אפשר להתקשר ולברר: תפילה שנענתה בהר הבית

קבלתי רשות לפרסם (מתוך פורום עליה להר הבית – פורם חרדי):

“בן דוד שלי אוטיסט בן 3 לא דיבר מילה עד שהזכירו אותו בקודש הקודשים האמיתי (בין שני המסגדים ואני לא בא להתווכח כאן עם אף אחד בנושא זה כלל!!) ואחרי זה הוא התחיל להגיד אמא, אני מסכים לפרסם את הטלפון שלי בשביל זה, הדודים שלי לא יודעים שהתפללו עליו בהר הבית, רק פתאום הודיעו לי את מה שהיה, 0556720343”

Wearing Techeilet Is About Zionism!

While the overwhelming majority of parshat Shelach (read last week in Israel and this week outside Israel) is about the sin of the spies, the last 5 verses deal with the mitzvah of Tzitzit and the famous blue thread called “Techeilet”: “Speak to the children of Israel… that they shall make for themselves tzitzit on the corners of their garments… and they shall place upon the tzitzit of each corner a thread of Techeilet (blue wool)…”

Believe it or not, I have been wearing Techeilet for over 30 years. In those days, you could count the number of the blue string wearers on one hand, but today – Baruch HaShem! – things are much different. I am currently in New York and am proud to say that this past Shabbat, the Rabbi of the shul we davened in was a member of the blue team! As I looked around the large shul, I was pleasantly surprised that about 25% of the people had Techeilet on their Tallit. Things are moving in the right direction… or so I thought, until I davened in a different shul and found myself the only one with the colorful string.

A quick background is necessary. For about 1,400 years every Jew who wore tzitzit had techeilet as part of his tzitzit. However, at the time of the destruction of the second Temple, the secret formula of making the blue-dye was lost. For 2,000 years our tzitzit became white-only and only recently was the unique snail found from which the blue-dye is produced. Major Talmudic scholars investigated this matter thoroughly and came to the conclusion that the 2,000 year wait was over… techeilet had been found! People like me jumped on the opportunity to fulfill this commandment properly and, slowly but surely, more and more people started purchasing the unique blue woolen string and becoming techeilet wearers – exactly as commanded by HaShem Himself.

However, as stated above, while new people are “joining the blue team” every day, the overwhelming majority of Torah observant Jews are still on “the white team”. Why is that? Don’t they recognize the gift that our Father has given us? For 2,000 years, the greatest Rabbis including the Rambam, Arizal, Rashi, Vilna Gaon, Ba’al Shem Tov, Rav Kook and the Chafetz Chaim didn’t have the opportunity to wear techeilet… but we do… so why hasn’t the Torah world embraced this miracle?

Rabbi Aryeh Lebowitz, in his sefer “Ha’Koneh Olamo” has an entire chapter dedicated to answering this question (chapter 5). To summarize, he writes that the Jewish nation follows the direction of the Gedolim. What they say, we do, and on this issue – for various reasons – they have not been convinced of the authenticity of today’s techeilet and therefore do not wear it themselves. In Rabbi Lebowitz’s words (translated from the Hebrew); “Since Gedolei Yisrael do not wear this techeilet, it is proper for the nation to act as they do.” (page 89)

With all due respect, I couldn’t disagree more. If the Gedolim ruled that one was forbidden to wear today’s techeilet, then there would be a solid reason why not to… but they have not said that. As a matter of fact, Rav Hershel Schachter wears techeilet… what better proof do you need than that?

So what’s the real issue at play over here? My answer may shock you, but I am convinced its 100% true. The debate over today’s techeilet is the same argument as the role of Medinat Yisrael – the modern State of Israel – in the world of Torah ideology. Mask it any way you like but the bottom line is this: Today’s Gedolim do not support the State of Israel. They do not say Hallel on Yom Ha’Atzmaut, do not sing Ha’Tikva and you’ll be hard pressed to find even one Israeli flag in the entire city of Bnei Brak. Their position on “the Medina” is the same as on Techeilet. They are not opposed (excluding Satmar) but certainly don’t endorse. They have representatives in the Knesset whom they meet with regularly but they would never consider themselves Zionists.

To me, and my fellow Religious Zionists, the events of 1948 was the greatest gift our King bestowed upon His people in 2,000 years. Our nation has returned to the very land given to us by HaShem! Yes, it would be difficult – exactly as it was when Joshua entered the land with the 12 Tribes. They had to fight and conquer the land. They had to build, plant and turn swamps into cities. Nothing was ever given to us on “a silver platter” and just like we fought for every inch 3,300 years ago… we have to fight for it now. Then it was the Cana’anim and the Yevusim and today it is Hamas and Iran. Yet, things are not all about war. With this land came unprecedented Torah study – more Torah in today’s Israel than ever before in history! Ancient scrolls were found, the exact boundaries of the Temple Mount were discovered, and secrets such as Techeilet were revealed.

How can we not embrace these events? How can we go through life as if nothing happened? The last 75 years has been a revolution; from the establishment of the modern State to the discovery of a 2,000 year old secret called “Techeilet”. I urge you to recognize these miracles and thank HaShem daily for allowing you to live in such a generation. How can we publicly show us gratitude to our Father and King? My suggestion is by starting with something simple, yet very powerful: Join the Techeilet revolution – get those blue strings on today!

From Am Yisrael Chai!, here.

Sure, Rabbi Hershel Schachter Opposes Ascending the Temple Mount. But the ‘WHY’ Matters!

From an interview:

There is a growing movement in Israel of frum Jews ascending Har Habyit after going to the mikveh. What’s your opinion on this movement?

The Rabbanut said you’re not allowed to go on the Har Habayit. Now, the majority of the Jews in Eretz Yisrael are not shomrei mitzvos and are not really interested in what the Rabbanut says. In fact, they want to do away with the Rabbanut because it gives them problems – a kohen can’t marry a grushah, he can’t marry a mamzeres, hcan’t intermarry, etc. In Bnei Brak and Meah Shearim, they also couldn’t care less what the Rabbanut says. So you’re left only with the Modern Orthodox, the Dati Leumi, and now they too are ignoring the Rabbanut by going on the Har Habayit.

So the government will do away with the whole Rabbanut. What do you need it for? In Bnei Brak they don’t hold from them, in Meah Shearim they don’t hold from them, the overwhelming majority are secular, and the Dati Leumi are also not listening.

How do you go on the Har Habayis? We’re going to be responsible for the demise of the Rabbanut. It will be a disaster. As bad as the situation is now, it’s going to be worse if there’s no Rabbanut.

Haven’t you said in the past that one may, in theory, walk on certain parts of Har Habayis?

Yes, but if the Rabbanut said you shouldn’t go, you have to listen to what they say. If they say a kula and you want to be machmirgesunterheit. But to be meikel against them I think is not right.

See it here.

Some of America’s ‘Wise’ Overlords

Here’s a 2015 Amazon review for “The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made” by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas.

Long but worth it:

I couldn’t agree more with the reviewer who writes: “The authors practically genuflect upon every page in paying homage to those overlords who once reigned supreme in the American presidium of power and privilege.” (See the three-star review by anarchteacher.)

In “The Wise Men,” authors Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas weave together six biographies of the government officials who shaped US foreign policy from the time of the Great Depression to the tail end of the Cold War. Together, they created the bipartisan foreign policy consensus that prevailed after WWII, leading directly to the Vietnam War and all the other tragic East-West confrontations along the way. The authors call these policy makers the “wise men.” C. Wright Mills had another name for them: the “power elite.”

Portrayed as highly educated, refined gentlemen, the wise men were as much pragmatic as visionary. They made things happen. Although they may have often disagreed about tactics, the wise men were united in their vision of the US government’s place in the world. This vision involved the rejection of “isolationism” and the establishment of a new, messianic role for the United States. Under their guidance, the United States would become the de facto world police man, waging war in the name of peace and meddling in the internal affairs of other countries. It is no accident that these men, particularly George Kennan, were also involved in the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The wise men were also instrumental in establishing the permanent war economy, which was a great boon for the military-industrial complex. The origin of this new militarized economy can be traced to National Security Council paper 68 (NSC-68). Approved of by Dean Acheson, this report exaggerated the threat posed by the Soviet Union in order to justify massive increases in government military spending.

According to the wise men, know-nothing Americans who believed that they should mind their own business and stay out of foreign conflicts simply did not understand the complexities of a geo-political strategy that required them to fight and die in foreign lands. So the wise men informed their fellow Americans through friendly politicians and media outlets that they must fight to keep their families safe, to preserve peace, and, above all, to protect Freedom itself.

Having been “educated by events,” as another court historian put it (see my two-star review of “Those Angry Days” by Lynn Olson), many Americans came to accept this new role for their country as “redeemer nation.” The wise men cleverly framed the issues of war and peace in such a way that not one in a thousand, perhaps, ever suspected that the US government fought its enemies in order to become more like them, or that the military interventions advocated by the wise men and like-minded politicians served to advance a hidden globalist agenda. (For the ugly details of this hidden agenda, see “Tragedy and Hope 101” by Joseph Plummer).

The narrative in “The Wise Men” deceives as much as it enlightens. The authors insist that the wise men were responsible for making the big decisions. Short of that, they were the ones who built consensus on what to do — on where to aim the guns. They were the intellectuals in charge of foreign policy, the six friends who made the world as we know it (if we go by the book’s subtitle). The authors want us to believe that the wise men exercised tremendous power and influence, except, of course, when the wise men’s decisions had disastrous consequences. At these moments, when foreseeable and disastrous effects naturally follow their causes, the authors abruptly change their tune.

The authors want us to believe that, at certain times, the wise men — these men of great power and influence who shaped our world — suddenly lost power, overwhelmed by circumstances beyond their control. Inexplicably, the tables turn. The wise men are now being shaped by the very world they intended to shape. For instance, by the authors’ own account, John J. McCloy, “Mr. Establishment” himself, clearly had a hand—perhaps the strongest hand—in the decision to forcibly remove thousands of Japanese-Americans from their homes and herd them into internment camps during WWII. According to the authors, just as McCloy was building a consensus on what to do, the decision-making process suddenly took on a life of its own. And the rest was history. Japanese-Americans were essentially kidnapped by the US government as a result of a decision-making process that existed independently of the decision-makers.

The authors make the same assertion in the case of the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan. Here again, at the crucial moment, the decision-making process magically takes on a life of its own, devoid of human agency.

Attentive readers will not fail to notice how conveniently the authors slip back and forth between methodological individualism and holism whenever it seems that their “wise men” might come in for harsh criticism. Clearly, the authors are trying to distance the decision-makers from their own decisions. But any thinking person who is honest knows that people ALWAYS make decisions; they even make non-decisions or decisions not to act. Decisions never make themselves or go on auto-pilot. It is intellectually dishonest to suggest otherwise.

Another inconsistency in the narrative can be found in the authors’ treatment of Dean Acheson. The authors remind us repeatedly of Acheson’s aversion to the United Nations (UN) and his dismissal of all such attempts at world government as “glabaloney.” But how do the authors reconcile Acheson’s purported aversion to globalism with his rushing off to the UN to secure an official condemnation of North Korea when it invaded South Korea? They don’t, and they make no effort to do so.

I take it that most people will agree that actions speak louder than words. Acheson, despite his lip service to nationalism, paved the way for U.S. military intervention in Korea to proceed under the auspices of the UN, without a declaration of war by Congress. In doing so Acheson helped undermine constitutional limits on executive war-making power, as well as national sovereignty (to the extent that the US is supposed to be governed by its own Constitution, its own laws).

But the authors do not seem to notice this glitch in the Matrix. And like good court historians, they ignore the inconsistency and sweep Acheson’s duplicity under the rug in their rush to flatter the naked emperor.

The authors also defend Acheson in his willingness to share “the bomb” with the Soviet Union. This boggles the mind, since by that time Stalin had revealed himself to be a homicidal psychopath who had no qualms about starving to death 7 million people in Ukraine as a matter of public policy, not to mention the mountain of corpses he climbed over to achieve and maintain power within the Communist Party. Go ask Trotsky.

Was Acheson insane? Of course not. He, too, was a career-driven psychopath who understood that the Cold War and the attendant military expansion could not proceed with only one side in possession of the bomb. It would be a total mismatch. A “bomb challenged” Soviet Union would not sufficiently frighten Americans into supporting massive increases in military spending. However, it wasn’t long before Acheson’s dream came true and he got the existential threat to his own country he was craving. Sharing the bomb with the Soviets was all part of the plan to advance Acheson’s globalist agenda. After all, Oceania needs its Eurasia. And the military-industrial complex needs to justify its existence and further expansion at the expense of US taxpayers.

Replacing George Kennan as head of the State Department’s policy planning staff was honorary wise man Paul Nitze. Nitze, in a fit of honesty, revealed the true meaning of the Soviet bomb. According to the authors, “…[Nitze] told Acheson that the real lesson of the Soviet bomb was not merely that the U.S. should proceed with the Super [bomb], but that it should build up conventional forces. The bomb was no longer enough to keep the Soviets in check. …To Nitze, the real mission became clear; to wake up the Administration and the Congress and make them spend more money, much more money, on defense” (p. 489). And there you have it, folks. Mission accomplished.

“The Wise Men” is thus propaganda at its finest: partly illuminating, partly misleading, and wholly biased in its celebration of that cabal of power elites who pursued their globalist visions at the cost of American blood and treasure, precipitating the decline of America’s economy and the country’s descent into a regimented Orwellian police state.

Today, the US continues to wage war in the name of peace to the detriment of working Americans who bear the costs of Empire and the “globaloney” fantasies of elite policy makers, not to mention the countless victims of imperial aggression overseas, e.g., Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, etc. And this is perhaps where the legacy of the wise men is most painfully felt.

Found here.

Walter Block on the Russia-Ukraine War

Hypocrisy, Thy Name Is Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal of March 31, 2023 (page A20, if you must know) featured this headline: “Turkey’s Parliament Ratifies NATO bid.” Here is the first paragraph of this entry:

“The Turkish parliament ratified Finland’s entrance into the NATO on Thursday, removing the last obstacle to a historic expansion of the alliance in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” [Emphasis Added]

Waitasec. If event B is a response to event A, A must necessarily come first in time, B only afterward. If B occurs first, this event can hardly be considered a response to A.

Let us do a little bit of history here. During the Cold War, NATO and the Warsaw Pact contended with one another. Then, in 1991, the Soviet Union ended. What should have then happened, for a true peace, was both military alliances should have disbanded. Or perhaps, turned into an organization that comprised both of them. But the Warsaw Pact dissolved, and NATO remained.

East and West Germany were combined in 1990. Promises were then made by NATO not to expand in an eastward direction. This agreement was broken upon numerous occasions.

And when, pray tell, did Russia invade Ukraine? Why, it was not until 2022, decades after NATO began its eastward move.

So what was a “response” to what? Obviously, the Russians responsively engaged in a war not so much against Ukraine; rather, in confrontation with all of the NATO countries. NATO instigated this war between Russia and Ukraine by expanding eastward. Russia, for many years, protested and warned against this aggressive activity, but to no avail. Finally, in 2022, this country took responsive action.

Robert D. Kaplan (also writing in The Wall Street Journal, titled “Putin’s Shakespearian Demons”) is having none of this. Suggests this worthy: “Would Europe today be at peace with Mr. Putin’s Russia had NATO not expanded east after the cold war…? Certainly not.”

Does he give any reasons for this contention of his? Certainly not. Instead, he waxes eloquent about alternative history. He offers his thoughts on what he imagines would have occurred in the absence of the NATO eastward march. To summarize: Putin’s Russia would have been a bully, controlling the areas between Germany and his country, and impoverishing them all.

One way to refute this is to consider Russia’s, well, the USSR’s westward march. You say there was no such westward march? You are mistaken. They “marched” into Cuba in 1962 and parked a few weapons of mass destruction there. (To contextualize that initiative, at that time the U.S. had located similar weaponry in several countries surrounding the USSR. Further, these countries had joined NATO; Greece and Turkey in 1952; West Germany in1955.)

How did the United States react to what it regarded as a serious provocation on its very borders? (Cuba is only 90 miles away from Florida.) Uncle Sam organized a naval blockade of the island nation. But a blockade is an act of war! If Ukraine were an island, quite possibly Russia would not have physically invaded it. It might well have followed the example of the U.S. and blockaded that island of Ukraine. Hey, I can also do a bit of alternative history and alternative geography to boot! I have learned from the master of this sort of thing, Robert D. Kaplan.

In other words, the U.S. did in Cuba almost precisely what it is now blaming Russia for doing in Ukraine. There is a word for this sort of thing. Wait, I think I’ve got it…Yes, hypocrisy! Kaplan is also a master of that characteristic. Notice the level of patience between the two super powers. The U.S. waited only a matter of hours before the provocation of Russia to engage in an act of war. Russia? Decades.

Question: how many times in history has Russia invaded the United States? Answer, zero. Question: how many times has the United States invaded Russia? Answer: one. This occurred at the end of the first world war. However, if we ask how many time has Russia been invaded by any and all countries in NATO, the answer is in the dozens. Can we really blame them for being concerned with the possibility of western military equipment, up to and including weapons of mass destruction, being placed in a neighboring country, Ukraine, courtesy of NATO?

Imagine if we all lived in the land now occupied by Russia and they occupied the territory of the 50 states. Moscow and Leningrad are ours, they own New York City and Los Angeles and everything in between. All else remains the same: the history, the language, the culture, the people.

How would we feel about the eastward movement by NATO? (Russia now being the leader and most powerful member of that organization.) Answer: we would not be happy campers. How is it possible that intelligent experts such as Kaplan cannot see matters through the eyes of the other guy? Answer: I don’t know.

This originally appeared on The Libertarian Institute and was reprinted with the author’s permission.

From LRC, here.