An atheist chaplain at Harvard and The Real Danger Of That Atheist Harvard Chaplin and DC Court Sends Man to Jail for Watching “Conspiracy Theory” Videos and FBI: Jews Most Targeted Religious Group in 2020 Hate Crimes Report and Kiryat Moshe mixed-use project to replace Jerusalem Angel Bakery and Infected Anti-Vaxers Impede Israel’s Quality of Care as Hospital Staffs Are Near CollapseBy David Israel
Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher, and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money, and spiritual engagement.
Active rejection of the most basic concept in Judaism—belief in G-d—by a religious figure is pretty fringe stuff in the eyes of most American Jews.
The news media had a field day recently with the man-bites-dog story of the self-proclaimed atheist who was recently named Chief Chaplain at Harvard University. The New York Times wrote about it positively, even quoting a former haredi Harvard co-ed who approves.
After nearly 400 years of having chief chaplains who believe in G-d, Harvard has gone in a surprising new direction. Not only that, but the new head chaplain, Greg Epstein, is Jewish and a graduate of the rabbinical ordination program at an institution called the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism.
Undoubtedly some parents of Jewish students at Harvard will be troubled at the prospect of their sons or daughters possibly coming under the influence of a passionate advocate of atheism. Active rejection of the most basic concept in Judaism—belief in G-d—by a religious figure is pretty fringe stuff in the eyes of most American Jews.
The problem is not that someone is an atheist; that's his business. The problem is that Greg Epstein presents himself as a rabbi, although his core belief system is rejected by every Jewish religious denomination of note—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist.
The power of the "rabbi" title is that it confers Jewish legitimacy and respectability on whatever the rabbi, even a self-proclaimed one, says. Jewish students at Harvard who don't know better will hear that "the rabbi" said something, and assume that what he said represents Judaism, not just a tiny fringe element on the Jewish spectrum.
Whether Greg Epstein will influence Jewish students' religious beliefs remains to be seen. It could be argued that these students are more likely to be influenced by their professors, whom they often perceive as experts and authority figures.
But where Epstein's influence may well be felt more strongly is on Jewish students' perceptions of Israel, the Holocaust, and antisemitism.
Because he is Jewish, and because of the power of his new position, Epstein will have significant new platforms from which to share his views on Jewish issues—at campus events, in the news media, and well beyond. And Epstein's views on Jewish issues are unquestionably extreme.
A Tweet from Epstein on April 28, 2021 employed the ugly term "Jewish supremacists" to demean Jewish nationalists who were marching in Jerusalem. That slur was coined by neo-Nazis and then more recently adopted by the radical left.
One indication of Epstein's understanding of the Holocaust was his 2019 tweet calling American detention facilities for illegal migrants "concentration camps."
If you think that Epstein could not possibly have meant literally that those facilities are similar to concentration camps, note that he wrote they "can LITERALLY [his caps], in a historically accurate way, be called concentration camps."
No, they can't be, which is why the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and other scholarly Holocaust institutions strongly denounced those comparisons.
As for Israel—when Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, Epstein was part of a group of leftwing rabbis who rushed to urge President Obama to refrain from rejecting the terrorist victors. "We urge you to maintain a cautious approach" toward Hamas, in order to advance the goal of a Palestinian state, they wrote to the president.
Since Epstein is a member of the J Street Rabbinic Cabinet, that's pretty much what we should expect. J Street, the controversial Jewish pressure group that lobbies for a Palestinian Arab state, consistently supports Palestinian Arab demands against Israel. The leaders of J Street seem to blame Israel for what goes wrong, no matter how extreme or violent the Palestinian Arabs are.
Is this the message on Judaism and Israel that Jewish parents want their college-age children to hear at Harvard? Up to them, but to me, that doesn't seem like a very attractive return on their $51,925 in annual tuition payments.
Moshe Phillips is a commentator on Jewish affairs whose writings appear regularly in the American and Israeli press. He was a U.S. delegate to the 38th World Zionist Congress in 2020. His views are his own.
WASHINGTON - Nearly 60 percent of religious-bias hate crimes in America in 2020 targeted Jews, according to data released by the Federal Bureau of Investigations on Monday. Despite the high figure, it still represents a decrease from 2019.
According to the FBI, overall hate crimes rose six percent from 2019, marking the highest total of reported hate crimes in 12 years. Of the 7,759 overall reported hate crimes, 1,174 targeted victims due to their religion — 676 of which (57.5 percent) targeted Jews, down from 953 incidents in 2019.
Infected Anti-Vaxers Impede Israel's Quality of Care as Hospital Staffs Are Near Collapse
Israeli hospital administrators warn that the quality of care for patients in their Corona wards is compromised because of the high number of patients. In a conversation with the director-general of the health ministry Prof. Nachman Ash on Sunday, the administrators said the workload in their Corona wards is heavy and that this may also affect other patients in the various hospitals who are not receiving optimal care because of the allocation of resources to Corona patients.
Military Intelligence researchers noted Monday morning that "most of the critical patients today are unvaccinated. The number of critical patients who are not vaccinated is about 10 times greater than the patients who were vaccinated with the booster dose."
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The same military intelligence experts also noted that "morbidity indices continue to be very high and the coefficient of infection is still frenetic due to the characteristics of this period – an increase in the number of events with a high potential for infection, along with changes in the scope of tests during the holidays."
This dire warning comes against the background of a surprising slowdown of the spread of the coronavirus in Israel. The encouraging news is the continuation of the declining trend in the coefficient of infection, which now stands at 0.92, meaning that the pandemic is retreating. No doubt, this development has to do with the fact that 3,084,656 Israelis have so far received the third vaccine dose.
5,587,006 have received the second dose of the vaccine, and 6,068,531 the first dose.
According to the Health Ministry, as of Monday morning, the rate of critical patients by age groups per 100,000 has been:
For people age 60 and under: among the unvaccinated – 7.4; vaccinated without the booster shot –1.7; vaccinated with booster shot – 0.6.
For people age 60 and over: unvaccinated – 185.8; vaccinated without the booster shot –38.5; vaccinated with booster shot – 4.3.
There were 6,456 new verified Corona patients on Sunday, out of 126,731 people who were tested, or 5.09% positive.
As of Monday morning, there are 714 critical patients, out of whom 194 are on respirators. To date, 7,541 have died from the pandemic since its outbreak in February 2020.
Are you confused by the inconsistency in the above report? Welcome to the club. But out of this mish-mash of seemingly contradictory information, one indisputable fact emerges: unvaccinated people are jamming Israel's healthcare facilities, impacting the entire system and endangering the lives of everyone else, if not through direct infection then by denial of medical service to everyone else.
Much has been said in the past about the right of a democracy to protect itself by suspending certain rights in time of an emergency. It is my personal opinion (and to be clear, not the position of this paper) that this appears to be such a time in Israel, where the government should appeal to the legislator and the courts for the temporary suspension of individual freedom for the duration of a shot in the arms of vaccine refusniks.
Dr. Osnat Lev Zion Korach, director of Assaf Harofeh Shamir Hospital, told Kan 11 News on Monday morning: "Hospitals need additional staff urgently. The teams are very committed and do their best, but we took them to the end of more than a year and a half of extremely hard work. The state needs to understand that it no longer needs ventilation machines but teams that will operate everything. If they do not prioritize and there are no standards for medical staff – it will be just like the parable about the horse who got used to not eating and died."
The Real Danger Of That Atheist Harvard Chaplin
By Moshe Phillips
The news media had a field day recently with the man-bites-dog story of the self-proclaimed atheist who was recently named Chief Chaplain at Harvard University.
After nearly 400 years of having chief chaplains who believe in G-d, Harvard has gone in a surprising new direction. Not only that, but the new head chaplain, Greg Epstein, is Jewish and a graduate of the rabbinical ordination program at something called the "International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism."
Undoubtedly some parents of Jewish students at Harvard will be troubled at the prospect of their sons or daughters coming under the influence of a passionate advocate of atheism. Active rejection of the most basic concept in Judaism—belief in G-d—is pretty fringe stuff in the eyes of most American Jews.
The problem is not that Greg Epstein is an atheist; that's his business. The problem is that he presents himself as a rabbi, even though his core belief system is rejected by every Jewish religious denomination of note—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist.
The power of the "rabbi" title is that it confers Jewish legitimacy and respectability on whatever the rabbi, even a self-proclaimed one, says. Jewish students at Harvard who don't know better will hear that "the rabbi" said something, and assume that what he said represents Judaism, not just a tiny fringe element on the Jewish spectrum.
Whether Greg Epstein will influence Jewish students' religious beliefs remains to be seen. It could be argued that these students are more likely to be influenced by their professors, whom they often perceive as experts and authority figures.
But where Epstein's influence may well be felt even more strongly, I fear, is on Jewish students' perceptions of Israel, the Holocaust, and antisemitism.
Because he is Jewish, and because of the power of his new position, Epstein will have significant new platforms from which to share his views on Jewish issues—at campus events, in the news media, and well beyond. And Epstein's views on Jewish issues are disturbingly extreme.
A Tweet from Epstein on April 28, 2021 employed the ugly term "Jewish supremacists" to demean Jewish nationalists who were marching in Jerusalem. That slur was coined by neo-Nazis and then more recently adopted by the radical left.
One indication of Epstein's shallow understanding of the Holocaust was his 2019 tweet calling American detention facilities for illegal migrants "concentration camps."
If you think I am exaggerating, and that Epstein could not possibly have meant literally that those facilities are similar to concentration camps, note that he wrote they "can LITERALLY [his caps], in a historically accurate way, be called concentration camps."
No, they can't be, which is why the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and other scholarly Holocaust institutions strongly denounced those comparisons.
As for Israel—when Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, Epstein was part of a group of leftwing rabbis who rushed to urge President Obama to refrain from rejecting the terrorist victors. "We urge you to maintain a cautious approach" toward Hamas, in order to advance the goal of a Palestinian state, they wrote to the president.
I guess since Epstein is a member of the J Street Rabbinic Cabinet, that's pretty much what we should expect. J Street, the controversial Jewish pressure group that was created to lobby for a Palestinian state, consistently supports Palestinian Arab demands against Israel. The leaders of J Street always seem to blame Israel for what goes wrong, no matter how extreme or violent the Palestinians are.
Is this the kind of person whom Jewish parents want influencing their college-age children? That doesn't seem like a very attractive return on their $51,925 in annual tuition payments.
Moshe Phillips is a commentator on Jewish affairs whose writings appear regularly in the American and Israeli press. He was a U.S. delegate to the 38th World Zionist Congress in 2020. His views are his own.
DC Court Sends Man to Jail for Watching "Conspiracy Theory" Videos
A DC district court judge on Thursday sentenced a man to jail for viewing content online that suggested the 2020 election was fraudulently stolen.
The man, Douglas Jensen, had been released on July 13 after a months-long incarceration in a DC jail for allegedly participating in the Jan. 6 rally at the US Capitol, Buzzfeed
One condition set by US District Judge Timothy Kelly upon Jensen's pretrial release was he refrain from going online, "specifically to stream election fraud conspiracy theory content," reportsBuzzfeed News.
During an unannounced compliance check, officers found Jensen in his garage streaming unidentified content from Rumble, which prosecutors claimed was a popular conservative platform.
"Jensen admitted to the court officer that he'd also spent two days watching a 'cyber symposium' hosted by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, one of the most prominent proponents of election fraud conspiracy theories," writes Buzzfeed.
Kiryat Moshe mixed-use project to replace Jerusalem Angel Bakery
Ir Olam will have office and commercial space, an events hall, hotel and housing.
Last week work began on the demolition of Jerusalem's flour mill on Yosef Weitz Street. It will be replaced by 'Ir Olam,' a unique mixed-use project planned by architect Avner Yashar, with office and commercial space, housing and hotels, and a unique design rarely seen in the Israeli capital.
The project is being developed by ISA Group, managed by co-CEOS Akiva Zorbein and Shalom Greiba, on a 3.375 acre site beneath Givat Shaul on the road to Har Nof and the Jerusalem Forest. The site is near Road 16, the new western Jerusalem entrance highway.
The planned project includes two long buildings six to seven floors high and two 25-floor towers with 3,000 square meters of commercial space, 5,000 square meters of office space, a 940 square meter events hall, a 1,825 square meter - 160-room hotel, and apartments in the interior of the project. 'Ir Olam' has yet to receive final planning approval so the final dimensions of the project are not yet certain.
Yashar said, "The location is very interesting because Givat Shaul was once an industrial zone far from the city where the Angel bakery and flour mill were built. Dramatic things are happening there. The first is Road 16 the new entrance highway to Jerusalem which comes right up to the southern side of the project and will be a major new entrance to the city. The second is that there will be a Jerusalem light rail line on the main road above the project, Kanfei Nesharim Street, on which construction has already begun. Ultimately, industrial enterprises will leave for more contemporary activities. Our project sits on the seam between the Kiryat Moshe residential neighborhood and the margins of industry. It's a strategic location in which to create change.'
Yashar added, 'Jerusalem is undergoing a very big transformation in everything related to real estate development. Once they only did government buildings and the economy itself did not get going. There is now a large amount of building of housing and businesses both in the heart of the city and the suburbs. The city is really flourishing. The planning authorities are also reexamining how to build. We meet the condition for building with stone but in a new way with silo structures and the bridge above the highway, which are very impressive. It isn't perhaps beautiful but it has the major power of a fleeting and past world. We wanted to preserve something of that spirit with the daring of a new project."
The project is on the edge of Kiryat Moshe, a Jerusalem neighborhood built in the 1920s as a garden suburb and today inhabited by the national religious and ultra-orthodox communities. A 100 square meter, four-room apartment in Kiryat Moshe Street is on the market for NIS 2.75 million and a 63 square meter three room apartment in Levi Eliezer Street is on the market for NIS 1.98 million. Office space in the Atid Tower in Givat Shaul is being leased for NIS 78 per square meter and a work space is for rent for Nis 4,500 per month for 138 square meters.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on August 29, 2021
See you Sunday bli neder, Shabbat Succout Shalom
On this Shabbat, we read in the Synagogue King Solomon's famous book Kohelet. King Solomon teaches us that having G-d in our life provides meaning in an otherwise meaningless world. Shabbat and Succout Shalom
