מרי דוראי אמר לי זיל קטליה לפלניא

יהודי שמנהל כמה בתי אבות בארה”ב פנה לרב שמואל קמינצקי שליט”א בשאלה. מושל ניו יורק, אנדרו קואומו, דרש ממנהלי בתי האבות בעירו לקבל חולי קורונה, למרות הסכנה הנגרמת לשאר השוהים במקום (אשנים מבוגרים עם מחלות רקע). הרב קמינצקי הורה לו לסרב, מטעם רציחה. המושל איים על סרבנים באיבוד הרישיון עצמו, כלומר סגירת הבתי אבות שברשותו ואיבוד הפרנסה, ושוב הרב הורה לו לסרב בכל מחיר.

כאשר כחצי מהקרבנות בארה”ב, ובניו ג’רזי בפרט, באו רק מתוך בתי האבות, בבתי האבות של אותו יהודי לא מת אחד. (קואומו מנסה כעת להתכחש שנתן הוראה כזו מעיקרא)…

הסיפור הובא בעיתון משפחה (אנגלית) כאן.

Welcome Home: Rabbi Pruzansky Made Aliyah, For the RIGHT Reasons!

Aliya

Last week my wife and I made aliya after more than six decades of life in the United States. We are officially Israeli citizens, which affords me the right to criticize the Israeli government without being told to move here if I want to have a say, and the right to denounce American Jews for remaining in the fleshpots of the exile. But I’m going to hold off on both for the time being…

It would be easy to make Aliya if we were fleeing persecution but that is not the case, notwithstanding that rabbis have always been among the most persecuted Jews, and usually by other Jews. But that is not why. It would be easy to make Aliya if America had become unlivable, a place without a long-term Jewish future, and one can make a compelling argument that the handwriting is presently on the wall waiting to be read. Nonetheless, when I announced to the shul eighteen months ago that we would be making aliya in July 2020, the United States was peaceful and prosperous, President Trump was cruising to a (narrow) election victory, and pandemics, economic collapse and race riots were not even on the horizon. That we left amid all this turmoil in American life is a coincidence and not the proximate cause of our departure. In any event, “coerced Aliya” (running from something) is not as salutary or enjoyable as “voluntary Aliya” (running towards something). We are in the latter category in fulfillment of the verse in Shir Hashirim (1:4), “Moshcheini, acharecha narutza.” Pull me and I will run after You.

It would be easy to make Aliya if our children lived here – and two children already do, with grandchildren, but two still live in the US with grandchildren. We have experienced the range of emotions, of farewell and reunion, as can be expected. It would be easy to make Aliya if I was out of a job and had nowhere else to turn, but that would also be untrue. I could have stayed. It was a l’chatchila choice (ab initio, even granting the long time abroad), not a b’diavad (post facto).

Politically, it turns out to have been a lateral move. I went from one country (the USA) where leftists and anarchists are daily and violently protesting the government’s failure to deal effectively with the Coronavirus and where the media elites despise the head of government to another country (Israel) where leftists and anarchists are daily and violently protesting the government’s failure to deal effectively with the Coronavirus and where the media elites despise the head of government. Like I said, a lateral move.

So why make Aliya now? And the simple answer is: it was time. Personally, professionally, and ideologically, it was time to make the move that is the mandate and destiny of all Jews.

For one thing, the future of the Jewish people is in Israel rather than anywhere in the exile. If the events of the last few months (or century) have not demonstrated that, then nothing will ever be sufficiently convincing. The exile is drying up around us. More Jews live today in Israel than in the rest of the world combined. Moreover, after millennia of persecution, punitive measures, and harsh restrictions directed against Jews generally and specifically those who wanted to dwell in the land of Israel, today there is no Jew in the world living in a country from which he or she cannot freely emigrate and come live in the land of Israel. And if there are (Cuba?), there are just a relative handful. That is a divine gift.

It was time to be a player in the grand game of Jewish life rather than just a highly interested and vocal spectator. And I do not doubt that for all the dedication of rabbis, teachers and professional leaders in the Jewish world – and for all the vast investments in Jewish infrastructure that makes the United States such a hospitable and pleasurable exile – life in the exile is a holding pattern. We are trying to hold on to something – powerful in its own right and indispensable for almost two centuries – that cannot be sustained in perpetuity. We are not building as much as we are trying not to fall. We are walking on a ledge rather on solid footing. And now this is true not only spiritually but also physically and politically.

Few will deny that America has experienced two terrible traumas in the last five months, both unpredictable but both bearing an imprint that will leave a long term mark on American life. The Coronavirus pandemic exposed the greatest vulnerability in America today: the polarization that is itself an epidemic. The hatred of the President has reached self-destructive proportions, in which his legion of political and media enemies would rather see the country collapse further than recover even gradually. The tirades about Trump’s failures to halt the pandemic or economic dislocation are vociferous, and inversely proportionate to the suggestion of any alternative plan or approach. It is particularly unctuous, which is to say typical of politics at its worst, to criticize every policy without offering even a hint of how you would have done it differently or better. So they do what politicians love doing – printing money and claiming credit for distributing it to the voters, and trying to WIN at all costs.

What is most damaging to American society is the growing notion among the elites – not the mob of racists and anarchists – that America was conceived in sin, nurtured in criminality and has no redeeming value. In the turbulent 60’s, the elitist institutions protected themselves against the anarchists. Today, the corporations, media and universities join hands with anti-American anarchists to stifle liberties like freedom of speech, assembly and worship in the name of some higher dogma, and routinely purvey lies, untruths and distortions of reality – in order to both protect and encourage the anarchists and, it can’t be denied, win an election. “Systemic racism,” all the rage today, is an indictment without any possible defense (to defend against it is itself racist); it is a cudgel more than it is a complaint.

Opposing sides that no longer share common values, a definition of truth or reality or even rules of speech cannot interact. When one side of a debate is perceived by the other not just as wrong but as evil and immoral, public discourse ends and mob rule begins. That the mob now rules – anarchists destroying private or government property, assaulting innocent people in the streets, attacking the police, “canceling” those who disagree with them (the latter, woefully predicted by Orwell) – will only be tempered and then only momentarily if President Trump is defeated in November. And if he loses by a whisker, amid allegations of voter fraud abetted by mail-in ballots, harvested ballots, forged ballots, and on line voting in key swing states, then all bets are off and the hostility will no longer be unilateral. And if Trump wins, as is eminently possible given the lies people tell pollsters and the fear of expressing public support? There will be even more violence. Uneasy times are ahead.

Jews should especially take note of this because we are in the unenviable position of being perceived as part of the privileged white establishment by the minorities who are now protesting across the country but not by the privileged white establishment itself who see Jews as outsiders. Jews will have no natural allies in the coming struggle, which will come as a shock to liberal Jews who think their liberalism and historic support for civil rights inoculates them from the disruptions ahead. The liberal Jew of old –tolerant, open, respectful, and supportive of even anathematic views like the right of Nazis to march in Skokie – is a dinosaur, because that type of liberalism has disappeared. The Democrat party of old, the church (or synagogue) of most modern Jews, no longer exists. It too pays obeisance to the leftist mob, and is unsympathetic to Israel and to the Jewish ethos, not that most Jews realize it.

In the best sense, none of that is a reason to move to Israel, although it might be the tipping point in people’s otherwise positive decision. Jews have an unblemished record of staying in the exile a bit too long and paying a heavy price for it. But more importantly, we all recognize certain basic truths about Torah and Jewish life. The long prophesied “Kibbutz Galuyot” (ingathering of the exiles) has not only occurred but is actually entering its final stages. Jews from over 130 countries today live in Israel. The return to the land of Israel, itself a biblical prophecy, is something that we now take for granted. Most Jews alive today cannot envision a world without the Jewish state of Israel. Even in quarantine (where I now find myself, in escalating tedium, life on hold), I realize that centuries of Jews would have given their right arms to be able to quarantine in the land of Israel.

It is not without its problems. As I am sure I will note in the coming years, many of the afflictions of the more modern, leftist, faddish elements of Orthodoxy, and its neo-Conservative offspring, exist here as well, along with the clamor for a more malleable mesorah and elastic morality. There is much to do here, especially in warding off the displacement of Jewish morality by Western morality. But these are the problems of growth, of building the future, rather than trying to preserve the past.

I feel blessed that I am able to be here, as I feel blessed to have succeeded in my careers in the exile. Even as a rabbi, I never hid the fact that Aliya was both a Torah value and an imperative, even if it was against my interest in saying so. I certainly don’t disparage the USA or its people, or my Jewish brothers and sisters there. I was the beneficiary of prior generations who not only built the wonderful Jewish community of Teaneck but who constructed the edifice of American Jewish life that enabled survivors and refugees to rebuild Torah after the horrors of the Holocaust. For that, I will always be appreciative of America, its history, its aspirations and the haven it provided to Jews and others.

Nonetheless, we should not let our gratitude and nostalgia for the past cloud our vision of the present and future. With blessings from Israel!

From Rabbi Pruzansky’s Blog, here.

Sweden & America: A Tale of Two Countries

I Looked Up What Happened When Sweden Refused To Shut Down – They Were Right, We Were Wrong

Sweden’s Stunning COVID Numbers Show We Shut Down for No Reason at All

Sweden did it.

The Nordic country defeated COVID-19 without seeming to break a sweat — fever-induced or otherwise. They effectively showed that Fauci & Co. were completely wrong about a shutdown being necessary to save civilization as we know it.

While that accomplishment should be lauded and their efforts duplicated around the world, the media has instead chosen to blast the Nordic state and paint a dismal picture that simply doesn’t exist.

A few examples (among many, many others) are below:

CBS News declared: “Sweden becomes an example of how not to handle COVID-19.” Similarly, the University of Virginia Health System issued a news release titled: “Lack of Lockdown Increased COVID-19 Deaths in Sweden.”

Taking a stab at prognostication, Newsweek said: “Sweden COVID-19 Deaths Linked to Failure to Lockdown as Country Prepares for Second Wave.” Always eager to bravely embrace the status quo, The New York Times ran a piece headlined: “Sweden Tries Out a New Status: Pariah State.”

Finally, Business Insider reported: “Sweden’s coronavirus death toll is now approaching zero, but experts are warning others not to hail it as a success.”

It’s all awfully prickly from a leftist media that used to adore Sweden’s welfare state. The reason for the barbed headlines is simple — Sweden dealt with COVID-19 in its own way.

The country didn’t truckle to the tyranny of over-educated, under-experienced experts. It didn’t implement authoritarian policies designed as much to break spirits as to break the pandemic. And it didn’t turn its voters into quasi-prisoners.

In other words, Sweden responded more or less the way the rest of the developed world has responded to contagious diseases until 2020, which just happens to also be President Donald Trump’s re-election year.

What were Sweden’s results?

Well, first let’s consider American results brought to us courtesy of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, the establishment mediagovernment officials around the country and legions of panic-prone and morally superior “Karens.”

All around the country, the U.S. tried just about every imaginable combination of masklockdownquarantinecurfew and closures orders — up to and including literally refusing entry across some state lines to certain fellow Americans.

The results were, well, not what anyone wanted. As of Saturday, the U.S. coronavirus death rate was 3.35 new deaths per million per day (based on a seven-day rolling average), which ranks as the 11th worst rating on the planet, according to Our World in Data.

And remember, thanks in large part to the Andrew Cuomo nursing home/death camp model of virus containment, New York state accounts for more than a fifth of all U.S. COVID-19 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins data. So we’re probably getting dragged down a little in the ratings by the disproportionate number of deaths in that state.

What else has America’s scattershot, but mostly heavy-handed, response yielded? If you read The Wall Street Journal, you will learn it led to anywhere between 30 million and 40 million lost jobs. (Some of those workers have no doubt been rehired as parts of the economy reopen, but millions more haven’t. And economists don’t really know how many of those job losses are permanent.)

So we destroyed constitutional rights, shed a few dozen million jobs and watched tens of thousands of people die. Oh, and we turned Americans against each other, all the way from the state to family levels.

But at least gross domestic product didn’t take it too hard, right? Not exactly. Commerce Department numbers released Thursday revealed that the U.S. economy shrank by a record 32.9 percent last quarter in what Bloomberg called the “sharpest downturn since at least the 1940s.”

So what about those rebellious Swedes? The ones who refused to play ball with all-knowing scientists and a ridiculously tunnel-visioned medical establishment?

While much of the rest of the developed world drowned themselves in hand sanitizer, locked ankle monitors onto their citizens and bought super cute masks on Etsy, the stalwart Swedes pressed on.

They lived their lives.

They didn’t mandate masks. They didn’t turn into NKVD-aspiring Karens, eager to publicly shame or quietly narc on neighbors, friends and family who dared bare an uncovered nostril.

Sweden defied the (dare we say) scientific consensus and has performed exceedingly well compared to the U.S.

As of Saturday, Sweden had registered 0.65 deaths per million per day, based on a seven-day rolling average.

Trading Economics projects a second-quarter GDP change of -4.2 percent (and a third-quarter growth of 2.4 percent). Depending on your preferred method of calculation, we could casually say that’s 7.8 times better than what the U.S. saw last quarter.

As of June 18, Statista forecast a 2.6 percent drop in Sweden’s employment rate for 2020. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, meanwhile, reported unemployment in the U.S. shot up 11.2 percentage points from 3.5 percent in February to 14.7 percent in April, before dropping a bit to 13.3 percent in May and 11.7 percent in June as parts of the economy reopened.

Now we’re not going to be like the dogmatic pro-mask Stasi here. There are lots of factors that impact the difference between U.S. and Swedish outcomes. We can’t say with 100 percent certainty that Sweden’s refusal to lock down saved their economy or is responsible for the miraculously low death rate.

But it would also be foolish to say that the decision didn’t play some role in the different outcome.

We can all learn two significant lessons from how COVID-19 responses have played out in the U.S. versus Sweden.

First, it is clear that the expert class in America whom the left appeals to at every turn (aren’t you sick of hearing “scientists say” or “experts find”?) is worth substantially less than we pay them.

Continue reading…

From The Western Journal, here.

Bottom Line: There Will Be No Recovery!

Donald Trump Can Ensure a V-shaped Economic Recovery by Heeding Lessons of 1921

A “U” or a “V”? That is the question – whether the economic recovery from the Covid-19 shutdown will be a long drawn-out process, a wide, flattish “U”, or a sharp, upward-bound one, a “V”.

To best wrestle with this question, let us look back a bit at some economic history regarding recessions and depressions, focusing on the US. Is this of interest to those following the course of the Chinese economy? Of course. When the US sneezes, China catches a cold. And, of course, the opposite is true as well.

Right now, the political relationship between these two countries has soured. But this will not, hopefully, always be true. In any case, economic law still operates, no matter what are the diplomatic relationships between nations.

The depression in 1921 was short-lived – maybe not a V, but at least a very narrow U. It was created by prior governmental monetary mismanagement, which led investors, as if by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” to engage in more long-term capital goods investments than the voluntary saving investment decisions of the populace would warrant, based on their time preference between present and future consumption.

Happily, during the 1921 depression, the government of president Warren G. Harding did not intervene with monetary stimulus, and the entire episode was over not in a matter of weeks (the V) or years (a fattish U), but months (a narrow U).

The Great Depression, which stretched from 1929-1941 (a morbidly obese U) stemmed from identical causes. Here, I am subscribing to the Austrian analysis of Ludvig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, not the Milton Friedman monetarist explanation of a lowered stock of money in the 1930s.

But presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt “fixed” this by propping up heavy industries whose extent was overblown by the previous artificially lowered interest rates, in an early “too big to fail” paroxysm. The Smoot-Hawley tariff  added insult to injury, and put the kibosh on any early recovery.

The blunder of 2008 also stemmed from unwise governmental policy. In 1992, the geniuses at the Boston Federal Reserve implied that the banking system was racist, since banks were more likely to reject mortgage applications by blacks and Hispanics compared to whites.

Rather, in my view, their favourite colour was green: the ranking in terms of credit reliability and collateral determined lending practices.

But the US Department of Housing and Urban Development contributed to the eventual crisis by diverting mortgages; billions of dollars were improperly diverted into the housing market. Only when bankruptcies were finally allowed did we escape from that debacle. Call that a fattish, but not an obese, U.

This brings us to present considerations. As an Austro-libertarian, I see government failure as the cause of virtually all depressions, and we are certainly in one now. However, I am forced to admit an exception to this general rule. The depression of 2020 is a product of some very vicious little virus critters, not the state apparatus.

I now predict the sharpest of Vs, but if and only if, all other things being equal, the Trump administration cleaves to market principles. First, and perhaps most important, stop paying people more to stay home from work than the salaries they can garner from their employers.

It is beyond me why US President Donald Trump ever agreed to any such a scheme in the first place.

Does he not want to win the election  in November? Does he not realise that a fast recovery, a V, will help him inordinately in that regard? Does he not realise that if people do not get back to work, there will be no recovery at all?

Continue reading…

From LRC, here.

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