Survivorship Bias?
“Doing Kiruv isn’t harmful. I can prove this from my own experience!”
How many times have you heard this?
Year: 2021
Government: The Fantasy of ‘Something for Nothing’
The fallacy was created with vaccines… That you could get all the benefits (lifelong immunity) with none of the challenge/work.
It’s a lie we’ve been sold for a very long time.
The lives we’ve lived were built on the back of the slave labor in China, Africa, and so on…
When communism/dictatorship/tyranny took over the world, we shook our heads and said nu nu nu… But we also gave over our industry to those countries and the slave labor they created for us.
We nó longer needed to think about others… Their pain and suffering. It was bigger than us… There was nothing we could do… So we continued to finance these regimes until everything was “made in China.”
We made jokes and comedy shows about it… But we kept buying.
All the rewards and no work. We committed atrocities that we never would have alone until Big corporations made it easy/possible for us. We could always shift the blame.
And we did. Hashem save us, we did.
China started to buy up our land… The whole world. Tnuva is owned by China… Haifa Port…
We stayed silent.
We wanted democracy, a rule of the people by the people for the people. But we wanted it without work and responsibility.
We decided it was the elected officials’ responsibility. Is it any wonder they started taking advantage of our trust… And the fact that we were never going to check up on their work beyond a cursory glance every 2-6 years.
We turned off our own critical thinking eons ago.
There was no need to think beyond putting the politician in office. And even then, we could merely align ourselves with a party and be given a “cheat sheet” before every election to tell us who to vote for.
We outsourced more than “made in China.” We outsourced our own children to public education. A factory, cookie-cutter institution.
Weren’t we supposed to teach our children a trade? Wasn’t it one of the 613?
Now, nó one leaves school with a trade. No. They need University. And sometimes even then, it’s not enough. Raising our own children is hard. We wanted something for nothing.
We outsourced birth. We outsourced our knowledge of healing. All the rabbinical degrees about doctors applied to the herbalists. Those were the doctors, those who lived in harmony with the seasons of HaShem’s earth… Who used medicines created for us by Hashem (how many times is it written that the herbs are for healing in our holy texts?!) and we allowed our governments to align with a new medicine. They burned the herbalists and midwives that we praised as Jews for millennia! (Shifra and Puah, anyone?) We vilified the people who kept the old (Torah sanctioned) ways. We pulled a switcheroo with the new Rockefeller Western Medical Model. The one that brought in animal studies, cadavers, Mengele, may his name be blotted out.
We turned the other cheek. We fed off the suffering of others again. Something for nothing.
This false Moshiach made a few healing, a few miracles. How quick and how fast they could heal. What fancy ventilators! We shifted our trust. We wanted all the benefits with no work, so we lowered our standards.
We corrupted ourselves, claiming all this was a gift from Hashem, all the while destroying the earth, the medicine and food Hashem created for us, and the keepers of HaShem’s wisdom.
We wanted ease. We sold our souls.
(Wise words from a friend)
דברי הרה”ק העטרת צבי מזידיטשוב בענין אדמו”רים המאחרים זמן תפילה
מתוך ספר “סור מרע” שהבאנו קודם:
ובפרט אם ראית אשר הרב עושה לעצמו איזה דבר שלא כדרך התורה, כגון אם מאחר זמן התפלה ומשנה הזמן שקבעו החכמים לכל דבר שבעולם לכל המעשה, אפילו זמן סעודת תלמידי חכמים, הגם שהרב הוא צדיק ומפורסם, לא תעבור אתה על דברי תורה ודברי חכמים ח״ו, אפילו על תנועה אחת, והרב הצדיק שעושה באפשר הוא בהוראת שעה, ואפשר לפי מזג גופו וכחו הוא עושה על פי משקל בריאותו, וצריך אתה לדונו לכף זכות וחלילה ח״ו להרהר אחריו, אבל אתה לא תעשה כמעשהו נגד התורה עד שתשא ותתן עמו על מה ולמה הוא עושה כן, וכאשר יורה לך טעם על פי התורה ויסביר לך הדבר ויכנסו דבריו באזניך אחר שתחקור בענין, אז תאמין, וזולת זה לא תאמין, אפילו יאמר לך שקבל מאליהו אל תאמין לו ולא תשמע לו, וכבר אמרו אם יבא אליהו ויאמר חולצין וכו׳ אין שומעין לו [יבמות קב.], ואפילו נגד תקנת חכמים בלבד לא תשמע לו, תהלה לאל יתברך שמו בעלי גילוי אליהו האמתיים כמו בעלי הזהר והרמב״ן וחביריו והאר״י ז״ל והבעש״ט לא אמרו לנו דבר אחד נגד דברי הגמרא בתלמוד אפילו כל שהוא, לכן אחי הזהר בזה, וזה הוא תכלית נושא ונותן באמונה, ובזה שלום לך.
Reifying ‘Foreign Aid’
Stop saying we gave billions to Afghanistan in your commentaries. We gave billions to Lockheed and Raytheon and Blackwater and politicians and warlords
How to Help a Yeshiva Bachur Who Doesn’t Want to Learn
Excerpt from an article by coach Rabbi Shmuel Brody:
After working in the mental health field for over twenty years, I realized that the hardest thing to convey to people is the importance of being with their children. In general Jews are extremely intelligent and intellectual. This is great, but it can be detrimental when working with our young men. Some parents and educators think that if they just present the boys with the right information—shalom al yisrael—mission accomplished. But the boys need much more than this. They need people to sit with them through their fears and loneliness. Only after a long period where all of the young man’s feelings are accepted can the young man himself accept them and realize that he’s normal. This type of education is experiential, not intellectual.
Some naysayers claim that validating someone’s feelings gives them the excuse to not learn. “I don’t have to push myself to learn, even so-and-so agrees that I’m having such a hard time!” But my experience has shown me the opposite. If you can look someone in the eye and say, “I hear what you’re saying, and I’m with you” (and mean it!), you can almost immediately say, “Ok, now go learn geshmak.” Since they got what they needed, they’ll do it.
I recommend his whole four-part series “Understanding Our Sons”, parts One, Two, Three, Four.