Year: 2021

Moses Returns

by Rabbi Yisroel Meir Lau

There once was a public debate in Ottawa, Canada between the Israeli ambassador to Canada, the late Rabbi Dr. Yaakov Herzog, and the famous historian Professor Arnold Toynbee. Dr. Toynbee insisted that Israel is not truly a nation, and does not deserve a state. The Jews, he claimed, are a religious sect with a mission to guide mankind in monotheism, morals and ethics in the Diaspora, but are not a nation. Permit me to use an imaginary voyage to develop a point made by Dr. Herzog.

An Olympic aircraft lands at Athens airport, and a customs official asks an elderly passenger the purpose of his visit.

“I’m Socrates, and I’ve come back to see my hometown.” The excited official tries to converse with him; they both speak Greek but have no common language, so they call a translator.

Socrates asks, “Can I see the Acropolis?”

“Sorry, it’s in ruins.”

“The Temple of Zeus?”

“There’s no Temple of Zeus here. We have a Greek Orthodox Church, but it’s Christian. We have no Neptune, no Mars, no Aphrodite, no Helen. Only Christianity.”

There’s no Temple of Zeus here. We have a Greek Orthodox Church, but it’s Christian. We have no Neptune, no Mars, no Aphrodite, no Helen. Only Christianity

“How many countries are under Greece?”

“None. Greece is a small country in NATO.”

“What do we excel in? The Marathon? The Olympics? Philosophy?”

“Sorry, Sir, none of the above. The only thing we have in common with the Greece of Aristotle or Plato is geography.”

An Alitalia flight stops at the Fiumicino airport near Rome, and an old fellow deplanes. A customs official approaches him.

“Your name, please?”

“Julius Caesar. Veni, vidi vici.”

“May I help you?”

Caesar doesn’t understand the question. Latin and today’s Italian are not the same.

“Will you please take me to the Temple of Jupiter?”

“Who is Jupiter? We have the Vatican here.”

“What is a Vatican?”

“It’s a church. Catholic. This Pope‘s from Germany. His predecessor was from Poland. Not Italian. No Jupiter.”

“What’s on in the Colosseum today?”

Same religion. Same language. Same homeland. Same commandments. Same faith. If this is not a nation, what is?

“Sorry, it’s in ruins.”

“Gallia still belongs to Roma?”

“No. France is Chirac. Rome is Parodi. Yesterday Berlusconi.”

“What countries do we control? Abyssinia? Angola?”

“None. Italy is a NATO state.

“What are we number one in?”

“Car production, maybe.”

“Car?”

“Cars are robotic chariots without horses.”

At Ben Gurion airport, a customs officer welcomes an elderly man with a white beard: “Shalom Aleichem!”

The man answers, “Aleichem Shalom. My name is Moshe.”

“Really? I’m also Moshe! I was born in Tbilisi, Georgia.”

“And I was born in Egypt.”

“Did you visit Israel before?”

“Unfortunately never.”

“So it’s not your homeland.”

“This is my homeland. I personally know of the Divine promise. Are you Jewish?”

“Of course I’m Jewish. Ani Mosheke m’Gruzia.”

“I’d like to sightsee, but I didn’t take along Tefillin. Do you perhaps know where I can get tefillin?”

“Tefillin? I’ll give you mine.”

“You have tefillin?”

“Of course I have tefillin. I davened Shacharis an hour ago.”

“You also have a tallis with tzitzis?”

“Of course!”

“Do you have a quiet place for me to pray?”

“Sure! We have shuls here in the terminal. Sefard and Ashkenaz.”

“And what Nusach is your Torah scroll?”

“Nusach???!!! We all have the same Torah, each word carefully transcribed back to Moshe Rabenu!”

Same religion. Same language. Same homeland. Same commandments. Same faith. If this is not a nation, what is?

From Ask Moses, here.

Great excerpts from an October 2010 article by Gary North:

When a pride of lions is waiting patiently in the tall grass for zebras, some zebras are going to get eaten. When we think “bureaucrats,” we should think “lions.” We are zebras.

There will be losses. But the lions are getting old. They don’t run as fast these days. Zebras are multiplying. Think “China.” Think “Russia.” Then think back to Mao and Stalin. If those two concentration camps could collapse without armed resistance or a lost war, don’t tell me about the inevitability of tyranny.

Lincoln Steffens visited the Soviet Union in 1921 and returned to say, “I have been over into the future, and it works.” No, it didn’t. Neither do the mini-despotisms of the various Keynesian utopias. Their employees will not receive those pensions after all.

…

Assume that you are Big Brother. You can monitor anyone. You can find out what he owns, what he earns, where he lives, where he works, what credit cards he uses. You have a database on him. Any information that your database lacks can be bought from private database companies.

If you can monitor anyone, you can target anyone. You can bankrupt almost anyone. Just bring a lawsuit against him. His legal bills will bust him. He knows this. He will capitulate. Money talks.

Do you want to set a legal precedent? Target someone with limited financial resources and no connections.

Scholars and journalists who are committed to a defense of individual liberty have collected databases of horror stories on coercive yet legal government invasions of privacy. For every documented story, there are untold numbers of similar stories that never reached the media.

…

The Madoff case is classic. All that government regulation, so little awareness! The reports got filed on time. The SEC was tipped off to chicanery. Yet nothing was done. Why not?

Mises told us why not. The government does not know how to price anything rationally. It cannot determine which cases are worth pursuing and which are not. There are no official guidelines that provide insight.

Here is the operational rule. Bureaucrats pursue those cases that justify their continuing employment. This goal includes the survival of their bureaucracies.

Civil Service laws protect most Federal employees. Bureaucratic immunity from budget cuts protects the bureaucracies. So, bureaucrats pick the easy targets in the same way that lions pick zebras: the young, the old, and the sick.

I once read an article about a jet fighter ace in the Korean War. He revealed his secret of success. He would rapidly survey a squadron of MIG-15s, looking for a plane that looked a little wobbly. If he spotted one, he knew the pilot was inexperienced. He went after that plane.

This strategy can make you an ace. It will not win wars. The Korean War ended in a cease-fire. It is still officially going on.

…

To run a really successful tyranny, the leaders must have increasing wealth as well as more reliable data. They need wealth to hire the programmers, the data collectors, and the police. Computer costs keep falling, but they fall much faster in the private sector (microcomputers) than the government sector (mainframes).

The government’s computer systems are not integrated. Not even the Internal Revenue Service has a seamless system. (The two greatest lies in computer marketing are these: “seamless transfer of data” and “user-friendly.”)

Yes, governments have access to ever-growing quantities of data. But the public has far greater access to low-cost information that it uses to increase the overall complexity of society. The task of monitoring what is going on becomes ever-more utopian. The government is always falling behind, for the reasons Hayek described. The greater the complexity of society, the less able the State is to monitor it, assess it, and use the data to control it.

…

The successful bureaucrat advances up the chain of command by not making a big mistake. The essence of bureaucracy is risk-avoidance. It is slow. It is self-consciously slow. It is defensive. It is always looking up regulations. Its answer to every request is “no.” Why? Because you can retreat from “no” to “yes” if you have to, and no one gets upset. You cannot avoid trouble by moving from “yes” to “no.”

…

The ability of the Establishment to maintain its power is dependent on its being able to buy off the voters and co-opt the newly elected representatives. The failure of the economy reduces the Establishment’s ability to hold onto power.

The police State is going bankrupt. It has issued more promises to voters and more promises to pay investors in Treasury debt than it can possibly fulfill. When it goes belly-up, as the USSR did, and as Red China did, the Keynesian system will be exposed as the little man behind the curtain — with a badge, a gun, and a printing press.

A determined herd of zebras can outrun any pride of lions. Eventually, lions will be too weak to run.

Zebras don’t need to kick lions to death. They merely need to run fast.

…

The little men behind the various curtains are getting exposed on YouTube. There is nothing they can do about this.

Familiarity breeds contempt. It can’t happen fast enough for me.

Read the rest on LRC here…

(I made similar points in an article here.)

Excerpts from the “If You Tickle Us” blog:

It is important to bear in mind the case that Dayan Schwarcz (DS) is dealing with, which is barely alluded to in the responsum. While the facts are not entirely clear, the following is what circulated in the community.

A 15-year-old boy from abroad, studying at a local yeshive, was allegedly sexually abused and possibly raped. In the course of the attack, the boy was injured and had to be hospitalised. The suspect, a local man approximately in his 40s, was arrested and possibly charged. As a condition of bail or police bail he was required to live under curfew conditions in one of the new Essex Charedi communities. He was eventually released, either without charge or had the charges withdrawn. The rumour mill is rife with reports of the boy being bought off by wealthy members of the community to leave the country and not return to give evidence, or possibly to withdraw his allegations altogether. The suspect allegedly admitted to rabbis the acts he was accused of but claimed that they were consensual.

Another two pertinent points are that the suspect has had similar allegations of abuse made against him over many years and that he is related by marriage to DS. The sponsor of the accused’s bail conditions is a close relative of DS.

Here is the original Teshuva by UOHC Dayan Paltiel Schwarcz:

Download (PDF, 89KB)

Lemigdar Milsa (Public Policy/Crime Prevention)

The discussion begins with a discussion of Lemigdar Milsa (LM) (literally ‘to fence off the matter’). LM is a doctrine that allows for rabbinic enactments and punitive measures on public policy grounds to prevent wrongdoing and harm to the public. Such measures are in addition to the laws of the Torah and according to some opinions even where such measures violate the Torah (see here for discussion in Hebrew). LM has its origins in the Talmud (where in one incident a violent man’s hand was amputated) though its principles were elucidated in a responsum by the Rashba (Spain, 13^th c.).

There is then the question of whether any BD can assume LM powers or whether the BD must also have ‘the king’s consent’ i.e. state recognition.

DS then cites the Maharam Schick (Hungary, 19^th c.) that a BD should rather refrain from carrying out any punishments.

DS concludes this section, without citing any source, that even where a BD can take punitive action, this power is restricted to the BD itself executing any sentence. It is not, however, a mandate for a BD to hand over or report a criminal to non-Jewish authorities for them to punish the offender.

This last conclusion is telling. One might have thought that if a BD can in principle itself carry out a punishment even as severe as amputating a limb, then surely handing the suspect over to others to carry out a far more lenient punishment of incarceration would also be included under the LM doctrine. It should be all the more so in a country such as the UK where maximum sentences are prescribed by law and approximate likely sentences can be surmised in advance. The BD would therefore know the worst outcome to befall the suspect if convicted.

However, and like elsewhere in the responsum, wherever DS applies his own view he takes the most narrow and restrictive approach. For this purpose, he adds “for otherwise every criminal could be handed over to the authorities” which he believes cannot be right in light of “the seriousness of mesirah”. The seriousness of child abuse merits no mention anywhere.

There is also a sleight of hand here because it definitely does not follow that if mesirah is permitted for serious crimes then “every criminal can be reported”. The discussion here centres on LM, which is a power that lies primarily with a BD, and so it would be for the BD to decide which crimes to punish rather than apply it to “every criminal”.

Furthermore, checking the Maharam Schick cited, DS has committed a glaring omission. The sentence preceding the one quoted by DS states “although one should not protest against others [who carry out the punishment] and whoever carries it out and endeavours to do so is acting lawfully for he has many Halachic opinions to rely on”, nonetheless Jewish leaders should desist. DS is happy to quote that BD should refrain from punishing offenders but makes no mention of the “many Halachic opinions” to the contrary.

The real problem though with DS’s reasoning, and which applies to the entire responsum, is the absence of any discussion or even a hint at the severity of abuse, the danger and risk of re-offending and the effect of abuse on the victims. This completely taints his approach because he repeatedly applies sources and arguments to restrict or ban reporting alleged abusers without even once making any argument or quoting a single source which would allow, never mind compel, reporting such individuals to the police.

…

“Applying this to our case we must consider in each such incident whether there is indeed a risk that [the suspect] will reoffend. Even where such a risk exists there is still no permission [for mesirah] unless the accused is classified as a rodef which is not always the case. This is because a rodef only applies [in the context of sexual crimes] where he is pursuing someone with whom it is forbidden [according to the Torah] to have sexual relations, and not every child abuser can be termed a rodef. Even in cases where [sexual] relations are prohibited by the Torah if it is in a manner of seduction of a godel (a child who has reached Halachic majority: 12 years old for a girl and 13 for a boy) then the law of rodef would not apply and so there would be no permission for mesirah under this category. And even if someone is classified as a rodef, mesirah would still only be permissible if there is no other way of rescuing the victim… and so if the abuser can be prevented by treatment or other means of whatever kind there would be no permission for mesirah.”

To summarise, DS excludes any reporting to the authorities of the abuse of a girl of 12 or a boy of 13 or older if it is “consensual”, because since there is no coercion the laws of rodef do not apply.

…

There then follows a longer discussion on a broader principle permitting mesirah against individuals who torment the general public. This is broader than a rodef as the laws regarding a rodef are primarily concerned with violent crimes while this new principle applies also to harassment and financial harm. On the other hand it may applies only where the threat is to the public and not to individuals.  The Rema broadens this principle further to cover someone involved in forgery, as he poses a financial risk to the public even if has as yet not committed a crime.

(Here too DS quotes selectively from the Chasam Sofer (Austro Hungary, 18/19^th c.) and ignores that private crimes can also be reported.)

…

Following the above summary, DS quotes from a letter from Rav Elyashiv to Dayan Dunner and Rav Feldman, both of the UOHC Rabbinate, where Rav Elyashiv writes that it is permitted to report an abuser if he is a public danger, it is certain that the abuse will continue and the Jewish community is powerless to prevent him. Rav Elyashiv adds that an individual cannot decide these facts on their own accord and must refer the matter to a BD who must carefully consider the facts. Anyone reporting an offender otherwise would themselves be a moser.

DS returns here to his favourite theme of the type of BD that can consider such questions and which does not appear in Rav Elyashiv’s letter nor in any of the sources cited in this responsum in relation to the principles under discussion. DS also draws attention to the requirement that there are no other means possible to prevent him from reoffending. He concludes that “in our case it is obvious that there are other effective means to prevent him reoffending in the future”.

(It is worth noting that Rav Elyashiv sent this letter to the UOHC rabbis in the 1990s in another notorious child abuse case in the community. In that case the child victims were expelled from schools and the family was hounded out of town while the accused had the full support of senior members of the community including rabbinical and lay leaders.)

DS again reminds us that even where it is permitted to report the accused, he must first be warned. For this he quotes from a source related to dangerous driving.

…

The very last paragraph is headed, “There is no permission [to report] if an entire family will be destroyed” and is followed by an analogy with monetary inheritance to make the point that you cannot destroy an entire family even “to rescue the public”. Nowhere in the entire responsum is the victim’s family honoured with even a passing mention. Nor is the grave risk to the public or the nature of these particular crimes ever brought into the equation.

The valediction to the responsum is an abbreviation of “So are the words of he who seeks your peace at all times” followed by “Paltiel Hacohen Schwarcz”.

No flourishes or grace or concern or even half a word of compassion or empathy is offered to the victim who is neither mentioned nor alluded to other than the fact that he is over 13 and may have been “seduced”. And also that there are many false allegations.

Let me just again repeat that we are dealing here with a boy of 15 years old, hospitalised after a sexual attack and denied justice by the likes of Dayan Schwarcz.

Read the rest here…

הרמב”ם בפירוש המשנה אבות א’ י’:

שמעון בן שטח אומר הוי מרבה לחקור את העדים והוי זהיר בדבריך שמא מתוכם ילמדו לשקר. שמעיה ואבטליון קבלו מהם. שמעיה אומר אהוב את המלאכה ושנא את הרבנות ואל תתודע לרשות – רשות. זה הוא השלטונות, ואלו שלש מדות יש בהן תיקון האמונה והעולם כי בהעדר המלאכה יצר לו ויגזול ויזנה ובבקשת השררה והרבנות יארעו לו נסיונות בעולם ורעות, כי מפני שיקנאו בו בני אדם ויחלקו עליו יפסיד אמונתו, כמו שאמרו כיון שנתמנה אדם פרנס על הציבור מלמטה נעשה רשע מלמעלה. וכן ידיעת השלטון בימים הקדמונים וקרבתו רחוק היה מאד להנצל ממנה בעולם הזה והיא מפסדת אמונתו כי לא ישגיח בדבר רק במה שיקרבהו אליו ואתה יודע ענין דואג ואע”פ שהשליט אשר קרב אליו דואג היה משיח השם ונביא ובחיר השם יתברך.