28 de dezembro de 2023

27 de dezembro de 2023

 

If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple. 

Luke 14:26

 

26 de dezembro de 2023

Esquerda

 

 
 
"How the War exposed the Failures & Possibilities of the Jewish Left", Rabbi Shai Held
 

25 de dezembro de 2023

Vida

 

 
 
A majestic spoonbill shows off its plumage in Tampa Bay, Florida, US 

21 de dezembro de 2023

20 de dezembro de 2023

América

 

 
 
 "The Wake-Up Call for American Jewry", Eric Cohen & Dan Senor
 

18 de dezembro de 2023

Islamismo

 

 
 
"Dalia Ziada had to flee for her life from Egypt because she spoke the truth about Hamas"
 

12 de dezembro de 2023

Vida

 

 
 
A fallow deer against a backdrop of snow-covered trees and roads in Cannock Chase, Staffordshire, UK 
 

11 de dezembro de 2023

Terrorismo

 

 
 
 "The Making of Sadistic Terrorists": An Interview with Mordechai Kedar | The Caroline Glick Show
 

10 de dezembro de 2023

6 de dezembro de 2023

Antissemitismo

 

 
 
"Semites, Anti-Semites, and Bernard Lewis: The Life and Afterlife of a Seminal Book", Martin Kramer
 

5 de dezembro de 2023

Harvard

 

 
 
"Elise Stefanik absolutely explodes at Harvard's President and calls for her resignation"

4 de dezembro de 2023

Magda Teter

 

 
 
 "Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism"
 

3 de dezembro de 2023

Vida

 

 
 
A multiple-exposure photo shows a cunning drongo bird using light 
from an urban petrol pump to catch termites during monsoon season 
 

28 de novembro de 2023

27 de novembro de 2023

Saul

 

 
 
"Character and Leadership: Rise and Fall of Saul", Micah Goodman (2018)
 

23 de novembro de 2023

16 de novembro de 2023

15 de novembro de 2023

 

So, in order to segregate souls God must not merely not foster but even injure.

Franz Rosenzweig

 

12 de novembro de 2023

N.Y.

 

 
 
"New Yorkers unite to support Jewish business owner after workers walk out" (Fox News)

9 de novembro de 2023

8 de novembro de 2023

Gaza

 

Reports in Gaza: 
The two damned terrorists who were recorded kidnapping 85-year-old Yaffe Ader
 were eliminated in IDF strikes
 

7 de novembro de 2023

Vida

 

 
 
Two leopards take a drink at the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Botswana
 

6 de novembro de 2023

 

The Gemara relates: When they took Rabbi Akiva out to be executed, it was time for the recitation of Shema. And they were raking his flesh with iron combs, and he was reciting Shema, thereby accepting upon himself the yoke of Heaven. His students said to him: Our teacher, even now, as you suffer, you recite Shema? He said to them: All my days I have been troubled by the verse: With all your soul, meaning: Even if God takes your soul. I said to myself: When will the opportunity be afforded me to fulfill this verse? Now that it has been afforded me, shall I not fulfill it? He prolonged his uttering of the word: One, until his soul left his body as he uttered his final word: One. A voice descended from heaven and said: Happy are you, Rabbi Akiva, that your soul left your body as you uttered: One.
   
Berakhot 61b:9
 

2 de novembro de 2023

Sukkot

 

 
 
A Jewish family celebrating Sukkot in Isfahan, Iran (late 1800's)
 

1 de novembro de 2023

Israel

 

 
 
"The American Jew and the State of Israel", Rav Soloveitchik (1958)
 

31 de outubro de 2023

 

A Monarch is in the palace, and all the subjects are partly in the country, and partly abroad. Of the former, some have their backs turned towards the Monarch’s palace, and their faces in another direction; and some are desirous and zealous to go to the palace, seeking “to inquire in the temple,” and to minister before the Monarch, but have not yet seen even the face of the wall of the house. Of those that desire to go to the palace, some reach it, and go round about in search of the entrance gate; others have passed through the gate and walk about in the antechamber; and others have succeeded in entering into the inner part of the palace and being in the same room with the Monarch in the royal palace. But even the latter do not immediately on entering the palace see the Monarch, or speak; for, after having entered the inner part of the palace, another effort is required before they can stand before the Monarch—at a distance, or close by—hear the words, or speak to the Sovereign.   

Rambam, Guide for the Perplexed, 3:51  

 

29 de outubro de 2023

28 de outubro de 2023

Vida

 

 
 
A whale breaches the surface of the Southern Ocean in front of mountains on the Antarctica peninsula
 

26 de outubro de 2023

25 de outubro de 2023

Israel

 

 
 
 "Why don’t Palestinians want peace?", with Benny Morris | SpectatorTV

24 de outubro de 2023

 

Warm yourself before the fire of the wise, but beware of being singed by their glowing coals, for their bite is the bite of a fox, and their sting is the sting of a scorpion, and their hiss is the hiss of a serpent, and all their words are like coals of fire. 

Pirkei Avot, 2:15 

 

23 de outubro de 2023

Yiddish

 

 
 
"Friendship in the Ghetto, the Forest and Beyond: 
The Story of Two Yiddish Poets During the Holocaus", David Fishman
 

21 de outubro de 2023

Tzimtzum

 

 
 
Tamar Ross on the Philosophical Importance of the Allegorical Interpretation of Tzimtzum (2013)
 

17 de outubro de 2023

Vida

 

 
 
A lynx cub that got separated from its parent is fed by local villagers in Sivas, Turkey
 

16 de outubro de 2023

Reféns

 

 
 
"This 13th-century Rabbi refused to be ransomed from captivity", Henry Abramson

10 de outubro de 2023

7 de outubro de 2023

 

America’s Betrayal of Israel

A decade of perverse U.S. policy sets the stage for mass murder

Liel Leibovitz, Tablet Magazine

October 07, 2023
 

Still image from a video of Israeli woman Noa Argamani being kidnapped by Hamas

I am writing this on Saturday, as news outlets report hundreds of Israeli dead, and dozens, if not hundreds, of soldiers and civilians kidnapped by Hamas terrorists and taken into Gaza.

It is never a good idea to write anything as events are still rapidly unfolding, especially as neither I nor anyone else can answer the only question that ultimately matters—namely, “what happens now?” But we can answer another, much more rudimentary and no less urgent question: Who’s at fault?

There will be plenty of time to pore over how a cataclysmic disaster of this magnitude could happen, and who—from Bibi down to the IDF Chief of Staff, head of intelligence, et al.—failed to protect the lives of Israelis. A lot of it will have to do with people who should have known better—including former prime ministers and former and current high level security officials—abandoning the core commitment of defending Israel and instead entertaining themselves by cosplaying some game of Demokratia, complete with donning handmaid outfits and ululating about fascism. Hysterics about your political opponents being the enemies of democracy may be fun in Kalorama; in Sderot and Ofakim, and even in Tel Aviv, there’s a price to pay for abandoning the real world and indulging in fetish play.

But the bigger mistake on the part of the Israelis is that over the past few years they have gotten the power equation that governs their lives backwards: Instead of understanding themselves to be citizens of a strong but beleaguered country whose first responsibility is to protect itself, they luxuriated in the fantasy that the United States was and always would be their protector—when in fact the ruling party in America has decided that Israel is a liability.

Watch this video. That’s a Hamas drone taking down an Israeli Merkava tank. A drone operated by an organization sponsored and trained by Iran applying both Iranian tactics and, most likely, Iranian hardware to attack Israel. This happened weeks after America sent Iran six billion dollars, and one week after we learned that the American government had over the past years ceded whole parts of its own intelligence units to Iranian spies.

The stage for this attack was not set in or by Israel. It was set by the United States.

For the better part of the last decade, the United States has pursued a foreign policy designed to strengthen Iran and enable it to form a strong sphere of influence in the region. This is the idea behind what Tony Badran and Michael Doran called “the Re-Alignment,” a vision of a new world order in which America partners with Iran in order to “find a more stable balance of power that would make [the Middle East] less dependent on direct U.S. interference or protection.” Those words aren’t Badran and Doran’s; they’re Robert Malley’s, Barack Obama’s lead negotiator on the Iran Deal who, as Semafor reported this week, helped to infiltrate an Iranian agent of influence into some of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. government—first at the State Department and now the Pentagon, where she has been serving as chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations. Biden himself, in an op-ed in The Washington Post, spoke of “an integrated Middle East,” using the phrase no less than three times to make clear that his administration was intent on pursuing his predecessor’s commitment to seeing Iran not as a U.S. foe but as our collaborator.

And the Biden administration wasn’t just talking the talk. It was also walking the walk, from unfreezing billions in assets to make it easier for Tehran to support its proxy, Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon, to sending huge cash infusions used primarily to pay the salaries of tens of thousands of unvetted “security personnel.” And while the previous administration halted all aid to the Palestinians—directly because of the “pay for slay” policies that support the families of those who slaughter Israelis—the Biden administration was quick to reverse the decision.

Lots of people argued that this was simply clear-minded realpolitik after decades of disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bullshit. Here’s how you know this policy was, and is, motivated not by what’s best for America but by what would kneecap the Jewish state: Because it extended to inside Israel’s borders.

In addition to creating the external circumstances for terror, the Biden administration did everything in its power to derail Israel’s democratically elected government and prevent it from being able to see an attack like today’s coming. That the Israelis let themselves fall for this was stupidity of criminal order. But the invisible hand here was America’s. Biden himself took to CNN to call Netanyahu’s government “the most extreme” he’s ever seen, and lost no opportunity to lecture his Israeli counterpart about democratic values. The former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, took the unprecedented step of intervening in the country’s domestic affairs, announcing ominously that he “think[s] most Israelis want the United States to be in their business.” And if words weren’t enough, the administration also sent American dollars to support the anti-Netanyahu NGOs organizing the protests that brought Israel to a halt for months. Netanyahu was famously denied an invite to the White House; his key opponent, opposition leader Benny Gantz, had no such problem.

One idea floating around my inbox this afternoon is that part of Israel’s complete military collapse today was caused by a massive Iranian cyber attack that hacked its systems and prevented it from seeing what ought to have been obvious. The U.S., having recently given a team of Iranian agents high-level access to U.S. intelligence which could very well have included information about Israeli systems, is not nearly as far-fetched a scenario as many would like it to be. And to the extent that we ever find out the truth about any of this, it will be because of Elon Musk, without whom we’d only have access to state-approved propaganda.

It doesn’t matter what words Biden says today. When you champion Iran; when you send it and its proxies money; when you reward Palestinian violence; when you go out of your way to portray Bibi as a dangerous fascist; when you finance and champion his opponents, contributing to further instability and unrest; when you hand over U.S. intelligence keys to Iranian agents; when you have your spokespeople declare it “disinformation” for people to connect obvious dots; when you do all of this, you know what is going to happen. You mean for it to happen.

Here today, then, is the challenge for Israel’s leadership: Can you accept that this is what’s happening? Can you imagine a future for the Jewish state decoupled from America? Because you must.

For at least a decade now, we’ve been told that part of what makes Israel so mighty and so safe is its superior technology, developed in partnership with America. Who, went this line of argument, needs to worry about missiles when we have Iron Dome and F-35 stealth fighter plans as part of a 3 billion dollar military aid package? Who cares about guns and grenades when we’ve developed high level cybersecurity systems that can strike at will? The war of the future, we’ve been promised, will be waged on computer terminals, in cyberspace—not in dusty border towns.

And then came a gaggle of Gazans with Kevlar vests and pick-up trucks and small arms that brought Israel to its knees. “Start-up Nation” has been ravaged by reality. It is clear that the dream Israel’s elites have entertained for the past decade—to become part of the global set of people who make all the money and all the decisions and have all the right opinions and fashionable friends—has soured into a nightmare.

And now it’s time to wake up. Stop prattling about the “cycle of violence,” about faults on both sides, about “the occupation,” about Bibi’s cabinet appointments, or any other distraction.

Re-root yourself in what you should never have forgotten—which is that we have enemies not because of what we did or didn’t do here or there, or on this day or that one, or because our hasbara isn’t good enough or because it is too good, or any other pointless argument. It is because we have vicious enemies, and they hate us. Instead of trying pathetically to curry favor with American overlords by scrubbing Judaism from your streets, pray to HaShem to fulfill the promise made to Isaiah and deliver vengeance. Reject, with great force and wrath, the death cult that has gripped so much of American political, public, and intellectual life and that sees virtue in prompting up benighted regimes in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We don’t need an integrated Middle East, because we don’t wish to integrate with the murderous Mullahs and their packs of wild animals. We have our own interests, and if we’re smart—and if we wish to survive—we’ll never forget it again.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/americas-betrayal-of-israel


5 de outubro de 2023

Dinamarca

 

 
 
Israel stamp commemorating the 30th anniversary of the rescue of Danish Jews (1973)
 

4 de outubro de 2023

Vida

 

 
 
A manatee enjoys the crystal-clear waters of the Homosassa River in Florida, US
 

3 de outubro de 2023

2 de outubro de 2023

Shoah

 

 
 
"Holocaust Denial Theological Reflections", Deborah Lipstadt & Rabbi Norman Lamm (2000)
 

28 de setembro de 2023

Sukkot

 

Sukkot is the festival of insecurity. It is the candid acknowledgment that there is no life without risk, yet we can face the future without fear when we know we are not alone. God is with us, in the rain that brings blessings to the earth, in the love that brought the universe and us into being and in the resilience of spirit that allowed a small and vulnerable people to outlive the greatest empires the world has ever known. Sukkot reminds us that God’s glory was present in the small, portable Tabernacle that Moses and the Israelites built in the desert even more emphatically than in Solomon’s Temple with all its grandeur. A temple can be destroyed. But a sukkah, broken, can be rebuilt tomorrow. Security is not something we can achieve physically but it is something we can acquire mentally, psychologically, spiritually. All it needs is the courage and willingness to sit under the shadow of God’s sheltering wings. For the sukkah, that quintessential symbol of vulnerability, turns out to be the embodiment of faith, the faith of a people who forty centuries ago set out on a risk-laden journey across a wilderness of space and time, with no more protection than the sheltering existence of the Divine presence. To know that life is full of risk and yet to affirm it, to sense the full insecurity of the human situation and yet to rejoice: this, for me, is the essence of faith and the heart of Sukkot. Judaism is no comforting illusion that all is well in this dark world. It is instead the courage to celebrate in the midst of uncertainty, and to rejoice even in the transitory shelter of the Sukkah, the Jewish symbol of home. 

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks


21 de setembro de 2023

Vida

 

 
 
Jellyfish among a swarm of a several thousand swimming off Seglvik, in northern Norway
 

20 de setembro de 2023

19 de setembro de 2023

18 de setembro de 2023

Rosh Hashanah

 

 
 
"Heads, Honey, Locusts, and Leeks: 
The Fascinating Foods of Rosh Hashanah and Jewish History", Rabbi Meir Soloveichik (2022)
 

13 de setembro de 2023

12 de setembro de 2023

Baal Teshuva

 

 
 
"The Secret of the Baal Teshuva", Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1969)
 

11 de setembro de 2023

Vida

 

 
 
A blue heron flies over the Corsica River in Centreville, Maryland
 

10 de setembro de 2023

 

וְהֵ֙מָּה֙ אִם־יִשְׁמְע֣וּ וְאִם־יֶחְדָּ֔לוּ כִּ֛י בֵּ֥ית מְרִ֖י הֵ֑מָּה וְיָ֣דְע֔וּ כִּ֥י נָבִ֖יא הָיָ֥ה בְתוֹכָֽם
whether they listen or not, for they are a rebellious breed—that they may know that there was a prophet among them.
 
Ezekiel 2:1-5
 

6 de setembro de 2023

Israel

 

 
 
A rare cache of weapons from the Roman period found stashed away in a cave in the Judean Desert 

5 de setembro de 2023

 

וּבְבֹאָ֑הּ הִנֵּ֣ה בָאָ֔ה וְיָ֣דְע֔וּ כִּ֥י נָבִ֖יא הָיָ֥ה בְתוֹכָֽם
But when the predicted punishment comes—and come it will—they shall know that a prophet has been among them.

Ezekiel 33:30-33


4 de setembro de 2023

2 de setembro de 2023

29 de agosto de 2023

Indecisão

 

 
 
"A Guide to the Jewish Undecided: A Philosopher makes the case for Judaism", Samuel Lebens 
 

28 de agosto de 2023

Shoah

 

 

"Long-silenced songs of Holocaust survivors are rediscovered" (PBS)

 

24 de agosto de 2023

Elul

 

 
(1/3) "Faith & Insecurity"
 
(2/3) "Rethinking Failure"
 
(3/3) "Building the Future"
- Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (2020) - 

23 de agosto de 2023

Vida

 

 
 
Caretta carettas set off towards the water at Iztuzu beach, one of the best protected beaches in the world, 
located in the Dalyan neighbourhood in the Ortaca district of Muğla, Turkey
 

22 de agosto de 2023

Exôdo

 

 
 
"Evidence of the Exodus & Cultural Appropriation in the Torah", Rabbi Joshua Berman

20 de agosto de 2023

 

אֵ֩לֶּה֩ דִבְרֵ֨י הַבְּרִ֜ית אֲֽשֶׁר־צִוָּ֧ה יְהֹוָ֣ה אֶת־מֹשֶׁ֗ה לִכְרֹ֛ת אֶת־בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל בְּאֶ֣רֶץ מוֹאָ֑ב מִלְּבַ֣ד הַבְּרִ֔ית אֲשֶׁר־כָּרַ֥ת אִתָּ֖ם בְּחֹרֵֽב
These are the terms of the covenant which יהוה commanded Moses to conclude with the Israelites in the land of Moab, in addition to the covenant which was made with them at Horeb. 
 
Devarim 28:15-69