Breaking News: Green Pass has gone as of Sunday and Students May Enter Israel Even If Not Vaccinated or Recovered and Israeli Mezuzahs to be Shipped to China Held a Surprise and Does Judaism Believe that People Are Basically Good? By Dennis Prager and Negev Now Part of “Palestine”By Rabbi Dov Fischer and Tu B’Shvat AndBreaking News: Green Pass has gone as of Sunday and Students May Enter Israel Even If Not Vaccinated or Recovered and The Ten Commandments By Michal Popper and The 29th Of November And Its Aftermath By Rabbi Hanoch Teller
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.
Avigdor Lieberman says, 'We will not allow the Green Pass to be extended after February 6'
Israel's government on Sunday approved a one-week extension of the Green Pass Covid regulations, which were set to be canceled on February 1, along with restrictions on gatherings.
All but three ministers, Gideon Saar, Yifat Shasha-Bitton, and Issawi Frej, supported the extension of the Green Pass. Although he voted in favor of the extension, Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman said, "I repeat, we will not allow the Green Pass to be extended after February 6, not even by a second."
The Green Pass, which indicates whether a person is vaccinated or recovered from Covid, is required by most businesses and public places to enter.
However, many health experts have called for it to be canceled, saying it has become obsolete since being previously infected or vaccinated does not protect against the omicron variant.
According to the experts, the Green Pass might even be "dangerous", due to the fact that in places where it is required, people feel safe and might neglect protection measures.
These places would therefore be conducive to contamination according to the experts, who recommend requiring a negative test in addition to the Green Pass, particularly at the entrance to retirement homes.
On Sunday, the Health Ministry reported that the reproduction rate, which indicates the average number of infections by a confirmed carrier, dropped to 0.95, showing a downward trend in the epidemic.
According to the ministry's latest report, 45,258 people tested positive on Saturday, the lowest number since January 15.
Students May Enter Israel Even If Not Vaccinated or Recovered
(VINNews) — Israel has again loosened Covid restrictions for yeshiva and seminary students.
In a newly released video, Rabbi Nechemya Malinowitz of Eretz Hakodesh announced on Wednesday that any traveler holding a student visa can enter Israel even if they're not vaccinated or recovered.
According to the new guidelines, students with a visa will automatically be allowed to fly to Israel. This means that yeshiva bochurim and seminary girls will be able to return home for Pesach, even if they are not vaccinated or recovered.
In addition, children of student visa holders will no longer need special permits to enter the county.
Rabbi Malinowitz invested a great deal of effort to make this development possible.
The Three Musketeers at the Kotel
Tu B'Shvat And The Ten Commandments By Michal Popper
Photo Credit: 123rf.com
A few weeks ago we celebrated Tu B'Shvat, which marks the beginning of the year for the trees. This means the beginning of all the commandments having to do with the fruit trees planted in the land of Israel.
All beginnings have something powerful and encouraging about them. When we start new jobs, move to a new place, a new school, new neighborhoods, make new friends, etc., there is always something that gives us hope, strength, and the ability to dream of something great that will arise from this new beginning.
However, when we think of the beginning of the year for the laws regarding the fruit trees planted in Israel, what kind of dreams or strength can we receive from such a beginning?
During the last couple of weeks, we have been reading the Book of Shemot – Exodus, on each Shabbat in shul, which tells the story of the exile and redemption of the Jewish people.
This week we read about the people of Israel becoming a nation bound by the laws of the Torah which we received on Mount Sinai. This beginning coincides with Tu B'Shvat, the New Year for the fruit trees planted in Israel.
Throughout all Jewish teachings, the Torah is constantly compared to the tree of life. And a fruit tree that bares fruit, is giving life by giving us its fruit to sustain ourselves.
Becoming a nation, we promised Hashem that we would obey all the laws written in the holy Torah. Thus our receiving the Torah is the power and strength that we have as Jewish people.
All that we have comes from the Torah that we received thousands of years ago. And yet each time we read about becoming a true and law abiding nation at Mount Sinai, it's all new and exciting once more. The fact that Tu B'Shvat falls during these portions of the Torah readings each year, is to show and to give strength to our nation, of how important it is to follow all the laws of the Torah.
When the Torah and the nation are constantly compared to trees, this gives us a better understanding of the importance of keeping all the laws written down in the Torah.
Everyone can understand that a tree needs certain conditions in order to grow in the best way. We can also understand the importance of the fruit that trees bare, and all the good we can derive from them.
Therefore by keeping the laws of the Torah we will receive strength and long life.
The land of Israel is the home of the Jewish people and the home in which Hashem chose to build His home. Therefore the beginning of the year for the fruit trees that grow in Israel overlaps the receiving of the Torah.
G-d is telling His children that if they keep the laws of the Torah, the Torah will protect them wherever they are. We cannot live without the Torah, nor can we live without food. The fruit trees are a symbol of life that gives us food.
The great Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai lived off a carob tree for 13 years.
Only in Israel are there laws concerning the fruit trees, because everything about Israel in eternal and has to do with our growth as a nation and our connection to Hashem.
There is the famous quote from the Talmud Bavli, in Ta'anit page 5, which talks about a tree, Ilan. It's recited over and over on Tu Bishvat since it talks about a beautiful tree which has everything it needs to keep growing. And then it continues with the blessing which is given to the tree, that all of its offspring should be as lovely as the tree itself.
This is obviously a parable to us, that as great and as learned as we might be, we wish our offspring to be like us and follow in our footsteps forever.
May our footsteps always be rooted in the tree of life which is the Torah and may all the children of Israel return to their true roots, right here in the land of Israel, and see the true fruits of their labor.
Israeli Mezuzahs to be Shipped to China Held a Surprise
Photo Credit: courtesy, COLLive.com
The ants were found, individually, packed into mezuzah cases.
Customs officials at Israel's Ben Gurion International Airport noticed something strange about a shipment of Mezuzos to China this past month.
Instead of kosher parchments with Shema Yisroel, they found inside live insects.
Each Mezuzah case had a secret compartment with a test tube containing a queen ant, generally the mother of all the other ants in an ant colony.
A total of 16 ants were found, reported Israel's Ministry of Environmental Protection which was contacted by border control.
These were unique species of harvesting ants that are found specifically in the Negev region. Also known as harvester ants, they collect seeds or mushrooms which are stored in the nest in communal chambers called granaries.
"This story is unusual," Dr. Gal Zagron, Director of the Pests and Pest Control Division at the Ministry of Environmental Protection, told the Hebrew-language Yedioth Aharonot newspaper.
"When customs contacted us, we thought a few ants got into the shipment. But this was a planned smuggle."
She said it isn't clear what was behind the smuggling, noting that past attempts to grow such ants in a laboratory have failed.
So what happened with the captured harvesting ants? They were released in the Negev, in their natural place.
A Jewish publication I highly respect, recently published a column about Judaism that is not merely wrong; it actually advances a thesis that is the opposite of what Judaism teaches.
That fact alone would not have prompted me to write a rebuttal. What prompts me is that the column was written by an Orthodox rabbi. It is sad enough that many non-Orthodox rabbis have been influenced more by their secular/Left educations than by the Torah. But when a rabbi identified as "centrist Orthodox" distorts one of the most important and normative ideas in Judaism, and is published in a major Jewish journal, we might be in trouble. Of course, he might be an outlier. But I don't think he is unique. Though certainly not yet dominant, secular values have entered parts of modern Orthodox life just as they have traditional Catholic and Protestant Christian life.
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With regard to mainstream Christianity — both Catholicism and Protestantism — and non-Orthodox Judaism, we are indeed in trouble. The secular and leftist influence on these denominations has been disastrous.
I should note that I am not mentioning the rabbi's name as I have no desire to make this issue personal, let alone engage in an ad hominem attack. I know that the curious can identify the rabbi by searching the internet, but I cannot control that. I can only control what I write. And since I assume that this rabbi is a sincere individual, I want to restrict my response to what he wrote.
The rabbi wrote that Judaism posits that people are basically good, that human nature is good.
This is one of the most foolish and dangerous ideas of the secular world. No Abrahamic religion — not Judaism, not Christianity, not Islam — asserts that people are basically good. This notion is a product of the secular age and a major reason for the moral confusion that characterizes our era.
With regard to Judaism, the Torah completely rejects the notion that man is basically good. God Himself states that "the will of man's heart is evil from his youth" (Genesis 8:21) and that "every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time" (Genesis 6:5).
For a rabbi to assert that man is basically good is to assert that God was wrong. I am used to secular people saying that, not Orthodox rabbis.
In addition, the Torah — and the rest of the Bible — repeatedly warns us not to follow our hearts. In fact, Orthodox Jews cite this admonition from the Torah three times every day: "Do not follow your hearts and your eyes after which you prostitute yourselves" (Numbers 15:39).
If the human heart is basically good, why does the Bible repeatedly warn us not to follow it?
The rabbi never cites any of these verses. For good reason: They would simply invalidate his argument. This secular belief in the inherent goodness of man is not only not Jewish; as noted, it is foolish and dangerous.
How foolish? It is not possible to be aware of human history and to rationally maintain that people are basically good. For a Jew to believe such nonsense after the Holocaust is simply breathtaking. Apparently, basically good people murdered six million Jews.
But we don't need references to the Holocaust to make our case.
In the 20th century alone, more than a hundred million people — civilians, not soldiers — were murdered by vile regimes and their vile followers. These include the approximately 20 million killed in the Gulag Archipelago; the slaughter of the Tutsis in Rwanda; the genocidal murder of Armenians; the deliberate starvation of about 60 million Chinese; the Japanese mass rape of Korean "comfort women" and hideous medical experiments on Chinese civilians; and the torture and murder of approximately one out of four Cambodians.
And that is only a partial list.
Virtually every serious thinker in history knew people were not basically good. They knew about the universality of slavery and the tortures and rapes that accompanied slavery. They knew how men behaved in wartime.
Were all the people who engaged in these evils aberrations? In fact, most were quite normal. The aberrations in history have been the truly good individuals. To cite the Holocaust, the Germans, French, Poles, Hungarians, Lithuanians and others who aided the Holocaust, let alone those who did nothing, were normal people. The handful who aided Jews were the aberrations.
And what about childhood bullying? Are fat, or slow, or unattractive boys and girls generally treated with kindness and empathy? The question is rhetorical.
And what about child sexual abuse? The WHO in 2002 estimated that 73 million boys and 150 million girls under the age of 18 years had experienced various forms of sexual violence. Quite remarkable for a world of basically good people.
So much for the foolishness of the belief that people are basically good. Now let's deal with why it is dangerous.
One reason is that the most important, and most difficult, task of parents and of society is to raise good human beings. Yet, those who believe we are born good will not concentrate on making good people. Why bother if we're already good?
A second reason the belief is dangerous is that those who believe it blame the evil that people do on outside forces, not on the individual who committed the evil. Belief in the basic goodness of human nature is the major reason people claim that poverty, or guns, or racism causes crime. Anything except the perpetrator.
The rabbi cites a Yale study that purports to show that babies are not only moral agents but are actually moral beings. Such studies are one reason so many Americans have come to hold universities in increasing contempt. The idea that babies know right and wrong is preposterous. The idea that babies are moral is even more preposterous. Babies are neither moral nor immoral since they have no more free will than your family dog.
Babies are selfish — as they have to be to survive. And babies are innocent. But innocent is not the same as good. The rabbi conflates "innocent" with "good."
He also conflates "in God's image" with "good." He writes: "the Torah stating that human beings are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27) (is) a statement that underscored humanity's inherent goodness."
Not so. Created "in God's image" has never meant man is basically good. Rather, it means that human beings, like God (and unlike animals), know good from evil and have moral free will. In Genesis 1:27, Rashi, author of the most influential Jewish Bible commentary ever written, explains "in God's image" as "the power to comprehend and to discern." Second, it means that human life (again, unlike animal life) is infinitely precious.
Finally, if people are basically good, what is the Torah for? What are all the commandments for? If people are basically good, why would God need to command us not to murder? Don't basically good creatures know this?
It is very troubling that an Orthodox rabbi would teach the opposite of what the Torah and Judaism teach concerning one of the most fundamental issues of life. As more and more modern Orthodox Jews attend college and graduate school, it is imperative that Jewish schools teach the distinctiveness of Jewish values.
Even his most ardent supporters know Binyanim Netanyahu and his Likud also might have formed a governing coalition with Mansour Abbas and Ra'am if he and they could have formed a 61-seat coalition majority with that Arab party associated with the Muslim Brotherhood – the crucial difference being that they would have been four Arab MKs ro 57 right wing MKs, but still crossing a red line. Netanyahu also closed down building new homes in Judea and Samaria at times, although he also authorized the construction of others and a of a new settlement, but also stopped Chomesh from expanding although carefully did not destroy it, He also was prepared during coalition talks to negotiate a split governance that the President had not initially authorized, and more.
However, it now emerges as a blessing that the ill-conceived Bennett-Lapid-Meretz-Labor-Ra'am government, truly born in sin, ultimately are the ones who actually did form such a governing coalition with Mansour Abbas. Because the unequivocal proof now is so manifest that it was wrong and misguided, utterly disastrous and contradictory to the entire Zionist enterprise to bring in Ra'am. Now that such a catastrophic step not only has been taken but is playing out to its inevitably terrible results, religious Zionists see that Bezalel Smotrich was absolutely right all along: Zionists do not form a government with Ra'am even if it means needing to go back to elections ten times.
The political sophisticates had it all figured out. Everyone in the Bennett-Lapid-Gantz-Saar-Liberman-Michaeli-Horowitz-Abbas cacophony would need everyone else, so everyone would give a little, get a little, and the quiltwork governing coalition would last its duration as a peaceful centrist experiment where all would balance each other, no one would be happy — the supposed definition of a perfect and fair compromise — and everyone ultimately would live side by side in quasi-harmony.
And yet it took, what, half a year? Now we see the result. A deputy minister, Yair Golan, calls perfectly behaved normative Jews in Judea and Samaria "subhuman." We previously expected that kind of language from Nazis. A Jewish government actually contemplating tearing down Jewish vineyards. And now thousands of Arabs — Bedouin this time — rioting against Israeli soldiers, hurling heavy boulders, needing aerial tear-gas deployment to rein them in, as they demand control of the Negev. In an interview on Israel's public television broadcaster, Kan 11, one prominent Arab said it plain and simple: The Negev is part of Palestine.
So it no longer is about Arabs demanding "only" Gaza and the so-called "West Bank" — the latter fictional term a despicable place-holding Arab nickname for "Yehudah and Shomron" (Judea and Samaria). Instead, suddenly, now the Negev also is part of the ever-expanding fiction of "Palestine," yet another piece of land to be part of the absurd "Two-State Solution"? Go to this link. Click the news report for January 13 (13.01.22). Go to the time of 28:00 (twenty-eight minutes into the report) and watch the half-minute interview with the Number Two of the northern wing of the Islamic movement. He does not bat an eyelash as he declares authoritatively that "the Negev is an inseparable part of Palestine."
And indeed this much is true: The Negev most certainly is as much a part of "Palestine" as are Gaza and Judea and Samaria — because there is no "Palestine" and there never will be. But that does not mean there will not be chaos and war over this next attempted Arab land-grab.
The Negev is where Ben Gurion University is located. The city of Beersheba is its regional center. David Ben-Gurion made his home there. And the Negev has Dimona, and Dimona has whatever it has. Even the 1947 United Nations plan allotted the Negev to the Jewish country called Israel. Arad, Sderot, and Netivot are in the Negev. So are many of Israel's most important military bases.
It is good and important to know all this now — before the Likud or anyone else ever forms another government with Ra'am, an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood. Through all the 54 years since June 1967, and even dating back to the 1964 founding of the "Palestine Liberation Organization" (P.L.O.), the Arabs have claimed a non-existent "Palestine" country as theirs, crafting a non-nationality they falsely call "Palestinian," comprised initially of pre-1967 Israel and then redefined after the June 1967 war to focus instead on reclaiming the land the Arabs lost in Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the rest of Judea and Samaria. Yet it had been a long — long — time since any of them dared claim openly that they deem the Negev as "Palestine," too. If they had, Ben & Jerry's would have told us so.
But now, thanks to the Bennett-Lapid government born in sin, these Bedouin "feel their oats." They just shoved through the Knesset a bill that had been inconceivable until Bennet-Lapid: legalizing utility hook-ups of electricity, telephone land lines, and other governmental infrastructure to illegal homes Arabs have constructed in the Negev without permits — even as the evil government tears down structures in Chomesh. That gave these Bedouin a new impetus to flex muscles. They now believe they are ascendant and Zionism in retreat. They suddenly feel no need even to hide their intentions.
Next has come the battle over planting saplings in the Negev during the days before Tu Bishvat. Yes, in the Shmitah year (the Biblical Sabbatical year of the land), planting is forbidden under Torah law. However, there are certain halakhic exceptions whose complex explanations lie beyond this discussion, and those exceptions allow the planting now — just as there are times when halakhic exceptions allow certain eating on Yom Kippur. Moreover, as Rav Dov Lior has ruled, Israel suddenly finds herself embroiled in a life-or-death war for its very land sovereignty in the Negev, and that sudden demand overrides Shmitah considerations even if the halakhic exceptions did not exist.
This is the price of a government that relies on associates of the Muslim Brotherhood for its majority. They look to Mansour Abbas — and an Arab Muslim — to cut down the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and to give them the votes to change the procedural and substantive rules by which non-Jews can convert to Judaism. They need his four Ra'am votes so badly that they prostrate legislatively to allow thousands of illegal Arab homes to be connected to electricity. And now they actually would defer to Bedouin demands that Zionists from the Jewish National Fund be stopped from planting trees in the Negev.
This government has to fall of its own weight. The Yamina (literally "Right Wing") party never sought and therefore never received a mandate to coalesce with Left-wing Labor, radical-left Meretz, and the anti-Zionist Ra'am. Knesset members like Ayelet Shaked, Nir Orbach, Idit Silman, and Ze'ev Elkin of New Hope truly need to look into the mirror to see what they have allowed themselves to become. Each compromise of personal principle has led to a new degradation. These four right-wingers and, except for Shaked, religious Zionists, rationalize to themselves: "Just one more compromise, and we stop. OK, just one more beyond that. OK, just one more."
In time, they preside over buildings torn down in Chomesh. Then they acquiesce to a Supreme Court that has been Left-dominated for 73 years but that finally now can be balanced because three seats have opened — but they will not coalesce the 66 right-wing Knesset seats they won because they hate one flawed man and covet power more than they would save the Negev from Bedouin aspirations of Arab sovereignty.
So they watch timidly as their government allows Arabs to build homes all over Area C, threatening the Jewish majority in that critical region. Their government has backed down on announced plans to build 9,000 new homes, primarily for young religious couples squeezed by a nationwide housing shortage, in Jerusalem. And now they would buckle to demands by Arabs that Jews stop planting trees in the Negev because that is "Palestine."
There is no "Palestine". There will be no "Palestine."
This is less and less of a Zionist government. And soon this government will fall.
The 29th of November 1947 was a very important date in the history of the State of Israel, although its significance is lost on many Americans. Israelis are assumedly more knowledgeable, not to mention that every Israeli city has a 29th of November Street.
It was on this date that the United Nations voted on a partition plan for Palestine, to enable both a Jewish and an Arab State. The outcome of this vote (which would need a 2/3 majority to be enacted) was by no means a foregone conclusion. Israel's ambassadors and friends worked feverishly to persuade countries to cast their vote for statehood.
Jews around the world gathered around the radio and made a check with a pencil for each country's vote, holding their breath until the majority was achieved. After the vote, spontaneous dancing broke out in Jewish communities around the world, from Brooklyn to Tel Aviv.
What got the United States and President Truman to vote in favor will be the subject of a different column, but in the first place, Truman was reluctant to contradict his State Department. Secretary of State George Marshall and the Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, were adamantly opposed to voting for statehood for Israel. The State Department and the CIA believed that Israel did not have a prayer to prevail against the Arab countries that would wage war against it, and they feared that hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops would be called in to save Israel.
To better understand the turmoil in the White House and how precarious Israel's odds of securing a majority vote were, we must better comprehend the unexpected situation that was thrust upon Harry S Truman. As detailed by Dr. Allis Radosh, author of Safe Haven: Harry S Truman and the Founding of Israel, the new president had abruptly found himself in the White House after FDR's sudden death on April 12, 1945.
Foreign policy was never Truman's strong suit, and after 10 years in the Senate he was much more comfortable with domestic policy. Still, he felt that the one issue that he could competently handle himself – without the assistance of State Department officials – was the situation of the Jews after the Holocaust and the future of Palestine. Never could he have imagined how erroneous his assessment was.
President Truman's daughter, Margaret, said that what her father had imagined would be easy to manage turned out to be the most difficult dilemma of his entire administration. This is a remarkable confession about a president who was always aware of the fact that he was not elected, and who had to end World War II, put his country back on peacetime footing, deal with the Cold War and the Soviet Union, and help reconstruct Europe.
Eight days after he was sworn into office, Truman was visited by a Zionist delegation headed by Rabbi Steven S. Wise. The president told his visitors that he supported the Zionist goals, but he was very concerned about the very vocal opposition of the State Department. The State Department informed the president that he should abandon the quagmire of the Jews and of Palestine and leave it for their experts. Otherwise, Palestine would likely require the involvement of hundreds of thousands of American troops, cost America a fortune, and undoubtedly cause World War III.
Truman was convinced that the most pressing, safest, and most humane solution was to get the 100,000 Jews languishing in the DP camps into Palestine (apparently, he was not aware that their number was much larger). The problem was that the British who controlled Palestine would not allow this. The British were tenaciously sticking to their White Paper, which very seriously limited the number of Jews that could arrive and forbade the sale of land to Jews.
On May 14, 1948, Harry Truman surprised the world and caused pandemonium in the UN by being the first to recognize the new State of Israel. Right after he did this, Truman called his advisor on Jewish affairs, David Niles, and said, "I am telling you before anyone else, as I know how much this will mean to you."
Niles, who had also served in the same position under FDR, later claimed that had FDR lived and Truman not succeeded him, Israel would not exist. No one can say for sure what FDR would have done had he lived, but he had made conflicting statements and promises to both Arabs and Jews, telling them both what they wanted to hear. In fact, FDR, the quintessential politician, had made so many contradictory comments about Palestine that it was not even clear to those closest to him where FDR stood on the matter at the time of his death.
