Monday, May 10, 2021
Members of Congress condemn evictions of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah
“The forced removal of long-time Palestinian residents in Sheikh Jarrah is abhorrent and unacceptable. The Administration should make clear to the Israeli government that these evictions are illegal and must stop immediately,” Elizabeth Warren, senator from Massachusetts, said in a tweet Saturday.
Israel's critics are right: ‘Sheikh Jarrah’ exemplifies the Arab-Israeli conflict
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/305845
These four houses, subject to the pending eviction notice, have already been the subject of extensive litigation in Israel, with appeals going all the way up to Israel’s very liberal Supreme Court and with all parties receiving representation and due process. The court determined last week that these homes must be returned to their legal owners and that another four homes shall be returned to their legal owners by the end of the summer. The court further determined that the people currently living in these homes had been illegally squatting in these homes for decades without paying rent or holding proof of ownership.
Sunday, May 9, 2021
On modern Orthodoxy
https://www.jpost.com/judaism/on-modern-orthodoxy-631076
AFTER MORE than 15 years of teaching in the Modern Orthodox yeshivot and seminaries in Israel, I have found that the students themselves are confused about Modern Orthodoxy and perceive it as some sort of “diet orthodoxy,” same great beliefs, but fewer observances. To quote Kaplan yet again, who is in turn citing Heilman, the Modern Orthodox Jew sees himself as a criminal. He is “in theory committed to meeting the demands of both modernity and Orthodoxy; however, insofar as he perceives these demands as being inherently contradictory, his commitment to the demands of modernity results in his selectively violating or, at the very least, not wholly living up to the full range of the demands that Orthodoxy makes upon him. To be involved in the modern world, ipso facto means to live a life that involves the constant compromising of the rigorous norms of Orthodoxy, norms whose legitimacy the Modern Orthodox Jew fully recognizes; in a word, it means to live a criminal existence.” Often my students will report having spent Shabbat with their “really religious cousins.” When I ask them what they mean by that, they usually explain that they are haredi (ultra-Orthodox). As if there is this understanding that haredi Jews are the ones who are “really religious” while what we do as Modern Orthodox Jews falls short of the real thing.
Compartmentalization and Synthesis in Modern Orthodox Jewish Education
As early as 1986, Jack Bieler argued that “The modern Orthodox school itself is undermining rather than supporting the religious outlook that it should be encouraging within its student body.”[11] Samuel Heilman, in his landmark 2006 study of the American Jewish Orthodox community, describes several factors that have contributed to this reality.[12] First, he notes that with increasing professional specialization and training in fields of medicine, law, and business, Modern Orthodox parents find themselves without the religious training or free time to be actively engaged in the education of their children. As Heilman puts it, “The school had hoped not to replace the family and community, but in practice in the modern world it did.”[13] This growing divide between the roles of parents and teachers – indeed, between school and home – means that students’ lived communal and familial experiences develop separately from their educational encounters; they often learn one thing at school and then see something very different at home. To make matters worse, the very teachers that students engage with at school are often at odds with the core values that Modern Orthodoxy espouses. This reality creates significant additional barriers to communicating a Modern Orthodox worldview within our schools, as Heilman further notes that
the teachers in their schools and many rabbis did not share their values and remained unprepared to endorse the modern orthodox life trajectory even tacitly… the teachers often did not share the same neighborhoods and certainly not the same community as the families of the students they taught.[14]
Jared and Ivanka do their own thing as observant Jews. And that’s normal.
Unsurprisingly, haredi Orthodox Jews — the fervent “black hats” who populate enclaves like Monsey, New York, and Lakewood, New Jersey — abide by halachah. Indeed, a whole subculture has grown around adopting “chumrahs,” or more stringent ways to observe Jewish law.
But among self-identified modern Orthodox Jews, the picture is more diverse, says Pew. Nearly a quarter say religion isn’t “very important” in their lives, more than a fifth aren’t certain of their belief in God and 18 percent hardly attend services.
When it comes to Judaism’s legal particulars, nearly a quarter of modern Orthodox Jews don’t light candles on Friday night, 17 percent don’t keep kosher in the home and about a fifth handle money on Shabbat. Alas, the survey did not ask about golfing.
Conversion crisis - because the Modern Orthodox are wimps! II
In order to clarify my point, I am posting some excerpts from one of the most insightful and sensitive presentations of the differences between the Chareidi and Modern Orthodox mindsets. Prof. Moshe Koppel is a talmid chachom who works as a mathematician at Bar Ilan University. He has lived in both worlds. It is worthwhile reading the whole article which is found in Tradition magazine.https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwi-lcDBs7zwAhVcwuYKHdi5CZQQFjADegQIDBAD&url=https%3A%2F%2Fu.cs.biu.ac.il%2F~koppel%2Fideology.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1C1fylbD77VTWOAzEPUpR4
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Yiddishkeit without ideology:
A letter to my son
By Prof. Moshe Koppel
Tradition 36:2 2002 pp 45-55
.
[…]
As a child in New York in the 1960's I attended school in what would now be called a Hareidi institution. What distinguished this school from other, non-Hareidi schools was not so much the stricter standard of halakha to which we were held, but rather the pervasive sense of alienation from everything outside our narrow circle. We were cynical about law and order, about high-sounding ideas, about goyim, about Jews, you name it.
Such an attitude is perhaps easily dismissed as the inevitable consequence of being the children of Holocaust .survivors. But in fact. it was merely a slightly exaggerated form of an attitude of wary subversiveness that serves as the backdrop for everything Jewish. "Avadai hem"- Jews are slaves of Hashem, but, more to the point, of nobody else. In any case that's what all the real Jews I knew were like; if there were any wild-eyed and bushy-tailed ones, they were somewhere else. To this day I think of alienation and its social corollary, subversiveness, as inseparable from Yiddishkeit, This attitude is deep in my bones (and, of course, I regard it with suspicion).[...]
At some point, we ourselves couldn't help but notice that there were plenty of things that goyim did a lot better than we did. In fact, as we got older we began to suspect that some of our role models might have been a bit more clever than they were wise and that, in a few cases, cynicism about rules and regulations had led to just plain crookedness. Not that I thought then, or I think now, that the rest of the world is any better, but suffice it to say that unpleasant moral dilemmas that pitted loyalty against rectitude arose more frequently than they should have. Beyond all that, for an adolescent kid looking to find himself and develop his own particular interests and talents the atmosphere was just a bit stifling. Ultimately,,we had to decide between buying into the whole system despite misgivings or leaving. I left.
I didn't go far. In the Modern Orthodox institution to which I eventually migrated, the underlying principle was openness. Openness to art and music, to science and literature. Not to mention sports and movies and television. My new friends really were more articulate, more knowledgeable in most areas and often more naturally ethical than many of my friends in the yeshiva world. Of course, I had to get used to the idea of guys with names like Jerry and Stuie who wore jeans and had girlfriends. Apparently, I was hopelessly square but at least I had found what I took to be a healthy rebellious spirit that held the promise of a more thoughtful Yiddishkeit and I identified with it.
There were some problems. The version of Yiddishkeit that was upheld there as an ideal was different in disturbing ways from that to which I had been accustomed. The place suffered from a Litvish coldness that had adapted neatly to the American technocratic mindset to produce a somewhat formal and not very heimish version of cookbook Yiddishkeit. You asked somebody there if it was okay to daven in your gatkes, they started pulling books off the shelf. Lacking a sense of the heimish and hankering above all for middle-class American respectability, they tended to undervalue the little hard-to-pin-down gestures and manners that give substance to Jewish distinctiveness.
Moreover, the yeshivish rule that "if it's not Jewish, we don't like it" was flipped in the modern Orthodox world to read "if we like it, it's Jewish." These two formulations are equivalent in logic books but not on the ground. It turned out that my casually-clad new friends had few rebellious thoughts after all; they were simply practicing Yiddishkeit often with rather quaint earnestness as it had been taught to them. It was the chnyoks in the yeshiva world, who managed to maintain some emotional distance from the trappings of middle-class respectability, who were actually the subversives. I wasn't quite home yet. […]
Let me be absolutely clear: where the demands of halakha are unambiguous, you must submit to them. But how does one navigate between much less well-defined traditional attitudes and strong personal inclinations? When I was your age I didn't know the answer I still don't but one proposition that seemed self-evident to me at the time was that it was essential to be consistent. In other words, I felt that I had to somehow make sure that the way 1 defined Yiddishkeit and the way I defined my commitments even my own inclinations would be perfectly aligned. [...]
The ideologues who ran the yeshivish institutions I knew tried to inculcate a set of ideological commitments so comprehensive and intense as to suffocate an individual's personality. One result of this was a kind of cynicism that sometimes amounted to the complete annihilation of any moral and aesthetic compass. The good news is that this mostly worked on the feeble; the normal people's cynicism extended also to their own education: Most of us lived rather comfortably with, for instance, the idea that in principle great rabbanim have da’as Torah whatever that might mean, but that in fact some of the rabbanim we actually knew were, how should I put it, not necessarily especially sharp.
Conversely, in some Modern Orthodox institutions that I know: many of the subtle attitudes that form the core of Yiddishkeit have been diluted out of existence. What remains is a bare-bones even if scrupulously observed-halakha that constitutes a kind of obstacle course that needs to be negotiated in the pursuit of self-fulfillment. But what is worse is that this pursuit of self-fulfillment doesn't consist merely of individuals unselfconsciously pulling received attitudes in directions suited to their own personalities; rather its acceptable forms are defined for one and all in accordance with prevailing cultural tradewinds-nationalism feminism, humanism, whatever. This can lead to an eviscerated Torah forever subordinated to passing intellectual fads. The encouraging fact is that, in general, fads pass-or else they're not fads after all. […]
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch—Torah Leadership for Our Times
It would be most perverse and criminal of us to seek to instill in our children a contempt, based on ignorance and untruth, for everything that is not specifically Jewish, for all other human arts and sciences, in the belief that by inculcating our children with such a negative attitude we could safeguard them from contacts with the scholarly and scientific endeavors of the rest of mankind…You will then see that your simple-minded calculations were just as criminal as they were perverse. Criminal, because they enlisted the help of untruth supposedly in order to protect the truth, and because you have thus departed from the path upon which your own Sages have preceded you and beckoned you to follow them. Perverse, because by so doing you have achieved precisely the opposite of what you wanted to accomplish…Your child will consequently begin to doubt all of Judaism which (so, at least, it must seem to him from your behavior) can exist only in the night and darkness of ignorance and which must close its eyes and the minds of its adherents to the light of all knowledge if it is not to perish (Collected Writings 7: 415-6).
The 'gray divorce' trend: As the Gates split shows, more older couples are getting divorced. Here's why
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/06/opinions/older-couples-gates-divorcing-wellness/index.html
That's not the case anymore. In my current work with couples, I have noticed a discernible difference in older couples in long-standing marriages. Years ago, the vast majority of my client couples who weren't happy in their relationship chose to remain married out of convenience or routine, or even a sense of familiarity. Over the past few years, many are deliberately choosing to part ways. My client base mirrors the divorce rate for Americans 50 and over, which has doubled since 1990.
“A Certain Madness Amok”
https://www.city-journal.org/canadian-father-jailed-for-speaking-out-about-trans-identifying-child
Soon after Bowden’s ruling, A.B. began gender-transition treatment, but Hoogland persevered with his legal fight. In violation of Bowden’s order, he also spoke in public and gave interviews about the case. In April 2019, in response to an application by A.B., Judge Francesca Marzari tried to quell these public appearances. Noting that there had been “substantial online commentary [i.e., reader comments on articles about the case] analogizing A.B.’s medical treatment to child abuse, perversion and even pedophilia,” and that A.B.’s doctors had allegedly received threatening emails, Marzari ordered Hoogland to stop trying to talk A.B. out of receiving treatment for gender dysphoria and to stop communicating with others—including media outlets, and A.B. herself, but excluding his lawyers, the court, doctors, and other authorized persons—about A.B.’s decision to receive hormone therapy.
Instead of recognizing that Hoogland was acting out of concern for his child, Marzari painted him as a selfish bigot. His conduct, she wrote, was causing A.B. “a significant risk of harm.” He was “publicly rejecting his [A.B.’s] identity, perpetuating stories that reject his identity, and exposing him to degrading and violent commentary in social media.” Marzari adduced no evidence to support any of these assertions. That said, Hoogland, added Marzari, “has been irresponsible in the manner of expressing his disagreement [with A.B.’s decision] and the degree of publicity which he has fostered with respect to this disagreement with his child.” Marzari also seconded Bowden’s description of Hoogland’s “rejection of A.B.’s gender identity” as “family violence.”
The 'America First' Revival Tour Throws a Trump Rally Without Trump
https://time.com/6046996/america-first-tour-matt-gaetz-marjorie-taylor-greene-the-villaages/
The hosts seemed an unlikely duo: a Florida congressman with a political pedigree who is under federal investigation for sex trafficking, and a freshman Republican from Georgia with a track record of promoting far-right conspiracies. But together, Gaetz and Greene have launched a joint effort to position themselves as the inheritors of the former President’s “Make America Great Again” movement—its message, its enthusiasm and its cash.
Gaetz and Greene aired grievances that added to the sense of déjà vu. Their message was rehearsed and persistent: it’s us against them. The “them” covered a long list of right-wing buzzwords: the deep state, Big Tech, the “fake news” media, socialists, Antifa, and so-called RINOs, or “Republicans in Name Only.” The loudest booing was directed at the latter, including at the mention of prominent Republicans like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, who not long ago had been enthusiastically welcomed at this conservative retirement community. The “undisputed leader of the Republican Party,” Gaetz declared, was the man three hours south at Mar-a-Lago.
Sensing victory, Jerusalem 'shabab' turn Sheikh Jarrah into major crisis
The Palestinians have succeeded in turning the dispute over the ownership of a number of houses in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah into a major crisis that has now caught the attention of the United Nations, the European Union and the US administration, as well as several countries and local and foreign media organizations.
Saturday, May 8, 2021
More Than Half Of Republicans Believe Voter Fraud Claims And Most Still Support Trump, Poll Finds
A majority of Republicans still believe the baseless claim that the presidential election was “stolen” from President Donald Trump and approximately half believe his spin on the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol building, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found, showing Trump’s continued influence on the party and how the ex-president’s falsehoods about the election and its aftermath have taken hold among his supporters.
Conspiracy theory in defense of Trump Big Lie
It is clear Trump lost the election to Biden. This fact has been accepted by most Americans as well as the courts - which include Trump appointees who have thrown out 63 Trumpian law suits in addition to Trump's attorney general and security director.
The pathetic "explanation" for not accepting reality is that all these officials were involved in a massive coverup of the truth to prevent a civil war!
Eyes that saw Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohein Kook - Rabbi Nota Greenblatt
https://mishpacha.com/priestly-blessing/
Rav Yitzchak took his young son to the city’s rabbi, Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohein Kook, to receive his blessing for a speedy recovery. The door opened, and Rav Nota saw Rav Kook sitting at his table wearing his tallis and tefillin, as was his custom.
“Rav Kook lifted me up, placed me on his lap and put me underneath his tallis,” Rav Nota paints the scene. “Then, when I looked up, I gazed directly into the tzaddik’s face.”
Rav Kook, who was a Kohein, proceeded to place his hands on the boy’s head and bless him with Bircas Kohanim. He then silently davened for a few minutes that Nota merit a complete recovery from his illness.
“He also gave me a brachah for arichus yamim. I’ll let you decide if it’s been fulfilled,” Reb Nota adds with a twinkle in his eye.
Millions of Americans think the election was stolen. How worried should we be about more violence?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/16/americans-republicans-stolen-election-violence-trump
Three months after an insurrection at the US Capitol, an estimated 50 million Republicans still believe the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, according to a recent national survey. But it’s far from clear how many Americans might still be willing to take violent action in support of that belief.
Compiling the Truth: A Resource to Refute Trump’s “Stolen Election” Lies
https://campaignlegal.org/update/compiling-truth-resource-refute-trumps-stolen-election-lies
What about supposed details of some of the alleged grand schemes of voter fraud?
Former Trump adviser Peter Navarro has compiled a number of these stolen election claims. Reporters have published rebuttals and counterarguments to the initial Navarro report. This narrative is hard to neutralize in part because it’s so voluminous.
The “firehose of falsehood”—the intentional deluge of made-up clickbait meant to sow distrust and disorient people—has produced so many claims.
The Navarro report, for example, alleges a laundry list of outright voter fraud, which would constitute huge crimes if true. However, these allegations appear imaginary. Here’s an example: in his report, Navarro alleges, “destruction of legally cast real ballots” in Arizona. He cites one legal brief filed by Trump conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell in Arizona.
This case was dismissed on Dec. 9, 2020 (before the publication of the Navarro report). The judge wrote of the brief that its, “allegations are sorely wanting of relevant or reliable evidence” and “[p]laintiffs failed to provide the Court with factual support for their extraordinary claims." This fate has been routine for these types of grand allegations.
Yes, Trump lost election despite what he says
Seeking to shame Republicans who are disloyal to him, former President Donald Trump distorted the Constitution’s meaning in asserting widespread voter fraud and insisting that state legislatures could overturn Joe Biden’s presidential win.
He’s wrong on all those fronts.
TRUMP: “Had Mike Pence referred the information on six states (only need two) back to State Legislatures ... we would have had a far different Presidential result.” — statement Wednesday urging Republicans to push out Rep. Liz Cheney as the No. 3 House Republican in favor of Rep. Elise Stefanik, who voted to overturn Biden’s victory in key states.
The 'Handmaiden of Trump': How Elise Stefanik Went From Moderate to MAGA
https://time.com/6046674/elise-stefanik-liz-cheney-republican/
The opening for Stefanik to become the No. 3 House Republican has been created by the anticipated ouster of Rep. Liz Cheney, who has lost the support of her colleagues for insisting the party stop parroting President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Rejecting Trump’s fictions about a stolen election is enough to make Cheney, a rock-ribbed conservative and daughter of a former vice president, an outcast in today’s GOP. “Elise Stefanik is a far superior choice, and she has my COMPLETE and TOTAL Endorsement for GOP Conference Chair,” Trump said in a statement. To replace Cheney with Stefanik would send a powerful signal: that anyone who refuses to carry water for Trump’s conspiracy theories cannot carry the Republican mantle.
Friday, May 7, 2021
The Status of Arabs in Israel
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-status-of-arabs-in-israel
Israel’s public health system is a model for Jewish/Arab coworking
and collaboration. As of May 2017, 42% of all nursing students in Israel
were Arabs, 38% of pharmacists in Israel were Arab, and 38% of medical
students at the Technion in Haifa were Arab as well. Roughly one-fifth
of Israel’s doctors, one-fourth of the nurses and almost half of the
pharmacists are Arabs. Israeli Arabs look to jobs in the healthcare
industry because it allows them to find work outside of the normal
confines of Arab society in Israel.
Video saluting Israel’s Arab medical professionals during crisis goes viral
A video lauding Arab doctors and nurses as heroes of the coronavirus
crisis has gone viral in Israel, and its creators are hoping it will
help bring about some change in the country’s politics.
But the creators of the video set out to challenge the nation as well as express its gratitude. “We wanted to say that if you trust an Arab person with your life in the hospital, you should be prepared to trust them to be part of your government,” Shir Nosatzki, the activist behind the clip, told The Times of Israel.
FEC Decides Not to Review Trump’s Role in Stormy Daniels’s Payments
A split Federal Election Commission said it won’t pursue a complaint that former President Donald Trump violated campaign finance rules when his lawyer tried to buy an adult film actress’s silence before the 2016 presidential election.
The commission’s decision, made public Thursday, was the result of a deadlock between Republican and Democratic members during a meeting in February. Four of the six commissioners must agree to proceed with an action.
Mr. Trump’s then-personal attorney, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty in 2018 to making hush-money payments to the adult film actress and coordinating another payment to a former Playboy model. Mr. Cohen said in court that Mr. Trump was aware of the payments to the women, which weren’t disclosed on the Trump campaign’s financial reports.
Israel’s abortion rate continues 32-year decline
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/israels-abortion-rate-continues-32-year-decline-654367
Referrals in Israel to pregnancy termination committees, from which approval is required before undergoing the procedure, have been trending downward since 1988, as has the number of abortions performed, according to new data from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS).
Has Rashby become a Jewish deity?
Safe in the Arms of Jesus
Text: Fanny Crosby, 1868
Safe in the arms of Jesus,
safe on His gentle breast,
there by His love o’ershaded,
sweetly my soul shall rest.
Hark! ’tis the voice of angels
borne in a song to me.
Over the fields of glory,
over the jasper sea.