September 2006

Rabbis across the country will be calling on their congregations to refocus their thoughts according to the JTA, which reports that

Support for Israel is the No. 1 focus for this year´s Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur sermons among American rabbis, according to a new survey.

Seventy-two percent of rabbis surveyed said they are talking about the Jewish state, followed by 42 percent who are discussing “creating a better future,” 37 percent who are focusing on forgiveness and 34 percent who are urging greater participation in synagogue life.

Rabbi David Weiss Halivni, in a class I had the honor to take with him discussing Divrei Torah (sermons), made the point that one can tell the crises facing the Jewish community throughout the ages by reading the contents of their sermons.

When the Jewish community is rich and content,Rabbis tend to preach about punishment for sinners and the need for charity. When the Jewish community is poor and afflicted, Rabbis tend to preach about Divine mercy and eternal reward. And when the Jewish community has slid in its obligation to remember Zion, as we see now, Rabbis preach about the importance of remembering the State of Israel, and those people who live and die and fight to ensure that we Jews who live around the world will know that our people has returned to the only land we have every called home as a People.

This burst of particularism is a blessed way to start a new year. May we be blessed with the ability to strengthen our community, and the wisdom to know when we should use our strength to help others so that evil will not be known in the world.

God is sending around a missive, and you better get in the game before time runs out:

The Books of Life and Death have been written!

God, King of the World
Tue, Sep 26, 2006 at 9:48 PM

My Dear Subjects:

At this time every year, I, God, King of the Universe, judge who will live and who will die, who will prosper and who will end up with only the shirt on his back, who will be gored by an ox and who will robbed blind.

But I’ve had a good long think, and I believe that it’s decidedly Calvinistic of me to choose who will live and die. Shouldn’t it be up to you? I’ve decided that some separation of powers is in order, and that I should become an enlightened Despot of enlightened Despots. Today, the power is in your hands!

Surf your way over to www.bookofdeath.com, and you will have the power to decide who lives and dies in this coming year. Some of my own personal favorite people to judge are already posted, and you can add your own friends and enemies.

This year, you make the choice: will it be life, or will it be death? You decide!

Yours Sincerely,

God, King of the World

It’s the Allstar game of good and evil, and you get to decide. Just try not to die laughing.

Checking out the GA 2006, I cam across something called the Ben Gurion Society. As a Zionist, and fan of Ben Gurion, I enthusiastically clicked through to find this:

The Ben-Gurion Society is a donor recognition program for individuals ages 25-45 who make a minimum individual gift of at least $1,000 to their Federation’s annual campaign. But the Ben Gurion Society is so much more than that; it is something new and vibrant that is on the rise around the country. BGS members are not just a part of their Jewish communities; they are stepping up and helping to SHAPE their communities. Rise to it - join us today!

What a horrible membership criterion for a society that calls itself on Ben Gurion’s name and bears his face on their symbol.

Ben Gurion was an idealist, a Zionist and a Jewish leader. He was a man of action who gave up the pursuance of wealth as a lawyer and moved to a farm–a man who spent his last days in humility, living on a kibbutz in the Negev. He was not by any ways and means a philanthropist.

Now, one can argue whether the leadership philanthropists provide is positive for the Jewish community–that is, if the set of skills they acquire while succeeding in the non-Jewish-world sphere of business are transferable to the skills we should expect our community leaders to posses–but one thing is for certain: If the UJC cares to respect Ben Gurion’s name and heritage, and wants to avoid cynically using his memory for fundraising purposes, it would do them well to either find a different membership criterion–or to change the name.

This is a fantastic portrait of Dubai from Der Spiegel. One section really caught my attention:

If one accepts the commonplaces of the debate on world cultures, Dubai is an impossible city. On the one hand, it’s more cosmopolitan than eastern Germany and southern Italy, more tolerant than Poland or Louisiana, and consumers spend more here than in Munich or Madrid. But on the other hand it’s a dictatorship, almost a rogue state, a desert regime without a parliament or a political opposition, without trade unions, political parties or associations. All books and newspapers are subject to censorship. Sharia law is observed, including corporal punishment, and all Jews are strictly banned from entering the country.

And I was about to book my ticket…

birthright israel decided to go with someone other than the Shabot this time…and this is what they got:

I don’t know who made this, and I really wish them no ill will. But they don’t touch the bolt on ShaBot’s nuts.

Shana Tova.

I would go on in disgust regarding Columbia University’s invitation to Iranian Oppressor in Chief Ahmadinejad to speak before the university (the invite having been issued by SIPA Dean Lisa Anderson, who was also appointed to deal with students complaints during the MEALAC scandal), but Bari Weiss and Birk Oxholm say it better than anyone in today’s Spectator:

Today, at the invitation of SIPA Dean Lisa Anderson, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was slated to speak here at Columbia. Though the event has been canceled for “security reasons,” we cannot ignore the fact that Dean Anderson extended Columbia’s resources and facilities to a fanatical leader who masterfully sows seeds of hatred.

When it comes to Ahmadinejad, there’s tragically more at stake than writing on the walls. In Ahmadinejad’s Iran, gays are killed, women are stoned, and democratic activists are flogged in public squares. He has jailed dissidents. He has denied the Holocaust. He has gleefully called for the destruction of the Jewish state. We have said no to hateful words, but we have reached out to a perpetrator of hateful deeds. Consider the evidence.

In Iran, being gay is a crime punishable by death. As reporter Doug Ireland has bitterly observed, gays in Iran have four choices: being hanged, stoned, halved by a sword, or dropped from the highest perch. Last November, two men identified to Amnesty International as Mokhtar N, 24 years old, and Ali A, 25 years old, were executed publicly in the town of Gorgan. Their crime? Lavat-sodomy…And of course, there are Ahmadinejad’s views on the Jewish people and Israel. At the now infamous conference “The World Without Zionism,” Ahmadinejad called Israel “a disgraceful blot” and quoted Ayatollah Khomeini’s fantasy that “Israel must be wiped off the map.” Lest some have become numb to his hateful vitriol, a reminder: his message is one of genocide.

And yet, despite all of these offenses, Dean Lisa Anderson saw it fit to invite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to our campus. Shame on her, and shame on an administration that would have him speak were it not for “security reasons.” Columbians-students, faculty, administration, and staff-if you are serious about standing up against hate, you will hold Dean Anderson accountable for offering Ahmadinejad a podium.

He is against absolutely everything we stand for.

Read the whole thing for a chronicle of Ahmadinejad’s crimes. And get in touch with Columbia…

What was before known as the Support Israel rally ended up being an anti-Ahmadinejad rally–and it was packed. So packed that I, getting there fifteen minutes late, was not allowed in. Luckily I caught the tailcoat of an older woman who beat her way through the cops and arrived at a second section for the rally–where the spill-over found themselves.

And, where these people found themselves too:

What you see here is called non-violent protest: these two respectable women began walking backwards towards the anti-Zionist, pro-Iranian Satmars–and the Satmars, who responded initially by spitting and throwing water, fled once the woman’s flesh came too close to their black jackets.

The women tried talking to them–but these anti-Zionists, who believe they are doing God’s work, weren’t that good at that whole “Sicha Im’Isha” thing.

More pics to come.

GlobalFirePower.Com attempts to create “a basic ranking model of the world military powers,” and allows you to compare countries and see how they would match off. According to them, popular matches have been:

• Israel vs. Lebanon
• India vs. Pakistan
• China vs. Taiwan
• United States of America vs. Iran
• United States of America vs. Syria
• North Korea vs. South Korea

Not so surprising, eh? What’s particularly interesting is that, when you look at the rankings, Israel is #25 on the list, beneath Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. I thought Israel had the best-trained military in the Middle East? I suppose not.

But if you look at how GlobalFirePower.com pairs the matchups, it’s apparent that they don’t know squat. When comparing Israel and Egypt, for example, you will see that they do acknowledge that Israel’s $9.45 billion yearly military expendature tops Egypt’s measly $2.4 billion, and that Israel does have more armor and artillery, but in general they only compare the bare numbers: If Egypt has more missile defense systems (which apparently they do), they seem to come out on top.

But life and death is not a “numbers game,” and no one who ever treated it as such ever really understood it. To truly understand Zionism, we must understand the intangible but supreme power of the human spirit, which has been the driving force behind the creation and building up of the Jewish Country.

It was not the multitudes of the Jewish People who built the state, nor who today come to Israel from the western countries—of their own will—to partake in the Zionist project, but the relative few. It is a conundrum to which our best have given much thought, but I believe that it is the nature of the Zionist dream that it is to be executed by the very best of the Jewish People. Isn’t that what draws us to Israel, that it represents the work of the very best of the Jews, and that is what rises it above the Diaspora? And isn’t it, by its very nature, the case that those who are willing to rip themselves out of the lives to which they are accustomed to and which they were born into, and move across the world and re-plant themselves in a new society that speaks a language that they most likely had to learn from scratch, naturally the cream of the Jewish crop?

If we were to walk through Tel Aviv in the 1920s and tell people what Israel would be like today, even with all of the problems that we deal with, they would tell us that we were crazy. If we told them that there would be nearly seven million people living in the land of Israel, a “land of milk and honey” which is more like a “land of very little water and much desert,” they would have told us that we were perhaps a bit loony. If we told them that Israel would have the second-most companies listed on the NASDAQ, behind only the nearly-hegemonic US itself, they would have said, “Stop being ridiculous.”

How did all of this happen? It was not because of numbers. It was not because of God, either, because unless I’m missing something the Messiah hasn’t shown up late to the party, which makes this whole phenomenon even more astounding. It was because of us, the Jews, who have had the spirit to survive thousands of years in the Diaspora and now have successfully applied that energy in a constructive manner—as opposed to the many occasions where people have taken their revolutionary energies and applied them in a completely destructive way—to build a place which, if you got rid of the problems of those who would give their own children to kill us, is a really great place.

So when GlobalFirePower.com says that Israel has a less powerful army than Iran because Iran has a larger base of conscriptable teenagers, it is completely ignoring the human element, which is the true determiner of the outcome of warfare. Because in a war, it is not just tanks and planes fighting against each other but the humans behind them. And just as we have proven that with a small few, we can erect for ourselves a country from nearly scratch, what is to say that simple numbers, that say that four is greater than two and that logically the four will win, is what determines the course of history?

Iran’s President Ahmadinejad is coming to New York, and this Wednesday you will have the opportunity to react to his calls to wipe Israel off the map.

Here are the specifics:

Dag Hammarskjold Plaza
(across from the United Nations)


12 noon, rain or shine
2nd Avenue at 47th Street
Subways: 4, 5, 6, or 7 to Grand Central Station

Thousands of shofarot will sound in a call of unity with Israel. Participants are urged to bring a shofar.

Sponsored by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York,
in cooperation with the United Jewish Communities, UJA-Federation of New York and Jewish Council for Public Affairs

For more information contact: Conference of Presidents at 212-318-6111 or info@conferenceofpresidents.org JCRC at 212-983-4800 x 151 or info@jcrcny.org

Or put differently: If Jews Can Live Anywhere, Why Live in Israel?

That’s a basic question that positive ideologies of Zionism come to answer. I’m not trying to present a chiddush here, but I particiapated in a fascinating discussion of Rambam’s Hilchot Melachim Friday night that brought the question home in a new sort of way.

Our question was why is it that Rambam fills the latter half of the chapter about the laws of a “war of obligation” and a “war of choice” with a presentation of aggadic and non-aggadic stories about Jewish connections to Eretz Yisrael? For instance, he says that living outside of Israel is like being an idol worshipper, and that the sages used to roll in the dust of Israel (most of these stories come from the end of Masechet Ketubot I believe).

Among other answers, it seemed to those of us learning that Rambam was trying to keep Israel on the agenda and remind Diasporan Jews (himself foremost) that the discussion of Jewish sovereignty is not simply an excercise in theoretical exegesis (as it may have seemed at the time), but an actual discussion of a Jewish political ethic that is meant to be enacted. The Jewish people are meant to remember that Judaism is a religion for a sovereign people.

And this brought home the point that Zionism, even in its secular form, even in its most humanistic form, was about Jewish People action, Jewish collective struggle. And that is a very religious idea at its core.

To bring this to bear on the recent discussion of Jewish particularism vs. universalism, it is clear that the more religiously ideal framework for Jewish action, at least from the early sources, is collective action. And while individual piousness and mitzvot are key, and personal spiritual struggle is mission critical, it is the collective that has the ability to catalyze a world, and that collective must be identified, separated in some way, and charged with a mission. This creates a feeling of family, and particular cares, and a prioritization in caring about the particular people. Of course, the ultimate goal of collective action in order to better the world should never be forgotten. But the particular must be maintained in order to influence the rest of the world.

It also stands that moving somewhere collectively is far more difficult than taking responsibility only for oneself. Israel is an expression of the Jewish People’s wish to be free and self-sufficient, but also the People’s wish to fulfill its collective destiny. Those who turn away from the idea of investing energy and care in the greatest collective movement of the Jews in modern times, flaws and all, are turning away from a core principal of Judaism. More than that, they are missing the greatest religious opportunity of our time.
[Thanks to SK, JK, and AS for the learning]

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