community.

Now, if the case for vaccinating all kids was a slam dunk, we'd have nothing more to discuss on the subject. But the situation is more nuanced than that. Not every argument the anti-vaxers make is right; but neither are their concerns all unfounded.

I've coined a term for places that ban the unvaccinated. "Unvaxenrein" (oon-VAX-in-ryn) means free, pure, cleansed of the unvaccinated.

I note that not one case of measles has been reported to my knowledge in the Greater Washington DC area.

People with colds and the flu are not banned. People diagnosed with HIV are not banned. People who speak Lashon Hara are not banned. Yet there is more evidence of the ability of these things to infect people than there is from any illness someone unvaccinated is likely to contract at this time and place.

trump and demoxracy

As democracy is perfected, the office of President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

-H.L. Mencken,1920

Divine Providence and a Big Question: If God Was Behind the Election of Donald Trump, Is He a Cyrus (Deliverer) or Nebuchadnezzar (Agent of Judgment)?

charismanews

Another interesting thing about Trump and unlikely agents who lead wise men to Bethlehem is the mysterious and metaphysical logic some currently share involving God's possible providence in the arrival of Trump as a "savior" figure. Nowhere is this language more pronounced than in the Holy Land itself, where several respected rabbis and kabbalists have insinuated that America's new president is a forerunner of Messiah and the final redemption.

"Donald Trump (424) is the Gematria of 'Messiah for the House of David' (משיח בן דוד)," wrote Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz for Breaking Israel News on May 16, 2016. "That is not to say that Donald Trump is the Messiah, but that his presidency will usher in the Messianic era."

Others, including Rabbi Matityahu Glazerson, who accurately predicted the Trump victory before the election using Bible Codes, have chimed in. He found various connections between Trump and "moshiach" (Messiah) in the codes, which in Hebrew means "anointed" and led Glazerson to conclude his election is connected to the coming of Messiah.

Rabbi Hillel Weiss is a Trump-Messiah-connection believer too, and he also sees in the president the agent of God's favor for building the third temple, another Cyrus linking.

And then there is the Sanhedrin in Israel, the nascent tribunal who has styled itself after the Second Temple-era Jewish court. This body has sent letters to Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, asking them to join forces to build the third temple for Messiah.

Professor Weiss is a spokesman for the Sanhedrin and notes how Donald Trump made support for Israel and recognition of Jerusalem as their capital part of public discourse during 2016. Combining that with Putin's expressed opinion that the third temple ought to be built caused him to say that both men should do what King Cyrus did 2,500 years ago and build the religious complex for the benefit of all Jews and the world. "We are poised to rebuild the temple," Weiss said, and "the leaders of Russia and America can lead the nations of the world to global peace through building the temple, the source of peace."

Rabbi Yosef Berger, who oversees King David's tomb in Jerusalem, takes it a step farther. He believes Trump actually won the election through "the power of Moshiach [Messiah], which gave him the boost he needed" and is "connected to the Messianic process which is happening right now."

NY Times reporter responds to Trump's story denial

HAMAS, ISLAMIC JIHAD AGAIN CELEBRATE ‘VICTORY’ - ANALYSIS

jpost

Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad officials see the ceasefire agreement that was reached with Israel early on Monday as a “big achievement.”

In their view, the latest round of fighting – during which the two groups fired some 700 missiles toward Israel – has “deterred” Israel and forced it to commit to the implementation of previous Egyptian-sponsored understandings, which include easing restrictions imposed on the Hamas-ruled coastal enclave.

The Law of War Permits Israel to Destroy Hamas

nationalreview

As of this moment, a fragile truce holds in southern Israel. After Hamas volleyed 600 missiles at Israeli civilian targets on Saturday and Sunday, prompting Israel to attack hundreds of targets in Gaza, the air-raid sirens have fallen silent, for now.

But over the weekend, when the rockets fell, we saw all the old arguments against Israel’s acts of self-defense crop up. The air raids were “disproportionate,” we were told. There were arguments over individual civilian casualties, as if it would somehow discredit Israel if its precision strikes killed more than a handful of noncombatants. Yes, there were rote condemnations of Hamas’s efforts to kill as many civilians as it could, but once again all too many voices on the left rose at once, demanding that the nation under attack — the nation defending its schools, hospitals, and homes from an indiscriminate rocket barrage — exercise restraint.

Trump Would Have Been Charged With Obstruction If He Weren't President, 370 Former Prosecutors Say

time

Nearly 400 former federal prosecutors say in a new letter that President Donald Trump would have been charged with obstruction of justice for his acts if he were anyone other than president.

The letter was signed by more than 370 ex-prosecutors who served under both Democratic and Republican administrations. It was released by Protect Democracy, a nonprofit organization critical of the Trump administration.

Finding a New Path Israel wakes up to the needs of ex-Haredim

Tabletmag

Leaving the ultra-Orthodox community is nothing new in Israel. Everyone, secular or religious, knows someone who used to be on, but is now “off the derech.” But the phenomenon hasn’t been well studied. Most of what we know comes from individual stories of people making the difficult transition from the insular Haredi world to mainstream Israeli society.

Now there is data to flesh out these stories, in the form of a report commissioned by the Israeli nonprofit Out For Change. The report provides a picture of ex-Haredim in unprecedented detail, estimating how many people leave Haredi communities each year, and describing who they are and why they leave. It also discusses new programs to serve the needs of ex-Haredim, many of them partnerships between nonprofits and the Israeli government. Still, it argues that much more must done to support ex-Haredim in the ways they deserve.

Previous attempts to study Haredi disaffiliation have been limited in scope. For example, a 2009 survey from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics included a single question asking whether respondents’ level of religious observance had increased, decreased, or remained unchanged over their lifetime. The new report, which Out For Change co-CEO Yossi Klar called “the first major research about this phenomenon in Israel,” takes a broader and deeper approach.

Neri Horowitz, author of the report and chairman of the Agora Policy Think Tank, took on the topic from many angles. He conducted in-depth interviews with former Haredim, about 100 individually and 100 in focus groups. He also spoke to “almost every person involved in supporting ex-Haredim” in Israel, said Klar. This included directors at Out For Change and Hillel: The Right To Choose, the other Israeli agency serving ex-Haredim, who provided data on the number of new people they serve each year. He interviewed less obvious sources, too, including welfare department employees in cities with large Haredi populations, who receive government subsidies based on the number of youth they’ve identified as “at risk,” many of whom are ex-Haredim.

Cosmology Has Some Big Problems

Scientificamerican

What do we really know about our universe?

Born out of a cosmic explosion 13.8 billion years ago, the universe rapidly inflated and then cooled, it is still expanding at an increasing rate and mostly made up of unknown dark matter and dark energy ... right?

This well-known story is usually taken as a self-evident scientific fact, despite the relative lack of empirical evidence—and despite a steady crop of discrepancies arising with observations of the distant universe.

In recent months, new measurements of the Hubble constant, the rate of universal expansion, suggested major differences between two independent methods of calculation. Discrepancies on the expansion rate have huge implications not simply for calculation but for the validity of cosmology's current standard model at the extreme scales of the cosmos.

Another recent probe found galaxies inconsistent with the theory of dark matter, which posits this hypothetical substance to be everywhere. But according to the latest measurements, it is not, suggesting the theory needs to be reexamined.

It's perhaps worth stopping to ask why astrophysicists hypothesize dark matter to be everywhere in the universe? The answer lies in a peculiar feature of cosmological physics that is not often remarked. For a crucial function of theories such as dark matter, dark energy and inflation, which each in its own way is tied to the big bang paradigm, is not to describe known empirical phenomena but rather to maintain the mathematical coherence of the framework itself while accounting for discrepant observations. Fundamentally, they are names for something that must exist insofar as the framework is assumed to be universally valid.

Donald Trump's 'Kentuky Derby' tweet makes literally no sense

CNN

 It's easy to dismiss any one of Donald Trump's tweets as ephemera because, well, there are just so many of them. That goes double for a Trump tweet about a sporting event given the fact that he, uh, isn't an expert in that arena.

hem. 

And yet, there's just something about the President's tweet on Sunday about the result of the Kentucky Derby that makes it impossible to simply ignore. Because it's about more than the tweet. It's about the man behind the tweet. A man who also happens to be the leader of the free world.

First, the tweet:

"The Kentuky Derby decision was not a good one. It was a rough & tumble race on a wet and sloppy track, actually, a beautiful thing to watch. Only in these days of political correctness could such an overturn occur. The best horse did NOT win the Kentucky Derby - not even close!?" (Trump later corrected his original tweet -- spelling "Kentucky" properly.)

Man freed from prison after 30 years faces new rape charge

Nypost

A Massachusetts man who spent roughly 30 years in prison for rape before being freed in 2016 is facing new charges in connection with a January sex assault, authorities said.

George Perrot, 51, was arraigned Monday in Salem Superior Court on charges of rape, assault and battery on a police officer, resisting arrest and open and gross lewdness after police said he was found unconscious on top of a partially naked woman who was also unconscious.

Perrot, according to the Boston Globe, became a “symbol for criminal justice reform advocates” after his release in 2016 based on flawed testimony about microscopic hair evidence. He was convicted in 1987 and sentenced to life in prison for raping a 78-year-old woman in her Springfield home two years earlier when he was 17.

Perrot was then granted a new trial in 1990 after a court ruled that prosecutors improperly presented evidence during his trial, The Republican reported. Two years later, he was convicted a second time and was again sentenced to life in prison.

But he was later released on bail in 2016 after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that testimony during that second trial “exceeded the foundational science” of hair analysis, according to The Republican. The guilty verdict was overturned and a third trial was ordered, but prosecutors decided against it since the victim had died and other factors.

Perrot’s release at the time was lauded by criminal justice reform advocates, including those at The Innocence Project and the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism and Brandeis University, according to The Republican.