Just In Time For Parshas Chayei Sarah

I found this via Arlene Kushner, who writes

Could it be that our people are now -- in the face of horrendous risks -- beginning to wake up to the fact of Jewish rights?

From Arutz Sheva:

As Jews worldwide prepare to read aloud in synagogues, this coming Sabbath, the Biblical account of Patriarch Abraham's purchase of land in Hevron, 54 MKs sign a petition in favor of Jews' right of purchase there.

The petition was written as a result of the case currently before the Supreme Court, in which the right of Jews to purchase land in Hevron has come under question. The ultra-left Peace Now organization demands that a family be evicted from its home in Jewish-owned land that, under Jordanian rule, became an Arab market. Peace Now also demands that a room added on to a Jewish house in the same area be razed.

The petition begins with a mention of this coming Sabbath's Torah reading:
"This coming Sabbath, we will read in the synagogues the portion known as Chaye Sarah, where we read the story of our father Abraham's purchase of the Machpelah Cave for its 'full price.' This was the first Hebrew land purchase in the Land of Israel, and it led the way for generations to come. Even then, our forefather Abraham knew, as did other nations of the world, to value of 'the right to purchase,' and certainly would not discredit it.

"As of now, the undersigned, Members of Knesset from various parties, call on the government of Israel to honor the 'right of purchase' of Jews in the City of the Patriarchs, and to allow Jewish settlement in those homes and lands which were purchased for their 'full price,' including:

** houses and lands purchased by Jews over the generations which were stolen as a result of the 1929 massacre [in which 67 Jews were slaughtered in their homes and synagogues by their Arab neighbors], and

** buildings purchased recently for their 'full price,' for example, Beit HaShalom [Peace House] between Hevron and Kiryat Arba."

The article points out that Jews have been living in Hebron continuously since 1540--and goes through the history of the Jewish community there. This is not stopping Peace Now from insisting on evictions. The government may want to do the right thing, but it is not going to be easy.

Read the whole thing.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Hebron.

Ari Fleischer--Leading The Jewish Vote Out Of The Democratic Party

That's the impression Webutante seems to have. These days, Fleischer has his own communications consulting firm, Fleischer Communications, which specializes in helping sports teams and helped start a new conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. called Freedom’s Watch.

In an article, Ari Fleischer: A New Breed of Jewish Leader, for Pajamas Media, Webutante writes about a speech Fleischer gave at the Republican Jewish Coalition. She was very impressed:

"In my business, it's all about making inroads," he said " No doubt about it, getting the Jewish vote out of the Democratic party and into the Republicans is a slow steady inroad we're making every year, every election. And we've only just begun."

 You could hear a pin drop.

"We're finally understanding the real threat that Islamic extremism represents to the United States, Israel and the rest of the free world. There's no such thing as peace without 100% strength."

Fleischer recalled the United States' first wars against Islamic fundamentalism, The Barbary Wars, in the early 1800's when then President Thomas Jefferson refused to continue paying bribes to Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean. Both the George Washington and John Adams Administrations had made bribery payments from the U.S. Treasury in hopes that our ships would not be attacked, robbed and destroyed off the coast of Tripoli. But to no avail.

"Jefferson said no more to Islamic bribery after repeated attacks on our ships and declared war, sent in the Marines and won that war, just like President Bush after 9-11."

**********

It was at that moment I saw Ari Fleischer in a totally new light: He was a modern day Moses leading his people out of slavery, into freedom. But rather than leading them out of the land of Egypt, he was taking them out of the bondage of the Democratic party.

Maybe you had to be there to really appreciate Fleischer's speech. I don't know. But I do recall that in the last presidential election the results did not indicate any trend towards Republican gains among Jewish voters.

Like Moses, Ari Fleischer may need a miracle.

Technorati Tag: Republican Jews and Ari Fleischer.

That's Easy For YOU To Say

AP:

It might take as long as half a century before U.S. troops can leave the volatile Middle East, according to retired Army Gen. John Abizaid.

Israel does not have that option.

Technorati Tag: Israel.

Death Camps Are Great Sites For Rock Concerts (UPDATED)

Especially in Serbia:

Soon, the site where some 48,000 Jews, Serbs and Gypsies perished in the 1940s will be throbbing to the rhythms of rock music.

For Serbia's small Jewish community, the weekend concert at the Sajmiste camp near the center of Belgrade is the latest indignity to befall a site they say needs to be saved from decades of neglect and deterioration.

"It's like holding a wedding at a graveyard," said Aleksandar Mosic, a Jewish chairman of the camp's memorial center, ahead of the concert by British band Kosheen.

Nearly all of Belgrade's 8,000 Jews were killed at Sajmiste soon after it was set up in 1941 at the site of the Belgrade Fair exhibition ground, Mosic said. Thousands of leftists and Serb nationalists also were killed at the camp. Stray dogs wander forlornly around the rundown gray brick barracks that used to house of one of the most notorious World War II Nazi death camps in the Balkans.

But there's nothing personal about this--it's just business:

Poseydon, the company that bought the hall, says the concerts simply make business sense.

Of course it does--just like the original decision to sell the building to a private entrepreneur.

UPDATE: Kosheen has canceled the concert--look in the comments.

[Hat tip: Hot Air Headlines]

Technorati Tag: Sajmiste and Poseydon and Holocaust and Kosheen.

UN Report Admits Failure In Lebanon

In mid-October Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was hopeful about Security Council Resolution 1701--at least when it comes to humanitarian concerns:

Welcoming the exchange of humanitarian gestures by Israel and Hizbollah mediated by his facilitator, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today voiced hope that this will create momentum to push both sides to comply with the key humanitarian demands of Security Council resolution 1701, which ended last year’s war in Lebanon.

The reality is that 'demands' of Resolution 1701 have gone nowhere--which Noah Pollak notes in the UN's own report that has now come out:

Detailed in Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post, the report says that, in addition to the establishment of surface-to-air missile capacity and the tripling of Hizballah’s arsenal of land-to-sea missiles,

Hizballah’s long-range missile teams are deployed north of the [Litani] river, and . . . most of the new missiles include [the Iranian-made] Zelzal and Fajr missiles that have a range of over 250 kilometers and are capable of hitting areas south of Tel Aviv.

And Hizballah has been busy with more than just weapons. It is also expanding on the strategy that was so effective in creating international condemnation of Israel's defense against Hizballah rockets:

Since the arrival of UNIFIL, Hizballah has focused its reconstruction and re-armament on the area of Lebanon north of the Litani, where UNIFIL does not enforce its paltry and symbolic suppression of Hizballah. Hizballah’s activity in this region, which also involves buying up land for Shia settlement, is actually quite strategically valuable—it allows the creation of physical contiguity between Hizballah’s two strongholds in Lebanon, the Bekaa valley/Syrian border area in the east and the Shia south. Creating this contiguity, and planting Shia civilians throughout this territory, are vital to Hizballah’s ability to deter encirclement by Israel in another round of war, and to wage war from among, and with the help of, Shia civilians. [emphasis added]

The UN has been no more effective under Ban Ki-moon that it was under Kofi Annan, and Israel is paying the price.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Ban Ki-moon and Hizballah.

Jews And The Disappearing Sense of Nation

Jonathan Rosenblum argues that the growing sense of Jewish religiosity does not compensate for the diminishing sense of peoplehood.

Jews as a Nation
by Jonathan Rosenblum

When last heard from we were lamenting the alienation of younger, non-Orthodox American Jews from Israel, as detailed in a recent study by sociologists Stephen M. Cohen and Ari Kelman. Those findings parallel a great deal of social science evidence describing the rapidly waning sense of peoplehood among American Jews and declining willingness to affirm any special responsibility to one’s fellow Jews (see Cohen and Wertheimer, “Whatever Happened to the Jewish People,” Commentary, June, 2006) [you can read it here].

Some have attempted to put a happy face on these findings by arguing that while Jewish ethnic identity is plummeting religious observance is holding steady and perhaps even increasing. Unfortunately, there is little consolation to be found in that direction.

Whatever can be said of religious observance that downplays mutual responsibility of Jews for one another, it is not Judaism. Lawrence Hoffman, a professor of liturgy at Hebrew Union College (Reform), describes the new Reform Siddur as taking into account “a growing emphasis on personalism as opposed to peoplehood, the individual’s search for the sacred…”

That emphasis on the subjective experience of the worshipper as sole source of validation of religious ritual is borrowed from 18th century German Protestantism. But it has far earlier antecedents. The essence of pagan ritual, Rabbi Yosef Ber Soloveitchik observed, is that it derives meaning only from the emotional impact upon the one performing the ritual.

In Jewish thought, Rabbi Soloveitchik noted, it is the objective command, not the subjective emotions that are primary. The word mitzvah, commandment, derives from a root indicating joinder. In short, the essence of the command is the link formed between the one performing it and G-d the commander. Joy is the outgrowth of the proper fulfillment of the Divine will, not its goal.

NO JEWISH CONCEPT HAS AROUSED such animosity over the millennia or creates such discomfort among modern Jews as that of choseness, a choseness predicated on Jewish nationhood. In a 1996 Commentary symposium on the state of American Jewish belief, almost no non-Orthodox theologian was prepared to give his or her unqualified assent to the idea that the Jews are G-d’s chosen people.

Yet what are we to do, the Torah reaffirms that principle repeatedly. Upon reading from the Torah, we bless G-d as “the One Who chose us from among the nations.” The Torah describes us as “a kingdom of priests, a holy nation,” and repeatedly as G-d’s “treasured nation.”

As Rabbi Yehudah Halevi writes in The Kuzari, the Jews are unique among the monotheistic faiths in that their revelation took place before the entire people and was not just given to a solitary prophet. The difference pertains not just to the verification of the revelation. In the other religions, the solitary prophet hands over the principles of faith, and those who accept those principles become members of a faith community. But in Judaism the entire people is described as entering into a covenant with G-d. The covenant is with an entire nation.

With His revelation to an entire people, G-d assigned to that nation a common mission incumbent on each and every member of the nation. That mission is nothing less than to reveal G-d’s existence to the world. Sometimes we fulfill that mission through our actions, and sometimes through what happens to us. Rabbi Shamshon Raphael Hirsch, emphasized that it is primarily through the fate of the Jewish people that G-d reveals Himself in history.

The mission is a universal one, but it starts with a particular people. Only be creating among ourselves an ideal society can we demonstrate to the world what a society based on a relationship to G-d might look like. (Obviously, I’m describing an ideal not any existing Jewish society.)

Because the mission is a national one, the halacha continually reinforces the relationship of mutual responsibility that Jews bear towards one another as citizens of a single nation. Thus it is forbidden to lend money to a fellow Jew – even though logic alone would not dictate a proscription on taking interest any more than on renting one’s donkey. Similarly, the halacha imposes different obligations with respect to the lost objects of a fellow Jew and those of a gentile. The reason in both cases: the Jew is “your brother.”

I can make Kiddush for another Jew who does not know how to do so, even though I have already fulfilled my obligation. The underlying concept is that no Jew has ever fully filled his obligation unless every Jew has done so.

In Chrisitian thought, and even to most modern Jews, there is something degraded about a particularistic love for one’s fellow Jews. Far more elevated is the universal love of all mankind. But in the Jewish view, it is only through the love of the particular that we learn to expand the realm of our concern outward. Those who aim to love all men equally usually end up in the position described in the old bumper sticker: “I love humanity, its people I can’t stand.”

That difference in perspective, Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik argues in the current Commentary, explains why Judaism, in juxtaposition to Christianity, rejects the ideal of celibacy. Far from the particular love of one’s wife and children derogating from a higher universal love that particularistic love is, in the Torah, the necessary condition for the development of a more all-encompassing love. A High Priest without a wife could not perform the Yom Kippur service.

When Jews lose the sense of their interdependency with, and obligations of mutual responsibility towards, their fellow Jews something more than mere ethnic identity has been lost. That ethnic identity was itself nothing more than an attenuated connection to the essence of what it means to be a Jew – to be a citizen of the nation with a Divine mission.

Read more articles by Jonathan Rosenblum at Jewish Media Resources

Technorati Tag: Israel and Judaism.

Is Google Earth Now BLOCKING Parts of Israel?

The answer appears to be yes, kind of, and for a while at least--Check out Israel Matzav for details.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Google Earth.

Rav Yaakov Kaminetsky and Halloween

Elder of Ziyon gives a hat tip to Soccer Dad for pointing him to a post by A Simple Jew about Rav Yaakov Kaminetsky and Halloween.

He also links to a psak on Halloween by Rabbi Michael Broyde.

Technorati Tag: Rav Yaakov Kaminetsky.

October 31st:: An Important Date For Zionists

Yesterday was the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Beer Sheva.

Check out Treppenwitz:

We tend to think of the British only in the context of the Mandate period and the struggle for Israeli statehood. But it is now clear to me that without the efforts of these mostly forgotten young British and ANZAC (Australian & New Zealand) soldiers, buried in a Beer Sheva cemetery so far from their homes, there very likely would not be a modern state of Israel!

Read the whole thing.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Battle of Beer Sheva.

The Void Has Finally Been Filled: A Kosher Version of Red Bull!

Jewish Blogmeister has a post about a new kosher energy drink--'Exit'. According to the source article, the man behind this explains:

“There are three things going on here. They make a lot of babies, they study the Torah and they dance. They need a lot of energy, and something to strengthen them.”

And don't forget the bloggers!

Technorati Tag: Jews.