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Vayakhel • March 1, 2019 • 24 Adar 1, 5779 • Expanded Torah section pages 18–20 • Luach page 18 • Vol 18, No 8
ZOA and NCYI are OK with Bibi-Otzma deal; AIPAC and libs say no Combined Sources The National Council of Young Israel and the Zionist Organization of America are defending Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to work with Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), a right-wing party led by disciples of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose Kach party was banned from the Knesset for its purported racist advocacy. A wide range of centrist and liberal American Jewish groups slammed the merger. Most prominent among them was AIPAC, which rarely criticizes Israel on internal politics, and Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, who called the deal that brought about the merger of Otzma Yehudit and Habayit Hayehudi “very disturbing.” “[Netanyahu] obviously has some political calculation that drove him to it, but politics can’t dictate everything,” Hoenlein told the Associated Press. “You have to take into consideration all of the ramifications and all of the concerns.” To form a government, Netanyahu would need the support of successful right-wing parties in addition to his own Likud. To win seats in the Knesset and create a governing coalition, each party must pass an electoral threshold,
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Otzma for good or evil: Two views on page 14
Rabbi Meir Kahane at a New York news conference in 1984.
currently set at 3.25 percent. Small parties that do not receive at least that many votes won’t win any Knesset seats and their votes will be lost, thus parties that fear falling short of 3.25 percent seek to consolidate with — and pool their votes with those of — another party. With the prime minister’s intervention, the right-wing Jewish Home party agreed to include on its slate for the April 9 elections Otzma Yehudit members Michael Ben-Ari and Itamar Ben-Gvir, self-professed followers of Kahane. “Netanyahu acted to get right-wing
parties to merge in order to meet the threshold necessary to secure a victory in the election,” NCYI President Farley Weiss told JTA. “He did it to have ministers of the national religious and national union parties in his coalition.” NCYI likened Netanyahu’s action to the 1993 vote on the Oslo II accords, when a left-wing government relied on votes from Arab-Israeli political parties to secure passage of that agreement. That argument echoes one made over the weekend by Netanyahu on Twitter — where he called negative reaction to the merger “the height of absurdity.” “What hypocrisy and double standards by the left,” he wrote on Facebook. “They are condemning a rightwing majority bloc with right-wing parties, while the left acted to bring extreme Islamists into the Knesset to create a majority bloc.” Netanyahu listed numerous instances in which Israeli left-wing leaders, including Ehud Barak, Shelly Yachimovich, and the Labor and Meretz parties, partnered with or supported anti-Israel Arab candidates and parties. “I don’t recall @AIPAC and the @AJC expressing misgivings when leftist IsSee Otzma on page 14
‘Giveback Sunday’ in West Hemp Patients at Northwell Health’s North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset will have everything they need to make their own seders, thanks to the children of the Young Israel of West Hempstead. More than 75 of them, along with their moms and dads, participated in the YIWH’s annual #Giveback Sunday event. Each patient who gets a #Giveback box will find a brightly decorated Kiddush cup; a seder plate made from the lid of the box; a washing cup with sharpied decorations; a cloth matzah cover decorated with bright fabric markers; a friendly looking frog origami bookmark, and, of course, a Haggadah. Standing from left: Rabbi Josh Goller, assistant rabbi at YIWH; Rabbi Hillel Fox, Northshore University Hospital chaplain; and Orit Lax, Adina Frankel, Jen Toplan, Ayelet Mottahedeh, Judy Feldman, Shulamit Hurwitz and Anat Schick. Sitting: Kari Levine and Ann Koffsky.
Some moon talk as Adar 2 nears By Alina D. Sharon As February turns to March on the Gregorian calendar, the Hebrew month of Adar Aleph becomes Adar Bet on March 3. The second Adar, comes seven times every 19 years on the Hebrew calendar. Traditional lore attributes the standardization of the Hebrew calendar — in which the months follow the course of moon, but are aligned with the seasons — to Hillel II, leader of the Sanhedrin in the 4th century. Experts believe the evolution of the calendar was much more gradual. “The Bible contains some basic references to solar and lunar elements, but it does not lay out clear rules. Over time, these emerged, and by the rabbinic period the calendar looked very similar to the one we use today, although there were sectarian groups who did not accept it and had their own traditions of calendar rules,” Elisheva Carlebach, professor of Jewish history, culture and society at Columbia University, told JNS. Sasha Stern, head of the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London, told JNS that “a lot of people use the word ‘lunisolar’ to indicate that the calendar is
regulated by the moon (which defines the beginning of the month) as well as by the sun (which demands the addition of 13th lunar month every two or three years).” But a core aspect of the original establishment of a Hebrew calendar was the need to determine the timing of religious holidays. “In the Jewish calendar, the addition of a 13th month is required for keeping up with the seasons (e.g. spring for Passover), not with the sun,” he said. In meteorology, the schedule of the seasons does not quite correspond with the movement of the sun. Stern believes the term “lunisolar” is a misnomer. The lunar year is 12 lunar months of an average of 29 and a half days each, with a total of approximately 354 days in a year, he explained. “This falls short of the seasons by about 11 days,” and thus “an extra month needs to be added every two or three years in order to make up for this and keep up with the seasons,” he said. The ancient Israelite calendar was therefore most likely lunar, with 12 months, each beginning with a new moon. Stern said all lunar calendars in the world “have always added a 13th (leap) See Adar on page 18