Sept. 27 to Oct. 3, 2024
24 Elul, 5784 • Selichot Nitzavim-Vayeilech Vol. 23, No. 33
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Donald Trump told Long Islanders he
County Executive Bruce Blakeman
and urged voters to reelect Rep. Anthony D’Esposito
If Donald Trump is elected in November, it will almost certainly be without New York’s 28 electoral votes.
But that doesn’t mean the state is not important to Trump and the Republicans, as the former president reminded more than 16,000 supporters at the Nassau Coliseum last Wednesday night.
Trump made it plain, during a cheer-inducing 80-minute address, that the night was actually about
more than him — it was a trumpet call to Long Islanders to vote for Republican congressional candidates on whose election the fate of a Republican-controlled House of Representatives may hinge.
“A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote to obliterate Israel,” he said.
Long Island’s Republican congressional contenders spoke ahead of Trump.
Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, who is facing challenger Laura Gillen in the nominally blue 4th CD that includes the Five Towns as well
as the Nassau Coliseum where Trump spoke, described the Democratic Party as “dangerous.”
Harris “broke our economy, she broke our border, she broke our peace in the Middle East, she’s broken our world,” he said.
“She’s weak, she’s a failure.”
Mike LiPetri, who would like to unseat Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi in the 3rd CD, also spoke.
As did Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, who Trump later on singled out for praise.
Nearly one year after Oct. 7, the Israel Chesed Center in Hewlett maintains a busy schedule of community-unifying activities that support our brothers and sisters in Israel.
The center, in a former bank building at 1315 Peninsula Blvd., opposite the Peninsula Shopping Center, drew nearly 1,000 people to a Yom Tov Shuk on Sunday, Sept. 15. Local vendors sold food, wine and gifts, with a portion of their proceeds going to the center.
The center was conceived immediately after Simchat Torah to support IDF soldiers, displaced civilians, local security teams and medical volunteers in Israel. It has grown into one of the largest support organizations in the United States and offers a fast and efficient way to
transport critical gear to Israel.
In establishing the center, Moshe Bodner and Jeff Eisenberg set two primary goals:
•To deliver critical gear and supplies to Israel
•To encourage community engagement — ensuring that members of the greater Five Towns community and beyond remain informed of the needs, aware of opportunities to assist, and receive support for their own initiatives.
The ICC encourages and enables everyone, from pre-schoolers to senior citizens, to become ambassadors for projects, and offers every community member the opportunity to identify a need that he or she can fall in love with.
“We hope the war will end today and we can close up,” Bodner said. Eisenberg added that they would remain open for at least two months after the war ends — “which we pray will happen very soon” — to helping anyone who needs assistance.”
By Robyn Spector
IDF Major (res.) Nerya Meir described for the Great Neck Synagogue on Sunday his experiences leading troops in Gaza combat. Meir heads the Department of Zionist Activity in the Diaspora of the World Zionist Organization (WZO). A lawyer by profession, he was called up as a reservist on Oct. 7 and utilized his abilities as a paratrooper and a leader to guide his troops in combat.
Meir recounted that before soldiers go into battle, they often write letters to their families to be sent in case they do not return. He displayed the “Last Letters” written by three fallen soldiers — Yoseph (Yossi) Chaim Hershkovitz, 44; Ben Zussman, 22; and Adi Leon, 20. While many people often think of the hostages, some may pay less attention to the soldiers who are sacrificing their lives on a daily basis.
As a result, there is a new WZO initiative — the Wall of Heroes (Kir HaGvura) — that encourages people to write letters to bereaved families and also prepare bumper stickers to memorialize those lost.
Sunday’s event was coordinated by GNS members Dr. Paul Brody and Yehuda Goltche. Brody is president of the Long Island Region of the Zionist Organization of America.
See Cards on page 10
In his buoyant 1983 album track
“Neighborhood Bully,” Bob Dylan sang: He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin/He’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in.
The song’s title is an ironic take on how much of the world views the State of Israel and the nation — as Dylan observed, “always on trial, just for being born” — that built it.
I remembered Dylan’s lyrics, which sadly have lost none of their currency four decades later, while I was reading the latest book by the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, “Israel Alone.” Just as Dylan conveys Israel’s grit in fighting back despite its stark isolation and its transformation by its enemies from victim into predator, Lévy’s book, sparked by the Hamas pogrom on Oct. 7 last year, communicates much the same spirit.
Unphased by the fact that he is writing about a rapidly moving target, the book is vintage Lévy, casually invoking thinkers and writers from
Rashi to Pascal, from Hegel to Louis Aragon, as he dives into the Middle Eastern fray to then rise above it with his telling insights.
The book begins with Lévy’s arrival in Israel one day after the pogrom, which he defines as an “Event.” Like the “Black Swan” episodes that occasionally plague financial markets — unpredictable, unexpected and littleunderstood developments that can send the price of equities and assets crashing downwards — no one sees an “Event” coming, Lévy explains, “nor even its silent stirrings.”
But once an “Event” manifests, it violently and rudely changes the future, tearing up the preconceptions we hold that give us comfort and a degree of certainty.
For Jews, both in Israel and outside, Oct. 7 marked a dramatic rupture with the concept of “Never Again” that had prevailed since the late 1940s, when the Jewish people emerged from the Holocaust still alive and achieved independence in our ancestral homeland.
In the intervening decades, we garnered both pride and strength from the Israel Defense Forces in its spectacular defense of the country against a succession of invasions by Arab armies, as well as its spectacular one-off operations, notably the rescue of hostages at Entebbe Airport
in Uganda in 1976 (I can still the hear the shrieks of joy from the kitchen of my grandparent’s London home when my grandfather picked up the paper and read the headline, dashing to the room where my brother and I were sleeping to break the news.)
Oct. 7 was the exact opposite. We watched with disbelief, sickness in our hearts, as the Hamas rapists and murderers ripped their way into Israel, crashing through a border that we had thought to be impenetrable. Suddenly, Israel seemed as small as it actually is and the IDF a shadow of what we had believed it to be.
Centuries of Jewish suffering merged into one moment, as though the Cossacks and the Nazi Einsatzgruppen had traveled into our own time, joining with the Arab armies that had failed time and again over the previous eight decades to drive the Jews into the sea. That repellent ambition had, until that day, sounded like an empty slogan coined by perennial losers. Now, amid the rapes and mutilations and burning homes and sundry other cruelties, it seemed like our new reality.
Lévy says, and I agree with him, that he never seriously thought that Israel was faced with annihilation on that terrible morning. But, he adds, there is that “geosymbolic space that is no less influential in determining how people stand in the world” — a space where political realism and its calculations is dislodged by fear and memory.
“October 7,” he writes, “marks the alignment, for the worse, of Israel with the diaspora.” Much later on, he reveals his love of “this little world of people stranded on the tiny strip of
land they finally received, three-quarters of a century ago, left there by a West and by a larger world wet with the rivers of Jewish blood spilled into the torrent of centuries.”
He is far from being the only Jew who feels that intense love, and far from being the only Jew consumed with the abiding fear of living in a world where that tiny strip of land is no longer called Israel.
As I said, Lévy is writing here about a moving target, and much has occurred since he submitted his manuscript, providing both sorrow and satisfaction in equal measure.
•Sorrow at how divided Israel has become internally, when it should have been united; sorrow at the fate of the hostages seized by Hamas, many of them now dead and many of them still crying out to be rescued from Gaza’s
fetid depths; sorrow at the global resurgence of an antisemitism — what Lévy calls the “Beast” — that deploys Israel as the gateway to attack and defame all Jews everywhere, and which denies in real time, as Lévy documents, the truth of what happened on Oct. 7.
•Satisfaction at the manner in which Hamas has, by the accounts of its own commanders, been emasculated and decimated; satisfaction at the humiliating blows leveled at Iran and its proxies, especially Hezbollah, through a slew of assassinations and daring operations, like the pagers and hand-held radios that detonated in the pockets of Hezbollah terrorists across Lebanon during the last week.
Lévy speaks for all of us when he writes that “the death of civilians in Gaza is not a massacre, and it is most certainly not a genocide.” To argue otherwise is, he declares, “a gift to the child-killers of Hamas, and an addition to the misery of the world.”
Lévy’s book is, of course, an early draft of a history that is still being made. We do not know for sure where that journey will lead, and we cannot discount the possibility of another “Event,” with all the trauma that will bring in the moment, and all the hatred that will flow towards us in its aftermath.
Let us remember, therefore, the postcard that Sigmund Freud sent from Rome to one of his friends — a picture of the Arch of Titus on the front, with its stone carvings of Roman soldiers pillaging the Temple in Jerusalem, and on the back the simple handwritten message: “The Jew survives it!” Because surviving is what we do, and we so do unbowed.
The current American role in the two conflicts reprises Great Britain’s preferred, and often successful, strategy (from the seventeenth century to the twentieth) for safeguarding its interests in Europe at relatively low cost.
To prevent any single power from dominating the continent, the British supported, mainly financially and without dispatching British soldiers, any single country or group of countries that was resisting a would-be hegemon. This was the strategy of “offshore balancing,” and it is what the United States is doing now, by assisting Israel and Ukraine, in the Middle East and Europe.
Support for these two embattled democracies has also come in for criticisms targeted at one but not the other.
Critics of Israel’s military activities in Gaza assert that these operations take a disproportionate toll on Palestinian civilians. The charge is unfounded for three reasons:
•First, the widely circulated numbers of Gazan civilian deaths deserve no credence. They come from Hamas which inflates them and counts its own terrorists eliminated by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as civilian casualties.
•Second, Hamas deliberately causes civilian deaths by placing weapons and combatants in homes, schools and hospitals.
•Third, Israel has taken unprecedented steps to avoid civilian deaths.
John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, has said of the IDF that he has “never known an army to take such measures to attend to the enemy’s civilian population, especially while simultaneously combating the enemy in the very same buildings.”
He added that “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history — above and beyond what international law requires and more than the U.S. did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
As for Western assistance to Ukraine, critics of that policy say that persisting with it will lead to a nuclear war with Russia.
To be sure, whenever the United States opposes a nuclear-armed country, this theoretical risk exists; but the only certain way to avoid it is to yield to any demand that such a country, in this case Russia, chooses to make.
Such a strategy would create a very different world and, from the Western point of
Bipartisan support for major foreign policy initiatives is an American tradition. The next president would be wise to try to revive it.
view, a far more dangerous one. Moreover, America and its allies faced this problem during the Cold War and found a way other than preemptive surrender to cope with it: deterrence through the threat to retaliate, with their own nuclear weapons if necessary, against Soviet aggression in Europe. That formula kept the peace in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century and has also deterred Russia from expanding its war against Ukraine to other European countries.
Abandoning the Ukrainians, moreover, could increase the chances of nuclear war by tempting Putin to attack countries such as Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. That would cause a direct Russian confrontation with the United States, which America is bound by the terms of the North Atlantic Treaty to defend.
Afinal common objection to support for Israel and Ukraine holds that such support takes attention and resources away from the confrontation with the single most formidable current threat the West faces, which comes from the People’s Republic of China.
However, a military failure by Israel in Gaza, or by Ukraine in eastern Europe — which abandoning them would risk — would do nothing to fortify the prevention of a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Indeed, it would be more likely to encourage such an attack by broadcasting American weakness to Beijing.
Most importantly, it is possible to defend Western interests and Western values in all three places.
The coalitions opposing Chinese domination of East Asia, Russian domination of Europe and Iranian domination of the Middle East are broad and cumulatively very wealthy. Together they have more than ample resources, in each case, to defend the interests and the values of the West — if those resources are mobilized for the task.
Mobilizing them depends, ultimately, on American leadership in all three parts of the world. America is more likely to exercise leadership effectively to the extent that the country is united in support of it, as is not now the case.
Bipartisan support for major foreign policy initiatives is an American tradition. To be sure, the country has not always followed that tradition. Division over foreign policies is a familiar feature of American history and today’s divisions are not unprecedented.
Still, bipartisanship was notably robust during World War II and the Cold War and was indispensable for American success in those two conflicts. The next American president would be wise to try to revive it.
Michael Mandelbaum is the Christian A. Herter Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and the author of “The Titans of the Twentieth Century: How They Made History and the History They Made,” a study of Woodrow Wilson, Lenin, Hitler, Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Gandhi, Ben Gurion, and Mao, published this month by Oxford University Press.
With rising tensions in the Middle East and the accompanying threat to the health and safety of the Israeli people, we can’t ensure that this Rosh HaShanah will usher in a peaceful year. But with your generous support, Magen David Adom will be prepared — no matter what 5785 brings.
Donate at afmda.org/give or call 866.632.2763.
By Menachem Wecker, JNS
Chanukah came 13-and-a-half weeks early at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, as a band and a Jewish student choir performed songs about dreidels and menorahs, as well as Yiddish and Ladino music.
Beatrice Gurwitz, the museum’s incoming executive director, thanked the musicians for helping the audience, of about 75, get into the holiday spirit during the United States Postal Service’s first-day-of-issue event on Thursday for its new Chanukah stamp.
“I’m very honored. Of course, I really wish some of my family were still around to see it,” the stamp’s designer, Antonio Alcalá, who is Jewish, told JNS. “The stamp began 86 years ago with Kristallnacht.”
The designer’s grandparents sent his mother and her siblings on the Kindertransport out of Hamburg, Germany. His mother ended up in America, and Alcalá grew up in San Diego. The decision his grandparents made led to Alcalá being able to design the Chanukah stamp, which is poised to reach millions, he said.
“It was very satisfying,” he said. He has worked previously on stamps about historical figures. “This becomes a bit more personal,” he said.
Alcalá said didn’t need to rely as much on consultants, as he did in the past to provide context about stamp projects. “I kept having flashbacks to going to my grandparents’ house.”
Technically, Jews light a nine-branched chanukiah on Chanukah, and menorah refers to the seven-branched candelabrum in the Temples, but the word menorah is often used for the former as well.
His family chanukiah had candles and “was not overly ornamental,” he recalled. “It had a certain decorative element, but it was not fancy and it was not modern.”
The menorah he designed for the Chanukah
stamp — which the Postal Service has released every few years since 1996 — lacks a base, suggesting it wouldn’t stand freely. It has thin, curved arms, but Alcalá took pains to vary the weight of the lines, eschewing symmetry.
“It feels, to me, a little bit humble in a way. It’s not highly polished or refined. It feels direct,” he said. “When I reached that, I felt like this was starting to reflect more of the attitude that I was hoping would be conveyed.”
Alcalá left candles out of his design — to suggest the role of faith in that gap between fire and menorah, he told JNS — and he arrived at the final design after first working on the computer, but setting that aside and painting in black and white after the design on the screen “felt a little cold and impersonal.”
The Postal Service plans to print 10 million stamps with his new design, suggesting it’s likely to join some of the other best-known menorahs, including on the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum and on the Emblem of Israel and outside the Knesset in Jerusalem.
“It’s a crazy thing to think that this will be everywhere in the country. Every post office will have at least one sheet of the stamp from Bangor, Maine, to Texas and Alaska,” he told JNS.
Alcalá designed the new Chanukah stamp in
2021, before Oct. 7. If he were designing it today, “I’m sure it would be different,” he said.
Michael Gordon, the government liaison director at the Postal Service who was also on hand at the event, told JNS that ‘generally speaking, current events don’t get reflected in stamps. We want it to be a positive, unifying message.”
Like Alcalá, Gordon, who is Jewish, reflected on Chanukah memories as a child. “It tends to be more of a kids’ holiday,” he said.
Every year, Ezra Academy in Woodbridge, Conn., hosts a big Chanukah production, and Gordon told JNS that the event — a “cute little kindergarten thing” — in which one kid would be the Shamash and others would be other candles, made a lasting impression on him and his siblings.
“I can still remember some of the songs that we sang,” he said. “It was the only time, really, that all of the families got together.” The Chanukah celebration became “an indelible memory”
for him, even though, he added, “I don’t remember a whole lot of things that happened yesterday.”
“A stamp can be a unifying message,” he said. “It’s the same stamp. It can travel from Alaska to the US Virgin Islands, or Maine to Guam. Much like Chanukah, it can be a family, unifying event.”
Brig. Gen. (ret.) Mitchell “Mick” Zais, former president of the American Philatelic Society, came to the ceremony from South Carolina, where he is a former state superintendent of education and former president of Newberry College.
Zais, who has been to about 25 first-day-ofissue stamp ceremonies, is also a former deputy US secretary of education and a former acting education secretary.
He told JNS that his late father, Gen. Melvin Zais, a former NATO commander, was the only Jewish four star general in US history.
By The Jewish Star and JNS
Donald Trump coupled a recounting of his pro-Israel bonafides with an attack on Jews who are, to his sensibility, off the derech politically, thundering that if he fails to win in November he’ll blame Jewish voters for his defeat.
Trump’s rambling performance was staged in front of an adoring audience, at the Israeli American Council’s annual summit in Washington last Thursday night.
The former president joked about the advantage Democrats enjoyed among Jews at the polls in 2016 and 2020 despite his support for the Jewish state and his daughter, son-in-law and three of his grandchildren being Jewish.
“I was the best friend Israel ever had,” he said. In 2020, after “I’ve done all these things … I got 29% [or the Jewish vote]. I went from 25% to 29%. Think of that. Honestly, you didn’t treat yourselves well.”
Trump said that polling currently showed him with support from “about 40%” of the Jewish populace. A Pew poll earlier this month showed that 34% of American Jews support Trump.
“Those votes may be necessary for us to win,” he said.
“I’ll put it to you very simply and as gently
as I can: I wasn’t treated properly by the voters who happen to be Jewish,” he continued. “Do they know what the hell is happening? If I don’t win this election, and the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens, because at 40%, that means 60% of the people voting for the enemy.”
Trump added that if he doesn’t win, Israel “will cease to exist within two years.”
The former president mixed lines he has
He cited his moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, his recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and the Abraham Accords that established diplomatic relations between Israel and several Arab countries as among the pro-Israel accomplishments of his administration.
He said he supported Israel’s right to win its
Rep. Anthony D’Esposito — a vocal supporter of Donald Trump who was praised by the former president during last week’s Nassau Coliseum rally — may have violated Congressional ethics rules designed to combat nepotism and corruption, the New York Times reported on Monday. Shortly after taking the oath of office in 2023, D’Esposito hired his longtime fiancé’s daughter to work as a special assistant in his district office, where she earned $3,800 a month; then in
April, D’Esposito hired a friend, Devin Faas, who earned $2,000 a month for a part-time job in the same district office, according to payroll records examined by the Times. Payments to both women stopped in July 2023, the Times reported.
D’Esposito has not been charged with wrongdoing, but the employment of both women, which resulted in a payment of about $29,000 in taxpayer funds, could lead to disciplinary actions in the House of Representatives, according to the Times.
The allegations surfaced as D’Esposito is be-
ing challenged by Democrat Laura Gillen, who he defeated two years ago. Early voting starts on Oct. 26; election day is Nov. 5.
“These are very serious allegations that demand further investigation and it’s clear that Anthony D’Esposito has abused his power,” Gillen said in a statement.
According to the Code of Official Conduct of the House, “a member … may not retain the relative of such individual in a paid position, and an employee of the House may not accept com-
war on terrorism, but “it has to win it fast.”
Perhaps the loudest applause of the night came when Trump said that he would deport “foreign jihad sympathizers” and strip universities of their accreditation and federal funding unless they put a stop to “antisemitic propaganda.”
The federal government does not directly control university accreditation but approves independent accreditation agencies.
“If you hate America, if you want to eliminate Israel, we will throw you out of our country so fast your head will spin,” he said.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), who made a surprise late-evening appearance at the conference, noted in his brief remarks that Israel might be one of the few issues that he and attendees would agree on.
“Politically, I’m a Democrat, but I’m very, very, very much all about standing with Israel,” Fetterman said. “I’m known as going into red [i.e., Republican] areas and rooms or whatever, and just to talk and have a conversation.
“I’m not asking ‘who are you voting for in 2024?’” he added. “Perhaps some of you are on a different ‘team’ politically, but I’m absolutely on your team, Israel.”
pensation for work for a committee on which the relative of such employees serves as a member.”
The House defines “relative” as someone related to the member, delegate or resident commissioner, including a parent, child, sibling, parent’s sibling, first cousin, sibling’s child, spouse, parentin-law, child-in-law, sibling-in-law, stepparent, stepchild, stepsibling, half-sibling, or grandchild.
“My personal life has never interfered with my ability to deliver results for New York’s fourth district, and I have upheld the highest ethical standards of personal conduct,” D’Esposito said in a statement. “Voters deserve better than the Times’ gutter politics.”
“Rep. Tom Suozzi has been a champion of the U.S.-Israel relationship.”
– 2024 AIPAC Endorsement
Suozzi’s support for Israel has been admirably strong and consistent, evidence of a deep personal commitment to the Jewish State... it is extremely important to bolster the pro-Israel, centrist majority among House Democrats. Having Tom Suozzi on Israel’s side in the halls of Congress will help offset the increasing influence of extreme left-wing progressives who are hostile to Israel and its interests. At the same time, we know that he will support all efforts to fight the growing antisemitism in this country.
01/24/2024
We must continue to do everything we can to defeat Hamas. There’s no equivocation... My job right now is to show solidarity.
12/22/2023
of the
Continued from page 1
“Under Donald J Trump, we had peace and prosperity,” Blakeman said, blaming the BidenHarris administraiton “that funded Iran to attack our best ally, the State of Israel.”
“We cannot afford another four years of Biden and Harris — high grocery prices, high gasoline prices, crime and lawlessness, higher taxes, a world at war — nothing will change, it will only become worse under come Kamala Harris,” he said.
“Nassau County protects the integrity and safety of women’s sports, and Nassau County unmasked the criminals, antisemites and hate mongers,” he adding, urging Trump’s eleciton so the country could “get back to common sense.”
“Let’s save our country, and let it start right here,” he said. “Let it start on Long Island, and go throughout the whole state of New York and the state of New Jersey and roll across America.”
Former Rep. Lee Zeldin of LI, who left Congress for an unexpectedly close challenge to Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2022, said Democrats “gave us a broken economy, a broken border, a broken world.”
In voting for Trump, Zeldin said, “we’re voting for a strong economy … a secure border [and] for a military focused on defending America.”
Zeldin said Trump had his support “because I don’t believe that boys should be able to play girls sports, I don’t believe that males should be able to access female bathrooms, I don’t believe that noncitizens should ever be given the right to vote.”
Shabbos Kestenbaum, a Harvard University graduate who is a champion of pro-Israel students, told the crowd he was a Democrat who re alized it was time for him to change.
“I tried pressuring my party to take the issue of antisemitism seriously” but did not get a positive response, he said. “Elections are binary choices,
Continued from page 1
Meanwhile, along with a team of volunteers, Bodner and Eisenberg will continue to engage the community, especially over the next few weeks.
Next Sunday and Monday, Sept. 29 and 30, the Chesed Center will host a bake sale, with over 50 local bakers signed up so far, offering challah and other baked goods for Rosh Hashana.
The center will feature a full-service Sukkah Shop, and an Arba Minim Shuk will open on Sunday, Oct. 6.
Simultaneously, the center is running a campaign, in partnership with the IDF and Kehillat Shir Chadash in Jerusalem, to provide 5,000 Arba Minim sets to chayalim. For $27 per set, virtually anyone can share in the mitzvah of ensuring that any chayal who wishes to receive his own arba minim set will be accommodated.
With the one-year anniversary of the Simchat Torah massacre looming, the Chesed Center plans to be “open to the entire community as the place to go on Oct. 7, to commemorate and to mourn,” Bodner said.
“In Israel, you can go to the Nova site or to one of the kibbutzim, and every community will have its observances. Here, you can come to the Chesed Center, to express your grief
and this election I’m going to vote with the president who told us that he will not allow one penny of American taxpayer money to fund antisemitic, unAmerican universities like Harvard, like Columbia, like MIT.
“I’m going to vote for the president who told us that he will expel non-American students who violate our laws and abuse the foreign visa system. And I am going to vote for the president who won’t negotiate with Hamas terrorists, he’ll kill
and to be connected to all of Am Yisrael.”
A full day of activities on Monday, Oct. 7, is scheduled to begin with a Unity Shacharit for high school senior boys from local yeshivot, continuing with an all-day Am Echad B’lev Echad mosaic project in which visitors will make mosaic art to commemorate Oct. 7 (the art will be displayed locally and in Israel).
At 6 pm, the community is invited to join a “Israeli-style” memorial ceremony, featuring a massuah (torch) lighting in memory of the victims, Tehillim and personal messages from local students, and a musical performance by Israeli singer Avi Perets.
In addition, schools and youth groups are invited to join in a Unity Flag project, allowing children to express themselves in designing flags that will connect us with our extended family in Israel.
The Israel Chesed Center is open daily. For more information about any of its activities or projects, visit IsraelChesedCenter.com or, to join its WhatsApp chat, go to tinyurl.com/ ChesedVol
Continued from page 1
Brody opened the program by leading the singing of the Star Spangled Banner and Hatikva.
GNS Rabbi Dale Polakoff recited prayers for the State of Israel and the safe return of the hostages. Meir led the singing of the mishaberach for the chayalim, after which everyone sang “Acheinu Kol Beit Yisrael” with great kavana. For further information about the WZO and its projects, contact nettam@wzo.org.il
Ihave been hearing two holiday comments recently — either “Rosh Hashana is so late this year” or “I am so glad we have more time to get ready for Rosh Hashana this year.” Are we ever content with the timing of these sacred days?
This year, the darkness will come sooner, so dinner will be earlier, good for younger family members and friends. In addition, the days will be cooler, so hot soups and foods will be more welcome than they might be during times when the holidays fall on days that are 90 degrees!
During the past several years, I have noticed that more than a few of my friends and relatives have become vegetarians or “mostly vegetarians.”
There is a lot of discussion about Judaism and vegetarianism and many people believe that we are mandated by the Bible to be vegetarians. In “Rabbis and Vegetarianism: An Evolving Tradition,” 17 contributors wrote essays on the biblical rationale for being, or becoming, a vegetarian. They make excellent arguments, and, while I’m not ready to take the plunge completely, the new year is a good time to take another small step towards healthier eating. I aim to make meatless meals at least three times a week and I also try to avoid plain white pasta, even though (or because) I love it.
It becomes easier as I get used to it, but I admit that some vegetarian meals take more prep time than most meat or chicken meals I can imagine. While I use tofu and seitan, I prefer lots of veggies and grains or legumes like faro or quinoa, barley, lentils, and beans mixed with tons of veggies and seasoned with Asian inspired sauces.
I love beans and lentils, and they can be a great side dish for any meal, even a holiday feast. It is a new year. What a great time to clean out the fridge and the pantry, toss all those processed foods and include more fruits and vegetables, legumes and grains into your diet.
My friend who is a nutritionist says that we
absolutely need those feel-good foods occasionally — mocha chip ice cream for me — but we should make good choices the rest of the time. Do we mostly choose those foods that will promote health and possibly longevity, or do we choose those foods that will promote inflammation and ill health? It’s all up to us.
This Rosh Hashana will be tinged with a lingering and heartbreaking sadness. The tragedies in Israel hit home in a thousand ways. We are all connected; we are all one in grief and sadness. To ignore such events is impossible; we all have connections that run deep. All we can do is pray that that war and bloodshed come to an end, that peace will come to the land and people we all love, and that all who are held hostage will be returned to their loved ones. This is what I pray for every morning, every Shabbat, every holiday. I know you do too.
This Rosh Hashana, I hope our collective prayers will be heard. We must find some joy in this holiday cycle as we gratefully celebrate with our cherished loved ones. I wish you all a happy, healthy and peaceful Shanah Tovah.
This is a great salad for kids to make. Allow extra prep time for creativity. You can use any veggies your family likes. Below are some suggestions. Add beans or other legumes if your family likes them. It’s very dramatic when you flip it into a big bowl for serving!
• Lettuces (I like baby crispy and baby romaine, but any lettuce will work)
• Baby spinach leaves
• Frisee
• Small grape tomatoes or tomato slices
• Cucumbers or zucchini
• Red and green peppers (yellow and orange for more color)
• Mushrooms
• Matchstick jicama pieces
• Fresh green peas
• Purple cabbage
• Shredded carrots or thinly sliced carrots
• Purple onions thinly sliced broken into rings, if you like
• Mandarin orange slices or pineapple chunks
• Olives
• Sliced pears or apples
• Fresh berries
• Walnuts, pecans, pistachios
• Pomegranate arils
• Dried cranberries or raisins or snipped apricots
• Hard-boiled eggs
Use a trifle style glass bowl for this. Help children cut the vegetables into small bite-sized pieces. Don’t cut the tomatoes. Cut the cabbage into thin slices and then break them into shreds. Let the children pull out the seeds from the peppers and slice them into bite sized chunks or slices. Mushrooms can be sliced with a “butter” style knife to avoid cuts.
Lay out all the vegetables and then have the children layer the vegetables, varying color, until the bowl is filled. Top with nuts, croutons, dried fruit, pomegranate arils, berries, pineapple chunks, etc.
NOTE: After everyone Oohs and Ahhs over the beautiful salad, I ceremoniously empty it into a huge bowl and toss it all together before serving. I let guests add croutons or sunflower seeds -candied walnuts or pecans are a favorite (and I have 2 or 3 different dressings for guests to choose their own).
Serves 10 to 15 depending on trifle bowl size.
Millet is a fast cooking, easy-to-use grain. It has a mild, nutty flavor that takes on seasonings very easily. I use lots of vegetables, but you may prefer fewer and different ones. Add YOUR family favorites and enjoy. This is a great main dish or side dish for chicken.
• 1-1/2 cup millet
• 8 cups water
• 1/3 cup canola oil
• 1/3 cup tamari sauce (more or less to taste)
• 3 large cloves garlic, crushed
• 3 to 4 large carrots, cut in 1-inch chunks
• 2 to 3 celery stalks, cut in 1-inch chunks
• 8 small red potatoes, washed and cut in halves or quarters
• 1 to 2 large onions, coarsely chopped
• 1 to 2 cups sugar snap peas
• 1 to 2 cups broccoli or cauliflower florets
(I also often add artichoke hearts, fresh corn cut from the cob, roasted Brussel’s sprouts, roasted red or green peppers, roasted cherry tomatoes, sun-dried tomatoes, etc.
Fresh herbs to your liking, I use chives, a little dill and fresh parsley.
Other additions you may like:
• Chopped red and/or green peppers
• Fresh tomatoes, chopped and seeded
• Sunflower seeds or pine nuts
• Chopped walnuts or other nuts
• Small amount of chopped apricots or raisins to add a bit of sweetness
Rinse millet by placing it in a large (4 cup) measuring cup. Add cold water, stir the millet, let it settle and pour off as much of the water as possible. Repeat until the water is clear. A strainer often does NOT work for this process because the millet is smaller than the holes and goes right through the strainer or blocks the holes.
Place potatoes, carrots and onions in a large pot with 6 cups of water. Bring to a boil and add other vegetables. Boil just until the hardest vegetables are BARELY tender. Add the tamari, oil, garlic and millet. Stir thoroughly and cover. Reduce heat to low and check frequently as you will have to add more water. Stir frequently as millet tends to stick. Add nuts, seeds, and any other herbs and seasonings you like and heat through.
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Serve hot with a good multigrain bread and perhaps an Israeli salad.
I had a version of this at a wedding, and my lactose intolerant son just loved it so we came home and ended up with this version. Add a hearty vegetables soup and you have a delicious meal. Or serve it as an appetizer alone or with vegetable soup.
1 package phyllo dough (use about half)
2 10-oz. packages white mushrooms, sliced (buy them pre-sliced to save time)
4 to 5 small-medium Portobello mushroom caps, peeled and diced
5 to 6 large shallots, minced
1 small onion, peeled and minced
1 clove garlic, minced, more if desired
2 to 4 Tbsp. flour
1 tsp. kosher mushroom. onion, or vegetable bouillon (powder or paste)
1 lb. baby spinach leaves
Salt and pepper to taste
Pareve margarine, melted, for brushing
2 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
Defrost the Phyllo dough in its box while preparing the rest of the recipe.
Heat a large skillet and add the olive oil. Add the minced shallots, onion, and garlic and sauté until transparent. Add the Portobello mushrooms and stir for 1 to 2 minutes. Add the rest of the mushrooms, stir and cover. Reduce heat and simmer for 4 to 6 minutes, until there is a lot of liquid in the pan.
Remove the cover and sauté for about 3 minutes, until half the liquid is reduced. Sift half the flour over the mushrooms and stir well to blend. Add the mushroom bouillon powder (or paste) and stir. Rinse and thoroughly dry the spinach leaves. When the mushroom mixture is thickened a bit, add the spinach leaves and stir well to mix. Cook for 1 to 2 minutes and turn off heat. Melt one stick of margarine. Line a jellyroll pan with aluminum foil, and a piece of parchment) and brush the parchment lightly with melted margarine.
Unfold the phyllo dough and place three sheets of the dough on the parchment. Brush again with the margarine and add another two sheets. Continue adding two sheets at a time, brushing each addition with melted margarine, until you have 10 sheets of the dough. Spoon the filling lengthwise about 3-inches from one long end, making sure that you do not go to the other long and sort edges. Dust 1 tablespoon of flour over the filling (I use a tea strainer to “sift” it finely and evenly).
Using the foil, lift the filled side up and over the filling. Roll the three-inch edge over the filling, wet a finger and run it along the edge to seal the dough and then pinch and fold up the short edges so the filling won’t ooze out. Use the foil and roll the log over so that the seam side is down. Brush the top with melted margarine and make three or four diagonal slits in the top. Bake at 375 for 35 to 45 minutes, until golden. Let the log sit for 10 minutes before serving. Serves 6 to 8. (NOTE: I double this and make two for a crowd.)
I love these lentils, they are a little sweet, a bit sour and delicious hot or cold!
• 3 cups brown lentils, rinsed in a large
strainer until water runs clear
• 1/4 cup tamari sauce, low sodium is fine
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 medium or large onion grated (depends on how much you like onion)
• 1/2 cup Canola oil
• 1/2 (scant) cup red wine or garlic wine vinegar
• 3/4 cup honey
• 1/2 tsp. powdered ginger
• 1 tsp. grated fresh ginger
• 1/2 tsp. allspice
• 4 cups water
Rinse the lentils and set aside. Place the rest of the ingredients in (at least) a 4-quart pot. Mix well. Add the lentils. Bring to a boil and then cover. Reduce heat and simmer for 1-1/2 to 2 hours, until lentils are soft, but not mushy. You may need to add more water, but do not add too much. Stir frequently and keep the heat low to keep the mixture from sticking to the pan.
Turn off the heat, keep covered, and let stand for 20 to 30 minutes. Remove bay leaves before serving. Delicious, hot, warm or cold.
Serves 8 to 10.
• 6 portobello mushrooms
• 4 to 8 Tbsp. olive oil
• 7 to 10 large cloves garlic, minced
• 5 to 7 large shallots, minced
• 1 onion, minced
• 4 oz. baby bella mushrooms or white mushrooms
• 1 tbsp tamari sauce, to taste
• About 1-1/2 to 2 pounds fresh baby spinach, washed trimmed and cut into thin strips
• 1/2 to 1 cup fresh breadcrumbs
• Salt and pepper to taste
• 1 egg
• Additional 1/2 cup breadcrumbs mixed with 1 tbsp melted pareve margarine
• Paprika or smoked paprika
OPTIONAL:
• Crumbled Feta Cheese
• Grated cheese of your choice
• Toasted chopped walnuts or almonds
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Line a rimmed baking sheet or small roasting pan with foil. Set aside.
Gently remove the stems from the mushrooms and set aside. With a small spoon, scrape out and discard the gills of the mushrooms. Gently peel the mushroom cap and brush both sides with olive oil. Set aside.
Process the onion, shallots and garlic in a food processor until finely minced. Heat a large skillet and add the remaining olive oil. Add the onion mixture and sauté until softened and translucent
and just beginning to turn golden, about 5 to 7 minutes.
Clean and trim the stems of the Portobella mushrooms and add to the bowl of the food processor with the baby bella or white mushrooms. Process until finely minced. Add to the skillet and cook until the mushrooms exude liquid and are bubbly, 4 to 7 minutes. Add the Tamari sauce and mix well. Turn off the heat.
Wash the spinach, cut out the stems and roughly roll a bunch of leaves into a cigarette roll. Slice them across into thin strips about onehalf inch thick. Add the spinach to the skillet, mix well, and turn the heat back on to low. Cover and cook for 2 minutes. Stir and, if the spinach is not wilted, cover and cook another minute.
Add the breadcrumbs and seasonings and mix well. Add the slightly beaten egg and mix thoroughly.
Mound the stuffing onto the mushroom caps. Sprinkle some of the buttered crumbs on the top of each cap and then sprinkle with paprika or smoked paprika or any seasoning you like. Place in the oven for 15 to 20 minutes.
VARIATIONS: Add some chopped toasted walnuts to the mixture before filling the caps.
This is a great buffet item. Guests can choose either mushrooms or onions (or both) for the topping and it is delicious, warm or cool and as a side for soup or salad.
• 1 or 2 loaves of good quality rustic bread - long thin loaves work best, but not baguettes, which are too thin.
For the WILD MUSHROOMS:
• 10 Tbsp. olive oil, divided
• 10 Garlic cloves, peeled and thinly sliced
• 1 additional garlic clove, cut in half for rubbing on the bread
• 1 cup dry white wine
• 1-1/2 pounds assorted wild mushrooms, shitake, baby portoballo, chanterelle, oyster, etc, or use white button mushrooms, if unable to find others
• salt and pepper to taste
For the CARMELIZED ONIONS:
• 2 Tbsp. olive oil
• 5 cups, about 3 large, onions red and/or white, thinly sliced
• 2 tsp. brown sugar
• Pinch salt
• 2 cups Feta Cheese
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Slice the bread on the diagonal into slices about one-halfinch thick. Brush the bread lightly with the olive oil and rub a cut garlic clove over the bread. Place the bread, oil side up, on cookie sheets. Bake until bread is toasted, about 10 minutes. Remove from oven and arrange on a platter.
WILD MUSHROOMS
Heat five tablespoons of the olive oil in a skillet. Add the sliced garlic and sauté for 30 seconds. Add the mushrooms and sauté for about 5 minutes. Add the wine and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and boil gently until almost all the liquid disappears, about 20 minutes. Stir occasionally. Season with salt and pepper. Place the mushrooms in a serving bowl and set aside. Spoon mushrooms over toasts when cool.
CARMELIZED ONIONS
Heat a large skillet and add the olive oil. Add the onions and cook over medium heat stirring frequently, about 10 minutes.
When the onions are translucent, sprinkle the sugar over the onions and continue cooking and stirring for another 20 minutes or so, until the onions are a deep golden brown. This can take up to 30 minutes.
When the onions are cooked, transfer them to a serving bowl and place the mushrooms and the onions in bowls next to the toasted bread and let your guests create their own Bruschettes.
The twist here is the bread which adds texture and thickens the soup. For a very different flavor, try using seedless rye bread or even black bread. Make this soup a few hours before serving to preserve the tart ripe flavor and crisp texture.
• 1 long English cucumber seeded
• 1 green bell pepper
• 1 red bell pepper
• 1 small red or sweet onion
• 3 lb. ripe tomatoes
• 2 to 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 scallions, finely minced
• 3 to 4 cups tomato juice
• 2 slices French bread, crusts removed
• 4 Tbsp. olive oil
• 2 to 4 Tbsp. garlic wine vinegar
• 1 tsp. sugar (scant)
• 1 Tbsp. freshly squeezed lemon juice
• Pinch salt
• Pinch white pepper
For Garnish:
• 1 cup garlic croutons
• 1/2 small cucumber, seeded and finely chopped
• 1/2 small red or Vidalia onion, finely chopped
• 1/2 red or green bell pepper, seeded and finely chopped
• Some fresh cilantro leaves or fresh parsley leaves
You do not need to peel the cucumber, but you can if you like. Cut the cucumber in half lengthwise and scoop out the seeds. Roughly chop and place the pieces in a food processor. Pulse until desired consistency is reached. Pour the cucumbers into a large bowl.
Cut the peppers in half and remove the seeds and any white membrane. Follow the same processing procedure as for the cucumber and add the pepper to the bowl.
Cut the onion into quarters and process until desired consistency. Add to the bowl. Finely mince the garlic and add that to the bowl. Mince the scallions and add to the bowl.
If you want to peel the tomatoes, drop them, a few at a time, into a large pot of boiling water. When the skin splits, remove them with a slotted spoon and drop them into ice water. They will peel very easily. Roughly chop the tomatoes and add them to the processor and pulse until desired consistency. Pour into the bowl.
Add the bread and process until fine crumbs are formed.. Add the oil, vinegar, sugar, lemon juice, salt and pepper and process again until smooth. Add to the bowl and mix well. Add the tomato juice and mix. Cover and refrigerate for several hours you have the consistency you like, either smooth or chunky. Place in a large container and chill for several hours. Taste and adjust seasonings.
Garnish with crispy garlic croutons, a pinch of each of the finely minced veggies on top
the soup and some fresh
Serves 6 to 8.
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The jicama, carrots and pears add a bit of sweetness to this peppery salad.
• About 2 to 3 oz. each or mix as you like:
• Baby arugula leaves
• Baby spinach leaves
• Baby romaine leaves
• 1 large green pepper, washed, seeds and white membrane removed, diced
• 2 to 3 stalks celery, thinly sliced
• Frisee
• Radicchio
• 3 to 4 radishes, thinly sliced
• Parsley, small bunch
• 1 Jicama washed and peeled
• Carrots, 2 large, washed and peeled
• 1 to 2 ripe pears, I like red, but you can use any kind, sliced thinly
• 1 to 2 cups grapes, cut in half
• 1/2 cup pomegranate arils
DRESSING:
• 1 garlic clove, crushed
• 4 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
• 2 Tbsp. white wine or sherry wine vinegar
• 1 Tbsp. freshly squeezed lemon juice
• 1/2 tsp. freshly cracked black pepper
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• Tiny pinch cayenne pepper
OPTIONAL: To sweeten the dressing, add a bit of honey
OPTIONAL: Garnish with walnuts or dried cranberries
Wash and dry the arugula, spinach and other greens and place on paper towels to dry. Place in a large bowl. Add the celery and pepper. Wash the radicchio and radishes and coarsely chop the radicchio and slice radishes. Add to the bowl. Add some fresh chopped parsley. Slice the jicama into thin slices and then cut the slices into matchstick pieces. Do the same with the carrots or slice them into thin rounds. Toss with the greens. Cut the pear in half lengthwise and then quarters. Slice the quarters into thin slices and add to the salad. Add the grapes. Toss to mix. Mix all the dressing ingredients together and drizzle over the salad. Add any optional garnish and toss. Serves 4 to 6.
• 8 to 10 cups baby spinach salad
• 2 tsp. toasted sesame oil
• 2 cups walnut pieces
• 1 cup raspberries
• 1 cup strawberries, diced
Place the washed, drained spinach in a large bowl lined with paper towels. Set aside, but shake every few minutes to drain off all the water.
Heat the toasted sesame oil in a small skillet. Add the walnut pieces and stir until they are coated. Stir constantly and be careful not to burn them just until fragrant, and then turn off the heat. Set aside to cool.
Wash and trim the strawberries and chop them.
Remove the paper towels from the serving bowl and discard. Add the chopped strawberries to the spinach and gently toss. Add the walnuts and toss. Divide among 6 to 8 plates and garnish with the raspberries. Drizzle with Sweet and Sour Raspberry Salad Dressing or your favorite dressing. Serves 6 to 8.
and Sour
• 1 tsp. celery seeds
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. dry mustard
• 1/2 tsp. paprika
• 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
• 1/4 cup raspberry vinegar
• 1 Tbsp. Fresh orange juice
• 1 tsp. freshly squeezed lemon juice
• 3/4 cup corn oil
OPTIONAL: 1 cup fresh raspberries, chopped
Mix the dry ingredients in a quart tight-lidded container (like Tupperware)
Add the vinegars and juices and cover. Shake well to mix. Add the corn oil and Shake thoroughly to emulsify. Shake again just before serving. Even kids like this pungent, sweet/sour dressing
jewish star torah columnists:
•Rabbi Avi Billet of Anshei Chesed, Boynton Beach, FL, mohel and Five Towns native •Rabbi David Etengoff of Magen David Yeshivah, Brooklyn
•Rabbi Binny Freedman, rosh yeshiva of Orayta, Jerusalem
contributing writers:
•Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks zt”l,
former chief rabbi of United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth •Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, OU executive VP emeritus •Rabbi Raymond Apple, emeritus rabbi, Great Synagogue of Sydney •Rabbi Yossy Goldman, life rabbi emeritus, Sydenham Shul, Johannesburg and president of the South African Rabbinical Association.
contact our columnists at: Publisher@TheJewishStar.com Five towns candlelighting: From the White Shul, Far Rockaway, NY
Fri Sept 27 / Elul 24
Nitzavim-Vayeilech Candles: 6:24 • Havdalah: 7:31
Wed Oct 2 / Elul 29
Erev Rosh Hashana Candles: 6:16
Thu Oct 3 / Tishrei 1
First Day Rosh Hashana (Tashlich) Candles: 7:15
Fri Oct 4 / Tishrei 2
Second Day Rosh Hashana, Erev Shabbos Shaabos Shuva • Ha’Azinu Candles: 6:12 • Havdalah: 7:20
Fri Oct 11 / Tishrei 9
Erev Yom Yippur (Yizkor) Candles: 6:01 • Havdalah: 7:09
Wed Oct 16 / Tishrei 14
Erev Sukkot Candles: 5:54
rabbi sir
jonathan sacks zt”l
The great transition is about to take place. Moses’ career as a leader is coming to an end, and Joshua’s leadership is about to begin. Moses blesses his successor. Then G-d does. Listen carefully to what they say, and to a subtle difference in their words.
This is what Moses says: Be strong and courageous, for you must go with this people into the land that the L-rd swore to their ancestors to give them, and you must divide it among them as their inheritance. Deut. 31:7
And this is what G-d says:
“Be strong and courageous, for you will bring the Israelites into the land I promised them on oath, and I Myself will be with you.” Deut. 31:23
The difference in Hebrew is even slighter than it is in English. Moses uses the verb tavo, “go with.” G-d uses the verb tavi, “bring.” It is
Rashi says that G-d
consulted with the
angels —
not
because He needed their help, but to show them respect.
the slightest of nuances, but Rashi tells us the words are worlds apart in their significance. They refer to two utterly different styles of leadership. Here is Rashi’s comment: Moses said to Joshua, “Make sure that the elders of the generation are with you. Always act according to their opinion and advice.”
However, the Holy One blessed be He said to Joshua, “For you will bring the Israelites into the land I promised them” — meaning, “Bring them even against their will. It all depends on you. If necessary, take a stick and beat them over the head. There is only one leader for a generation, not two.” (Rashi on Deuteronomy 31:7)
Moses advises his successor to lead by consultation and consensus. G-d tells Joshua to lead firmly and with authority. Even if people do not agree with you, He counsels him, you must lead from the front. Be clear. Be decisive. Be forceful. Be strong.
Now this is a strange comment from Rashi, considering what we learned elsewhere about the leadership styles, respectively, of G-d and Moses. Listen first to the comment of Rashi on the words of G-d immediately prior to the creation of humanity: “Let Us make man in our image after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). Who are the “Us”? To whom is G-d speaking and why?
Rashi says:
From here we learn the humility of G-d. Since man was [created] in the image of the angels they might become jealous of him. He, therefore, consulted them. Similarly, when He judges Kings, He consults His heavenly court. … Though they [the angels] did not help in his creation and [the wording of the verse] may give the heretics an opportunity to rebel, [nevertheless,] Scripture does
not refrain from teaching courtesy and the attribute of humility, that the greater should consult and ask permission of the smaller (Genesis Rabbah 8:9). Rashi on Gen. 1:26
This is a remarkable statement. Rashi is saying that, before creating man, G-d consulted with the angels. He did so not because He needed their help: clearly He did not. Nor was it because He needed their advice: He had already resolved to create humankind.
It was to show them respect, to pre-empt their jealousy of man, to avoid their resentment
at not being consulted on so fateful a decision, and to show us — the readers — the fundamental truth that greatness goes hand in hand with humility.
So it was G-d who acted according to the advice Moses gave Joshua: “Make sure that others are with you. Consult. Take their advice.”
On the other hand, Moses acted the way G-d advised Joshua to do. “If necessary, take a stick and beat them over the head.” Is that not figuratively what Moses did at Kadesh, when he
With the Yomim Nora’im here it is appropriate for me to suggest a book that could serve as a year-round resource for teshuva, study and self-improvement.
The headline echoes our holiday liturgy and teachings: ethics and halacha go hand in hand as the expected behavioral modes for the proper observance of our faith. Our relationships with G-d and with other people should govern our day-today lives and actions.
An excess of literature supports these faithbased teachings but I would like to suggest one particular work that will enable you to keep your pledge of teshuva in the new year.
“Jewish Ethics and Halachah For Our Time” (Ktav, 1984_, authored by Rabbi Basil Herring, former rav of the Atlantic Beach Jewish Center, presents an in-depth study of relevant sources and commentaries concerning just about every major ethical issue addressed in our religious teachings and every major ethical problem that we encounter in our daily lives, whether personal or communal or in the headlines.
Organized under four basic categories, these are issues that cannot be ignored by
clergy or layman: Bio-Ethics : Abortion, medical practice, research and selfendangerment, organ transplantation and euthanasia.
Law and Public Policy: Legal counsel and the truth, violence in self-defense and in defense of others, and capital punishment.
Psychosocial Ethics: parents and children, and issues involving sexual misconduct.
Business Ethics: Truth and deception in the marketplace.
Each chapter begins with a basic introduction
of the subject matter followed by several questions that set up the discussions to follow. This, in turn, is followed with a list and texts that draw from the whole gamut of Jewish law sources.
A full discussion section follows, that enhances the practical aspects of the issues being discussed. Extensive notes give the reader the opportunity to perform their own research later. This makes this book an excellent text for both individual and group study.
A work of a different kind that deals with the study of mussar, “Every Day, Holy Day” (Trumpeter Book, 2010), is from Alan Morinis, founder of the Mussar Institute.
This soft-cover book lists 26 ethical topics and is organized for each of the 365 days of the year. Each day has teachings that can be read as a supplement to prayer and learning. Selections are literate and timely and address our spiritual needs in a learned and sophisticated manner. Previously published.
From heart of Jerusalem
Rabbi binnY
FReeDMan
Ihadn’t planned on stopping to watch, but something about him caught my attention. It was Tisha B’Av, the anniversary of the day our Temples were destroyed, the city of Jerusalem ransacked and hundreds of thousands of Jews murdered or sold into slavery, and he was being interviewed on Israeli television.
“How old are you?”
The question hung in the air as the Kapo in concentration camp uniform with the authority over life and death stared down at the frail little boy in front of him. In the camps, it was a question that could get you killed.
“Fifteen,” answered the boy, who could not have been more than eight. There was no room for little Jewish boys in the Nazi world of death camps, and his older brother Naftali had warned little Srulli to lie. The Kapo glanced down at the boy with a skeptical look and asked again: “How old are you?”
And again, little Srulli answered: “Fifteen.”
At which point he asked the fellow behind the
boy: “Is he your son or your brother?”
“My brother,” answered Naftali.
“Well, how old is he?” asked the Kapo again.
“He already told you, he’s fifteen,” answered Naftali, trying to stay calm.
At which point the Kapo looked around and, lowering his voice and motioning towards the syringe in his left hand, said: “Look, this is a typhus vaccine, and it’s based on weight which I figure out according to age. If he’s really eight years old and I give him the vaccine of a fifteen year old, it will kill him. But if he’s really fifteen and I give him the vaccine of a ten year old, he’ll probably get typhus and die, so I ask you again: how old is he?”
Naftali thought for a moment and, in a voice barely above a whisper answered:
“He is seven.”
At which point, the Kapo looked around and squirted half of the injection onto the ground before giving young Yisrael (Srulli) Lau the typhus injection that ultimately saved his life.
And 60 years later, on Israeli National Television, the young child, saved from the Holocaust, who would become famous around the world as Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel, smiled and said: ‘There were many angels that conspired to allow me to sit here today, and that Kapo was one of them.
So what do you do with a story like that?
Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur suggest we are not doomed by the inevitable.
It’s true there are many angels in life and they can often take the most mundane forms, from the simple traffic light that keeps you from being in the wrong place at the wrong time, to the little girl whose temper tantrum sends you to the back of a pizza store saving your life from a suicide bomber. But there are just as many angels who don’t seem to make it.
There are those who will say that we must repent, that the books of life and death, sickness and health, joy and sadness will once again be open, and we must return from our evil ways in order to hope for a good, and even a safe, year. They will tuck their children to sleep at night secure in the knowledge that if we fast on Yom Kippur and give tzedakah, pray every day with our tefillin and learn to be more tolerant towards one another, that we will, please G-d, have a better year.
And yet, do we really think that everyone who fasts and prays with all their heart is guaranteed a good year? And of all the pain and heartache, the love lost and people broken this year, as it all simply because some people didn’t pray hard enough?
Is there a recipe for ensuring there will be peace and no more bloodshed in the new year at last?
These past weeks, as we do every year in the weeks and leading up to Rosh Hashanah, we read the portions of Ki Savo, Nitzavim and Vayeilech, which seem to repeat again and again the idea that the day will come when tremendous calamities will surely befall the Jewish people. Indeed one need not be a scholar to see in Jewish history a pattern of exile and pain that seems to follow us wherever we go.
But then what is the point of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, which seem to suggest that we are not doomed by the inevitable? Judaism believes we can change things, but how?
It seems that this week’s parsha contains a new covenant:
“Atem Nitzavim hayom … le’ovrecha’ bebrit Hashem Elokecha’, asher Hashem Elokecha’ koret imcha hayom.” (You are standing here today … to pass into the covenant of [with] Hashem your G-d
DR. tzvi heRsh weinReb Orthodox Union
All men are mortal. Yankel is a man. Therefore, Yankel is mortal.
You have just read a basic lesson in logic. While all of us are mortal and will someday die, it is also true that we deny our mortality and live our lives as though death was not inevitable.
Our tendency to exclude our deaths from our awareness leads to some peculiar results. For example, in the graduate program which was designed to prepare me for a career as a psychotherapist, death was not part of the curriculum. The entire topic of death and dying was not something discussed in the graduate psychology programs of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
I remember attending a workshop by the then little known Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross which introduced me and other mental health professionals to the issues of death and dying. Her book, “On Death and Dying,” became the first in a flood of similar works designed to train professionals to be aware of the psychology of the dying person, and of the ways in which people coped with the death of
loved ones. That book continues to occupy a place of prominence on my personal bookshelf.
The Jewish tradition encourages us to contemplate our ultimate end. Especially at this time of year, so soon before the days of awe and judgment, death preoccupies our consciousness. Those of us who are familiar with the Rosh Hashanah liturgy can already hear the cantor chant, “who will live and who will die?”
This week we read two Torah portions, Nitzavim and Vayeilech, the first of which contains the last public address which Moses made before his death, and the second of which tells us so much about his inner feelings as he prepared to die.
In Nitzavim Moses stands before all of Israel — judges and chieftains and the lowly wood choppers and water fetchers — and delivers a powerful inspirational message.
Then, Vayeilech opens with the phrase “and Moses went and spoke.” The commentaries tell us that Moses left the podium from which he addressed the public, and went down to the people, visiting each of them individually. He did this in order to take leave of each person, and to assure him that his death did not mean that the people’s mission would fail.
He told them that he, like every other mortal, was about to die and that he could no longer “go
out and come in.” He was exquisitely conscious of his waning powers and wanted to use his final moments to say his goodbyes to his people face to face.
Rashi tells us that by saying “I can no longer go out and come in” he was indicating that “the traditions and wellsprings of wisdom” were no longer available to him. He sensed that he no longer had access to his inner sources of inspiration and creativity. What a lucid glimpse into the emotional experience of our great shepherd, in his last hours on earth!
As you may know, Rashi is so great a biblical commentator that there are commentaries written upon his commentary. These are known as “supercommentaries”, and one of them, Sifsei Chachamim, offers us an even more profound insight into Moses’s psyche. This author suggests that as Moses realized that his wisdom was failing him, he was better able to accept his impending death, for a life without wisdom would not be worth living.
Toward the end of this week’s Torah reading, indeed just at the point where maftir begins (Deuteronomy 31:28), we find Moses asking that all the elders be again assembled for him to address them.
Here Rashi wonders why Moses did not simply called for the trumpets to be sounded, signaling that assembly was in order. After all, throughout the sojourn in the wilderness Moses would gather
the people to him by sounding the ”chatzotrot,” the trumpets. Rashi suggests that at this moment, just before his death, Moses no longer had the symbols of power and authority available to him. He quotes Kohelet (Ecclesiastes 8:8), “there is no authority in the day of death.”
One of the lessons I learned from Dr. KublerRoss so very long ago is the importance of the helper, be he or she a family member or a professional, to help the patient reach this stage of acceptance of impending death. To help teach us about this stage of acceptance, she quoted the following poem by the Indian poet Tagore:
I have got my leave. Bid me farewell, my brothers! I bow to you all and take my departure.
Here I give back the keys of my door---and I give up all claims to my house. I only ask for last kind words from you.
We were neighbours for long, but I received more than I could give. Now the day has dawned and the lamp that lit my dark corner is out. A summons has come and I am ready for my journey.
Studying Parshas Vayeilech gives us a unique opportunity to learn about what a man’s life is like in his last moments, as he prepares for his death. True, that man is Moses, and we cannot all aspire to his example. But there is nevertheless much to learn from this greatest of men, not only about how to live, but about how to die.
Parsha of the week
Rabbi avi billet Jewish Star columnist
In our efforts to get closer to G-d in the days leading up to Rosh Hashana, every person employs a different strategy.
Some learn the laws of Rosh Hashana, some give more charity, some pray more fervently or sincerely, people are a little nicer to one another, we hear the Shofar on a daily basis, Sefardim pray Selichot for a month.
We give High Holiday greetings — K’tivah Va’Chatimah Tovah (May you be Inscribed and Sealed for a Good Year) — send Rosh Hashana cards, and try to make a good showing as the clock ticks towards the moment of truth.
Is there a unique instruction that can help us maintain our focus?
Sometimes a Hassidic thought nails the idea perfectly.
The last verse in our double parsha, Nitzavim and Vayeilech, brings Moshe’s efforts of chapter 29–31 to a close when it declares, “And Moshe spoke the words of this song into the ears of the congregation of Israel, until it was completed.”
The term “until it was completed” is the most likely translation of the two Hebrew words, ad tumam, referring to the completion of the song Moshe was telling over. The dangling modifier allows for the possibility that ad tumam refers to the Israelites, that Moshe spoke to them, until they were finished or completed.
It was Rabbi Simcha Bunem of Pshischa who went in this direction — not suggesting the people were finished but that they achieved the
meaning of the root word tumam
Essentially, he suggests that Moshe repeated the song over and over and over again until the people achieved becoming tamim (complete or perfect).
This is the lesson we must carry for ourselves at this time of year.
What will it take for the message of godliness to penetrate our minds and hearts? How will we be able to answer for ourselves that we put in our greatest effort?
If we can read through the Rosh Hashana prayers in advance, to familiarize ourselves with them, and to have their impact be felt in our hearts, we may be moved to become more wholesome human beings. If we can hear a message of shuva (return to G-d) over and over, it might be effective.
According to R’ Simcha Bunem, Moshe did not give up with the Jewish people. He plugged
away with them, because of his concern for the direction they’d choose after his demise. He never felt they were ready for him to leave them.
But here, in this final verse of our parsha, Moshe achieved his goal:
Moses then proclaimed the words of this song to the entire assembly of Israel until they became complete and perfect.
His efforts to help the people change their essence and their totality proved successful.
Because reviewing the points they needed to hear, helped the right ideas penetrate so they could become the complete nation he could feel comfortable leaving with his successor.
May we be so lucky to find the message that speaks to us and dedicate ourselves to listen to it over and over, so we may be able to perfect and complete ourselves in our continued effort of improving ourselves in the service of G-d and in our fellowship with Mankind.
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It was the covert operation that inspired countless Internet memes. The simultaneous explosion of thousands of pagers in the possession of Hezbollah operatives followed a day later by a similar mass explosion of terrorist walkie-talkies was the top story across the world.
The strikes on Hezbollah leadership that occurred a few days later might have been just as important in seeking to cripple the terrorists’ ability to continue its ongoing missile strikes on northern Israel and possible threats of a possible land attack on the Jewish state. Nevertheless, the attack on members of the organization (and its associated sponsors and string-pullers, like the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon who reportedly also had a Hezbollah beeper and lost an eye when it blew up) carrying around those relics of 1980s technology triggered both the imagination and the indignation of international opinion.
We can’t know for sure just how much damage Israel has done to Hezbollah’s morale, let alone its capabilities to inflict terror and pain on Israelis as well as Lebanese citizens. There may be some truth to what the doomsayers among New York Times analysts and Israeli left-wingers who claimed that any harm would be superficial and transitory.
More important was the angry reaction inspired among many Western liberals who denounced the attacks because they don’t believe in Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorists and because they no longer believe that any Western nation has the right to fight even the most just wars.
Not an ‘escalation’
The claim that this was an Israeli “escalation” is entirely untrue since it is Hezbollah that initiated the current round of strife. No matter how many terrorists were killed, maimed or wounded in the strikes, the Iranian proxy shows no sign of
Israel’s deterrent power rests on the belief of its enemies that it is a mighty power that can’t be beaten.
halting its firing on not just northern Israel but now other areas since the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas in the south. Hezbollah’s rockets have essentially depopulated Israeli communities along the country’s northern border, turning tens of thousands of its citizens into evacuees holing up in hotels in the center of the country alongside those who were similarly affected by the assault on southern Israel.
No spy caper — no matter how ingenious or expertly targeted to harm as few innocents as possible — means much if it doesn’t contribute to Israel’s strategic goal: pushing Hezbollah forces away from its border and ensuring safety to the north. It may be, as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has recently hinted, that this objective may only be achieved by a cross-border offensive involving the use of land forces.
But there is no avoiding the fact that the enormous attention devoted to what analyst Michael Doran satirically called “Operation Grim Beeper” told us not only about the role that Jews and Israel still play in the Western imagination but also about what a great many people in the West now think about armed conflict.
One side of this reaction is not entirely bad. As much as the still-powerful myth about Jewish power is at the heart of antisemitism, the belief in what might be termed the “magical Jew” who is smarter and more resourceful than other people sometimes works to benefit Jews.
Britain’s 1917 decision to issue the Balfour Declaration in favor of the creation of a Jewish National Home, which gave Zionism a crucial boost at a critical time, is often ascribed to the philo-Semitsm as well as the belief of several British statesmen, including Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s in the authority of the Bible, which has a thing or two to say about to whom the land of Israel belongs.
More important was their misplaced belief in the unchecked power of the Jews (whom they were persuaded would be won over to the Allied cause by the declaration) to ensure that the United States stayed close to British objectives and to keep Russia an active participant in World War I, something that was far beyond the capabilities of either Jewish community.
Yet the heart of the deterrent power of Israel’s defense and intelligence forces is the fact that many of the Jewish state’s enemies see it as a mighty power that can’t be beaten.
This reputation has been honestly earned by Israel’s many military victories and intelligence coups over the decades. The latter, in which technology masterminds working inside Israel’s Mossad has dispatched with ingenious methods a long list of those working to harm Jews — Arab
terrorists, German scientists working in Arab countries to produce weapons of mass destruction, those involved in the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre, and, in recent years, Iranians working on building the Islamist regime’s nuclear program — are already well-documented.
This sense of their own invincibility has sometimes also worked against Israelis. The tragic errors made by its intelligence establishment before Oct. 7 showed the price of such hubris. The same geniuses that helped pull off the exploding beepers this week were members of the organization that failed so badly to prevent the largest mass slaughter of Jews since World War II and the Holocaust.
The exploding pagers and walkie-talkies (employed only because Hezbollah was already convinced that modern means of communication involving cell phones and the Internet were inevitably going to be compromised by the Israelis) will join that list. But as with every Israeli achievement, including the innumerable technological and medical innovations produced by that tiny country’s scientists, tech specialists and engineers that have inspired great praise (and made Jews everywhere proud of what their people have done), it will also inspire more harmful conspiracy theories that contribute to hatred for Jews.
This proves again that although times and circumstances changed, the Jews remain the primary boogeymen of Western thought.
Along with those more traditional tropes of
antisemitism, the reactions to what we all must presume was an Israeli operation, the moral disdain it aroused among some needs to be understood and put in context.
The attack provoked condemnation from among supposedly high-minded people who labeled the scheme a “terrorist” attack or claimed that it violated international law — as did Human Rights Watch, a group that has time and again been exposed for its bias against Israel and antisemitism.
As predictably negative articles published by NPR and The Intercept noted, so-called experts from the United Nations agreed. Other entities irredeemably committed to undermining Israel’s right to exist and defend itself decried that the exploding devices were evidence of a massive “war crime.”
Even more insufferable was the moral opprobrium directed at the many Israelis and people everywhere, Jew and non-Jew alike, who found humor in the misfortune of the terrorists, as was made clear in a tsunami of jokes and memes about their stupidity as well as the grievous injuries suffered by many of them.
Let’s specify that many of these jibes were not in the best of taste. Maybe all of them were tasteless. The notion that we should in some ways recognize the common humanity we share with
Outrage dissipates with time. Left unattended, the aggrieved become inured. Allow wrongdoers to go unpunished and forgiveness is presumed. The once extraordinary becomes, improbably, quite ordinary. The moral universe demands justice, but not a world of moral ambiguity.
We just passed the 23-year anniversary of 9/11. While there was some gridlock in lower Manhattan to mark the reading of names of the 3,000 people pulverized by the evil of Islamic extremism, the collapse of the Twin Towers has, for far too many, become a distant memory that evokes little reaction.
We are coming upon another landmark date imbued with anti-American animus — the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel. So recent is this atrocity that no reminder is necessary — at least not yet. It’s too soon to forget that 1,200 were murdered, many in unspeakable ways, and hundreds taken hostage.
The perpetrators of this crime were Islamists, too. No other people on the planet has such affinity for beheadings and torching their victims alive.
Why do I refer to 10/7 as an “anti-Ameri-
Islamists burn the US in effigy and celebrate our defeats — because they have nothing to fear.
can” attack? It took place in Israel, after all, and Jews were its primary victims.
Yes, but 43 Americans were killed on that day, and of the 11 Americans taken hostage, one, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was found murdered just two weeks ago. Several still remain captive in Gaza: Omer Neutra, a 23-year-old from Long Island, 64-year-old Keith Samuel Seigel from North Carolina, and 20-year-old Edan Alexander from New Jersey.
Meanwhile, at pro-Hamas encampments and violent demonstrations around the United States, including at the nation’s capital, the American flag has been set aflame and the words “Death to America!” widely chanted.
What is the US doing about it? Is anyone doing anything to induce Islamists to reverse course or face the consequences?
Actually, antisemitism, and its anti-American offshoots, has only gotten worse since 10/7. Pandora was no Jew, but she did have the Midas touch when it came to unleashing a newly lethal strain of antisemitism that comes with a buyer’s warranty: Go ahead. Kill Jews. No one will stop you, especially if you’re an Islamic terrorist.
World leaders have actually shown themselves to be decent recruiters for Islamic extremism. Great Britain has suspended some arms export licenses to Israel while at the same time renewing its aid to UNRWA — yes, the same refugee agency that we have since come to learn actively participated in killing Jews on Oct. 7, and maintained a presence directly above those tunnels.
Unlike the United States, Europeans have expansive hate speech laws, but they don’t seem to apply to the open hostility toward European Jews on the streets of major capitals.
Does the United States have any commemorative plans for Oct. 7? I hear that the good Muslims of Dearborn, Michigan have been baking a cake for weeks.
See Rosenbaum on page 22
Jewish students from the City University of New York recently attending a Hillel welcome-back dinner were surrounded by masked, screaming protesters who banged on windows and chanted, “Terrorist! Terrorist! Terrorist! All Zionists are racist! Dogs off campus!”
The protesters shoved pictures of dead babies in students’ faces and assaulted a Hillel staffer.
Campuses are already paying the price of last school year’s weak-kneed, appeasing administration responses, as violence and threats by radicals rachet up again.
Last school year, Jewish students were physically attacked and their civil rights blatantly denied by protesters. Universities were trespassed and vandalized, and their rules enforcing respectful behavior and academic freedom were trampled.
Sadly, it took both Jewish students and college administrators nearly the entire school year to understand — and respond to — the full impact of the calamity.
But the dust has not settled. Virtually no criminal protesters nor negligent universities have been punished. And organizers of last year’s insurrection are making their intentions clear: They’re back with a vengeance.
It’s time for those who care about Israel, Jewish students and the hallowed values of higher education in America to assess the battleground. What have we learned about the motivations, ideologies and strategies of the protesters? What do we know about who is funding them? What do we understand about forcing university leaders to protect academic freedom and student safety? What do we know about the legal recourse open
to those whose rights are violated on campus?
Finally, how can we, who are invested in these issues and their fair outcomes, ensure that justice is done — that we defeat student terrorism?
Supporters of Israel, Jewish students and academic freedom now understand that our campus enemies are neo-Marxist revolutionaries.
A few weeks ago, the Student Intifada coalition of anti-Israel pro-Palestinian groups promised “the total eradication of Western civilization.” They tell us they are fighting “US colonialist and imperialist institutions.” The neo-Marxists also say the world consists of two kinds of people — oppressors and oppressed. Jews and most Americans are considered oppressors. Adding a racist note, the pro-Palestinian thugs simplistically claim that the oppressed are people of color, while their oppressors are white. Israel is
thus (somehow) a white, colonial state — ignoring the fact that Jews originated as indigenous people of color in the Middle East, and most Israelis are people of color.
Pro-Hamas demonstrators are well-funded by establishment organizations. According to an analysis by Politico, donors include a who’s who of Democratic Party supporters: Soros, Rockefeller and Pritzker.
Pro-Hamas protesters also receive funding from abroad. The top donor? Qatar has donated more than $3 billion to about 28 universities across the United States since 2012. Qatar gives refuge to Hamas leaders and is a major financier of the terrorist group. Qatar’s funds are used to promote Marxist and postmodern thought, as well as anti-Israeli events, such as Israeli Apartheid Week.
Some efforts have forced meaningful reforms on campus, while others have not. For example, some donors have withheld their donations from colleges in the hopes of forcing them to fight Jew hatred. In one case, Robert Kraft, CEO of the New England Patriots, pulled his donations to Columbia University.
Unfortunately, little evidence proves that such withdrawals of individual financial support influence major universities.
Lawsuits and civil rights complaints have proven more effective. Following a lawsuit against New York University, where pro-Hamas protesters chanted, “Gas the Jews,” the university updated its Non-Discrimination and Harassment Policy to include language that identified “Zionist” as a term that can conceal the antisemitic intent of speech and other conduct that denigrates and excludes Jews.
In another settlement, North Carolina State University agreed to update its anti-discrimination policies to recognize anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism and include antisemitism in its programming on racial and ethnic hatred. Some lawmakers have also taken action to protect Jewish students and college campuses from student terrorists. North Carolina recently passed a law requiring all state institutions to abide by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which includes anti-Zionism. Ohio passed the CAMPUS Act, which requires public and private universities to adopt and enforce policies regarding racial, religious, and ethnic harassment.
At the federal level, the Restoring Civility on Campus Act was recently introduced in the Senate. It is intended to provide more transparency for federal civil rights investigations into reports of discrimination based on shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics, which includes antisemitism and Islamophobia. This legislation also increases fines that can be levied on colleges
They say you can’t kill an idea. Who are they? Quite a few people mouth this bromide but let’s focus for a moment on Josep Borrell, the European Union’s top diplomat.
A 77-year-old Spanish socialist, he has several times asserted that “Hamas represents an idea, and one cannot kill an idea with bombs.”
He doesn’t spell out the idea, but I will. It’s killing Jews. Exactly what you saw on Oct. 7, 2023.
This is by no means a new idea.
Killing Jews is what the Roman emperor Hadrian did in Judea in the 2nd century to suppress one of history’s earliest anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist rebellions.
The Nazis had a similar idea, based not on the refusal of Jews to submit, but because the Nazis saw Jews as racially inferior — vermin to be exterminated.
The Nazi idea was assisted by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who had moved to Berlin from Palestine, a territory that had been ruled by foreign empires since Roman times. His mission, while a guest of the Reich, was to recruit European Muslims to the Nazi idea and broadcast the Nazi idea into the Middle East.
Antisemitism — the word was popularized by Wilhelm Marr, a 19th-century German agitator who wanted a more scientific term for Jew-hatred — has always
been a mutating virus.
So, when contemporary antisemites claim it’s not Jews they hate, “only” Israelis or Zionists, reach for a grain of salt.
The Houthi rebels of Yemen, a proxy of Iran’s rulers, do not bother to equivocate. The slogan on their flag: “God Is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.”
Another of Borrell’s bons mots: “There is no military solution.”
He fails to note that both Hezbollah and Hamas vehemently disagree with this assessment.
Hezbollah official Nawaf Moussawi recently boasted: “We are lovers of war. After all, fighting is what we do.”
The Hamas Charter (Article 13) asserts: “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad.”
Also, in the Charter (Article 7): “The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them.”
Their invasion of Israel and the small-scale holocaust they carried out against concertgoers and farmers a year ago next month was intended, among other things, to undermine the idea of peaceful coexistence between Israelis and their Arab neighbors as expressed in the Abraham Accords and the Oslo Accords.
On university campuses, angry mobs of Islamist agitators, activists with tenured professorships and their student followers now wave Hamas flags and harass Jews.
Their goal is to kill the Zionist idea. Which is what exactly?
Prior to 1948, Zionism was the belief that Jews had the right and should have the opportunity to exercise self-determination in part of their ancient homeland.
There were reasonable arguments against this idea — not least that it would prove too arduous. For one thing, most of what was to become Israel was either desert or malarial swamp.
Following the re-establishment of the Jewish state — and a failed war launched immediately thereafter by the Arab countries surrounding Israel — Zionism took on a different meaning.
If you agree that Israel — the only democratic society in the Middle East, the only nation-state in the region where Jews, Muslims, Druze, Christians and other ethnic and religious groups enjoy a broad spectrum of rights and freedoms — has a right to
continue to exist then, congratulations, you are a Zionist.
If, on the other hand, you demand the eradication of Israel “from the river to the sea,” if you support mass-murdering Jews or are indifferent regarding that eventually, then you may consider yourself an anti-Zionist.
Borrell has expanded upon his assertion that you “don’t kill an idea” by adding that “you have to provide an alternative that’s better.” His better idea is (did you guess?) a “two-state solution.”
As he must know, Hamas forcefully rejects such a compromise based on its theological conviction that any territory ever conquered by Muslims — as the land the Romans re-named Palestine was by the imperialist/colonialist army that marched from Arabia in the 7th century — is a waqf, an endowment from Allah to the Muslims for eternity.
Imight also note that a proto-two-state solution was what existed after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Two years later Hamas violently ousted the Palestinian Authority and seized power, tolerating no competitors or dissenters. Huge amounts of aid poured in from “the international donor community.” The United Nations provided social services such as health care and education, which soon included antiIsraeli and anti-Jewish indoctrination.
Hamas spent its energies building a mammoth and elaborate subterranean fortress to be used for the “military solution” it was planning. Hamas leaders have sheltered in it, surrounded by hostages abducted from Israel.
Above the tunnels, Gazan civilians have served as human shields. Hamas leaders knew from the start that Israelis would be blamed by UN officials, faux “human rights organizations,” much of the media, and others for those human shields who were killed.
Keener minds than Borrell’s have pondered terrible ideas and what to do about them. In World War II, Churchill sought to if not kill, at least cripple Nazi ideas. He understood that required defeating Nazis on the battlefield.
Of course, there are still Nazis, neoNazis and Nazi apologists in Europe and America.
One of their fundamental ideas, a Europe “cleansed” of Jews, has morphed into the idea behind the Tehran-led multifront war being waged against Israel — a Middle East “cleansed” of Jews.
Borrell is neither a Nazi nor a jihadist. But he and many others are helping keep a genocidal idea alive.
Additional information about the mobile unit and its schedule are posted on the hospital’s Facebook page @MountSinaiSouthNassau
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Continued from page 16
hit the people with his words and the rock with his staff (Num. 20:1-12), for which he was condemned by G-d not to enter the Promised Land?
So we seem to have G-d saying words we associate with Moses’ type of leadership — firm, strong, decisive — and Moses advocating the kind of leadership — consensual, consultative — that Rashi associates with G-d. Surely it should have been the other way around.
However, perhaps Rashi is telling us something profound. At the end of his life, Moses recognized one great failure of his leadership. He had taken the Israelites out of Egypt, but he had not taken Egypt out of the Israelites. He had changed his people’s fate, but he hadn’t changed their character.
He now realized that for this to happen there would have to be a different kind of leadership, one that handed back responsibility to the people as a whole, and to the elders in particular.
So long as there is a Moses performing miracles, the people do not have to accept responsibility for themselves. In order for them to grow, Joshua would have to engage in participative leadership, encouraging diverse views and listening to them, even if that meant going more slowly.
That is transformative leadership and it requires the leader to engage in what the kabbalists called tsimtsum, self-effacement.
Or as Rashi puts it: “Make sure that the elders of the generation are with you. Always act according to their opinion and advice” (Rashi to Deuteronomy 31:7).
As for G-d, He was not changing His mind. He was not suggesting that Joshua should become, in general, an authoritarian leader. He was suggesting that Joshua needed to do this just once.
Listen carefully to the verse:
For you will bring the Israelites into the land. (Deut. 31:23)
Recall that there was one occasion that condemned an entire generation to die in the wilderness — the episode of the spies, in which the people lacked the faith and courage to enter and take possession of the land.
It was then that two men — Joshua and Caleb — stood firm, insisting against the other 10 spies, that they could conquer the land and defeat their enemies. G-d was saying to Joshua that there will be one future trial in which you must stand firm, even against the majority, and that will come when you are about to cross the Jordan. That is when the people are in danger of giving way to fear.
That is when your leadership will consist, not in consultation and consensus, but in allowing no dissent. That is when “it will all depend on you . … There is only one leader for a generation, not two.” Sometimes even the most consensual leaders must lead from the front and bring the people with them.
There is a time to discuss and a time to act, a time to seek agreement and a time to move ahead without waiting for agreement. That is what both G-d and Moses were telling Joshua in their different ways.
A leader must have the courage to lead, the patience to consult, and the wisdom to know when the time is right for each.
… which Hashem your G-d seals with you today.” (29: 11)
A careful look at these portions actually makes clear what this new and final covenant is all about: this is the covenant of teshuvah.
The day will come, says the Torah, when all the blessings and curses have come to pass when “Ve’shavta’ ad Hashem Elokecha’ (when we will return)” (see Devarim 30:1-6). We will return from all the far-flung places where we have wandered and from all the lost paths to which we have strayed.
Many translate teshuvah as repentance, but that is not really accurate. Repentance in the dictionary means regret or feeling sorry, but regret alone is simply about guilt, and that is not what Judaism wants, despite all the jokes to the contrary.
This does not mean to say regret is necessarily a bad thing, because regret is the first stage towards teshuva and involves recognizing the fact that there is something wrong I would like to fix. But while regret on its own suggests that we cannot undo the past, Judaism believes we can hope to change the future.
Teshuvah, from the word shuv (return), is an attempt to go back to who I could have been before all the mistakes I made. Teshuvah is about creating a whole new reality, by tracing history back to the precise point where the present reality we struggle with began to go astray.
Every year on Rosh Hashana as we begin a new year, we have the capacity yet again, to redefine who we are and who we choose to be.
members of Hezbollah or that we are obligated by our own faiths to grieve with our enemies, even as we resist them, is well grounded in Jewish as well as Christian traditions.
After all, one of the highlights of a Passover seder is the ritual of removing drops of wine from our cups at the mention of each of the plagues sent by G-d to punish the Egyptians for their enslavement of the Jews. Moses’ own sister, Miriam, was punished for celebrating the deaths of the Egyptians who drowned when the Red Sea reconstituted itself after letting the escaped slaves pass.
But dipping our fingers in a wine cup is easy enough when trying to atavistically recall an event that happened more than 3,000 years ago. Israelis have been living with the trauma of Oct. 7 for the past year and decades of terrorism before that. Jews elsewhere are facing a surge in antisemitism the likes of which have not been experienced in the living memory of most people.
We are all only human and are entitled to take some satisfaction when those dedicated to murdering Israelis, Americans and other Diaspora Jewish communities encounter some misfortune.
This is not dissimilar to reactions to the deaths of Nazis in the past, even though as many as a million or more German civilians were killed in both Allied bombings and the invasions of Germany needed to overthrow Adolf Hitler’s regime. When human beings engage in mass murder, as members of Hezbollah have repeatedly done, they forfeit the right to sympathy when reaping the whirlwind they have sown. Anyone who disagrees with that has lost their moral compass.
Although the deaths of any innocent civilian is a tragedy, there is no other example that I am aware of such a mass-targeted killing of terrorists that was so clearly crafted to avoid such casualties.
In the past year, Israel has often been falsely accused of making no effort to spare civilians, even though they do more than any nation in that respect. But when it does something that is so transparently directed only at terrorists — who else would have a Hezbollah pager? — it is still attacked with the same unfairness charge. As in so many other ways, this proves again that Israel is assaulted verbally, legally and physically not so much for what it does but for what it is.
At the root of this the same belief in Israel’s illegitimacy as a “settler/colonialist” and “apartheid” state that motivates the mobs who have marched in the streets of American cities and on college campuses in support of Hamas’s efforts to purge Jews “from the river to the sea.”
To such people, there is nothing that Israelis could do to defend itself under any circumstance that would be justified. And, as they have also shown, there is nothing that those who wish to eradicate Israeli — even the genocidal Islamists of Hamas who perpetrated an orgy of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction on Oct. 7 — can do that can’t be characterized as an act of justified “resistance” against “settlers” and “white” oppressors.
Just as important as that is the way the attack on Israel’s efforts to stop Hezbollah tells us about the way many in the West have lost any belief that there is such a thing as a just war.
The immediate reaction to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, reminded the overwhelming majority of Americans that there were times when you had to fight to defend yourself and your country. That was a matter of consensus among the generation that fought in World War II but had gone out of fashion in the Vietnam War era. Amid the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan that followed 9/11, it is once again being attacked by the left.
That sense that there is nothing worth fighting or dying for has been compounded by the success of the left’s long march through our institutions in recent years as a generation of American students were indoctrinated in the toxic neo-Marxist myths about critical race theory and intersectionality. This is not just a war against America and its history but against Western civilization itself. By this means, many Americans have been intellectually disarmed against threats to their values and their nation. Along with it comes a belief that “white” Westerners are, like Israelis, inherently illegitimate and should not resist those who label themselves (as does Hezbollah) as members of a class of victims who seek to do them harm and topple their civilization.
In the aftermath of Vietnam, Michael Walzer, a liberal intellectual who had protested America’s involvement in that conflict, sought to map out a way to think about war that would be free both of mindless pacifism and to chauvinism and war fever.
His 1977 book, “Just and Unjust Wars,” is a classic that has withstood the test of time and bears revisiting. It teaches that while unnecessary and aggressive wars are unjust, those waged to defend against murderous regimes and those who seek to victimize the powerless are just. Most of all, a war waged to defend a nation’s existence is fully defensible and should be supported by anyone with a set of moral values. [Editor’s note: Walzer has endorsed Israel’s military actions since Oct. 7, but improbably objected to aspects of Israel’s beeper attack.]
But many contemporary Western liberals have either forgotten that or have embraced antiWestern and Marxist ideology that would render even the most obviously moral wars, such as those waged against Hitler’s regime and the perpetrators of Oct. 7, as somehow immoral.
In this way, they are prepared to condemn Israel’s exploding beepers that are clearly aimed at killing only terrorists as much as they do anything to prevent Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen and their Iranian paymasters from continuing to inflict suffering on Israel and the West. In their worldview, the terrorists should be protected from attack, and their Israeli and Western victims deserve none.
The issue this week isn’t so much whether it’s OK to laugh at the predicament of terrorists who have had the tables turned on them. It’s whether it’s ever right for Israelis or any citizen of a Western country to defend themselves against murderers with blood on their hands, and who wish to create more mayhem and death.
Ethical people understand that there is only one answer to that question. The anger directed at Israel is because they have once again shown that they are prepared to try to make the killers pay for their crimes.
stead, they all became avatars of the First Amendment.
Pro-Hamas sentiment has already returned to the campus green. We can look forward to another year where antisemitic academics convince their brainless charges that hating Jews is the only subject that doesn’t get graded on a curve. And where supporting murderous Palestinians is deemed far more important than reading Proust.
This past week, Jewish students from Manhattan’s City College found themselves barricaded into a Jewish deli on Broadway with an angry mob taunting them to come out. A Muslim from Toronto with Islamic State ties was apprehended before fulfilling his mission: a mass shooting at a Brooklyn Jewish center.
New York City was once derisively referred to as “Hymietown.” Today, it is more visibly a Hamas bastion where, the day after six hostages were found murdered in one of those Gaza tunnels, giddy, pro-Hamas celebrants marched through Manhattan pounding on drums.
Speaking of those hostages, especially the Americans: How is it possible that we have allowed nearly a year to pass without demanding their release, or rescuing them ourselves? The United States should have reclaimed Goldberg-Polin long before his murder. Isn’t that the very least to be expected of a superpower?
A citizen of ancient Rome knew that no matter where he or she traveled, no harm could ever befall them. No faraway land would dare. All they had to do was deliver the following warning: “Cīvis Rōmānus sum.” (“I am a Roman citizen.”)
Those simple words would bring foreign despots and lawless pirates to their knees. Roman wrath was so mighty, its demonstrated capacity for lethal retaliation so fierce, the citizen would be instantly placed on a chariot, along with a fruit basket for the emperor, and returned safely to Rome.
After World War II, and the end of the Cold War, wasn’t the United States declared the world’s most powerful nation? Obviously, not in the same way as the Roman Empire. In 1979, American hostages were taken in Iran. Al-Qaeda delivered a mortal blow on 9/11. Dead and captive Americans resulted from 10/7.
Clearly, Islamists burn the United States in effigy, and celebrate our defeats, because they have nothing to fear.
Our American hostages, tormented in the tunnels of Gaza, must have lamented that it would do no good to proclaim: “Civis Americanus Sum!”
No surprise that the morons at the University of Maryland granted permission, since retracted, to celebrate Oct. 7 as that glorious day when Hamas successfully outwitted the Israelis and barbarically murdered 1,200 people.
Why not just turn 10/7 into a nationwide Homecoming? After all, the violence that took place on college campuses last year — the harassment of Jewish students, the death chants against Israel and America and the seizure of university buildings — resulted in no one forfeiting a diploma, or facing suspension or criminal charges. In-
for failing to disclose a crime motivated by antisemitism on their annual security reports. Unfortunately, this act has yet to pass.
Here are four lessons learned to fight back against student terrorism on campus:
1. Neo-Marxist ideology is the main motivator for the pro-Hamas protesters. Rooting out curricula and faculty that foster this revolutionary ideology, such as critical race theory and violent “resistance” — including genocide — should be a top priority. Abolishing faculty tenure would also allow a housecleaning of revolutionaries ensconced in academic positions.
2. Funding that promotes the teaching of antisemitism and anti-Americanism needs to be curtailed, particularly that which comes from terrorist-supporting countries like Qatar.
3. State and federal levels of government need to enact legislation that ensures Jewish students are equally protected from hate-fueled discrimination on campus. Colleges should be required to include antisemitism and anti-Zionism as part of their anti-discrimination policies. Violators should be subject to severe financial penalties.
4. We should encourage aggressive legal action against post-secondary institutions that fail to protect Jewish students, as this has proven effective in changing these institutions’ policies. We are fighting determined anti-Israel and anti-American enemies on campus. Those who commit illegal acts or break school policies deserve harsh punishment. Finally, we must ensure that Jewish students — and all other students — experience a safe learning environment, no matter their political leanings.
