World War Meme - Why postings about Trump's lies are so important

Politico   [This article is about the current problem that it doesn't matter whether a story is true or not - the main thing is to have an impact and fun. This is the post-Truth i.e., Trump philosophy and it needs to be fought even within the frum community.]

Veterans of the Great Meme War brag that they won the election for Trump. Just about everyone else, if they’re aware of these efforts at all, assumes they amounted to little more than entertainment for bored geeks and some unpleasant episodes for the targets of its often racist and sexist harassment campaigns. After all, the idea that a swarm of socially alienated trolls played a meaningful role in a multibillion-dollar presidential campaign by, among other gambits, relentlessly spreading images of a cartoon frog is at least as ridiculous as the idea that a billionaire TV entertainer could win that campaign.

There is no real evidence that memes won the election, but there is little question they changed its tone, especially in the fast-moving and influential currents of social media. The meme battalions created a mass of pro-Trump iconography as powerful as the Obama “Hope” poster and far more adaptable; they relentlessly drew attention to the tawdriest and most sensational accusations against Clinton, forcing mainstream media outlets to address topics—like conspiracy theories about Clinton’s health—that they would otherwise ignore. And they provoked a variety of real-world reactions, from Clinton’s August speech denouncing the alt-right to the Anti-Defamation League’s designation of Pepe as a hate symbol to—after the election—the armed assault on a Washington pizzeria wrongly believed to be hiding sex slaves.

Part of the power of memes has always been their organic, grass-roots quality: They bubble up from the fever swamps of the internet, shrouded in anonymity, as agents of chaos and mockery. But in this election, something seemed to change. They began colliding with a real campaign operation and doing useful work, seemingly always pushing in one direction. Curious about what happened, I tracked down and interviewed a number of veterans of the Great Meme War, along with others who hung out in the same dark corners of the internet and watched it all unfold. It turns out that, as anonymous online pranksters go, they’re surprisingly organized and motivated. It also turns out that the Trump campaign, which spent relatively little on messaging, paid rapt attention to meme culture from the start. They took it seriously, even pushing some memes out to the candidate’s millions of Twitter followers.

Trump’s campaign will not be the last to tap into this subculture. Internet troll Charles Johnson, a self-commissioned general in the Great Meme War with close ties to Trump’s political operation, claimed he has fielded about a dozen post-election phone calls from the Washington area about the political potential of memes. “If you’re trying to win an election and you have a million dollars to spend on political ads or $100,000 to spend on trolling,” he said, “I would advise everyone to spend the hundred thousand on the troll.”

If the soldiers in the Great Meme War are even partly right about their capabilities, then their efforts have profound implications for the future of politics. But before tackling that question, it is worth asking how, in the first place, a community of some of the savviest, most subversive internet users became a hotbed of support for a 70-year-old white billionaire who refers to Apple products as “damn computers and things.” And for that matter, what exactly is a meme, anyway?

The concept of a “meme,” in its broadest sense, has been around for decades. The term was first coined in 1976 by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who defined a meme as “a unit of cultural transmission or a unit of imitation”—essentially, a reproducible bit of the DNA of human culture. He saw the idea expansively; the most effective memes, like religious rituals and catchy melodies, worm their way into people’s brains, spreading across entire societies and shaping human behavior for generations.

The Jesus fish is an ancient meme, and Uncle Sam is an early American meme. The planking fad, in which people lie flat on their fronts in weird places and pose for photographs, is a recent behavioral meme. The term came into popular parlance with the advent of the “internet meme,” usually a photograph with a clever caption that is shared around the Web. Created anonymously, remixed endlessly and shared constantly, the most viral memes seem to materialize out of nowhere.

But the typical internet meme doesn’t exactly come from nowhere. Its very Darwinian life cycle often begins among thousands of other memes on a group of obscure message boards frequented by the internet’s most devoted users, mostly young men, who Photoshop captioned images for their own amusement. The most promising become popular on these boards, as users post their own variations on the theme, and end up crossing over to more mainstream platforms like Reddit and Tumblr, which are used by “normies,” or normal people, and often drive what’s popular on the internet at any given time. From there, the most successful memes start populating platforms that almost everyone uses, like Facebook, and a very select few, like LOLCats and Rickrolling, enter the cultural canon, becoming recognizable even to one’s parents.

The fighters in the Great Meme War took their intimate knowledge of this ecosystem and weaponized it, genetically engineering pro-Trump and anti-Clinton supermemes they designed to gain as much mainstream traction as possible. They juiced the rules on platforms like Reddit and created networks of fake accounts on Twitter to push the memes in front of as many eyeballs as possible as quickly as possible. The staging ground was an anonymous message board called “/pol/”—the “politically incorrect” section of 4Chan, which was founded in 2003 to host discussions about anime and has since evolved into a malignant hive mind with vast influence over online culture. The denizens of /pol/ believe that their efforts memed President Trump into existence, midwifing his presidency from a far-fetched fantasy into our current reality. Memes like “the Trump Train” were popularized by 4Chan, spread to the rest of the Web and then rapidly absorbed into official campaign messaging—sometimes reaching all the way to the candidate himself.[...]

Without a doubt, many participants are genuine Trump supporters. A person close to the Trump campaign introduced me to “Daniel,” a young man who professed to have friends in the White House. A frequent /pol/ and 8Chan poster, he told me he created several fake personas on Reddit and one on Twitter to post anti-Clinton agitprop. “The reason I fought in the meme war is that as Andrew Breitbart said we are at literal war with the left. There is an ideological Cold War going on right now and the victor will determine the fate of Western Civilization,” Daniel wrote in an email.

Other meme warriors simply think there is no greater cosmic joke than electing Trump president. “Most of the people who took part in the Great Meme War hate Trump a lot,” insisted Gregg Housh, a reformed hacker and active 4Chan user who did a stint in federal prison a decade ago and was an early ringleader of Anonymous. (Linking his real-world name to his online activity makes him a “namefag” in the eyes of /pol/, which is populated mostly by “anonfags.” In the world of /pol/, everyone is some sort of fag.)[...]

But its use of memes landed the Trump campaign in some pretty unsavory company. In November 2015, Trump tweeted a virulently racist image titled “USA CRIME STATISTICS ~ 2015” that depicted a menacing black man holding a gun alongside made-up statistics overstating the proportion of murders committed by black Americans. While the source of the chart was traced to a neo-Nazi Twitter account, the image of the gangbanger had been floating around on 4Chan for some time. In July, Trump’s campaign tweeted a picture that had been circulating on 8Chan that superimposed Hillary Clinton’s face on a background of $100 bills with the caption “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever” written on a six-sided star that, given the boards’ anti-Semitic proclivities, was almost certainly a Star of David. (The Trump campaign insisted unconvincingly that it was a sheriff’s star.)

Democrats dabbled with memes—the Clinton campaign even built a meme generator that was quickly swarmed by pro-Trump trolls—but they were generally dismissive of these efforts. A former Clinton aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the requirements of a new job, scoffed at the notion that memes played a meaningful role in the campaign. “If you see a Nazi frog glorifying Donald Trump and you’re on the fence and you’re like, ‘OK, now I’m going to vote for Donald Trump,’ you were never going to vote for Hillary Clinton anyways,” said the aide. But the aide conceded that such efforts could have discouraged uncommitted voters from going to the polls, and others on the left view the meme ecosystem as a real asset to Trump.[...]

Like much else on /pol/, it is unclear to what extent posters were trolling and to what extent they genuinely believed they were sleuthing out a child sex ring. “Let’s meme this into reality, it’s too good,” wrote one user on one of the original Pizzagate threads. “It was absolutely a joke and a guy just made it up on the spot,” Housh said. “I was on the thread and people thought it was hilarious and halfway through they were like, ‘How can we get people to take this seriously?’” [...]

Take it seriously people did. Pizzagate quickly supplanted Spirit Cooking as the boards’ closing argument. /Pol/ users combed through Podesta’s emails for other references to pizza and developed an elaborate conspiracy theory positing a Clinton-linked sex ring run out of a D.C. pizzeria owned by Brock’s ex-boyfriend. They created memes and charts and pushed them to broader audiences on The_Donald subreddit. Twitter users with big followings like blogger Mike Cernovich and Pizza Party Ben began tweeting about the theory with the hashtag #PizzaGate.

Trump won the election, and the Chans and The_Donald took their victory laps. But Pizzagate continued to fester, and in December, an impressionable North Carolina man heard about the fake sex ring and began researching it online. Carrying an assault rifle, he stormed the D.C. pizzeria that he believed housed the sex slave ring. Finding only pizza, he surrendered to the police. (“I regret how I handled the situation,” the man told the New York Times from jail.) One other Pizzagate casualty was Michael Flynn Jr., the son of Trump’s since-ousted national security adviser who was fired from the Trump transition team for his role in spreading the bogus story.[...]

Trump’s poor understanding of national security investigations may prove dangerous

NY Daily News

Revealing dangerous paranoia, profound ignorance or both, the President of the United States leveled gravely serious accusations at his predecessor — essentially alleging criminal abuse of power.

That Trump’s claims appear impulsive makes them no less alarming for the republic.

In tweets Saturday morning, Trump asserted that President Obama last year personally ordered Trump Tower wiretaps.

Citing no source, Trump wrote that he “just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory,” calling the former President a “bad (or sick) guy.”

So much for the more presidential, sober Trump who briefly reared his head in a joint address to Congress Tuesday night.

What motivated Trump is, as often, a mystery, but he appears to have been driven by a breathlessly conspiratorial report in, you guessed it, Breitbart News, detailing radio host Mark Levin’s theory that Obama staged a “silent coup” against his successor.

To further elaborate upon the theory is to lend it credibility; no one on Trump’s staff offered up an explanation. Obama, in a statement, flatly rejected Trump’s allegation.

Indeed, a senior U.S. official in a position to know told NBC News’ Pete Williams that Trump’s charges had no merit, and that the President apparently did not consult with others in the government who were in a position to verify, correct or reject the claim.

At the very least, Trump is taking leaps that reveal a profound, perhaps willful failure to understand how national security investigations work.[...]

Professional investigators in the executive branch request a warrant; an independent judge, serving a seven-year term, must then approve it. Foreign surveillance warrants are triggered by probable cause that a particular individual committed a serious crime or acted as an agent of a foreign power.

And tapping a political candidate for political purposes is expressly forbidden.

A President of the United States should know all this. If he doesn’t, he has dozens of people ready, willing and paid to educate him.

Is Trump a Populist Authoritarian?

Why Charles Schumer meeting Vladimir Putin doesn’t give Trump & Co. a pass

Washington Post

To hear President Trump tell it, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other Trump allies are under fire for committing no greater sin than sitting down with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak.

“Just out,” Trump tweeted Saturday morning, “The same Russian Ambassador that met Jeff Sessions visited the Obama White House 22 times, and 4 times last year alone.” The implication? How could it be bad that Sessions met with the ambassador when Barack Obama’s White House had done the same?

e employed a similar strategy in lashing out at Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). He posted a photo of Schumer with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Pelosi with former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev several years ago. Pelosi had denied having met Kislyak but, there he was, across the table from her in that photo.

Fox News and other conservative outlets joined the fun.

There are certainly any number of people in the government who have met with Kislyak at some point in time. This, after all, is his job: He acts as liaison between the Russian government and our own. And that’s why it’s simple to dig up old photos of Kislyak or other Russian leaders with prominent elected officials.

But those photos, and those interactions, are entirely beside the point.[...]

The two questions at issue with Sessions are, first, why he told the Senate that he didn’t have communication with the Russians despite having met Kislyak twice last year and, second, if those meetings involved any discussion of the Trump campaign. That campaign, as you’re likely aware, has been the subject of scrutiny from intelligence officials who believe that Russia was trying to sway the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. The scrutiny has reportedly included monitoring of Trump allies who were involved in the campaign.

Sessions isn’t just Trump’s attorney general. He was one of the earliest elected officials to endorse Trump, and he served in a senior advisory position to Trump beginning in February of last year. There’s a difference between Sessions meeting with Kislyak last year and, say, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson having a professional relationship with Putin. If Sessions met Kislyak during the campaign, and Russia was hoping to ensure that Sessions’s chosen candidate won, that’s significant — particularly if Sessions then withheld information about that meeting. And particularly when he didn’t mention it while under oath.

That’s simply not at all comparable to Schumer meeting Putin a decade ago, or even Pelosi not remembering having met Kislyak in 2010.

For it to be comparable, the following would need to be the case:

Schumer or Pelosi would have had to have been close advisers to the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Those meetings would have had to have occurred in 2016, during the campaign.
U.S. intelligence officials would have had to have thought that the interference Russia intended during that campaign was to see Clinton, not Trump, victorious.
Schumer or Pelosi would have to have offered sworn testimony denying that those meetings in Step 2 took place.
That’s the point at which it becomes comparable.

Trump has two skills that he has deployed to tremendous effect over the past 18 months. The first is that he’s adept at what has been called whattaboutism — bringing up anecdotal they-did-it-too examples to counteract critiques. The second is that he’s a master of social media, and has a large base of support that’s willing to echo the specious analogies he presents.

This isn’t really goalpost-moving so much as it is arguing that everyone’s really playing soccer. That Sessions met with Kislyak doesn’t prove that anything nefarious happened or that the Trump campaign was complicit in Russian interference in the election. But an old photo of Schumer and Putin eating doughnuts doesn’t prove that everything’s copacetic, either.

Trump increasing paranoid and citing no evidence, accuses Obama of ‘Nixon/Watergate’ plot to wiretap Trump Tower

Washington Post

President Trump on Saturday angrily accused former president Barack Obama of orchestrating a “Nixon/Watergate” plot to tap the phones at his Trump Tower headquarters last fall in the run-up to the election.

While citing no evidence to support his explosive allegation, Trump said in a series of four tweets sent Saturday morning that Obama was “wire tapping” his New York offices before the election in a move he compared to McCarthyism. “Bad (or sick) guy!” he said of his predecessor, adding that the surveillance resulted in “nothing found.”

Trump offered no citations nor did he point to any credible news report to back up his accusation, but he may have been referring to commentary on Breitbart and conservative talk radio suggesting that Obama and his administration used “police state” tactics last fall to monitor the Trump team. The Breitbart story, published Friday, has been circulating among Trump's senior staff, according to a White House official who described it as a useful catalogue of the Obama administration's activities.

Kevin Lewis, a spokesman for Obama, said in a statement early Saturday afternoon: “A cardinal rule of the Obama Administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice. As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”

Officials at the FBI and the Justice Department declined to comment.[...]

Haredi principal arrested for money laundering. Retaliation for draft resistance?

Arutz 7

The dean of haredi elementary school Tiferet Yaakov was arrested at Ben Gurion Airport on Tuesday upon his return from a fundraising trip abroad, reported Kikar News.

The suspect, Rabbi Eliyahu Tumbak of Beit Shemesh, is close to Rabbi Shmuel Auerbach of Bnei Brak and is suspected of money laundering.[...]

"They're chasing after our community, there's no other way to explain it," said a source close to Tumbak. "If they continue acting this way, Israel will burn as they have never seen it burn. We will work like ancient Egypt did; we will say, 'Let us outsmart him.'

"We will slander their leaders, we will make sure they have thick files with the police. Everyone who knows Rabbi Tumbak knows how straight and honest he is. It's obvious this allegation is simply slander for the sake of harming us."

The haredi community has suggested Tumbak's arrest is connected to Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit's "threat" to "deal with those who resist drafting into the IDF."

Rabbi Sacks on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign

New book: The Gedolim - looks interesting

From Seforim Blog

New book announcement; He-Gedolim

New book announcement; He-Gedolim

By Eliezer Brodt

הגדולים: אישים שעיצבו את פני היהדות החרדית בישראל, בעריכת בנימין בראון, נסים ליאון, קובץ מאמרים לכבוד פרופ' מנחם פרידמן ובהשראתו, מגנס מכון ון ליר, 958 עמודים

[...]    Table of Contents and Introduction

Here are the Table of Contents of this special work.

Man suspected of sexually assaulting women at weddings arrested

Arutz 7

Police have taken a 28-year old man into custody following a string of sexual assaults against women and children at a Bnei Brak wedding hall.

The arrest took place less than 24 hours after a local pizza delivery man was apprehended for committing vile acts against a child during one of his deliveries.

A community watch group in Bnei Brak “Hashomrim” received a number of complaints in recent days regarding an employee at a Bnei Brak wedding hall. According to the complaints, the employee sexually assaulted both women and children at Hasidic weddings.

The man allegedly committed the vile acts during the “Mitzvah Tantz” – a dance usually held towards the end of a Hasidic wedding.

On Wednesday night, Hashomrim received yet another complaint regarding the employee. Volunteers from the group made their way to the wedding hall, where they located and detained the suspect, holding him until police arrived.

[...]

Goodbye Spin, Hello Raw Dishonesty - Who's going to stop him?

NY Times  by Paul Krugman

The latest big buzz is about Jeff Sessions, the attorney general. It turns out that he lied during his confirmation hearings, denying that he had met with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign. In fact, he met twice with the Russian ambassador, who is widely reported to also be a key spymaster.

Not incidentally, if this news hadn’t come to light, forcing Mr. Sessions to recuse himself, he would have supervised the investigation into Russian election meddling, possibly in collusion with the Trump campaign.

But let’s not focus too much on Mr. Sessions. After all, he is joined in the cabinet by Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, who lied to Congress about his use of a private email account; Tom Price, the secretary of health and human services, who lied about a sweetheart deal to purchase stock in a biotechnology company at a discount; and Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, who falsely told Congress that his financial firm didn’t engage in “robo-signing” of foreclosure documents, seizing homes without proper consideration.

And they would have served with Michael Flynn as national security adviser, but for the fact that Mr. Flynn was forced out after the press discovered that, like Mr. Sessions, he had lied about contacts with the Russian ambassador.

At this point it’s easier to list the Trump officials who haven’t been caught lying under oath than those who have. This is not an accident.

Critics of our political culture used to complain, with justification, about politicians’ addiction to spin — their inveterate habit of downplaying awkward facts and presenting their actions in a much better light than they deserved. But all indications are that the age of spin is over. It has been replaced by an era of raw, shameless dishonesty.

In part, of course, the pervasiveness of lies reflects the character of the man at the top: No president, or for that matter major U.S. political figure of any kind, has ever lied as freely and frequently as Donald Trump. But this isn’t just a Trump story. His ability to get away with it, at least so far, requires the support of many enablers: almost all of his party’s elected officials, a large bloc of voters and, all too often, much of the news media.

It’s important not to indulge in an easy cynicism, to say that politicians have always lied and always will. What we’re getting from Mr. Trump is simply on a different plane from anything we’ve seen before.

For one thing, politicians used to limit their outright lies to matters not easily checked — hidden affairs, under the table deals, and so on. But now we have the man who ran the Miss Universe competition in Moscow three years ago, and who declared just last year that “I know Russia well,” then last month said, “I haven’t called Russia in 10 years.”

On matters of policy, politicians used to limit their misrepresentations of facts and impacts to relatively hard-to-verify assertions. When George W. Bush insisted that his tax cuts mainly went to the middle class, this wasn’t true, but it took some number-crunching to show that. Mr. Trump, however, makes claims like his assertion that the murder rate — which ticked up in 2015 but is still barely half what it was in 1990 — is at a 45-year high. Furthermore, he just keeps repeating such claims after they’ve been debunked.

And the question is, who’s going to stop him? [...]

To be fair, the first weeks of the Trump administration have in important ways been glory days for journalism; one must honor the professionalism and courage of the reporters who have been ferreting out the secrets this authoritarian-minded clique is so determined to keep.

But then you watch something like the way much of the news media responded to Mr. Trump’s congressional address, and you feel despair. It was a speech filled with falsehoods and vile policy proposals, but read calmly off the teleprompter — and suddenly everyone was declaring the liar in chief “presidential.”

The point is that if that’s all it takes to exonerate the most dishonest man ever to hold high office in America, we’re doomed. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen again.

Tomer Devorah (Chapter 6) Man should view his wife as standin for the Shechina

How should man train himself to acquire the quality of Power (Gevurah)? Know that all actions which incite the evil inclination (Yetzer ha Ra) actually stir up the (Gevurot Chazakot) strong Powers. Therefore, man should not incite the evil inclination, so as not to awaken the Powers (Gevurot). The reason is that man is created with two inclinations, good and bad: the one belongs to Loving-kindness (Chesed), the other to Power (Gevurah). However in the Zohar Ha Kaddosh, (Bereshit 49a) it is stated that the good inclination was created for the sake of man himself, the evil inclination for the sake of his wife. See how sweet are his words. Behold Beauty (Tiferet), the quality of mercy, turns to the Right and all its conduct is with the Right, the good inclination. But the Female is of the Left and Her conduct is with Power (Gevurah). It is, therefore, proper not to bestir the evil inclination for man's own sake because this bestirs the Power (Gevurah) in Supernal Man and so destroys the world. Hence, every incitement of man towards (Gevurah) Power and the evil inclination makes a flaw in Supernal Man. From which one can observe how ugly is anger and the like, for it causes the strong Powers (Gevurot Chazakot) to prevail. 

In truth the evil inclination should be bound and tied down so that it is not incited to any bodily act whatsoever, not for the desire of cohabitation, notthe desire of money, nor towards anger, nor towards honor in any way. However, for his wife's sake he should gently bestir his evil inclination in the direction of the sweet Powers (Gevurot Metukot), to provide her with clothes and with a house, for example. And he should say: 'By providing her with clothes I adorn the Shechinah,' for the Shechinah is adorned with Understanding (Binah) which is the Power – Gevurah that includes all Powers – Gevurot and these are sweetened in Her abundant mercies. Therefore, all the needs of the household are the Tikkunim of the Shechinah, which is sweetened from the evil inclination, which was created to do the will of his Creator and for no other purpose. 

Therefore, a man should not intend to derive any kind of pleasure from the evil inclination but when his wife appears before him in her beauty in a fine house he should have the intention of adorning the Shechinah, for She is adorned by the good Powers of the Left from whence come wealth and honor. For this reason he should bestir his evil inclination to love her and he should then have the intention that the Left bestir itself to draw Her near, according to the secret of (Shir ha Shirim8: 3): 'His left arm is under my head' (for She does not at first bind Herself except towards the Left). And then (Shir ha Shirim8: 3): 'And his right arm embraces me,' he should intend to sweeten all those Tikkunim with the good inclination and to really perform the Tikkun for Her, to make her happy in performing the divine command for the sake of the Supernal Union. Behold in this way he sweetens all the judgments (Gevurot) and performs their Tikkunim with the Right. This method applies to all desires which derive from the evil inclination. These should be directed chiefly towards the benefit of the wife whom G-d has chosen to be a help mate for him and afterwards he should turn them all towards the service of G-d to bind them to the Right. 

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Terumah 74 - The Shulchan - table and Collaborative Living by Allan Katz

Guest post by Allan Katz

The parasha- portion reading of Terumah deals mainly with the Mishkan-tabernacle and its components. The table – shulchan was placed near the north wall of the Tabernacle's outer chamber, had 12 specially baked loaves of ' show-bread' on it at all times, in 2 columns of 6 each. Frankincense was placed on the loaves. They were baked on Friday and put on the table on the Sabbath. The old loaves miraculously remained fresh, were divided amongst the priests- cohanim.

Like the Ark, the table had a crown – the rim. The crown of the table symbolized the ' crown of kingship'. God's material blessings flowed through the table and its loaves topped up with fragrant frankincense, to the people and ensured material well- being and abundance which came with ease and comfort. The table had some complete measurements indicating that people can be ' complete' as far as their material needs are concerned and their ' inwards' be blessed so a little satisfies a lot. But the height of the table- shulchan was a broken measure 1.5 cubits warning against haughtiness and encouraging continuous spiritual growth. The table was made out of wood depicting the dynamic nature of economic growth and blessing. The wooden table was plated with gold to remind us that our intentions in striving for material success must be holy and pure and for the good of people. The protective rim or crown was a barrier reminding us to keep out baser motives and that our material success stands upon purity and holiness. The 12 loaves , representing the 12 tribes , were shaped like a letter ' U'- a flat bottom and ends turned upward with a slight fold on the tops, so that the' arms' of each loaf seemed to support the loaf above it. Each individual loaf was supported by metal tubes so that their 'outstretched arms' would be able to bear the burden of the other loaves. This paints a picture of material success based on a commitment to the well- being of the community as a whole as well as ourselves and other individuals. This means attending to the needs of others, but at the same time making sure that our own economic concerns and needs are being met.

The table is symbolic of material well- being and abundance based on our commitment to ourselves and also the family, classroom or community. But when we look around we witness family fights about who is going to sit where and when it comes to food – either it looks like that some kids have never seen food in their lives or some kids are such ' picky' eaters that can never be satisfied.

We can use the CPS – collaborative problem solving approach to ensure that the spirit of the table – meeting the concerns of the group as a whole and its individuals – can be expressed by our families.

Seating at the table. - Problems should be solved in a pro-active way and not in the moment – in the heat of the moment. We can arrange a family meeting to discuss the issue. The focus must be first on ' concerns' - where I want to sit is a solution to a concern. Possible concerns – the need to sit next to somebody who would offer help , feel left out of the conversation because of the seating , need access to the kitchen , bathroom etc. We should try to speak in the plural – we and us. This helps kid see themselves as part of the family and that individual choice per se may be limited , but not choice itself , as there are so many more opportunities when we work as a family .

Picky or gluttonous eating habits – We should try and encourage Mindful Eating where the focus is on tasting food rather than filling one's stomach and cleaning the plate. Kids are asked just to taste the food , they don't have to finish and clean their plates. It helps to have small quantities but plenty of variety. The taste of food is considered the spiritual part of food. Mindful eating helps kids focus on the process of eating, and this has enormous benefits for the digestive system and obesity . Kids also develop a taste for different foods. It is also helps people to practice mindful eating when there is no talking while people are eating.Mindful eating thus facilitates God's blessing - our insides are blessed so a little goes a long way.

When the holy temple existed , the altar would be an atonement for the people of Israel. Today , as the temple and the altar no longer exist , our tables atone for us. They atone for us when we use our tables to feed the poor or needy , and for families to connect in a way , that shows caring and dialogue which is filled with words of Torah.

Justice Department confirms that Attorney General Sessions lied about not meeting with the Russians during the campaign

Washington Post

Then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) spoke twice last year with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Justice Department officials said, encounters he did not disclose when asked about possible contacts between members of President Trump’s campaign and representatives of Moscow during Sessions’s confirmation hearing to become attorney general.

One of the meetings was a private conversation between Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that took place in September in the senator’s office, at the height of what U.S. intelligence officials say was a Russian cyber campaign to upend the U.S. presidential race.

The previously undisclosed discussions could fuel new congressional calls for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russia’s alleged role in the 2016 presidential election. As attorney general, Sessions oversees the Justice Department and the FBI, which have been leading investigations into Russian meddling and any links to Trump’s associates. He has so far resisted calls to recuse himself.

When Sessions spoke with Kislyak in July and September, the senator was a senior member of the influential Armed Services Committee as well as one of Trump’s top foreign policy advisers. Sessions played a prominent role supporting Trump on the stump after formally joining the campaign in February 2016.

At his Jan. 10 Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing, Sessions was asked by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) what he would do if he learned of any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of the 2016 campaign.

“I’m not aware of any of those activities,” he responded. He added: “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.”

Officials said Sessions did not consider the conversations relevant to the lawmakers’ questions and did not remember in detail what he discussed with Kislyak.

“There was absolutely nothing misleading about his answer,” said Sarah Isgur Flores, Sessions’s spokeswoman.

In January, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) asked Sessions for answers to written questions. “Several of the President-elect’s nominees or senior advisers have Russian ties. Have you been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after election day?” Leahy wrote.

Sessions responded with one word: “No.”

In a statement issued Wednesday night, Sessions said he “never met with any Russian officials to discuss issues of the campaign. I have no idea what this allegation is about. It is false.”

Justice officials said Sessions met with Kislyak on Sept. 8 in his capacity as a member of the armed services panel rather than in his role as a Trump campaign surrogate.

“He was asked during the hearing about communications between Russia and the Trump campaign — not about meetings he took as a senator and a member of the Armed Services Committee,” Flores said. [...]

The Washington Post contacted all 26 members of the 2016 Senate Armed Services Committee to see whether any lawmakers besides Sessions met with Kislyak in 2016. Of the 20 lawmakers who responded, every senator, including Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), said they did not meet with the Russian ambassador last year. The other lawmakers on the panel did not respond as of Wednesday evening.

“Members of the committee have not been beating a path to Kislyak’s door,” a senior Senate Armed Services Committee staffer said, citing tensions in relations with Moscow. Besides Sessions, the staffer added, “There haven’t been a ton of members who are looking to meet with Kislyak for their committee duties.”

Last month, The Post reported that Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn had discussed U.S. sanctions with Kislyak during the month before Trump took office, contrary to public assertions by Mike Pence, the vice president-elect, and other top Trump officials. Flynn was forced to resign the following week.[...]