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The New Campus of Israel’s State Library

A Visit to the National Library of Israel

Tuesday, November 7, 2023

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Many were anticipating the gala, grand opening of the new campus of the National Library of Israel, but with the current “matsav” (situation), it’s been kind of a “soft” opening, with a limit on how many people can be in the library for security reasons. We joined one of the daily tours of the facility, and the word “cool” came to mind throughout the tour.

As you can see from the photograph, the building is supposed to look like an open book. You don’t really get that close up, but it’s still an interesting shape. It is also a “green” building, so several aspects are mindful of the environment, including the landscaping. Our tour guide pointed out that while across the street (to the right in the photo), the Knesset building is heavily fenced, the library has no gate or fence, so everyone has access.

To preserve the quiet of the library, the tour guide had a microphone, and all the tour participants had head sets connected to the tour guide’s output, so she could speak quietly and everyone could hear what she was saying. The building is built from Jerusalem Stone, a light-colored limestone. Even though it is called “Jerusalem Stone,” the limestone for the building was quarried in Mitzpe Ramon, about 115 miles south in the Negev.

As part of the green concept, there is a huge skylight above the main reading rooms:

Besides the main reading room, there are several rooms for special collections and exhibits. There are offices, a synagogue and a prayer room.

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From Life Is Like a Library, here.

How Yaakov Answered Reuven…

Response to Nonsense

Posted by: Gil Student in From The Hashkafah Files, Magazine Dec 18, 14

 

The book of Mishlei (Prov. 26:4-5) offers directly contradictory advice on responding to fools:

Do not respond to a fool’s folly in kind lest you too be considered his equal. Respond to a fool’s folly in kind lest he consider himself wise.

So what should we do, respond or not? The Gemara (Shabbos 30b) distinguishes between a discussion of Torah, in which you should respond to prevent mistaken explanations from spreading, to a discussion of mundane things, which you should let go. Commentators explain differently. The Living Nach summarizes the explanations:

Do not respond to a fool’s folly in kind. This verse, unlike the next, discusses how to behave in the face of provocation (Rashi), such as when one is being cursed by a fool (Ibn Ezra). Respond…in kind. This verse describes how to react to a person who is attempting to lead one astray (Rashi); or, to a person who has misconstrued a Torah principle (Metzudoth).

Another explanation emerges from a perplexing midrash about Reuven and Ya’akov’s interaction. Ya’akov, distressed by the possibility of losing his son Binyamin, refuses to allow the brothers to take him to Egypt despite the demand by the powerful Egyptian leader (Yosef). Reuven offers collateral to ensure Binyamin’s return (Gen. 42:37):

Kill my two sons if I do not bring him back. Give him to me and I will return him to you.

This is a strange offer because Ya’akov is Reuven’s father, and hence the grandfather of Reuven’s two sons. Why would he ever kill his own grandsons? Commentaries like Ibn Ezra and Seforno try to salvage a coherent argument by suggesting that Reuven was merely swearing that he would bring back Binyamin. However, the Midrash Rabbah (Bereishis Rabbah 91:9) takes Reuven’s offer at face value and calls him a “foolish firstborn” (bekhor shoteh).

Part of the ambiguity is due to Ya’akov’s response to this offer. He simply reiterates his opposition (Gen. 42:38):

My son will not go down with you because his brother is dead and only he is left. If harm falls on him on the way you travel then you will bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave.

The verses themselves are perplexing but the midrash’s continuation is even harder to decipher. The midrash describes R. Tarfon’s unique method of interaction (Bereishis Rabbah, ibid.):

When someone would say something proper [smart] to R. Tarfon, he would say, “Kaftor va-ferach.” When someone would say nonsense to him, he would say, “My son will not go down with you.”

The response of “kaftor va-ferach” is understandable. They are the beautiful ornaments of the menorah and their names strike a response of astonishment. But what is the response of “My son will not go down with you”?

Rashi and some other commentators explain that “my son” (beni) is intended as a play on the word “binah,” understanding. R. Tarfon is saying that he disagrees. This is a bit of a stretch. R. Zev Wolf Einhorn suggests that R. Tarfon would use the terminology of “son” when discussing halakhah, perhaps as a form of endearment. Here, he is merely gently telling a student or colleague that he cannot agree.

R. Tzvi Pesach Frank (Peninei Rabbeinu Tzvi Pesach Al Ha-Torah, Gen. 42:38) quotes the following explanation from R. Mordechai Sender Kopstein of Radin, in the name of R. Kopstein’s father. What was Ya’akov’s response to Reuven’s outrageous offer? He ignored it. He simply reiterated his original objection and essentially pretended he did not hear Reuven’s foolish (as per the above midrash) suggestion.

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From Torah Musings, here.

Periclean Athens Was a Massive Welfare State

Periclean Athens Was a Welfare State

Gary North – October 21, 2015

Periclean Athens was a massive welfare state. Scholars of the era have long known this. The public is never told, however.

The state built huge public works projects, organized public assistance, offered pensions to the disabled, subsidized bread purchases, established price controls on bread, imposed export controls, established free theater programs for the poor, and regulated corn merchants [G. Glotz, The Greek City and Its Institutions (New York: Barnes & Noble, [1929] 1969), pp. 131-32.]

The “bread and circuses” political religion of Athens ended in an enforced inter-city alliance, war with Sparta, defeat, tyranny, and finally the loss to Macedon. That is the fate of all bread and circus religions.

Athens worshipped politics with all its being, on a scale barely understood by most historians. It was understood by Glotz:

Five hundred citizens were to sit in the Boule for a whole year. The heliasts, whose functions were originally confined to hearing appeals against awards made by the magistrates, were now to judge in first instance and without appeal the increasingly numerous cases in which citizens of Athens and the confederate towns were involved: they formed a body of six thousand members of which half on an average were in session every working day. There were ten thousand officials within the country or outside, five hundred wardens of arsenals, etc. Thus public affairs did not merely demand the intermittent presence of all the citizens of the Assembly; they required besides the constant exertions of more than a third of them [Glotz, p. 126].

Consider this: one-third of all the estimated 35,000 to 44,000 resident male citizens of Athens in the year 431 B.C. were in State service. [Alfred E. Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth: Politics and Economics in Fifth-Century Athens (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1915), p. 172.] At least 20,000 were “eating public bread,” meaning that they were either on the payroll or on the dole [Zimmern, pp. 172-73].

This is not the standard textbook view of classical Greece.

From Ron Paul Curriculum, here.

Revanchism: Victory Must Include Reabsorbing Aza

Defeating an enemy that doesn’t care about dying

Jews should not have qualms about taking land from an enemy that tried to conquer and destroy our country. Opinion.

Abraham Shusteris
Many have wondered, how can Israel possibly force a military defeat on a brutal enemy that cares neither about the death nor for the life and welfare of its own civilians. While Israel has flattened half of Gaza and created a considerable death toll, the spirit in Gaza and around the Arab world remains fairly euphoric after the Oct 7th Massacre.

The Palestinian Arabs and their cause has never been as popular throughout the world. As nations push for a permanent ceasefire, the Palestinian Arabs are poised to claim victory no matter how many Gazan buildings are flattened, and how many terrorists killed. Unless the Palestinian Arabs feel defeated after this war, Israel will not have gained any deterrence value, and all of its soldiers and civilians will have died in vain. Given these circumstances, how can Israel possibly win? The answer lies in understanding how the Arabs perceive victory and loss.

Unlike Westerners, Arabs don’t care much about lives or buildings, if they did Hamas would not use its civilians as human shields. If they cared, they would provide their civilians with shelters or at least protect them in their tunnels. They did neither.

From the Arab perspective, the most important commodity is honor, and the Arab’s land is their honor. By conquering an Arab’s land, you rob him of his honor, which is more precious than life itself. This is why the 1948 War was called “The Nakhba” or the “the catastrophe” since Arabs were displaced from their land. While Arabs lost many lives and buildings in many of the future wars and conflicts with Israel, none of them were a true catastrophe for the Arab, only the conflict in which they saw “their land” conquered and taken by the Jewish state.

Israel cannot win this war unless the Palestinian Arabs lose land. Only then will they feel defeated and deterred. Only then will they bow their heads in defeat. Until that point, even if Israel wipes out a million Gazans and flattens all of the buildings in Gaza, it won’t deflate the Arab, it will only galvanize and embolden them to plan further massacres until they achieve their ultimate goal of the complete destruction of the Jewish state. Only defeat on their own terms will put an end to their national aspirations of liberating the entire land between river to the sea.

But what will the Americans say?

It’s a fair question, so lets give it some thought. Israel is not in its nature a warrior nation. Despite its small size, it isn’t interested in conquering its neighbors or expanding its boundaries. Israel is simply a nation that wants to be left alone to live in peace. That is why the concept of conquering land provokes an innate repulsive response for most Jews, and rightly so. It’s not Israel’s business conquering the land of other nations. However, in this case, we are not talking about conquering foreign land.

The Bible clearly states (Genesis 15:18) that G-d has given the entire land between the Euphrates and the Nile to the Jewish people. This isn’t a right wing conspiracy theory, its written in black and white in the Bible. The entire land between Euphrates and the Nile is promised to the Jewish people, those are the boundaries of the true Jewish state. The Jewish people have no right or authority to renounce this claim.

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From Arutz Sheva, here.

Death-Dealer Kissinger Dead

HENRY KISSINGER, TOP U.S. DIPLOMAT RESPONSIBLE FOR MILLIONS OF DEATHS, DIES AT 100

“Few people … have had a hand in as much death and destruction, as much human suffering, in so many places around the world as Henry Kissinger.”

HENRY KISSINGER, national security adviser and secretary of state under two presidents and longtime éminence grise of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, died on November 29 at his home in Connecticut. He was 100 years old.

Kissinger helped prolong the Vietnam War and expand that conflict into neutral Cambodia; facilitated genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America. He had the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands, according to his biographer Greg Grandin.

There were “few people who have had a hand in as much death and destruction, as much human suffering, in so many places around the world as Henry Kissinger,” said veteran war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody.

A 2023 investigation by The Intercept found that Kissinger — perhaps the most powerful national security adviser in American history and the chief architect of U.S. war policy in Southeast Asia from 1969 to 1975 — was responsible for more civilian deaths in Cambodia than was previously known, according to an exclusive archive of U.S. military documents and interviews with Cambodian survivors and American witnesses.

The Intercept disclosed previously unpublished, unreported, and under-appreciated evidence of hundreds of civilian casualties that were kept secret during the war and remained almost entirely unknown to the American people. Kissinger bore significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians — up to six times more noncombatants than the United States has killed in airstrikes since 9/11, according to experts.

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From The Intercept, here.