העורך Editor

And quotes “Mizrachi.org“, no less. I just knew it!

Here’s an excerpt:

Unsurprisingly, the longer you live in Israel, the harder it becomes to relate to those who choose to live in exile. And so it’s not shocking that every few weeks another article written by an exasperated oleh appears on Arutz Sheva, excoriating Diaspora Jews for not returning home. The arguments are familiar: “Jews in America have no future! How can they be blind to the sky-high assimilation rates and rising antisemitism?!” “They are repeating the failure of the Babylonian Jews who refused to return to Israel and build the Beit HaMikdash!” Some frustrated olim have gone so far as to pick fights on social media, accusing people of making South Florida the “new Jerusalem” and hypocritically praying for the building of Jerusalem three times a day while expanding their synagogues in the Diaspora.

I agree with many of these points. I also believe that G-d is sending us all a clear message to come home. But it is also obvious that attacking Diaspora Jewry has achieved little more than resentment and frayed relationships, counterproductively making it harder for Jews living in exile to absorb the teachings of Religious Zionism. Telling an older woman that she should make Aliyah now, since “you don’t want to make Aliyah in a box,” as someone recently told my friend’s mother (really!), likely won’t have the desired effect. People don’t appreciate being yelled at – even if you’re making a fair point.

How, then, can Religious Zionists encourage more Jews to come home? What is the best way to convey our message? The answer can be found by looking backwards, to a time when Am Yisrael was still young in the Land and struggled with many of the same challenges we face today.

…

“Elkana used to go up to Shiloh… His wives and sons, the members of his household… came up with him. On the way he would camp out in town squares… Wherever they went, people would notice them and ask, ‘Where are you going?’ ‘To the house of G-d in Shiloh,’ [Elkana would reply]. ‘Why don’t you come with us and we shall go up together?’ Thereupon [the people] would shed tears and say, ‘We shall go up with you.’ The following year five households would go up, the next ten, and the year after, all would assemble to go up… Elkana did not go up by the same route twice. Finally, all of Israel would go up to Shiloh” (Tanna Dvei Eliyahu Rabbah 8).

Elkana didn’t rebuke his fellow Jews or look down upon them with condescension. He didn’t grab the pulpit in local synagogues or stand on a street corner to castigate the townspeople for abandoning the Mishkan. Instead, he simply traveled from town to town, and when people asked him where he was going, he shared his excitement about going up to the Mishkan. “We are going to G-d’s house; it would be great if you came with us!” Elkana’s passion for the Mishkan, combined with his overflowing love for his fellow Jews triggered powerful, deep-seated emotions among the people. Their cynicism and disillusionment melted away, and they broke down in tears.

I suggest reading the rest…

Thanks to the dear scholar who sent this our way!

You know the old joke about reading Der Stürmer to hear the good news, right?

All I see is Rabbi Shraga Kallus. So, I need to start believing the goyim!

Quoting Al Jazeera (bolding added):

Jordan has been the official custodian of Christian and Muslim holy places in Jerusalem since 1924. Following the Third Arab-Israeli War, when Israel seized the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan in 1967, Israel accepted the continuation of this status quo agreement, which states that while non-Muslims are allowed to visit the Al-Aqsa compound, they cannot worship or pray inside.

The arrangement at the time was uncontroversial. For hundreds of years, Jewish religious authorities issued strict prohibitions on Jews visiting the compound, on the grounds that they could accidentally defile the purity of the site. Until relatively recently, these bans were accepted by the overwhelming majority of Israel’s Jewish public.

According to Mordechai Inbari, a professor of religion at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, this started to change during the Oslo peace negotiations in the 1990s.

Fearing the Israeli government may at some point transfer sovereignty of Al-Aqsa over to the newly created Palestinian Authority, a committee of settler rabbis issued a ruling urging all rabbis who held the exceedingly fringe view that it was permissible for Jews to enter the Temple Mount to “ascend the Mount themselves, and to guide their congregants in ascending the Mount”.

Their reason for promoting a ruling that was supported by a very small minority was political: to encourage masses of Jews to enter Al-Aqsa to pray in order to establish facts on the ground that would make it harder for Palestinians to ever assume sovereignty over the site, Inbari tells Al Jazeera.

Since then, this movement, led by a small group of individuals from Israel’s so-called “national-religious” camp – who are often referred to as “Temple Mount activists” – has been enormously successful.

Over the years, there has been a meteoric increase in visits by Jews to the compound, with right-wing Jewish Israelis challenging the status quo with increasing resolve and frequency. Last year, these visits hit a record high, with about 50,000 religious Zionists visiting the holy compound.

Last year, a survey found that exactly half of Jewish Israeli respondents support allowing Jews to pray at the Al-Aqsa compound, or the Temple Mount, with most saying they support it because it would send a message about Israel’s control over the site, rather than for religious reasons.

During the last few years, Israeli police have begun allowing for daily prayers to be carried out in the compound, hinting at a dramatic change in the status quo. The police, who just a few years ago would have ejected any person suspected of praying or even possessing a Torah, now look on passively and provide protection to the worshippers if Palestinians, like the Murabitat, attempt to confront them.

An Israeli police spokesperson, however, denied any change in policy to Al Jazeera, stating that there have been “no changes to the status quo,” and that any non-Muslim who attempts to pray in the compound is “immediately detained”.

At the start of the year, Itamar Ben-Gvir, an outspoken supporter of Jews praying at Al-Aqsa, provocatively visited the compound days after being sworn in as Israel’s minister for national security, as part of the country’s newly formed government – considered the most right-wing in its history. It was one of the highest-profile visits by an Israeli official since then-opposition leader Ariel Sharon did so in 2000, which sparked the second Intifada.

But for the Temple Mount activists, this discursive strategy that has successfully garnered general support for Jewish prayer at Al-Aqsa is part of a larger plan to eventually demolish the Dome of the Rock and build a third temple in its place.

In a similar process that transformed Jewish worship at Al-Aqsa from a fringe religious position to one that is supported by half of Jewish Israelis, Temple Mount activists hope that as Jewish presence and worship become normalised at the holy site, the idea of building the third temple will likewise become acceptable to mainstream Israeli society in the future.

Amen to that!

Read the rest here…

J. B. S. Haldane 1892–1964, Scottish mathematical biologist: 

Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose…I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.

Rabbi Herschel Grossman’s original article:

Download (PDF, 285KB)

Response and Rabbi Herschel Grossman’s rejoinder:

Download (PDF, 18.5MB)

Reprinted with permission from “Dialogue”.

(For more background see here.)