Year: 2019

The Suicidal Charade of Diaspora Judaism

No More Half-Way Judaism

By Tzvi Fishman – 

Recently, I read a shocking and saddening report published in the “Jewish Press.” In an article written by Sandy Eller, entitled “67 Deaths in Eight Months,” the New York-based Adumin organization revealed that since Rosh Hashanah, 67 Orthodox young people under the age of 35, in the tri-state area alone, have died because of substance abuse. The figure is astonishing! 67 young lives! In the Orthodox community! Gevalt! 21 suicides, 41 drug overdoses, and 5 alcohol-related deaths! I don’t have statistics available, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this figure is higher than in the overall age group in the general tri-state area, which numbers 1000 times more. As Hamlet might say, “Something is rotten in the Orthodox community in New York.”

Eller writes that the Orthodox community has hidden the problem for years. Now Rabbi Zvi Gluck, director of Adumin, has decided it is time to come out of the closet with the issue, in order to save lives.

Of course, we all empathize with the plight of these young people, and the tragedy of their deaths. Certainly, just like every individual is unique, the causes behind these deaths vary from case to case. But, to tell you the truth, if I were a young Orthodox person living in New York, I too would want to be drunk or stoned most of the time to escape the emptiness, inner horror, and hypocrisy of galut existence. How can you raise an Orthodox child to believe in the Torah while teaching him that Jewish life in the Diaspora, living amongst the gentiles in alien lands, is perfectly OK?

Any normal child who reads the Bible understands that G-d wants the Jewish People to live in the Land of Israel, just like it says in the Torah again and again. But if you tell a Jewish child that living in New York is just as good, and even better than living in Israel, you screw up his, or her, brain, and some form of schizophrenia is sure to follow. The Torah was given to be practiced in Eretz Yisrael, not in Egypt, or the wilderness of Sinai, and not in Brooklyn, New York. That’s why Judaism in the galut is hollow and void of real spirit. Like Rashi, and the Ramban, and other great Sages have written, the practice of the commandments in the exile is just to keep us from forgetting them so that we will know how to do them when we return to Eretz Yisrael.

Young Orthodox people sense this charade. They sense the hollowness of Orthodox life in America. This feeling of emptiness leads them to feel alienated from Judaism, and from life in general. Unfortunately, to express their feelings in the Orthodox world around them is strictly taboo, as forbidden as cheeseburgers and pre-marital coupling, so they resort to alcohol and drugs to drown out their inner anxiety and deep unhappiness in living a life that doesn’t feel true. Some anguished souls even commit suicide.

The real problem is that no one tells them the truth. No one tells them that their inner feelings are really healthy feelings – that a Jew is supposed to feel the emptiness of Torah in galut, because the real place of Torah is in Israel. Their parents don’t tell them; their teachers and rabbis don’t tell them; the Rosh Yeshiva doesn’t tell them that they are perfectly right to feel the way they do, because, just as the Torah portion, Behukotai, teaches, Jewish life in the exile is a curse, a life filled with anxiety and dread.

If the Orthodox community in New York wants these terrible tragedies to cease, there is only one solution – to teach young people that the joy and spiritual high of Judaism are waiting for them in the Land of Israel. They don’t need shrinks and half-way centers. They need to hear the truth. No more half-way Judaism. It is time for the full Judaism of Eretz Yisrael.

Reprinted from The Jewish Press.

Tzvi Fishman is a recipient of the Israel Ministry of Education Award for Creativity and Jewish Culture. His many novels and books on a variety of Jewish themes are available at Amazon Books, including four commentaries on the teachings of Rabbi Kook. Recently, he has published “Arise and Shine!” and “The Lion’s Roar” – 2 sequels to his popular novel, “Tevye in the Promised Land.” In Israel, the Tevye trilogy is distributed by Sifriyat Bet-El Publishing. He is also the director and producer of the feature film, “Stories of Rebbe Nachman,” starring Israel’s popular actor, Yehuda Barkan. He can be contacted via his website: www.tzvifishmanbooks.com

‘ALL of Klal Yisrael Cannot Err’ – Sounds Sabbatian…

Gershom Scholem’s “Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah” (English translation by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, Princeton 1973) on pages 816-817, discusses a Sabbatian work (אגרת מגן אברהם מארץ המערב by Abraham Cardozo) written to justify the false Messiah’s apostasy.

I quote (omitting both his footnotes and my caustic comments):

Cardozo was the first author to state clearly what was subsequently to become a Sabbatian stock argument: God does not “permit the beast of the righteous to sin in error, how much less the righteous themselves,” and He certainly would not allow His saints, let alone his whole people, to fall into such grievous error (ed., I capitalized the letter “H” twice). The argument is of considerable interest. Cardozo rejects the view, apparently voiced by many disabused believers, that Sabbati had acted in good faith at the beginning of his career, but had taken to deciet and sin after realizing his error. For if this view were correct, it would show that a life of exemplary saintliness may be rewarded by falling into sin, and thousands of devout penitents and earnest believers would have become victims of lies and decieit. This would be tantamount to denying God’s justice and providence. The messiah’s soul was from the highest world of asiluth, and ordinary human beings whose souls came from lower spheres could not possibly comprehend his actions.

Without getting into this too deeply, I will note the Chazon Ish was asked why he exposed the problems with Eruvin when the masses were innocently relying on their rabbis, and he reportedly answered along the lines of “even they know the truth regarding whom to ask”.

Also, see p.156 and thereabouts in Rabbi Brand’s “Bayom Harishon Tashbisu”.

The Current Regime Is a Strategic DISASTER

Our Strategic Balagan

by Victor Rosenthal

Balagan: chaos, total disorder, huge mess. Borrowed from Russian.

The incendiary and explosive balloons continue to be sent across our southern border, and the Hamas special “night unit” continues to burn tires and throw explosives over the fence, as well as to cross over into Israel, attack soldiers, and try to get at civilians. We continue to “respond” by bombing or shelling empty installations.

We are careful not to kill them because we are told that if we kill them, their honor will require that they kill us in return; this will lead to an escalation. They want that, we are told, because there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, primarily because their rivals in the Palestinian Authority have been cutting salary payments to PA officials in Gaza who either work for Hamas or don’t do anything. If there is an escalation, the crisis will get worse and the UN or other outside forces will step in and give them money, which they will spend on weapons or tunnels anyway.

Until recently, Israel has allowed Qatar to send millions in cash to Hamas because nothing makes them madder than running out of money.

If there is an escalation, Hamas, Hezbollah, the PLO, and even Iranian forces in Syria will coordinate their efforts, there will be a two- or three- front war, and we would suffer a lot of casualties although we would “win.” That would be giving them what they want, we are told.

There is a news report that is emblematic of the insanity surrounding our relations with our Palestinian Arab enemies. It seems that the Israel Prison Service has been unable to stop the smuggling of cellular phones into facilities where Hamas terrorists have been imprisoned, so they are installing jamming devices. But – get ready for this – the IDF has asked them to suspend the work because of “its possible impact on the situation in the territories.”

At the same time, the Iranian regime is trying to upgrade Hezbollah’s rockets with precision guidance kits. We are acting against it, insofar as the Russians allow, but likely we are simply slowing it down, not stopping it. Iran is also working to establish Shiite militia forces in Syria and Iraq, and of course, proceeding with its ballistic missile and nuclear programs. We are certainly taking action, overt and covert, in these areas too, but again these operations are only capable of slowing the process, not stopping it.

Meanwhile, here at home the waqf and radical Muslims are trying to further erode the remains of our sovereignty on the Temple Mount. We proved to them last year that we were not prepared to defend it when they forced Israel to back down from installing metal detectors and cameras at the entrances to the Mount in order to prevent any more of our policemen from being murdered. My prediction is that we will back down over this latest provocation too.

And then there is the illegal Bedouin encampment of Khan al-Ahmar, which even the Supreme Court says should be removed, which Bibi has solemnly promised to remove, but which we apparently can’t demolish because the Europeans wouldn’t like it.

Is your head spinning? Mine is. One wonders if we have a plan, or if we only react. One thing stands out in all of this: Israel, supposedly the eighth-strongest power in the world, militarily and economically (after the US, Russia, China, Germany, UK, France, and Japan), acts like she has no better option than to lie down and take it. Little by little, her sovereignty and security erode. We don’t seem to have the will to confront these problems when they are manageable, and they only grow more intractable with time.

There are a number of reasons for this. For one thing, there’s the normal human propensity to put off trouble. Dealing with the root of the problems today would be disagreeable, more disagreeable than accepting their manifestations. Of course, tomorrow it will be worse, but tomorrow is not today and maybe something will change before then (someone more cynical than I might say, “it will be someone else’s responsibility, tomorrow.”)

Our Prime Ministers and their cabinets and generals are not supposed to think this way. They are supposed to think like good chess players, carefully laying the groundwork for their future actions, while systematically evaluating all the paths that the enemy might take, and developing contingency plans for them. Last week I played chess with my 9-year old grandson, and I relieved him of his queen because he was concentrating too hard on what he was about to do to me. By the time he becomes Prime Minister, I hope he will know better.

We can’t just blame our leaders. They are operating in a political system that pits an Attorney General and Supreme Court with undefined and arbitrarily broad powers against the PM and his government. So when they try to do something like make a deal with private companies to exploit newly-found and highly strategic natural gas reservoirs, suddenly the Court can stick its nose in and upset everything, as happened in 2016. Or they are stymied when they try to find some solution to deal with an illegal influx of tens of thousands of migrants, as happened in 2014 (most of them are still here, having children whose first language is Hebrew).

But while the legal establishment still hasn’t intervened directly in strategic military matters, the Attorney General, State Prosecutors’ Office, and police have driven the Prime Minister crazy with criminal investigations for pretty much the past 4 years (he was interrogated by police for several hours at a time at least 12 times in connection with various accusations against him and his wife). The charges have ranged from stupidly trivial to serious, but the overall impression is that they are out to get him on something, anything. Even apart from the political aspects of the legal assault – the Attorney General announced his intention to hold a pre-indictment hearing last week, a month before the election – it’s hard to believe that the PM has had much time to ponder his next moves in the multiple geostrategic games he is playing with Hamas, Iran, and others.

Then there is the perennial problem that minor parties that happen to hold the balance of power in the coalition can paralyze or even bring down a government because of one rabbi who is angry over something.

Other pressing matters, like the massively funded European campaign to intervene in our politics and policies, and to help the Palestinian Arabs create facts on the ground in Judea and Samaria, have proven difficult to deal with decisively, possibly because too many Knesset members benefit directly or indirectly from the influx of Euros.

One thing that we do not seem to have to deal with today is the pressure from an American administration for more and more concessions to the Palestinians, for the sake of an impossible peace. This could change after our election in April when the Trump megadeal will be revealed. But I don’t think so – my feeling is that the Trump Administration is far more sympathetic to Israel than the last few, and will not try to impose a solution that we can’t live with.

On the other hand, the American election is not so far off, and the Democratic Party in the US is less friendly toward Israel today than even in the days of Obama. If Trump is not re-elected and the next administration is headed by a left-wing Democrat, the Obama period will look like a picnic in comparison. We’d best end the balagan while we can.