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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.

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Israel Deploys Rapid COVID-19 Testing at Ben Gurion Airport

By TPS / Tazpit News Agency

Israel's International Ben Gurion Airport is on the way to becoming a "Green Terminal" through the "Safe Flight" program and the use of antigen tests for incoming passengers.

Antigen tests are immunoassays that detect the presence of a specific viral antigen, COVID-19 in this case. The tests in use were developed by Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv.

The new test works by detecting protein portions of the virus. It yields results within two to 15 minutes and has a 100% success rate in identifying people who are infected.

The program will enable non-Israelis to arrive in the country and enter it after testing negative with the rapid testing. Foreign nationals can enter Israel on condition they receive permission from a special committee before they travel, the Population Immigration and Border Authority said.

A trial is being conducted on inbound El Al flights.

The country is limiting the number of daily entries to 3,000.

Israel has only recently reopened its skies after several weeks of closure in an attempt to block the import of new COVID-19 variants into the country.

The government fears that a variant resistant to the vaccines it using to inoculate the population will enter the country and overturn the progress it has made in fighting the pandemic and reopening the economy.

The Three Musketeers at the Kotel

The Portion of Pekudei

The Final Balance

Following the completion of the construction of the Mishkan (tabernacle), it is time to present a final accounting of the materials that were collected and how they were used. Betzalel ben Uri, the architect charged with the implementation of the Divine plans as told to Moses is praised for his impressive work.

The Torah embellishes his name with the addition of extra crowns atop the letter "tzadi" of his name. (Remazei Yoel)

The portions of Vayakhel and Pikudei are adorned with a large amount of specially curved letters "pei". Perhaps this is to emphasize the joy felt at the completion of the building of the Mishkan. (I did not find any references for this idea.)

The Biden administration is systematically erasing Trump

By Andrea Widburg, AM THINIKER

Biden is undoing every single executive order Trump signed, regardless of whether a given order made sense or not. The goal isn't to benefit America or Americans, it's to destroy any vestige of Trump in the American government (and, as a pleasant byproduct, to replace the American population which a more malleable one).

The Victory Girls blog caught up with the seven executive orders that Biden signed on Wednesday. What's noteworthy is how innocuous or pro-American the Trump executive orders were. It's clear that, for the Democrats now in power, the substance of Trump's executive orders is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is getting rid of them. This is the executive order equivalent of fumigation.

Or to put Biden's conduct in its proper historical context, we are witnessing the American version of the damnatio memoriae – or condemnation of memory. It's how a successor government erases the predecessor from every official record. It's a very primitive action, as well as being one that totalitarians embrace. (Stalin was famous for it.) You may draw your own conclusions about the Biden administration's motives.

Biden revoked Trump's effort to rid the American government of hideous modernist architecture. Trump had signed an order "Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture." That's gone.

After the summer of violence in Democrat-run cities, Trump issued a memo aimed at identifying what had happened in those cities that allowed "anarchy, violence and destruction." That makes sense because the wise person learns from errors, especially costly ones. But Biden is not going to let anyone finger the major government failures in Seattle, Portland, New York, or Washington.

Deeply disturbed by America's headlong dive into insolvency, Trump announced "Core Principles for Regulating the United States Financial System." Among other things, it intended to make it possible for Americans to create and save wealth. Biden didn't like that one either, so it's now gone.

Biden also slashed orders aimed at reducing poverty as a general matter and helping small businesses during the lockdown. He gave no explanation. It's enough to know that even those good ideas bear the evil Trump taint.

And then there was this one, and here I'm quoting the Victory Girls:

Finally, the biggest reversal of the day was Joe Biden lifting the ban on some green card applicants from entering the US. Trump had placed the ban last year, saying that it was needed to protect American workers during the pandemic:

"By pausing immigration, we will help put unemployed Americans first in line for jobs as America reopens. . . It would be wrong and unjust for Americans laid off by the virus to be replaced with new immigrant labor flown in from abroad. We must first take care of the American worker."

But Biden said that the ban "not advance the interests of the United States." In fact, he said it "harms the United States." How? By keeping family members apart, he said.

Plus:

"It also harms industries in the United States that utilize talent from around the world."

Forget American workers who may just be returning to work after Covid-layoffs. Gotta bring in that "talent from around the world."

The purpose behind lifting the immigrant ban is clear: Democrats don't like the current American population. The really bad Americans are white and believe in traditional values. Blacks are becoming a problem too. Some are getting independent and trying to escape the Democrat plantation. Others, while reliably Democrat in their voting patterns, are not productive.

In Democrat minds, though, Latin American immigrants are made to order: They're non-white, the ones who haven't been tainted by American education are hard workers, and they'll be reliably Democrat for a long time.

The Democrats have just invented an old saying: If you don't like the current American population, go out and get yourself a new one.

And that's what Joe did between naps on Wednesday.

A critical piece of information about the new vaccines

By Stephen Leonard, MD

Thanks to President Trump's fast-tracking the process for developing and approving vaccines in America, we currently have two anti-COVID vaccines available, one from Moderna and one from Pfizer. Both of these vaccines use mRNA to trigger the body's immune response by giving the body instructions to create certain proteins. Because mRNA is the instrument by which our bodies express their genetic instructions, many people have become concerned that the new vaccines will actually alter their body's DNA. That's not the case; they're just a shortcut to the body's usual response to a traditional vaccine.

Traditional vaccines inject viruses that have been weakened, or "attenuated," so they cannot cause serious illness, against which the host creates antibodies. These vaccines don't inject enough viral material to stimulate an immune response. Instead, the weakened viruses in traditional vaccines do exactly what naturally occurring pathogenic viruses do — they multiply in the host. The weakened viruses do this by producing mRNA that tricks the hosts into making enough of the proteins (and lots of new, live virus particles) to stimulate our bodies to create antibodies and mount an immune response that is then effective against the original disease-causing virus when and if it tries to invade.

What the new mRNA vaccines are doing is leapfrogging over the intermediate, time-consuming, unpredictable, and potentially dangerous step of waiting for injected viruses to multiply and do their thing. Instead, the new vaccines introduce mRNA engineered to mimic the mRNA that the live viruses would have produced.

This engineered mRNA consistently, quickly, and predictably triggers production of a protein that looks just like one that exists on an intact virus. That protein stimulates an immune response to intact viruses without actually injecting either a weakened or theoretically dead virus into the body. The engineered mRNA cannot itself cause the disease, and it vanishes in short order.

Understanding how the mRNA works — that it tricks the body into learning how to defend against a virus without exposure to actual viruses or any changes to genetic DNA — makes the criticism of the new vaccines much less persuasive. I am in awe of the brilliance behind this advanced vaccine therapy.

Since I am in my 70s, I was able to qualify for the new vaccine. I got my second Moderna shot last week and felt slightly achy and flu-ish the following day. Now, though, I am absolutely delighted that I have put most of the risk of this plague to me personally behind me. I have also contributed my small part to letting our desperately sick society heal from the damage inflicted by politicians and Tony Fauci.

Stephen Leonard is a retired surgeon and active aviation medical examiner and pilot, living in Idaho.

The Racist Origins of President Trump's Impeachment

By Daniel Greenfield

"We are not in favor of giving a vote to the negro, because we believe that he is not fit to enjoy that right," Senator Allen G. Thurman once said.

These days, even while Democrats topple the statues of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, two men that Thurman hated, the old dead racist has become the basis for the unconstitutional Democrat campaign to impeach President Trump after leaving office.

Thurman, who was picked by the Democrats as their nominee for Vice President, had played a major role in the sole case of the Senate deciding to impeach a public official after leaving office. The Democrat case for impeaching President Trump rests on that one case.

And on Thurman.

Legal partisans have spent weeks debating whether President Trump can be impeached after leaving office. Every single one of these analyses is heavy on rhetoric and light on precedent.

There's a very good reason for that.

Impeachment exists to remove officials who are in office. The brilliant legal scholars who argue otherwise might want to put down their law books and check a dictionary. Impeachment shares its origin with the more commonplace word, 'impede'. The whole point of impeachment is to impede public officials from holding office by using legislators as investigators and courts.

The post-office impeachment arguments remind me of the movie, Gus, where a mule is allowed to play professional football because the referee can't find anything in the rulebook that says the players can't be mules. Every argument for impeaching President Trump comes down to the same position that mules can play football because the Constitution never says they can't.

"It makes no sense whatsoever that the president or any official could commit heinous crimes against our country and then defeat our impeachment powers and avoid the vote on disqualification by simply resigning," Senator Schumer argued.

Like saying, "You can't fire me, I quit", that gets the same result.

The purpose of impeachment is removing an official from office. If he quits, then he's removed. And if he committed "heinous crimes" then a court of law could try him for those offenses.

Democrats are obsessed with removing President Trump from an office he no longer holds, but their only precedent for that is the impeachment of Belknap, Grant's Secretary of War, who was tried and acquitted by the Senate after leaving office.

"The Senate convened a trial, and voted, as a chamber, that Mr. Belknap could be tried 'for acts done as Secretary of War, notwithstanding his resignation of said office.' The language is crystal clear, without any ambiguity," Schumer blotivated. "The history and precedent is clear: the Senate has the power to try former officials."

Schumer is quoting a resolution by Senator Allen Thurman, who opposed President Lincoln's emancipation proclamation and campaigned against allowing black people to vote. But that's just the old Democrat habit of refighting the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. Even while accusing President Trump of sedition, the Democrat cause is wedded to sedition.

The Democrat precedent for impeaching President Trump is a resolution put forward by a Senate Democrat who had opposed the Grant administration because he was a violent racist. Senator Thurman had previously delivered a speech to the Democratic State Convention in West Virginia declaring that Republicans wanted "to put the heel of the negro upon the neck of the white man" with the 14th Amendment.

That's the Constitutional scholar on whose resolution the Democrat impeachment crusade rests.

If Schumer and the Democrats are going to use Thurman's resolution as a constitutional precedent, making him the arbiter of what the Framers thought, then they must share his opinion of the 14th Amendment and allowing black people to vote. That would be consistent.

Eight years before the impeachment of Belknap, Thurman was warning that there would be another civil war, leading to "a war of races in the South and the extermination of the negro".

Thurman went on to argue that black people were inferior, couldn't be allowed to vote, and that they were little more than brutes who would be killed if they kept demanding equal rights.

This is the author of the Democrat precedent for trying President Trump after leaving office.

Senator Thurman's opposition to President Grant and attempts to smear his administration had everything to do with his racism and support for the Confederacy, rather than the rule of law.

The sole Democrat precedent for post-office impeachment comes from a racist who was threatening the country with a second civil war, and the extermination of black people, and was waging a political war against President Grant because he had defeated the Confederacy.

It's not just Schumer. The Belknap trial and the Thurman resolution have been widely quoted.

Every time the media trots out a legal expert to explain why President Trump can be impeached, he turns to the Belknap trial and the Thurman resolution as if they were the Constitution.

The legal experts, like Schumer, don't discuss how the Belknap trial concluded.

There were only enough votes to impeach Secretary of War Belknap in the first place because legislators argued that Belknap had resigned to avoid impeachment. But the Senate acquitted Belknap because its members believed that a former official couldn't actually be impeached.

Impeachment failed because 23 senators voted, "not guilty for want of jurisdiction."

Not only did the Belknap trial fail because Schumer was wrong, but the entire premise doesn't even apply. Had Belknap's term naturally expired, there would have been no impeachment.

It was only because Belknap had so blatantly resigned to avoid impeachment that his behavior was so provocative that he was illegally impeached to avoid creating a bad example.

When your only real precedent for trying a former president in American history is one case from 1876 of a cabinet official that was highly controversial at the time and ultimately failed, you're gonna need a whole lot more precedents to actually impeach a former president.

Especially when your only real basis for it is a resolution by a Democrat racist seditionist.

Impeaching elected officials can be political theater or serve a legitimate purpose. Impeaching former officials is never anything except political theater. That's true of the campaign to paint the Grant administration as corrupt which helped pave the way for a Democrat revival by smearing a generation of Republican officials associated with the Grant administration as crooked thieves.

The ultimate goal of that plot was the restoration of Democrat power and of segregation.

Democrats failed to make their case in actual courts, but holding hearings and an absurd impeachment tainted President Grant and Republicans in the eyes of the American public. Grant would labor, even while dying of cancer, to finish his memoirs, provide for his family and redeem his reputation from the Democrat smear campaigns of Grant Derangement Syndrome.

That's the playbook that Democrats are following in their campaign against President Trump.

If the Democrats believe that President Trump is actually guilty of committing the crimes for which the Constitution says that can be impeached, "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors", then why not bring them into a court of law?

Democrats and their legal hounds have generated numerous investigations. New York has been drowning in blood while Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance have spent their time inventing new Trump investigations. And those haven't fared very well.

The US Attorney's office in Manhattan is done with the "Individual-1" investigation that Democrats had been claiming would "lock up" President Trump. But surely if the Democrats claim to have evidence of "high crimes and misdemeanors", their allies in the FBI and among federal prosecutors would be happy to see them. Why settle for a mere impeachment and disqualification when the Democrats could finally fulfill their dream of seeing him behind bars?

Especially when they're almost certain to lose their latest impeachment again in the Senate.

Instead, the Democrats claim that they have evidence of "high crimes and misdemeanors", but clearly don't expect these "high crimes and misdemeanors" to be actionable in an actual court.

Courts try people for actual crimes. Impeachments are political proceedings.

Every single presidential impeachment in our history was a political proceeding. The proliferation of impeachments and attempted impeachments in recent American history is a symptom of partisan abuse of legislative powers, not of higher ethical standards.

The Framers of the Constitution wanted impeachment to be taken seriously.

Impeachment was meant to keep the government clean, instead the government is hopelessly dirty, and impeachment has become a tool for making it even dirtier and keeping it dirty.

The Democrats are turning America into Venezuela, endlessly borrowing and spending money that doesn't exist, while keeping the streets full of soldiers, and using security powers against political opponents, while their Big Tech oligarchy suppresses opposition political speech.

Washington D.C. is full of razor wire and military checkpoints through impeachment. Impeachment may be doomed, but it provides another justification for extending a manufactured state of emergency. And if any violence does take place, that will extend the D.C. occupation.

Even Chief Justice Roberts, no friend of the Trump administration, has refused to preside over what he clearly doesn't think is a legal presidential impeachment process. The same Democrats who universally voted for an unconstitutional 25th Amendment coup couldn't care less. When you've got troops in the streets and control over the government, the law is what you make of it.

Those are high crimes and misdemeanors. Maybe the impeachers should impeach themselves.

Hollywood Blacklist is Back–and Jewish Libs are Cool with it

By Jonathan S. Tobin

One of the staples of the Los Angeles entertainment world in the last few decades has been stories that depict the unfairness and cruelty of the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s. At the height of the Cold War, many with left-wing political convictions were driven out of the entertainment industry because of their beliefs. It was the original "cancel culture" fueled by whisper campaigns that were something like the way social media works today, though with far less speed and efficiency.

Some victims of this purge were wrongly hauled in front of Congress to be asked if they were Communists. Those who refused to answer were prosecuted, despite citing their constitutional rights. Many others were also prevented from getting work in the film or television industries for many years.

That era gets its name from the often inaccurate and demagogic accusations made by Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.). Yet the people who fell afoul of these persecutions are now considered martyrs to injustice. Many of them were Jews. Indeed, some historians believe that anti-Semitism played a strong motivating role in the saga of the blacklist. Of the "Hollywood 10"—a group of screenwriters who all refused to testify about communism and were jailed, of whom the most famous was Dalton Trumbo, the protagonist of a recent film on this chapter of history—six were Jewish. Other Jewish entertainers like Zero Mostel, whose career was shelved for years before becoming a star in the 1960s after his starring role in the original stage production of "Fiddler on the Roof, also suffered.

The moral of this story—drilled home in countless films and plays made since then—is that it was wrong to penalize people because of their political views. We've been taught that the right-wing Hollywood oligarchs who stifled the careers and ruined the lives of those targeted by the blacklist had violated the rights of their victims. Although the congressional bullies who were part of this tragedy operated a House Un-American Activities Committee, it was really they who were "un-American." The heroes of the tale were people like actor/producer Kirk Douglas, who mustered the courage to break the blacklist by hiring Trumbo to write the script of "Spartacus," and thus ending this shameful chapter of American history.

But it appears that the lesson that was supposed to be learned from this wasn't what we thought it was. It wasn't really about it being wrong to persecute people for their beliefs, especially those who were not part of a consensus, like left-wingers in the conservative Hollywood of the 1950s. From the perspective of 2021, it's clear now that what was bad about it was that the victims came from one particular side of the political aisle, not the trashing of freedom of speech.

That's the only conclusion to be drawn from recent events of which the most prominent was Lucasfilm's firing of actress Gina Carano from her role in the hit show "The Mandalorian," the "Star Wars" spinoff on the Disney+ platform. Of course, that isn't the way the story has been reported in most mainstream media outlets, where her employers' claim that she was "denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable" has been accepted at face value.

In most accounts of the incident, Carano's firing is being represented as a justified punishment of a woman who had gone off the deep end with hateful social-media posts, including one in which she compared the targeting of supporters of former President Donald Trump to the Holocaust. In the wake of her firing, the former mixed-martial-arts star was quickly ostracized, with the agency that represented her also dropping her. But if she was being "canceled," it was, we've been told, her own fault since no decent company or person should wish to be associated with anyone who expounds hateful views or expresses them in a way that has been widely described as anti-Semitic. The viral Twitter mob that helped pressure the "Star Wars" franchise into firing her depicted itself as defending Jews.

There are a number of serious problems with what happened here—not the least of which was that while Carano's invocation of the Holocaust was deeply inappropriate, it was clearly not anti-Semitic in nature. Nor were her other supposedly offensive posts in which she raised the possibility of voter fraud in the 2020 election, mocked the inclusion of pronouns in Twitter profiles and the wearing of face masks during the coronavirus pandemic.

More to the point, if everyone who made a wildly inappropriate Holocaust analogy were to be canceled, she would have plenty of company on the unemployment line. Indeed, her co-star Pedro Pascal had also used a Holocaust analogy in a social-media post in which he criticized the Trump administration's policies at the border with Mexico (he actually compounded his offense by using a picture of Palestinian children rather than Mexican migrants).

Nor was Pascal alone in this respect. Just weeks ago, a video by former actor and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger went viral after he compared the U.S. Capitol riot to Kristallnacht. During the presidential campaign, many Democrats, including President Joe Biden, made comparisons of Trump to Nazis. The National Jewish Democratic Council ran an ad during the election campaign comparing the Trump administration to the Nazis and found itself praised, rather than condemned, by prominent Jewish figures, including historian Deborah Lipstadt and former Anti-Defamation League head Abe Foxman, who normally condemn such hyperbole. Indeed, it might be easier to list those Jewish entertainment figures who didn't compare Trump and the Republicans to the Nazis than those who did.

Carano's real offense was not in invoking the Holocaust to condemn something that wasn't remotely comparable to the murder of 6 million Jews or anti-Semitism. It was for expressing opinions that the Hollywood establishment and social-media mobs despise, which was what happened to the victims of the blacklist.

There are those who claim that this is nonsense. They are right when they say companies have the right to hire and fire at will, though that was as true in the '50s as it is today. More importantly, they assert that the victims of the blacklist had good intentions even if many of them were naive about the Communists and the Soviet Union. By contrast, they assert that Carano's beliefs are hateful, though whether this is simply about her support for Trump or genuine right-wing extremism is a question few of those who applauded her firing seem to care about.

This is partly a matter of historical amnesia and partly pure partisan hypocrisy.

Part of the generally accepted narrative about the blacklist is that its victims were innocent of doing anything worthy of criticism. They are depicted in most accounts as being high-minded liberals falsely accused of being Communists. But, like some of the other "martyrs" of McCarthyism such as Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were actually guilty of spying for the Soviets, many of the blacklist targets were indeed secret Communists. Some were even ardent Stalinists, who ignored, rationalized or apologized for the murderous purges that took the lives of millions, as well as Moscow's open anti-Semitism that led to Jews being executed or imprisoned in the Gulag in incidents like the Doctor's Plot.

The closer you look at the blacklist, the less appealing many of its victims appear. But that didn't make their persecution any more defensible. The same principle applies to Carano and others being canceled these days.

As it happens, Carano is a beneficiary of something that didn't exist in the 1950s: a formidable counter-culture media willing to attack the liberal sacred cows that are defended by the Internet and entertainment establishment that is today's version of the Hollywood bosses who bowed to the blacklist. She's signed up to do a movie project with conservative journalist Ben Shapiro and his Daily Wire website. But it is precisely the existence of media outlets that offer a different perspective on the issues of the day that is infuriating many of the same liberals who revere the memory of the blacklist victims. They're all for freedom of speech, but also think it would be a good idea to bounce Fox News off the cable spectrum and applaud when people are forced out of their jobs at outlets like The New York Times for having the wrong opinions, which they label as "misinformation" that must be suppressed.

Outrage about the Capitol riot and Trump's failings is understandable. But like the very real concerns about the threat of communism in the 1950s, none of it justifies the rise of cancel culture, and the willingness of Big Tech oligarchs and mainstream media companies to collude in silencing voices expressing opinions they don't like. If you thought the blacklist was a threat to individual freedoms, then you should be equally outraged about what's happening now to those on the other end of the political spectrum. If you aren't, then it's likely that you're a partisan hypocrite as well as blind to the dangers that silencing dissent poses to everyone in a democracy.