This criticism of Mr. Trump’s leadership has appeared in editorials, letters to the editor, and even major articles in frum publications since the election and inauguration. Without delving into these accusations, I personally have responded privately by explaining that none of us were voting to place Donald Trump on the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah or to submit kvittlach to him for brachos. He was by far the best candidate for president, and his actions thus far have supported that hope and prayer. However, I believe that there is at least one middah—and as we will see, many more—that are worth highlighting for several reasons. It is something we can all learn from and emulate. It is an admirable trait for a leader and one to be proud of. Most importantly, the Torah itself recommends that we follow this approach to life.
Thursday, January 30, 2025
Schumer hits Trump over funding freeze memo reversal: ‘Americans made their voices heard’
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5115038-schumer-trump-funding-freeze-memo/
The reversal followed massive blowback on Capitol Hill, as lawmakers were bombarded with calls from constituents who had questions about which programs would be affected and about access issues to web portals, including for Medicaid.
“When the Trump administration announced this awful directive on Monday night, we knew immediately it was shortsighted, disastrous, cruel, and dumb,” Schumer said at the press conference.
5 questions about Trump’s federal employee buyout offers
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5114659-trump-buyouts-government/
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) warned federal workers against taking the offer in a Senate floor speech Tuesday night.
“The president has no authority to make that offer. There’s no budget line item to pay people who are not showing up for work,” he said. “If you accept that offer and resign, he’ll stiff you.”
Arbel Yehoud, Agam Berger, Gadi Moses, five Thai nationals to be released today
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/2025-01-30/live-updates-839868
According to information presented to mediators of the deal, five Thai citizens are also expected to be released by Hamas.
Elizabeth Warren Exposes RFK Jr.- another "victim"
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pledged during his confirmation hearing on Wednesday to root out corruption between industry and government. Yet the man who wants to be the nation’s Secretary of Health and Human Services refused to rule out personally making money from lawsuits against drug makers. This ought to be disqualifying
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
Trump White House reverses course, rescinds freeze on federal grants
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/01/29/white-house-budget-office-spending-freeze/
The White House budget office on Wednesday rescinded an order freezing federal grants, according to a copy of a new memo obtained by The Washington Post, after the administration’s move to halt spending earlier this week provoked a backlash.
The original White House order freezing federal grants, which became public on Monday, caused mass chaos and confusion across Washington, appearing to imperil government programs that fund schools, provide housing and ensure low-income Americans have access to health care. States reported issues accessing funds under Medicaid, and even as of Wednesday, public housing authorities reported being locked out of their funding portal. White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that assistance for individuals would not be affected.
As a Rising Political Star, Gabbard Paid to Mask Her Sect’s Ties to Alleged Scheme
Years before Tulsi Gabbard became Trump’s pick to coordinate U.S. spy agencies, she tried to evade unwanted scrutiny
Caroline Kennedy and the Kennedy family's views on RFK Jr. over the years
https://www.newsweek.com/caroline-kennedy-rfk-jr-video-letter-family-2022650
Caroline Kennedy alleged Kennedy Jr. "put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks," adding that "it was often a perverse scene of despair and violence."
Kennedy Jr.'s use of drugs was also brought up by Caroline Kennedy, who accused him of leading his siblings and cousins "down the path of substance abuse, addiction, illness, and death," while he went on to "cheat his way through life."
Two of his siblings and his niece wrote an op-ed saying he has "helped to spread dangerous misinformation," and is "complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines."
Tulsi Gabbard Pictured at Altar Dedicated to Her Wacky Anti-Gay Guru
The photograph of President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be director of national intelligence shows how a teenage Gabbard took part in a ritual dedicated to Chris Butler, the leader of the Science of Identity Foundation, while she was a student at one of its boarding schools.
Gabbard was around 15 when the photograph of her at Butler’s altar, the first visual evidence of her participation in the group, was taken in the Philippines. Her parents, both deeply enmeshed in Butler’s movement, had sent her to one of the group’s boarding schools there.
Religious sect followers prayed and sang as an 8-year-old died. All 14 have been found guilty of manslaughter
Fourteen members of a small religious sect in Australia have been found guilty of the manslaughter of an 8-year-old girl, who died after they withheld insulin needed to treat her diabetes because of their unwavering belief that God would heal her.
Instead, as she lay dying, they turned to prayer and song, maintaining a vigil around her bed, and even after she’d stopped breathing, sought divine intervention to raise her from the dead.
A central tenet of their faith was the healing power of God, and they rejected conventional medicine, which some members described as “witchcraft,” the ruling said.
Why Trump’s funding freeze is deepening fears that he seeks unlimited power
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/29/politics/donald-trump-funding-freeze-analysis/index.html
US District Judge Loren L. AliKhan summed up a surreal and baffling day after pressing a Justice Department attorney, saying: “The government doesn’t know the full scope of the programs that are going to be subject to the pause.”
In seeking to freeze loans and grants and align them with his priorities laid out in a blizzard of executive actions, Trump was seeking to redirect or halt funding already appropriated by Congress.
“It is a direct challenge against Congress and its ability to be able to approve and authorize its expenditure of money,” Kettl said.
But presidents and their advisers are not kings and don’t get to decide what is constitutional. If they did, the system of US democratic governance would collapse.
“What democracy requires isn’t that as soon as the president comes into power, they could wipe away everything that came before,” said Corey Brettschneider, author of “The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens who Fought to Defend it.”
“The idea of a democracy is that when laws are passed, take the 1964 Civil Rights Act or environmental protection, that those laws bind not just citizens, but bind even the president,” said Brettschneider, a constitutional law and politics professor at Brown University.
Abuse - Beating children
Igros Moshe(E.H. 4:68): You and your wife have such great stress from raising your children that you beat them. However it is obvious to everyone that there is absolutely no beneficial purpose in beating them – in fact it makes raising them much more difficult. Therefore it is an irrational behavior caused by nerves and because of this you cannot handle the stress and you do this crazy behavior of viciously beating your small children without any rationale. You are fully aware that you are transgressing a Torah prohibition every time you hit them because it is clearly not justified educationally. Furthermore these beating from rage are without any limit and are just an attempt to dominate them. It is also possibly dangerous because you don’t avoid hitting them on places of the body which are very dangerous to the child. Consequently I give you have permission to use birth control …for two years…This permission also is granted because of the danger to the mother. It is obvious that she is sick with nerves and all this is very stressful to her. Therefore the difficulty of raising children is possibly dangerous not only to the children but also to her life.
What is a serious defect to annul marriage without a get?
There are ignorant people who claim they are relying on Rav Moshe Feinstein to annul a marriage because the husband has an incurable psychological issue. It is clear that not every personality order justifies such an approach. This can be seen clearly in one of the classic tshuvos where he annuls a marriage when it was discovered that the husband was a homosexual and he states that this applies only if the husband were exclusively homosexual.
Igros Moshe (E.H. 04:113): Concerning the present matter where the wife has discovered that her husband has had homosexual relations since we find that this is considered a major defect the marriage is a mistake also for the wife as I have explained in Igros Moshe (E.H. 1:79 and 1:180).. It is also reasonable that the fact that the husband is involved in homosexual relations - which are the worst possible abomination and most disgusting thing - it is a disgrace to the whole family. And surely it is extremely degrading to his wife that her husband prefers this disgusting intercourse rather than intercourse with his wife. Thus it is definitely a mistaken marriage. It is clear to us that no woman would be willing to marry such a disgusting, repulsive and debased man as this. Consequently if immediately after she was informed about this she left him - that if it is impossible for her to receive a divorce from him - that she should be permitted to remarry because of having a mistaken marriage. However if it is possible to obtain a divorce, it is necessary to try with all that is possible in order to obtain a kosher get. On the other hand, if he is not fully immersed in homosexuality - but only occasionally because of the influence of his lust - perhaps this should not be considered to be a mistaken marriage. So even though he is a complete rasha (wicked) - even for the sake of a single incident – there are those who mistakenly imagine that this is called a mistaken marriage. However if he is fully immersed in homosexuality - in that he gets more pleasure from homosexual intercourse than from relations with women – it is definitely a mistaken marriage. All of this is if she left him immediately when she found out. But if she remains with him even after being notified, then it is difficult to nullify the marriage. If his behavior is the result of foolishness, since this is something which is unnatural it is definitely a defect. Since it is from foolishness it is likely that there are other manifestations of foolishness. However in essence it is from wickedness and is repulsive - which also makes it a mistaken marriage.
Capital punishment
Igros Moshe (C.M. 2:68): … The Torah reserves capital punishment for those sins which are very serious such as murder, kidnapping, sexually prohibited relations and idolatry. The perpetrator in these cases is unrestrained and is capable of doing whatever disgusting and cruel acts in the world that are in his heart that he thinks are for his benefit. However the death penalty is not administered out of hatred to evildoers or fear for the welfare of society because Bava Metzia (83b) tells us that G‑d will punish transgressors. That in fact is the halacha as poskened by the Rambam (Hilchos Chovel u’Mazik 8:9) as well as all other poskim. So on the one hand the purpose of capital punishment is to let people know the severity of these prohibitions so that they will not transgress them. On the other hand the laws of capital punishment emphasize the importance of each soul and other concerns. Therefore we are commanded that only the Sanhedrin with proper semicha can judge these cases. Only the greatest people in Torah scholarship and other knowledge receives this semicha. In addition to their knowledge they also need to have perfected their character and be very humble as well as G‑d fearing people. They also need to hate money and love the truth as well as wonderful people who are beloved by all…They don’t have any imperfections or bad reputations and they are very merciful. That is why very old people are not appointed judges because they have forgotten the stress of raising children. Also people without children are not appointed because they lack mercy to some degree and they will be too angry at those who have committed sins.
Even these great and good people cannot judge unless they constitute a Sanhedrin of 23 people.However it is not enough there are 23 such people to make a Sanhedrin. They also need to have before them 3 rows of very great Torah scholars who are not yet great enough to be part of the Sanhedrin – but are almost great enough. This is to protect the Sanhedrin from making a mistake in judgment. That is because when these three rows of scholars think that the Sanhedrin is mistaken in their ruling of innocence they will protest and will not listen at all to their words. Another safeguard against making a mistake is that they do not convict based on circumstantial evidence – no matter how convincing. They only convict a person based on two valid witnesses who have not the slightest bias in the matter... Furthermore the witnesses are warned concerning the severity of the sin of false testimony as well as the seriousness of the sin of murder so that they are very afraid of mistakenly convicting or mistakenly declaring the suspected murderer innocent. Even with all of this the witnesses also have to warn the person against murder and the suspected murderer has to acknowledge the warning by saying that even though he is aware of the seriousness off the crime he is still doing it. As a consequence of all these safeguards, only once in many years would someone be convicted of murder. In addition it was impossible to judge capital cases unless the Temple existed and that the Sanhedrin of 71 of the greatest scholars was in session on the Temple Mount. In fact capital cases were not judged even in those countries where the king gave the Jews permission to judge their own people according to the law of the Torah.
As a consequence of these two factors there were almost no Jewish murderers because of the awareness of the severity of the prohibition of murder and because they were educated by means of the Torah and the punishments of the Torah to understand the seriousness of the crime. They were not simply afraid of punishment in the sense of getting caught but were afraid of the crime itself.
However this use of the Torah system to run society was only when the crime of murder was not common but was simply the result of someone’s great lust or some quarrel concerning money or honor. But when people killed simply because it was viewed as an insignificant thing and the murderer was simply a callous and cruel person or similarly if there was a great deal of murders and wickedness – then a different system of law was utilized that was concerned with the pragmatic question of stopping killing and the goal became saving the society.
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