Haaretz spy scandal - Caroline Glick

JPost

Over the past two weeks Israel has been rocked by a major espionage scandal in which the Haaretz newspaper plays a central role. To understand the significance of the scandal, it is worthwhile to preface a discussion of it with a look at a smaller story Haaretz developed this week.

On Sunday, Haaretz’s Amira Hass reported that in January, the IDF published a new military order that paves the way for the mass expulsion of illegal aliens from Judea and Samaria. The story sported the disturbing headline, “IDF order will enable mass deportation from West Bank.”

In a follow-up on Monday, Hass reported that 10 self-described human rights organizations (all funded by the New Israel Fund) sent a joint letter to Defense Minister Ehud Barak asking him to rescind the order. She noted, too, that, “the international media also has taken great interest in the story.”[...]

Goodists - those who view themselves as Moral Beings

JPost

Psychologists Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong of Toronto University recently reported a startling discovery in the journal Psychological Science: those who purchased a “morally virtuous” product, like organic baby food, were less likely to be charitable and more likely to lie and steal than those who purchased conventional products.

The Guardian summarized the findings: “[T]hose . . . who bought green products appeared less willing to share with others a set amount of money than those who bought conventional products. When the green consumers were given the chance to boost their money by cheating on a computer game and then given the opportunity to lie about it – in other words, steal – they did, while the conventional consumers did not.”  Those findings confirmed previous observations of patterns of “moral balancing,” whereby people who have proven their credentials as moral people in one area allow themselves to stray in other areas. Apparently, relatively minor acts that confer some sort of “moral halo” have the effect of licensing subsequent asocial and unethical behavior.[...]

Ramat Beit Shemesh mikve - Chareidim v. Modern Orthodox

JPost

Friction between two religious communities in Ramat Beit Shemesh has surfaced once again, this time over who should take responsibility for the mikve (ritual bath) in a neighborhood that is equally inhabited by both haredi and  national religious communities, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

The tension is focusing on a mikve that opened roughly two years ago on Nahal Dolev and was divided in two last summer by the city’s Religious Council so each community could follow its own interpretation of Jewish law.[...]

Concern about abuse - only from 1970's

Dr. Christine A. Courtois and Dr. Steven N. Gold (Psychological Trauma 2009 1:1 page 3).For several decades now, the knowledge base about psychological trauma has been continually expanding in the professional literature (Friedman, Keane, & Resick, 2007). In the earliest days of the practice of psychotherapy in Europe in the late 19th century, trauma was recognized as playing an important role in the genesis and exacerbation of many psychological difficulties; however, for various reasons, appreciation of the relevance of the experience of trauma to many psychological problems waned through much of the 20th century (Friedman, Resick, & Keane, 2007; Herman, 1992b; van der Kolk, 2007; Monson, Friedman, & LaBash, 2007). It was only in the 1970s that the focused attention on psychological trauma resumed. This trend was catalyzed largely by the difficulties exhibited by Vietnam War veterans and emerging awareness, via the feminist movement, of the alarming prevalence of rape, domestic violence, and all forms of childhood abuse. Renewed awareness of trauma in the 1970s culminated in the inclusion of the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the dissociative disorders (DDs) in the in 1980 (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 1980). Since that time empirical and clinical exploration of psychological trauma has sustained and flourished. The extensive literature that has accumulated since the 1970s has simultaneously been accompanied by burgeoning awareness on a societal level of the broad reach, financial costs, and lasting adverse impact of traumatic events. In the final two decades of the 20th century, increasing sensitivity arose about the widespread and emotionally damaging nature of domestic violence, childhood abuse, and sexual assault. More recently, acts of terrorism such as the attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, and much more recently those in Mumbai, India, the return of thousands of veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and widespread natural disasters such as the tsunami in Southeast Asia in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina have been increasingly framed through the lens of trauma by both professionals and the news media.

Abuse lawsuit: Boy Scouts ordered to pay $18.5 M

Fox News

An Oregon jury's decision to award a man $18.5 million in punitive damages in his case against the Boy Scouts of America will likely be the first of many financial hits the Scouts will take as it prepares to defend itself against a series of sex abuse lawsuits.

The jury on Friday ordered the Scouts to make the payment to Kerry Lewis, the victim of sex abuse by a former assistant Scoutmaster in Portland in the early 1980s.

The case was the first of six filed against the Boy Scouts in the same court in Oregon, with at least one other separate case pending. If mediation fails to settle the other cases, they also could go to trial.[...]

World's first full face transplant

Telegraph

Dr Joan Pere Barret said the patient, who is in his 30s, received a new beard from a donor as part of his new face.

In an operation at Barcelona’s Vall d’Hebron University Hospital lasting 24 hours, the patient now has a new nose, lips, tear ducts, cheekbones and jaw.[...]

R' Shafran: Community's learned elders are wisest arbiters of what is Jewish

Five Towns Jewish Times

As a Jewish teenager, I absorbed a vital truth—arguably the essence of Orthodoxy: The community’s learned elders are the wisest arbiters of what is and is not Jewishly proper.

Over the many years since, I have come to see that truth vindicated time and again. Had I not perceived it in my youth, I sometimes reflect, I might have become enamored of the Conservative movement, which declared fealty to halachah while expressing sensitivity to American realities. I could have chosen to see it as the most promising standard-bearer for Jewish observance in America. And I would have been devastated to see its claim to halachic integrity crash and burn. But I trusted the elders. And, it turned out, they saw more than I did, and predicted precisely what came to be.

What brings the thought to mind are reactions to a recent pronouncement of our contemporary gedolim and z’keinim. When a congregational rabbi tried to create a new institution in Orthodoxy—women serving as rabbis—the Council of Torah Sages felt compelled to declare that any congregation with a woman in a rabbinical role “cannot be considered Orthodox.”