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Bring Out The Best In Each Other »
We are all very different when at our best than when we are at our worst. We can even seem like two different people. This isn't a rare case of "multiple personality disorder." Rather, it is simply that when we feel good we think clearly, while when we are stressed we may get angry.
We all have met people who bring out the best in us. Around them, we feel better about ourselves. We think clearer. We act kinder and more elevated. Around other people, however, we might sometimes behave our worst.
This will be true for you, and true for the person you are married to. Your task is to bring out the best in yourself and the best in your spouse. (And before you complain that this seems unfair, remember that your spouse has the same task!)
A husband and wife who know how to bring out the best in each other will live blessed lives. They will cherish each other and create a wonderful environment in which to raise their children.
Love Yehuda Lave |
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Spring 2016 has sprung in Sheri Hesced
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View of the neighborhood of Ras al-Amud in the Shiloah (Silwan) section of Jerusalem. (file) Photo Credit: Miriam Alster / Flash 90
JewishPress.com columnist Paul Gherkin raised an important point in his article today, which is not just the fast growth rate of Jerusalem's Arab population, but also that their poverty levels are high due to the fewer job opportunities that exist in Jerusalem compared to the rest of the country.
Makor Rishon's token leftwing columnist, Shalom Yerushalmi pointed out last year that Jerusalem is at high risk of losing its Jewish majority – and it's all Israel's fault.
As often as I find myself disagreeing with Yerushalmi, to the point where reading him as of late has become simply tedious, in this case he's right.
There's another significant factor that keeps Jerusalem's Arab population size artificially inflated, despite the lack of housing and job opportunities – and it has nothing to do with religion.
After 1967, Israel found itself with a lot of Arabs in newly reunified Jerusalem, but not quite sure how to deal with this enemy population who mostly grew up hating Jews and Israel.
Eventually it was decided that Jerusalem's Arabs would be given Residency Status – they would have full civil rights and benefits, except voting in national elections (they can vote in Jerusalem's local elections), along with a path to citizenship, if they wanted to become Israeli citizens.
Most were happy with that option. They received all the benefits of modern Israeli society, without the stigma of acquiring that despised Israeli citizenship.
The downside is that Israel required these Arabs to reside exclusively and almost constantly in Jerusalem, otherwise they lose their Residency Status.
The unintended consequence is that Jerusalem's growing Arab population can't leave Jerusalem for any extended period of time to build a life elsewhere. If they do, they'll lose all their Israeli benefits and residency status.
The option is still there for them to take Israeli citizenship – but most don't want it and probably never will.
Yerushalmi's plan is to get rid of the Jerusalem residency requirement.
Let them move to Nazareth, let them move to America, and let them keep their Israel Residency status.
The immediate effect will be an Arab exodus from Jerusalem, and possibly even an Arab exodus from Israel.
It would be as if they all took the citizenship option, without the downside of their acquiring national voting rights.
This idea is not without risks and problems, perhaps to be discussed in another article.
But as long as the path to citizenship remains open to them, there's no risk of calling Israel an Apartheid state, just as Puerto Rico's referendum against becoming a full US state doesn't make the US an Apartheid state.
Perhaps, as Jerusalem's Arab integrate into other Arab communities in Israel, get better jobs and settle down, they will become less religiously extreme. Some may want to take on full citizenship. Others may want to leave Israel completely, knowing they can come back if they wanted.
One thing is for sure, removing the Jerusalem residency requirement, would safely release one of Jerusalem's most major pressure valves and keep the city unified.
About the Author: JoeSettler blogs at The Muqata.blogspot.com and occasionally on his own blog at JoeSettler.blogspot.com.
The author's opinion does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Jewish Press. |
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K A H A N E
The magazine of the authentic Jewish Idea
July –August 1988 Tamuz – Menachem Av 5748
On A Mountain, With A Trumpet (excerpts)
"But if the watchman see the sword come and blow not the trumpet and the people be not warned; if the sword cometh and take from them a soul…his blood will I require from the watchman". (Ezekiel 33)
I sit on the mountain with a trumpet in my hand. We all sit on a mountain, each of us a watchman with a trumpet in hand. Our mission is to sit and see the enemy. Our mission is to see the danger, to search our own souls and to blow the trumpet and warn the rest – the rest of the Jewish people.
I sit on a mountain as the sands slip through, the clock ticks away and the Almighty watches from above to see whether the sleeping Jew will awake on top of the mountain to see the enemy and blow the trumpet and save himself and all the rest and reclaim his greatness and his destiny before there are no more years left.
We are all watchmen, we Jews. We are commanded to know the danger, to see it approach, to blow the trumpet and save, both ourselves and our fellow Jews.
How possible to sit on a mountain and behave like valleys! How incredible that we sit on high, seeing all that is below, and sees nothing! How awful that the watchman sleeps even as the enemy grows bolder and comes closer and the clock that ticks, rings its alarm, shrilly, without pause, and he hears nothing. We are a nation of watchmen on a hill and we sleep the sleep of the mediocre fool. "Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest; so shall thy poverty come as one who travels and they want as an armed man." (Proverbs 6)
I sit on the mountain and, behold, the enemy, the terrible dangers, are in full view. There they are, there they approach, those who travel, as armed men. Jew, can you not see them:
- A land of Israel that sees Arabs rioting without fear of an army hobbled by tragic orders of small men, fearful of the nations and what they will say; little men who never thought for a moment of fear: What will G-d say? A land in which soldiers and civilians – are stoned by howling Arabs whose self-confidence and certainty grow in proportion to the hesitation, uncertainty and loss of confidence on the part of Jews. A land in which Arab citizens of Israel puncture the absurd myth of "loyalty" to the Jewish State by carrying the riots and hatred and the cries of "We will free Palestine," into the Jewish cities of Jaffa and Lydda and Acre. A land of Israel which sees its Jewish citizens, frustrated and bitter at the impotence of the government, who are gripped by the terrible thought: Perhaps, G-d forbid, the State will not survive…
- A Land of Israel in which the "stranger", so beloved by the guilt-ridden eyrev rav, mixed multitude, of our times, the "stranger", the Arab, "rises above us higher and higher and we sink lower and lower."
- A Land of Israel in which fear stalks the highway, and the inner psyche of the Jewish citizen, as soldiers and civilians are murdered regularly and the proud new Jew, the product of the Zionism of Herzl, and Borochov and Jabotinksy, the one who left Minsk and Pinsk and Fez and Sa'ana, who fled the fear and psyche of Minsk and Pinsk and Fez and Sa'ana and the psychological ghetto of the exile. A land in which fear grips the Jew and Zionism dies a pathetic spiritual death.
- A land of Israel in which there are funerals each week, funerals of Jews who did not fall in battle but who were murdered in the streets and in the fields of Eretz Yisrael, and an impotent Jewish government "gropes at noonday as the blind gropeth in darkness," and has no answer, even as it frees 1100 terrorists and jails Jewish heroes. A land in which the glory of Samson is shorn from our heads by the Peresitic Delilahs and strength ebbs from the body Israel even as the Palestinian-Philistines pledge: "See wherein his great strength lieth and by what means we may prevail against him…. And we will give you every one of us eleven hundred pieces of silver."
- A Land of Israel in which the army is slowly destroyed as a fighting force and the morale of its soldiers shattered by timid and frightened orders, conceived in gentilized concepts and born in fear of that gentile, not to strike with an all-powerful hand at the enemy – lest women and children, who are an integral part of that enemy, be hurt. A land that ties the hands of its soldiers and thus passes a death sentence on them, a land that sees more and more Jews fearful of army service and fearful of taking the action that will save their own lives.
- A Land of Israel that sees our enemy grow bolder, encouraged by the madness and gentilization of the Hellenists, the mixed multitude who destroy the Jewish state in stages even as they pretend to govern it. A land that see Arab boldness and confidence increase in proportion to Jewish insecurity, guilt, weakness, confusion, stumbling and fear. A land that sees a guarantee of worse, much worse, Arab action and slaughter of Jews, as the barrier of fear is swept away, a land that will make Northern Ireland appear idyllic, as the wild man who is Ishmael, emerges in all his barbarism and savagery.
- A Land of Israel that sees the Jewish character of the land disappear under the hobnailed boots of the storm troopers of the self-hating and fascist Left. The ones who spiritually destroyed Sephardic Jews and who kidnapped young Yemenite Jewish infants even as they stripped Jewishness from the souls of their parents. The ones who, driven by self-hate and with a Judaism that they see as hideous hump they cannot escape, attempt to destroy our children, our people, by ordering enforced gathering together of Arab and Jewish youngsters in Arab villages and Jewish towns, in weekends and dances and songs, sounds of music that are a funeral dirge for Jewish survival. A land that opens the doors to the impurity and pollution of intermarriage and assimilation and calls them "good." A land that in the moves to increase the defilement of the Jewish seed and Jewish purity, that is seen already all too clearly in the Jewish women living in Arab villages, in the Jewish prostitutes and their Arab pimps, in the Jewish girls sitting and laughing with Arabs on the beaches and in the coffee houses.
- A Land of Israel in which the economy dies even as the men of fraud pretend that it improves; a land in which unemployment and disaster will unravel the social fabric leading to chaos and anarchy in the streets. A land in which young Jews, released from the army, find themselves unemployed, as greedy Jewish employers prefer two Arabs for the price of a single Jewish worker. A land in which cities see entire areas becoming Arab, as Ishmaelite arrives, cash dollars in hand, dollars that come across the Jordan bridges from the PLO coffers, and buys apartments, in neighborhoods and towns.
- A Land of Israel that sees a Knesset populated, not only by Arab enemies of the state, but by Jewish ones. Jews who are enveloped with blind, obsessive hate against religion, against Judaism. Jews who cannot sleep without dreaming of ways to liquidate Judaism. Who yearn to go to war against Judaism and erase it from the earth and who are so spiritually sick that they prepare to go to war and murder the Jews they so hate.
- A Land that sees the Arab, free of obligation to serve the country, free of paying his full share of taxes, multiplying at a rate that sees the Galilee and Wadi Ara and the Triangle, filled with a majority of Arabs, Arabs whose quantity is matched by a quality stemming from Jewish madness as the Hellenists in their guilt and self-hate took an ignorant, illiterate peasant's child and turned him into an educated intellectual who is the greatest danger to the survival of Israel, who is the future leader of the PLO. A land that sees Jewish madmen subsidizing the Arab birthrate by paying checks each month for every child.
- A land that, through a perverted "democracy" and "coexistence" calmly salutes national suicide as it allows the Arabs to grow swiftly and move towards a majority, a majority that will vote Israel out of existence on the way to slaughter that will be a thousand fold that which they commit against each other daily in Lebanon.
- A Land that sees immigration into the country dry up even as Israeli Jews seek to flee the country, their main obstacle being American and Western immigration quotas. A land that is unhappy, that has lost confidence in itself, in the justice of its own cause and in the iron guarantee that "Israel can never go under." A land in the hands of the gentilized Hebrews, the hideous Hellenists, the mixed multitude.
The enemy comes nearer, the dangers are closer, and I sit on a mountain and blow
the trumpet. Arise, O slumbering Jews and save yourself, save your body, save your soul!
I sit and blow the trumpet and the Jew sleeps on, or reacts in vicious anger and shouts: Silence, we sleep! I sit and blow the trumpet and plead with brothers and sisters to arouse themselves, their people – to bring the Messiah now.
Another year enters the volumes of time and the next takes its place in the march
toward Jewish destiny. The sands of the New Year are already running. Running out. The sands slip through, the clock ticks away and the Almighty waits to see whether the sleeping Jew will awaken from his slumber to reclaim his greatness and destiny before there are no more years left.
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