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Tour de Force: Rafi Farber Gives Genuine Hope

The Reset Will Be On Our Terms, Not Theirs; Let the Bastards Drown in their Own Inflation

This is the speech I gave at Agenda 2030, Petach Tikva, Israel, March 18, 2024; Adar 8, 5784

RAFI FARBER

MAR 20, 2024

 

  • I gave this speech in Hebrew, but since I wrote it in English and then translated it, the original is actually in English.
  • I actually got a standing ovation when I finished, so I guess they were receptive.
  • This is a remix of things I’ve written in the past, with an Israeli/Jewish twist on it.

 

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Many of us in this room are afraid that the elites are going to take over the world completely. They already control medicine, academia, the school system, and pretty soon they’re going to sterilize us all and feed us bug powder through a tube (grasshopper powder for those who keep kosher, with kosher certification from a Yemenite Rabbi of course).

Yuval Noach Harari, may he live a long and peaceful life, the Gadol Hador (Titan of this Generation) of the Torah of the elites, is already talking openly about sticking sensors under our skin so the government knows exactly what we’re thinking at all times. The best part about that is if we crack the wrong joke or don’t take every injection they want us to take or if we even think the wrong thing, they’ll know about it, and they’ll cut our universal basic income of central bank digital currency for the month so we can only afford a half ration of bug powder while we watch our children we’re not even allowed to have, slowly starve to death for lack of bug sandwiches.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have good news for you. I want you to internalize it and understand it well. This is not going to happen. This is not a prediction. It’s just simple logic. Let me explain to you how I know this.

Please, my friends, think back to when you woke up this morning. How did you know what you’d have to do today? How did you know how much you’d have to work and how much you’d have to spend to basically keep up your standard of living? How did you even decide if you could afford coming to this conference? Basically, how did you happen to know exactly where you fit in to the division of labor that spans the entire planet and feeds every human being on Earth?

The answer is prices. Prices are the signal that tells every person in the world what he has to do in order to be part of global production. Without prices, everyone would wake up in the morning and they’d have no idea what they’re supposed to be doing. Very quickly, within a matter of days, there would be chaos, the zombie apocalypse, mass murder and mayhem.

But where do prices come from? When you woke up this morning, how did you know what prices were? The answer is that you remember what prices were, basically, from the day before, and if you don’t remember, you can ask someone or look it up. You knew yesterday from the day before that, and so on and so forth back into the past.

This, my friends, is what Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises called the Monetary Regression Principle. Many of you probably have never heard of Mises unless you are familiar with the Austrian School of economics. Mises was one of us. He was a Jew, a holocaust survivor in fact, but he was one of those survivors that the mainstream, including the propagandist rabble rousers at Yad Vashem, would rather you know nothing about. Mises opposed the power of the State and championed liberty and free markets. His greatest work was published just after he escaped the Nazis by the skin of his teeth.

Anyway, Mises’s Monetary Regression Principle is cold, hard, economic law. It is as inescapable as gravity. It is simple deductive logic. It says that there is no such thing as prices in a vacuum. Prices cannot simply be made up out of whole cloth. They need to flow from some prior source, all the way back to the origin of exchange itself. Otherwise, prices have no connection at all to what came before, and in that case they would convey no meaningful signal as to the supply of and demand for anything at all. The result would be, necessarily, the breakdown of the division of labor and the zombie apocalypse.

Now, tell me, my friends. What the hell is a “shekel”? When I ask people why the shekel has any value, the most common answer I get is along the lines of “people just agree on it”. As if there was some kind of Rousseauan social contract for money, some sort of colossal meeting at Israel’s biggest football stadium where everyone took a vote on a medium of exchange and then just distributed it amongst the population ex nihilo.

This never happened.

There is no monetary contract and there never was. There can never be a manufactured, top-down agreement that determines what will constitute money on planet Earth, ever.

True, people do seem to agree on the value of a shekel, but why? How? Where does this agreement come from? As I said before, it came from yesterday. Your “agreement” with everyone else today as to what a shekel is worth is based only on your extrapolation from that same agreement from yesterday.

And so on until we get all the way back to the invention of the New Israeli Shekel itself. How did that happen? Well, the old Shekel hyperinflated to nothing in 1984, and so the Bank of Israel issued a new currency in exchange for dollars from the Federal Reserve, and promised not to directly finance the Knesset’s deficit ever again, and the New Shekel came into existence based on and backed by the US Dollar.

The shekel, my friends, is just a derivative of – a substitute for – the US Dollar. That’s all it ever was. That’s what it is right now. The Bank of Israel issues the Shekel as its liability, and the Bank of Israel’s only assets are US dollars. Literally. Maybe a few Euros, but that’s it.

Now, we come to the next question. What the hell is a dollar? If we can answer that question, we can figure out what a shekel is.

The agreement about what a dollar is started long before the dollar was ever born. The word “dollar” was just like the word “gram” or “ounce”. Just like the word “shekel” means weight in Hebrew, literally, a dollar was simply a unit of weight of gold or silver. A silver or gold dollar was just a standardized coin that weighed one dollar. As for the paper dollar bill, it was born as a receipt for a dollar’s weight of gold or silver. It was the first dollar “derivative”, having “derived” its already agreed-upon value from a weight of gold or silver.

If you go back in time all the way back to when the dollar was born as a unit of anything, you will reach gold and silver. There is no avoiding it. The widespread agreement as to the value of a dollar today stretches all the way back to the agreement on the value of gold and silver.

But where did this agreement come from? A meeting? No, there was never any meeting on the value of precious metals.

What happened was people just started trading things for other things, which is better and more productive than murdering one another for stuff, generally speaking. In trading, they figured out that some things like gold and silver trade better. Why? It doesn’t really matter why, but it’s probably because they never go bad and you can divide them easily. And you can make them into stuff. Beautiful stuff. And so even if I don’t personally want gold or silver now for itself, the guy who I trade it with next seems to want it, and so I’ll keep it for now and exchange it for something else later because it works better than these goats, which smell bad and you can’t divide them without them trying to eat your pants and bleeding to death.

Eventually, someone down the chain of exchange will use the gold. Who cares who or why? The point is, if that were not the case, that somebody at some point will actually use the stuff, gold and silver would have no value at all.

Trade is an organic process that ferments and matures from the bottom up. “Money” is simply the word we use for “most liquid commodity available in a given economy”. In a prison it could be cans of fish or cigarettes. It doesn’t have to be gold and silver, but it does have to be the most liquid commodity available. Money is the commodity that changes value the least from day to day. It is the commodity that the most people in the world want to buy, and the most people in the world want to sell, all at the same time. The dollar began as a unit of weight for these most liquid commodities, gold and silver. Then something weird happened.

People realized it was much more convenient to trade around the receipts rather than the money itself, which is heavy and you can lose it. And so paper promises for dollars started circulating, and they became known as “dollars” themselves, even though they were only receipts for dollars, and not themselves dollars. This continued to morph into still more promises for those paper promises for money, what we call “bank deposits”, much more of which exist than actual paper dollars. And again, it continued to morph into what we call “debt” or “bonds”.

What the hell are those?

Debt, or bonds, are promises for bank deposits which are promises for paper receipts which are promises for money, which is gold and silver.

But it doesn’t stop there. Not even close. It keeps going and going. It is the Tower of Babel itself. It goes higher and higher and higher still, promises upon promises stacked upon promises for money, piled up to heaven in an increasingly unstable pile of garbage. And the foundation of that entire global tower is physical gold and silver. It has to be. Because of the Monetary Regression Principle, there is no other possibility.

What about Bitcoin? Isn’t that new? No, it is not. Again, how does anyone know how much stuff a bitcoin can buy? Because bitcoin attached itself to the existing dollar price array, and so did the shekel. What is a bitcoin then? It is simply the next layer of the Tower of Babel of dollar derivatives.

And what, my friends, is a central bank digital currency? If and when the bank of Israel hands us all our universal basic income in blockchain shekels and tells us we can all eat 2 kilos of grasshopper powder for the month with a Badatz hechsher by Rav Machpud, how will anyone know what a blockchain shekel can buy? Because the price array of blockchain shekels will feed off the existing shekel price array, and another layer of the same damned Tower of Babel will be put into place.

But at the base of this disgusting tower of evil, of derivative after derivative piled up to heaven, is physical gold and silver.

The shekel is a dollar derivative, and the dollar is still ultimately a gold derivative. It must be, or the chain back in time on which the entire agreement on the value of a dollar is based, collapses, and the division of labor breaks down. Meaning, you wake up in the morning and you have no idea what to do, and neither does anybody else. That’s a zombie apocalypse.

So what happened in 1971 then when President Richard Nixon supposedly “closed the gold window”? That was simply an admission that the statutory rate of $35 per ounce was a lie. There were too many money derivatives, and not enough money to redeem them all. But this doesn’t change the fact that the gold window is still open. For both the dollar and the shekel. For that reason alone, people still agree that the dollar has any value whatsoever.

But the gold window will not remain open for much longer. The dollar will go off the gold standard at some point, when nobody will accept any amount of dollars for any amount of gold or silver, not even at coin shops.

This is a scary prospect indeed, but it is also liberating, exhilarating, even cathartic. Because on that day, the entire massive engine of corruption that is poisoning every aspect of human society – medical, academic, military, nutritional, all funded by the inflation of the dollar and shekel supply, it will all end. All at once. My God, it’ll be beautiful.

When all the myriad layers of promises for money are dead and gone, the only thing left to maintain any semblance of a division of labor on Earth will be money itself – gold and silver. When all the promises for money are all revealed to be lies, literally all of the goods and services on planet Earth will be on offer for physical money, at rates so desperate that even the most hardcore of gold and silver collectors will be absolutely astounded.

Why? Because all currencies in the world today, without a single exception, are based on the US dollar, which is based on gold and silver, through the monetary regression principle. When the dollar falls, all currencies fall, including the shekel. In a world where currencies no longer work, there are no prices in currency terms, and so there can be no division of labor in currency terms. Therefore, the absolute most important thing in such a society is not food, and not water, but money.

Food and water are obviously important, but famines do not happen because there is no food. They happen because food cannot be distributed, because there is no money. The only way to establish any kind of division of labor in a world where currencies are dead, is to return to money itself. Prices will regress back to real money in terms of ounces of gold and silver, through the logic of the Monetary Regression Principle of Ludwig von Mises, the Jewish holocaust survivor they do not want you to know about.

Ladies and gentlemen, we live on a massive monetary Tower of Babel with our heads in the clouds. Most of us have no idea where we are, and the air is getting way too thin and it’s driving us insane for hypoxia. The Torah opens the story of the Tower of Babel with this verse:

וַיְהִ֥י כׇל־הָאָ֖רֶץ שָׂפָ֣ה אֶחָ֑ת וּדְבָרִ֖ים אֲחָדִֽים׃

“And the land spoke one language, and was concerned with singular matters.”

This is the first communist society. The first economic central plan. Nothing matters but singular things, not “one thing” which would be דבר אחד but “singular things” in the plural, דברים אחדים. You all will focus on these singular things or the government will kill you. Whether it’s the coronavirus, or “Judicial Reform”, or “Peace Now”, or – I’m sorry to say – “Bring them Home Now”. It’s all BS.

We are deep in it, my friends, high in the clouds, but God has promised that He will not let the evil elites take over the whole world. Never again. It is impossible, by His word, because of monetary regression. Their sick tower will collapse. And how will it collapse? Because in the end, as the dollar falls, and as the shekel falls with it, everyone will rush to gold and silver out of necessity, the base of the Tower itself, and knock it over once and for all.

If we picture the inverted pyramid, the Tower of Babel of our monetary system as an actual physical structure rather than strictly an intellectual concept, then to acquire an ounce of gold is to pile that pyramid with more and more dollars, with more promises, and at the same time hack away physically at the gold base supporting it all. Take a piece of that gold base while you still can. Keep it with you, and keep hacking away. Methodically. Intentionally. Consciously. And fully understanding the consequences, both good and bad.

At some point soon, very soon, the gold base of our pyramid will be thin enough that the entire thing will topple over. At that point, the elite can print as much currency as they want, but it won’t matter, because it will not have any gold or silver value. Any central bank digital currency will not be able to base itself on a dollar price array that no longer exists. The elites will lose control entirely, and it will be up to us to rebuild from the ground up. Those of us with real money we hold in our hands will be responsible for how the new world takes shape.

Rabeinu Sa’adya Gaon, from the period of the Gaonim (literally “The Greats”) just after the Talmud was finished, asks this basic question in his book “Beliefs and Opinions”. He asks why the Torah forbids theft. His answer is obvious. If theft were allowed, everyone would steal, nobody would produce, and eventually everyone, including the thieves, would starve to death.

You can have a society with thieves. They must be punished, yes, but society can survive some amount of theft. But a society based on the idea of theft itself as a good thing, that is bound to collapse, because eventually you will run out of stuff to steal.

Inflation, my friends – the act of printing currency that is a claim on money that does not exist – is itself theft, literally. There is no denying it. Our monetary system is based on theft, and therefore, according to Rabbi Sa’adya, and Moses and Mises, one who brought down the Torah from Sinai, and the other who explained Monetary Regression all the way back to Sinai and before, this society must collapse, the entire disgusting thing.

And it will. Just like the Tower of Babel. When it does, the elites will lose control of everything, and their central plan to have us eat bugs will fail completely. And it will be up to us to rebuild. We must be up to the task, because there is nobody else to do it.

How did Joseph the Righteous save the world in his day? By collecting silver. What did Moses our Teacher, the greatest prophet in history whose level of prophecy will never, ever be equaled and the closest man to perfection who ever existed, what commandment did he relay from God right before we left Egypt forever? The commandment to collect all the gold and silver in Egypt, and we emptied the whole damned country. Then God drowned all the murderous bastards for drowning our babies. I cannot wait until He drowns the elites in their own inflation. Please God, exact Your vengeance in our days.

All monetary pyramids of tyranny are based on gold and silver, and once we destroy that base by collecting it for ourselves, we destroy the entire evil machine. It will be dangerous, and it will be glorious, and it is inevitable anyway, and so it must be done by good people like us.

This, ladies and gentlemen is the monetary reset. And it will be on our terms, on God’s terms. Not theirs. Keep calm, keep stacking, and let’s finish the job.

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From The End Game Investor, here.

Rafi Farber’s Take on the Rise of Milei (And More)

I received Rafi Farber’s explicit permission to copy (and edit some of the language):

Here come lots of excerpts.

The election of Catholic-born anarcho-capitalist economist, with a dog named after Murray Rothbard, who learns with a Rabbi, to the Presidency of a hyperinflated country called “Argentina” (literally “The Land of Silver”), is just too weird and out-of-the-blue to put to chance. There is nothing sane about it.

Milei’s flogging of the World Economic Forum with an avalanche of completely unhinged economic truth was nothing short of a giddy pleasure. It was a haymaker right to the face, and the ultra elites at Davos have been stunned. They had no choice but to invite him. Not to invite him would have shown weakness. To invite him means the megalomaniacs at least have a chance of coddling him to the point of brain death, as they do to everyone who crosses their gates to cartoon hell. But if they fail to suck out his soul, they risk sparking a contagion of glorious disobedience among the peasants and serfs around the world.

By the way, for an Austrian critique of the WEF, see Robert Murphy’s series here, continued here (the only one I know).
Funnily enough, the WEF themselves promote one of Murphy’s own books! (credit: Tom Woods)! And they didn’t even have to, unlike with Milei (saving face, as above).
Does that mean Murphy’s a plant? A double agent? A turncoat? No, it means the enemy is unsurprisingly incompetent, which reinforces the truth of both the foolishness of their presumptions and the futility of their global schemes. These conspiracies are shockingly incompetent above all else, as we explained in the past.
Rafi then goes on to criticize various aspects of the speech itself.
I love his explanation of capitalism and socialism (sure, I think “it’s more complicated than that”, but I notice myself saying that about EVERYTHING, so…).

When we use the term “capitalism” we have a loose set of concepts in our heads. In that sense, the word is a broad heuristic for a society that allows people to amass capital to a certain extent, and produce stuff with that capital. But capital is just stuff that allows people to produce other stuff better and more quickly. For example, if you want to knock someone unconscious, like Klaus Schwab let’s say, you could use your fist, but that would probably take a few swings at least, and you’d bruise your knuckles. Alternatively, you can channel “capitalism” and use capital, like a two-by-four. That piece of wood will knock Klaus right out without bruising your hand, and it might even kill him.

Hmm, is choosing Klaus Schwab for “someone” a Freudian slip? Don’t think it qualifies as a “slip”, though.

There is no “ism” regarding capital. Man has used capital since homo habilis. Even apes use capital when they stick twigs in termite nests to crunch on those insects that eat two-by-fours professionally.

How do people amass capital? By not having it stolen.  If you have a society that doesn’t glorify stealing and rather punishes people who steal, then people can start amassing capital, making stuff, and trading it for other stuff. Industry is just bigger pieces of capital. There is no qualitative difference economically between a massive factory and a twig used to fish for termites. People figure out their talents, go to where they are most needed through a combination of price signals, predilection, and ability, and they start producing stuff. If that stuff is not stolen, it will be traded, and everyone then has more stuff.

If this goes on for long enough, meaning if people are allowed to make stuff and trade for other stuff without being robbed, then society becomes rich. If you want to call that “capitalism” then fine. I prefer to call it just. If, however, that stuff is stolen, people will stop producing it, and everyone has less stuff and becomes poor. If that goes on for long enough, everybody starves and dies, including the thieves. If you want to call that “socialism” then fine. I prefer to call it lawlessness.

Rafi deconstructs GDP and economic growth:

Milei spends most of the beginning of his speech talking about per capita GDP as a justification for capitalism. What’s “per capita GDP”? That’s some amount of units of money being exchanged by some unit of people in a given unit of time. This doesn’t indicate anything other than how many units of money exist in a society and how fast they circulate. In a hyperinflationary society, per capita GDP approaches infinity, as people struggle to exchange their monetary units instantaneously. Try to tell them that their per capita GDP shows they are all infinitely rich and they’ll whack you in the face with a two-by-four, if there are any left to whack you with.

Of course, in order to whack someone in the face with a two by four, you need capital. So you need to be “capitalist” to some extent.

The truth is, people in hyperinflationary societies are poor because their government glorified theft through inflation, citing “growth” in “per capita GDP” to justify it all the way down, until per capita GDP approaches infinity and everybody dies of starvation. People who are robbed are poor, regardless of GDP. It’s really not that complicated, unless you focus on made-up fairy-tale concepts like GDP.

Milei doubles down on this calculation from hell when he talks about “growth” accelerating to “3% a year” from 2000 to 2023, which just so happened to be the decades of maximum inflation. If GDP measures the amount of money circulating, and you print a ton of money units out of absolutely nothing, GDP is going to expand in those terms. When you think about it, it’s really dumb.  Who the hell cares, besides some high school dropout zit-encrusted bureaucrat paid a living wage via that very inflation, out of your pocket, to calculate the garbage GDP that justifies the salary he steals from you? Nobody cares. That’s who.

Even “growth” itself is not necessarily a good thing. “Growth” implies a rise in wealth, the ability to consume more, to satisfy one’s physical desires. But “growth” could also mean consuming less, like a morbidly obese man-whale who finally decides to lose weight so he can walk without crushing his own shins. Did he grow? Yes, because his quality of life is now much better, and if he wanted to, he could walk over and smack Klaus Schwab in the face with some capital. Still, he consumed much less, so is that a recession?

As the Rabbis of the Mishna say in Tractate Avoth, “The more flesh, the more worms. The more possessions, the more worries.” There is a downside to wealth, to “growth”, and that is, maintaining all you have becomes more and more difficult. We all want to climb higher, but the higher you climb and the faster you “grow”, the more prone you are to a psychological breakdown as a result of not handling the pressure and status and not being able to maintain it.

So, a two-by-four can serve as a great metaphor… I don’t agree with each word (especially the ones I left out here), but the ending is crucial:

But my Number One critique of Milei’s speech is not related to any of these mistakes. It is that he does not mention God anywhere. Milei comes from a Jewish/Noahide mindset, so he cannot be shy about it now. If he chooses to throw his lot in with us, with the Jews, to feely choose that danger and that magnifying glass, then he’s got to go the whole way.

Interestingly, though, he did quote Austrian School economist and Rabbi Israel Kirzner, a Talmud scholar, but Rav Kirzner, also, for some inexplicable reason, does not wear a kippah when speaking about economics. I never understood this.

The one thing the World Economic Forum does not have, for certain, is God. These people are the godless of the godless, rivaled only, maybe, by the secular Zionists who run the State of Israel. If we are going to defeat them, and we will, then we need to invite God into the battle. God will fight for us, if only we let Him.

And we will.

Amen! Rafi’s new domicile on Substack is here.

RAFI FARBER: You Can’t Pray to God If You Are Afraid of the State…

Take Off Your Mask And Remind The World Of Your Humanity

 rafifarber
Last Friday night, January 8, 2020, for the first time in my life, I prayed to my Creator. In a vacuum, it’s a strange statement to make for me because I’m an Orthodox Jew who “prays” three times a day. But I never really knew what that meant until Friday night. Here’s my story of how it happened.

I hate masks. I hate them so deeply it’s impossible to put it into words. But I’ll try. When I see a mask it’s like a gut punch to my soul. In Hebrew, the word for soul, Neshama, is the same as the word for breath – Neshima. It has the same root. According to Genesis, when God gave the first man life, he breathed life into none other than his face. Life is breath. It is a Divine kiss from the Creator.

It’s so obvious now that masks do absolutely nothing health-wise against this virus that it’s not worth repeating. What masks are – their entire essence – is pure dehumanization. You order someone to cover his face, and you are telling him to cover his humanity, to hide his soul. If you cannot see someone’s face you cannot see what they’re feeling or thinking. You can’t see them smile or frown. They become blank. You can still say words to people, but you can’t really communicate.

I know dehumanization when I see it. I know it well. Whether it’s a yellow Star of David on your chest, a tattooed number on your arm, stripping you of all clothing and shaving your head, or a damn mask right across your soul, it’s all the same thing. Your rulers see you as less than human. They always have. Now it’s just more obvious. To some of us at least. You are not a person. You are now simply a vector for disease.

I live in Israel. It’s a complete, absolute mess here. We are on our third lockdown, our children are becoming progressively emptier, people are committing suicide from the loss of their lives, their families and their livelihoods, and Israel is supposedly “leading the world” in mass experimental vaccination against this nothingness, as if Jews are once again lab rats for the testing of Dr. Mengele’s insane proclivities. No, I am not an antivaxer. My kids are vaccinated with the standard complement. But I know what this is. This is mass experimentation on human lives and I will not be part of it.

Leave it to the political Zionists to be proud of something completely crazy like this and broadcast it to the world as if it’s some kind of great accomplishment. They always do that, the political Zionists. Look for bragging rights like some snot-nosed kid who just knows that he’s a singularity of pure infinite awesomeness when he doesn’t realize everyone else knows he’s just a little nothing pisher.

Last Friday Jews read the first portion of the book of Exodus. In Hebrew, the name of the book is Shmot, or simply Names. “These are the names of the children of Israel who came down to Egypt,” the book begins. Then it lists all their names. Why? We already know their names from Genesis. The answer is that the book begins by emphasizing their humanity. Their individual names as people. They are about to be the victims of vastly expanding state power and mass murder. They are about to be gradually enslaved to the point where they will be forced by the state to drown their own baby boys in the Nile. But they all have names for the love of God. Do not forget that, begins the book of Names.

I am working on a serious personal project right now. It is a libertarian commentary on the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, gathering all relevant liberty sources from the medieval Rabbinic commentators. I’ve been stuffing notes in the margins of my holy books. I am calling the work “Liberty on the Tablets”, or in Hebrew, “Herut Al HaLuchot”. My books are now covered with beautiful highlighting in different colors.  One color for points of economics, principles of ownership and property and such. Another color for issues of State power and points of political philosophy. It’s going well, thank God.

In this portion, I came across a hauntingly beautiful comment by Nachmanides. He notes, among other commentators, the peculiarity of Exodus 2:1-2. The decree to murder all Israelite baby boys is now in force at this point. The verses read, “A man from the house of Levi went and married a daughter of Levi. She became pregnant and gave birth to a boy, and she saw that he was good so she hid him for three months.”

What’s the peculiarity exactly? Simply that this is about the birth of Moses, and Moses was the third child of Yocheved and Amram of Levi, not the first. Miriam was the first born. Aaron the second. Moses was the youngest. So on the face of it, this verse doesn’t make any sense. The simple explanation, the pshat as the Rabbis call it, is that the births of Miriam and Aaron are simply skipped here because they are not relevant to the story. Yocheved and Amram were married beforehand, and this is not exactly purely chronological.

But there is another possibility, a deeper explanation, the so-called exegetical drash. That is, this is actually speaking of the remarriage of Yocheved and Amram. What happened, say the Rabbis, is that Yocheved and Amram initially separated in despair when the government decree to murder all baby boys came into force. They couldn’t bear the risk of having another baby and so they got a divorce.

Here is where Nachmanides comes in and quotes the Talmud. The Talmud in Tractate Sotah tells the story that Miriam, the oldest, was the one that insisted her parents get back together and have another kid. Miriam was a prophetess, and she foresaw that their next baby would save Israel. But not only did she insist. She made a small wedding party for her parents. She made a wedding canopy, and they went through the wedding ceremony all over again. And Miriam and her then two-year-old brother Aaron, too young yet to understand what was even going on, danced and danced with happiness around their parents in the midst of this terrifying and crushing despair and fear.

Because of this defiant party and this happiness, Israel was redeemed, says the Talmud. I highlighted that one with two colors earlier in the week, thinking of defiant dancing and parties and happiness in the midst of evil lockdowns against life itself.

I have a tradition in my family that I dance with my kids to a Sabbath song Jews sing on Friday night called Lecha Dodi, after I come home from synagogue. It’s a poem about welcoming the Sabbath as if she is a beautiful bride and we are all getting married to her. It is probably the most famous poem about the Sabbath ever written.

So last Friday night, I leave my house and I immediately break the law the moment I pass my gate. I do not wear a mask, of course. Ever. So I head to the only place where I can sit and pray with other Jews without being harassed about my exposed face, my exposed breath, my exposed soul that everyone can see and that I proudly show to everyone. It’s an outdoor quorum of Chabad Lubavitch Hasidic Jews. We are not allowed to pray inside anymore. I am not a Chabad Hasid, but these are the only ones who leave me alone unmasked and don’t give me dirty looks, God bless them.

One Chabadnik gets up and starts giving a Dvar Torah, a point on the Torah portion. This Jew, I notice, was not wearing a mask. It was beautiful. He asks a simple question. “Who were the ones throwing the babies into the Nile?” Good question. Who, actually, physically, picked up these newborn baby boys and threw them into the Nile river to die? He quoted the Lubavitcher Rebbe of course, who said that it was the fathers who did the horrible deed.

Why the fathers? Simple. They were making a logical calculation. Either they kill their own sons, or their whole family gets murdered by the government. You can’t really fault them. It makes sense. The same thing is happening now. We are all killing our children with these lockdowns, he says. Sitting them in front of screens all day, depriving them of life, killing them slowly, because we do not want to get fined and shamed by the sick Israeli taskmasters.

Until someone puts his foot down and says “Enough!” this will not stop. If you think the “vaccine” is going to do it, you are deluding yourself. And I thought back to Miriam, insisting her parents get remarried and have another baby, and the defiant wedding party she threw her parents, and how Moses was born. Enough. I thanked him for his words. They were beautiful. We then begin the Friday night service.  A few minutes later, we are about to begin the Lecha Dodi poem about the Sabbath bride.

Now, there happens to be a bad guy who lives on that very street we are praying on. This guy is completely rabid nuts about masks. He poses as a religious Jew, dressed in Sabbath clothing with a hat and long coat kaputteh and the whole shebang. (I wear a black leather jacket.) This guy calls the police on anyone he can identify who is not wearing a mask. I know him. He knows me. As Lecha Dodi is about to begin, I see this guy walking down the street, eyeing us. Most in the quorum are wearing masks. Then he sees me. I am not. We make eye contact. And Lecha Dodi begins. My wedding song I dance to with my kids about the Sabbath bride, begins.

I’m not a big dancer, not in public at least. All of the sudden, almost as if not even by my own volition, I feel my legs starting to take steps towards this man. I cannot stop them. Step after step, my legs pull me to him inexorably. I do not know what I’m doing exactly. I have no plan. Our eyes are still locked in eye contact. I cannot tell what he’s thinking, of course, because he has a mask on.

Then I start singing loudly as Lecha Dodi goes on, right at him. He starts walking along in the middle of the street. So I follow him, singing louder. And then I start jumping. And dancing in circles around him while singing Lecha Dodi as loud as I can as he walks down the street. I know everyone is looking at me, and everyone else is singing, too. I’m clapping, jumping as high as I can, singing at the top of my lungs along with everyone else cheering me on, though I am the only one dancing around him. I must have done 10 laps around the guy at least. A furious, ecstatic wedding dance and I just cannot stop myself.

He gets to his house and I break off, sitting down in a chair on the sidewalk, out of breath. Lecha Dodi is over and people shake my hand and pat my back. I’m wondering whether I did the right thing. I’m having doubts now. What happens now?

Then the next part of the evening service begins. This part is called Ma’ariv. There is a part within it called the Amidah, or “The Standing” where the worshipper begins by taking three steps forward into the presence of God, and prays silently, feet together, with everyone else in the group, taking three steps back when finished. During the Amidah, one is forbidden to talk or move or even signal to anyone. The Amidah is a conversation with God and must be completed without any interruption.

Ma’ariv begins, so we have only a few minutes until the Amidah begins. A few minutes pass and I see a police car turn on to the street. That mask fiend, dressed as a religious Jew, obviously broke the Sabbath to call the police on me. A religious Jew can only break the Sabbath when lives are literally at stake, mind you.

Right before the policeman gets out of the car, the few people without masks quickly slap them on. Except for me. I never carry one. I know exactly what’s about to happen now.

He walks towards me. He’s about 30 seconds away from me now. And we have about 30 seconds untilthe Amidah begins. My heart is thumping. Did I do the right thing? Or did I do something stupid? I lock eyes with the policeman. He reaches me. 15 seconds.

“Put a mask on,” he says.

I nod no. You can still nod signals until the Amidah begins.

“Corona!” he yaps.

I stare at him.

“I’m talking to you!” he barks. 10 seconds. I keep staring. Heart hammering.

“Then move to the side,” the cop barks again. “Don’t be next to anyone.” The guy next to me moves away. I stand completely still, staring the cop down.

And then I felt what I can only describe as a Divine shield falling all around me, protecting me, blocking the cop completely out. I knew at that moment that I had done, and was doing, exactly the right thing.

The leader of the prayer group then chants, “Amen,” signaling that the Amidah will now begin. I take one last look at the cop. I close my eyes. And I take three steps forward into the presence of the God of Israel. And for the very first time in my life, I pray.

When I open my eyes, the cop is gone, and tears of happiness and relief are streaming down my exposed, unmasked face.

Everyone, all human beings with a soul, I call on you, I implore you. Don’t let them dehumanize you. Do not wear that yellow star like a slave. Take your masks off. Show the bastards you are a human being, that you have a face, that you have a name, that you have a soul, and that they will not succeed in destroying your humanity. And if you are on lockdown, get up. Get out there. And dance!

From The Jewish Libertarian, here.

Hamodia Forced to Mention Zehut and Rafi Farber!

As we noted in the past, it’s a sign of growth when those who try to avoid mentioning your existence are forced to do so anyway. Hamodia almost never mentioned Ron Paul in print and held out as long as they possibly could (see for yourself). Just like Yated (in both incarnations) Ham-Dia has a similar “blacklist” for a great many concepts and individuals. At the moment, for instance, Ham Magazine are writing an entire series attacking Kedushas Tzion‘s ideas, without bothering to name them.

This matters, because though every media organ pretends their consumers lack alternative sources of information, Hamodia’s audience very often does.

Now Hamodia was forced to mention Moshe Feiglin, Zehut and their “international” primaries, including Rafi Farber. This may lead some percentage of interested individuals to research further. I highly doubt it made it into the print paper as well:

Feiglin’s Zehut Gives Diaspora a Vote

The Jews of the Diaspora will soon have their first shot at a seat in the Knesset, with Moshe Feiglin’s Zehut Party, which has reserved a place on its electoral list for a candidate living abroad, The Jerusalem Post reported.

Feiglin, a former Likud MK, said he looks forward to the day when Jews around the world will have the right to vote directly for the Knesset; but meanwhile his party is arranging for the 250 Zehut members abroad to vote for a representative who will be No. 10 on the list. The candidate will be chosen in a special election on Sunday.

“This is important because it’s the first time anyone in Israeli politics gave practical expression to Israel being a Jewish state for all the Jews in the world, even those who have not yet made aliyah,” Feiglin said. “Frankly, I don’t think any other party is capable of thinking outside the box.”

However, as required by law, the candidates must be citizens and residents of Israel. The three people running are: former Uruguay chief rabbi Ben Zion Spitz, dog trainer David Sidman, and libertarian activist Rafi Farber.

Zehut currently has no seats in the Knesset, but the tenth spot on the list may not be as unrealistic as it sounds. A 2016 Maagar Mohot poll of 500 respondents of the Israeli Jewish population sponsored by Zehut, found that the party could win 12 seats. However, media-sponsored polls routinely do not include Zehut in their research.

While Feiglin is national-religious, the party’s composition and appeal is much broader. Supporters and potential supporters defined themselves along the spectrum from right to center and even left wing. Most said they are not religious.

Feiglin’s strategy is to take votes from disaffected Likud voters and weakly identified Yesh Atid voters.

The party advocates keeping the entire land of Israel in any peace agreement with the Palestinians, favors a free economy, smaller government and vouchers for education.

Moshe Feiglin has a bit of Trump’s flair in forcing the media to cover him for free. In modern politics, that’s as good as winning, if not better.