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Making the Case for the Beis Hamikdash

Building the Beis Hamikdash

Monday, 25 July 2016

Active or Passive?

From the beginning of modern Zionism (and possibly before, depending on what you call ‘modern’) there was debate in the Jewish world as to whether we must wait for redemption from exile, or whether we should play an active role. After the establishment of the State of Israel this debate seems less relevant, as very few would advocate for disbanding it.

However, with regard to the Beis Hamikdash this debate remains extremely relevant. Should we be doing whatever is necessary physically to facilitate its rebuilding, or is it enough to rely on our constant davening together with teshuva for the sins which caused its destruction in the first place?

Although the question is definitely similar to the one debated years ago in regard to the State of Israel, there is one major facet to that debate that is not relevant here. The main objection that some had to establishing the State, and still have to celebrating its establishment today, is the issue of collaboration with irreligious and anti-religious Jews. As there certainly are very few irreligious Jews interested in this, we naturally may have expected the proactive camp to be much larger here.

The reality is not like this, and we need to try to come to an informed decision as to whether this is correct from a Torah perspective. To do this we need to look at some of the reasons that have been given for this passive stance.

Is there a mitzvah?

One reason some have given is Rashi’s comment that the future Beis Hamikdash will descend from Heaven in fire.[1] What then is the point of us trying to build it ourselves?

This argument is flawed on two counts. Firstly, Rashi’s explanation is disputed by the Meiri,[2] and the Rambam says explicitly that the Mashiach will build the Beis Hamikdash.[3] Secondly, even from Rashi there is no proof that we are exempt from the mitzvah of building the Beis Hamikdash.[4]

According to all those who list the 613 mitzvos (Behag, R’ Saadiah Gaon[5], Rambam[6], Ra’avad[7], Ramban[8], Smag[9] and Sefer Hachinuch[10]) building the Beis Hamikdash is one of them. It is also undisputed that only mitzvos that apply for all generations are counted.[11] It seems improbable that Rashi would differ on this, and it certainly seems extremely problematic to exempt ourselves from something that so many consider to be a mitzvah without stronger proof.

Does the mitzvah apply now?

Some claim that there is a prerequisite to the mitzvah of building the Beis Hamikdash. The gemara tells us that the correct order is first to fulfil the mitzvah of appointing a king.[12]

Here too, they are wrong for two reasons. Firstly, although ideally we should indeed be appointing a king first, when this is not possible the mitzvah of building the Beish Hamikdash certainly applies. Not only is there no source that says that the order is an imperative, there are clear indications that this is not the case.

The second Beis Hamikdash was built approximately three-hundred years before the Chashmonaim set up their kingdom.[13] It is also explicit in the Yerushalmi that the future Beis Hamikdash will be built before the Davidic kingdom is re-established.[14] The suggestion that this was and will be based on an extraordinary ruling meant for the time only, is extremely difficult.

Chazal tell us that three nevi’im came out of the Babylonian exile, and their prophecies were needed to tell us about the altar and its place, that sacrifices could be brought before the Beis Hamikdash was rebuilt, and according to one view that the Torah should be written in Assyrian script.[15] There was no need for prophecy to allow the rebuilding of the Beis Hamikdash itself.

Secondly, even if the mitzvah of building the Beis Hamikdash does not apply yet, it is certainly meritorious to make all possible preparations for the time when it will apply. David Hamelech was told that he could not build the Beis Hamikdash,[16] but nevertheless dug the foundations.[17]

Physical danger

Another argument I have heard is that anything we do to upset our neighbours endangers human life, and this is sufficient reason to do nothing until the situation improves (presumably miraculously). As the question here is predominantly one of judgement and not of halacha I will be brief.

This issue extends further than to the Beis Hamikdash alone, but also to our control of the whole country. Simply put, in my mind it is clear that whenever we have been soft with those who are out to destroy us we have lost more lives, and the nature of these enemies is to run away when they are shown power. One example of this is M’aras Hamachpela, where we now have partial control thanks to the defiant efforts of R’ Levinger zt”l.[18] The security situation there is definitely far superior to what it once was.

Continue reading…

From Torah Clarity, here.

3 Reasons to Doubt COVID Vaccine Safety

Unassailable proof that the COVID vaccines are the most deadly vaccines in human history

Just for the record…Just because the FDA, CDC and the Public Health Agency of Canada have found no issues with the vaccines, doesn’t mean they are safe. Here’s unassailable proof they aren’t.

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We have to stop blindly trusting our trusted authorities that they are giving us good information. It isn’t warranted. We should always insist on hearing both sides of the story.

We should be extremely suspicious when not a single leading medical advocate of the vaccine is willing to debate a team of qualified scientists who disagree with the narrative.

For example, it is well known that Merck received approval from the FDA to give Vioxx to 2 year old children just 3 weeks before Merck pulled the drug for safety issues.

We’re doing it again now with our kids and this time the drug companies aren’t going to pull it even though there is compelling evidence is in plain sight of everyone.

Here are three pieces of unassailable proof that the COVID vaccines are the most dangerous in history and should be immediately pulled:

  1. The VAERS data shows 8,456 deaths in the US (note: if you are using openvaers, be sure to “flip the switch” to show domestic only). Even using the most conservative assumptions of 223 background deaths (the highest annual death toll in VAERS history for domestic deaths), this is 8,233 “excess” deaths. Something caused those deaths. That’s a HUGE number. It’s a public health disaster. If it wasn’t the vaccine, then what did the CDC find caused all these excess deaths? Nothing! Absolutely nothing! Note that I didn’t even have to multiply by the VAERS under-reporting factor (URF) of 41 (calculated via the CDC’s own methodology). There are only 226M vaccinated people. That’s a death rate from the vaccine of at least 36 deaths per million vaccinated (assuming the most conservative possible URF of 1). That’s 36 times more deadly than the deadliest vaccine in human history, a vaccine that is too unsafe to use. It has no business being on the market. Note that all reports in VAERS are validated by HHS before they are allowed to appear in VAERS. Mistakes do happen. There are at least 2 records of the 1.6M in VAERS that were gamed, one by Dr. David Gorski (who is proud of breaking Federal law to do that).

  2. A prominent group of neurologists with 20,000 patients has had around 2,000 patients with vaccine-related adverse reactions. In the 11 year history of the practice, they’ve never had a patient with a vaccine-related adverse reaction. While this could happen just by bad luck, the chance of it happening by “bad luck” is less than 1 in 10**100, i.e., impossible. This is a huge increase in significant neurological events that is inexplicable if the vaccines are safe. This is further evidence that the increase in the events reported in VAERS is not “stimulated reporting.” NOTE: The doctors won’t come forward publicly for fear of retribution (loss of medical license). That’s why nobody knows. With the doctors’ permission, I’m happy to disclose it to the NY Times or other allegedly reputable news source under NDA if they want to do a story on it.

  3. And then there is the 60-fold increase in the rates of adverse events happening in front of our eyes. Hard to explain since it never happened before the vaccines rolled out.

Continue reading…

From Steve Kirsch, here.

Private Policing COULD NOT Be Worse…

The DC Sniper Rampage: The Biggest Police Debacle of the Century?

12/03/2021

Those who forget police debacles could be the victims of the next law enforcement fiasco. Former Montgomery County, Maryland, police chief Charles Moose passed away on Thanksgiving Day. He became famous as the most prominent law enforcement official during a three-week sniper rampage in the Washington area in 2002. The Washington Post ran a front-page piece on his death, and career and local officials hailed him as a “great leader” and “terrific” while the media touted him as a “hero.”

But Moose was the mastermind of one of the biggest law enforcement pratfalls in this century. After the snipers were finally captured after killing ten people, Moose declared, “Twenty-two days felt like forever. It could have easily been 22 weeks.” Actually, if private citizens and the media had not acted proactively, it could have been twenty-two weeks. Criminologist Susan Paisner observed in late 2002 in the Washington Post that the two sniper suspects “were caught despite [Moose] and the task force’s efforts, not because of them.”

Blunders by Moose, the first black police chief in Montgomery County, and other law enforcement officials boosted the sniper death toll. Because the first shootings occurred in Montgomery County, Moose took charge of the local law enforcement response.

The sniper case represents a deadly case of racial profiling gone awry. Moose decided early on that the killers were white guys in a white van. As a result, police ignored a slew of evidence that the killers were actually black guys in a ratty old car with out-of-state license plates. Several eyewitnesses reported to police that they had seen an old Chevrolet Caprice at the scenes of shootings, but police scorned their reports. They spotted the snipers’ blue car and recorded its out-of-state license plates at least ten different times during the month of the killings; the vehicle was reported to have been stopped or seen five times at roadblocks established immediately after shootings. But because they were searching for a white van or truck, police disregarded the suspects again and again. One federal investigator later complained to the Los Angeles Times, “The car was screaming, ‘Stop me.’ It’s dilapidated. It’s got Jersey tags. It’s got a homemade window tint.”

President George W. Bush announced that the sniper attacks were “a form of terrorism” and boasted of “lending all the resources of the Federal Government” to the investigation. But the FBI were as incompetent and incorrigible as Moose. Prior to the snipers’ rampage, the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ignored reports from five different people in Washington State (where John Allen Muhammad lived) who warned about Muhammad’s comments about killing police, his interest in buying silencers for his rifle, and his visit to a gunsmith to inquire about modifying the rifle to make it more easily concealed.

More than seven hundred FBI agents were involved in the case. FBI trainees were brought in to staff the telephone tip lines at the Montgomery County Police headquarters. The FBI, scorning the technological revolutions of the prior half century, relied on the same methods the bureau had used to pursue John Dillinger in the 1930s. Instead of entering tips from the public into a computer database, FBI trainees would write out the information by hand and stack the reports into piles marked “immediate,” “priority,” or “routine.” FBI agents would then drive the stacks of reports to other locales where the snipers attacked, including Fairfax County and Richmond, Virginia. The Washington Post reported complaints by numerous lawmen that “the FBI’s problems handling thousands of phone tips are slowing and hampering the probe.”

When the FBI trainees were not laboriously scrawling down the latest tip, they were busy hanging up on the snipers. In a note attached to a tree after the ninth shooting, the snipers complained that operators at the tip line had hung up on them five times. The note denounced police “incompitence” [sic] and declared, “We have tried to contact you to start negotiation. These people took [our] calls for a hoax or a joke, so your failure to respond has cost you five lives.”

At the scene of an Ashland, Virginia, shooting, the killers left a note with a demand for money in a ziplock bag. But no law enforcement official bothered to read the note before it was shipped off to check for fingerprints. The FBI and the police dismally failed to exploit the bevy of clues in the note and in the other material in the ziplock bag. If the note had been publicized—like the Unabomber’s manifesto—savvy citizens might have fingered at least one of the culprits much sooner.

Instead of using common sense and exploiting excellent leads, the feds unleashed Pentagon spy planes to track all vehicles in the entire Washington area. Bush Pentagon appointee John Poindexter declared that the sniper case illustrated how total information awareness surveillance could have help detect the killer’s car. The spy planes may have violated the Posse Comitatus Act (which prohibits using the military for domestic law enforcement) but they provided no information that solved the case.

Moose took a command-and-control approach that left citizens in the dark at the same time that law enforcement ignored a tidal wave of damning evidence. “When we have people from the media interviewing witnesses and publishing reports, we get confusion,” Chief Moose complained. He was enraged when the Washington Post and a local television channel reported that a tarot card had been found at the site, later blaming them for five additional deaths due to the disclosure. At a press conference, Moose shouted, “I have not received any message that the citizens of Montgomery County want Channel 9 or The Washington Post or any other media outlet to solve this case. If they do, then let me know.”

But it was a leak of key information that led to the apprehension of the snipers. News media had been listening to police scanners and, on October 23, heard the renewed suspicions about the Caprice. Both MSNBC and CNN broadcast the license plate and car description hours. Within six hours, an alert citizen phoned in a tip that the suspects’ car was at an interstate rest stop in Frederick County, Maryland which a SWAT team quickly swarmed to arrest the suspects.

The initial sainthood that Moose received after the snipers were apprehended was truncated by his buck chasing. Montgomery County officials are prohibited from profiting from their government jobs but Moose speedily signed a $170,000 book deal to reveal his account of the sniper manhunt. He resigned under pressure after a local ethics commission refused to let him profit from the case. Numerous other government officials complained that the speedy publication of Moose’s book risked undermining the prosecution of the snipers. The commission also discovered that Moose violated ethics rules by failing to disclose a $10,000 payment he received from Marriott hotels after he claimed to be a victim of racial discrimination while staying at a resort in Hawaii. Moose initially demanded $200,000 from Marriott after he wandered into an unfinished area of the resort reserved for employees. “Moose was confronted by a hotel employee. When the chief was asked to produce proof he was a guest at the hotel, in the form of a room key, an argument ensued,” the Washington Post reported. If only I could pocket ten grand each time a hotel staffer asked me a question!

The real lesson of the 2002 sniper rampage was that neither local nor federal law enforcement could be trusted to protect citizens against dire threats. The Washington area was traumatized for weeks by two dimwitted psychopaths who rode around brazenly shooting people from the trunk of their ancient Chevrolet. If a team of trained, savvy terrorists had launched the same type of attacks, the death toll would likely have been vastly higher.

Commenting on Moose’s death, Montgomery County executive Marc Elrich praised him for providing “a calming presence in the midst of the terror and fear that consumed our County.” Politicians valorize political appointees to shroud government failures. Don’t expect local politicians to admit that Moose had blood on his hands due to his incompetence in capturing the snipers.

From Mises.org, here.