America's six guardian angels by Rabbi Yitschak Rudomin and Court rules online civil marriages valid, upending Israel’s religious status quo and KKL-JNF Releases Old Maccabiah Images to Celebrate the 2022 Games By David Israel - and Co-Dependence DayBy Daniel Greenfield
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.
A ruling by the Lod District Court has upended the religious status quo in Israel and could augur a marriage revolution in the Jewish state.
In a decision published on Friday, Judge Efrat Fink ruled that the Population and Immigration Authority of the Interior Ministry is obligated to register as married couples who wed through an online civil marriage service carried out under the auspices of the US state of Utah.
The decision means that Israeli couples can now get married in civil ceremonies without leaving the country, granting a de facto victory to advocates in the decades-long struggle for civil marriage in Israel.
Orthodox political parties have long fought efforts to institute civil marriage in Israel, citing their religious objections to the state sanctioning interfaith marriages and other unions prohibited by Jewish law.
Friday's ruling in effect circumvents the political roadblock, making civil marriage available to all Israelis without having to travel outside the country. It swiftly invoked the ire of Orthodox politicians, who denounced it as "undermining" the Jewish character of the state.
Israeli law only allows for marriage through Israel's established religious institutions — e.g., the rabbinate for Jews, sharia courts for Muslims — meaning that hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens cannot get married in Israel due to various religious barriers.
Although couples have been able to marry in civil ceremonies abroad and have them registered by the Population Authority for nearly six decades, this process involves considerable expense and inconvenience.
In December 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, several Israeli couples got married through an online marriage service provided by Utah County, in Utah.
When these couples approached the Population and Immigration Authority to register as married their requests were approved, but then-interior minister Aryeh Deri, the leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, later froze the process and ordered a legal review of the issue.
Other couples who had married through Utah's service then filed lawsuits against the Interior Ministry demanding that their marriages also be approved.
The ministry published the legal opinion ordered by Deri in June 2021, arguing that since the couples were located in Israel at the time of their marriages, Israeli law applies to them and their marriages were therefore invalid.
By then, senior Yamina politician Ayelet Shaked had replaced Deri as interior minister, but she declined to intervene on the matter and did not offer an opinion.
In its decision on Friday, the Lod District Court ruled that the location of an online service is a highly complex issue — beyond what a Population Authority clerk is authorized to deal with.
The court went further, ruling that the only issue relevant for officials in the Population Authority is the validity of the documentation provided to them.
"When it became clear that the marriage certificate confirms that the applicants were married in a ceremony recognized by the State of Utah, and that the certificate was issued by an authority authorized to do so, the clerk should have been instructed to carry out the registration," wrote the judge.
Although Israel has no provision for civil marriage, the Interior Ministry has been required to register as married couples who wedded in civil services performed abroad since a Supreme Court ruling on the issue in 1963.
In 2019, 9,950 couples who married abroad in which at least one spouse was an Israeli citizen were registered as married by the Interior Ministry.
But traveling abroad to get married became all but impossible during the pandemic, leaving thousands of people without any marriage option for an indefinite period of time.
In December 2019, Utah County launched its "remote appearance marriage" ceremonies as part of its efforts to streamline a series of administrative services for its residents.
Although Utah County officials never intended to facilitate civil marriage for foreign couples, Burt Harvey, the division manager of public services and tax administration for the Utah County Clerk Auditor, said he was happy that the county's services would help those outside of the state and indeed the country.
Vlad Finkelshtein, an attorney who represented the couples in the lawsuit at the Lod District Court, welcomed the decision, describing it as a victory for human rights in Israel.
"The court made it crystal clear that any couple with a valid marriage certificate along with an apostille is entitled to get registered as married, and the location of the couple inside the Israeli borders is irrelevant for registration at the registration authority," said Finkelshtein, whose WedinSea organization facilitates such marriages.
Rabbi Uri Regev, director of the Hiddush religious freedom organization, also praised the decision, describing it as "an opportunity for hundreds of thousands of Israeli couples who are either unable to marry in Israel due to the Orthodox Rabbinate's monopoly on marriage of all Jews in Israel, or who are unwilling to marry through the Rabbinate for reasons of conscience."
Orthodox MK Shlomo Karhi of the Likud party denounced the court's decision, saying it "gnawed at the Jewish and democratic character" of the state, and vowed to change the law to circumvent the ruling.
MK Avi Maoz of the ultra-conservative Religious Zionist Party, said it was "unthinkable for judges in the State of Israel to undermine the Jewish state and carry out a quiet revolution to turn the State of Israel into a state of all its citizens. We will fix this soon, God willing."
Shaked and the Population and Immigration Authority did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Three Musketeers at the Kotel
The Three are Rabbi Yehuda Glick, famous temple mount activist, and former Israel Mk, and then Robert Weinger, the world's greatest shofar blower and seller of Shofars, and myself after we had gone to the 12 gates of the Temple Mount in 2020 to blow the shofar to ask G-d to heal the world from the Pandemic. It was a highlight to my experience in living in Israel and I put it on my blog each day to remember.
The articles that I include each day are those that I find interesting, so I feel you will find them interesting as well. I don't always agree with all the points of each article but found them interesting or important to share with you, my readers, and friends. It is cathartic for me to share my thoughts and frustrations with you about life in general and in Israel. As a Rabbi, I try to teach and share the Torah of the G-d of Israel as a modern Orthodox Rabbi. I never intend to offend anyone but sometimes people are offended and I apologize in advance for any mistakes. The most important psychological principle I have learned is that once someone's mind is made up, they don't want to be bothered with the facts, so, like Rabbi Akiva, I drip water (Torah is compared to water) on their made-up minds and hope that some of what I have share sinks in. Love Rabbi Yehuda Lave.
Co-Dependence Day By Daniel Greenfield
Joe Biden is celebrating July 4th with a massive expansion of the IRS. How better to celebrate the colonists who chased British tax collectors out than by replacing them with Biden's tax collectors.
But every progressive person knows that Independence Day is for extremists. The dream of the new post-national nation is Co-Dependence Day in which we all live happily together in a planned economy.
The old British entity that Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and a bunch of other dead white men fought to be free of, has been recreated. The new London is in Washington D.C. whose bureaucrats throw fits if they're asked to leave the imperial city. The new social welfare empire is built on redistribution.
A few centuries ago, some young men refused to have their property and their political autonomy redistributed to an elite thousands of miles away.
The very idea of having a revolution over such a thing seems entirely absurd to today's wokies.
Or as another Englishman once again, "Imagine there's no countries". It's easy if you live in the EU.
All that the Crown really wanted was for the colonists to pay their "fair share", a share that was determined thousands of miles away. All that the colonists wanted was the rights of Englishmen that they believed they were entitled to. After a great deal of bloodshed, the colonists won the right to be Americans instead—an odd series of consonants and vowels having to do with an Italian explorer but meaning personal freedom and limited government. Now we have free things, unlimited government, and our freedom shrinks in proportion to the growth of our free things and of the government that hands them out.
To the denizens of public housing watching the fireworks burn briefly in the sky, who get a free ride on everything from food to housing by taking away everyone else's freedom and future, the fireworks are just one more free thing in the sea of free things that they swim in.
To the Democrat voters of the welfare state, this is Fireworks Day. Every country has its fireworks days and this is the day that this one chooses to light up the night sky. The day means nothing to them because though they are surrounded by free things, they aren't free. The difference between freedom and free things has been progressively erased so that many think that the American Revolution was fought because the British were racists or weren't providing free transgender surgery to the colonies.
If only they knew about the NHS, they would vote to undo the American Revolution in a flash.
There is a big difference between a free country and a country of free things. You can have one or the other, but you can't have both. A free country isn't obsessed with free riders, only a country of free things obsesses with making everyone pay their fair share for the benefit of the people who want the free things. Rugged individualism has given way to stifling crowds, co-dependent on each other, lined shoulder to shoulder, clutching at each other's wallets, crying, "Take from him and give to me."
We are a nation overflowing with the right to things paid for with other people's money.
The fireworks that shoot up in a wonderland of blue and red, silver and gold, are a faint echo of the real thing, the gunpowder that blasted back and forth between the lines of government troops, their Hessian mercenaries and the rebel colonists who chose to ride free, rather than bend their necks to the plans of an expanding empire. The faint smell of gunpowder and the dark shapes of the barges only mime the war that was fought here. A play of light and shadow whose meaning reaches fewer and fewer people each year.
The expected speeches will celebrate some notion of independence, but did so many men risk their lives just to end up with a system that made the one they escaped seem positively libertarian by comparison? If they had known that they were going to end up with some version of the NHS, along with death panels, in a co-dependent system where everyone is looted for the greater good of the looters—they might have stayed home on their farms, sadly watching the fighting from a distance.
JFK's famous line, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" was always a hollow lie. Half the country is expected to ask what their country can do for them, while the other half is expected to ask what they can do for their country. This simmering civil war is often pegged as a class war, but it isn't about class. There are billionaires and paupers on both sides, and the divide cuts across the Middle Class, dividing those who derive their income from private business from those who receive it from government and government-subsidized employment.
The Fourth of July is Independence Day, but every other day is Co-Dependence Day, the days we celebrate our integration, our volunteerism and our compliance with a vast system which makes everyone dependent on the government and which makes the government dependent on everyone who still works for someone other than the government.
Empires function by draining every drop from their possessions to cover their costs. The British Crown tried to drain America to pay down its debt, resulting in growing protests from the population and eventually a revolution. Now the Empire of Co-Dependency is draining its independent subjects for the benefit of its dependent subjects and the dependency infrastructure that employs its numberless bureaucrats who govern it all.
A new crisis is always here to justify higher taxes and bigger government.
The American Revolution was not a struggle for another nation, one of many, but for a free nation. It was not split off to accommodate the national strivings of an ethnic group or their historical destiny. Its guiding idea, like its national holiday, was independence, but independence means very little unless it reaches the individual.
A nation where everyone is part of one great co-dependent community, a centrally planned marketplace that can only be balanced if everyone is forced to buy what they are told to buy, is not a free nation. It will not even be independent for long. The logic of co-dependence is to expand that dependency beyond the borders and make the region and then every part the world dependent on one another to balance out the numbers.
Co-dependence required an end to states rights. It will eventually require an end to the rights of nations.
Like all pyramid schemes, the burden of dependency is passed on to greater and greater systems until its weight is more than that of the entire world. That burden of co-dependency is like a rock rolling downhill; it gathers more and more mass to itself, increasing its momentum, until it crashes.
The system attempts to stay ahead of the inevitable crash by making sure that every productive person pays his "fair share". It hunts for individuals and nations who still aren't rolling downhill, tips them over and pushes them off the mountain. All in the name of the greater good.
The new Crown is not a person, it is an idea. The throne at whose foot a formerly free people kneel is the golden seat of the welfare state. While the fireworks light up the sky, a counterrevolution undid the revolution. There is a new king and his face is on every magazine cover in the land. His bounty is a jagged bear trap that turns everyone into a ward of the state at their own expense.
As the last wave of fireworks die out, the shooting stars sinking to earth and vanishing into the darkness, the light of Independence Day fades and the crowds slowly trudge away from the brief spectacle, past the lines of police barricades, through narrow streets, past government buildings, back to their co-dependent lives in a co-dependent nation where the will of the people and the rights of the individual matter less than the latest proposal to solve the problems of their independence by making the country a more dependent place.
A few hundred years ago in these streets, men and women celebrated the end of tyranny, and in its darkest hour, lines of grim men marched along the waterfront up to the highest point on the island to mount a final defense. Sometimes the older buildings still wear their shadows on their brick walls and by the golden light of the fireworks you can almost see them, shadows moving in the darkness, their footsteps taking them north, a faint song on their lips, muskets in their hands, their lives lost and gained in defense of their freedom.
Roe v.s. Wade falls: The six judges reasserted classical morality in 2022 and for this, may God bless them! Opinion.
Rabbi Yitschak Rudomin
US Supreme Court justices 2022 SCOTUS website
2022 has been shaping up as a very miserable year with raging inflation in the USA and the Russia-Ukraine War dragging on. The gender-blurring pro-LGBTQ+WOKE environmentalists running the White House are responsible for the cut-backs in oil drilling and exploration in America that has brought it from being oil self-sufficient under the Trump Administration that allowed unlimited fracking, drilling, pumping, oil exploration and the laying of massive pipelines all of which were stopped by the leftist pro-abortion Biden ANTIFA anarchists. That, in turn, ruined the American economy with high fuel prices pushing up the cost of living and sky-rocketing inflation leading to a recession cum depression.
It seemed like the leftist Democrats were riding on an ego trip wave of bravado expecting to mow down every conservative right leaning cause in America, much like the statues of American presidents and heroes which their backers have toppled all over the USA. The Democrats in-your-face smugness is nauseating to say the least, as they get their free peanut-gallery support in the massive liberal media.
But then suddenly out of the blue like a sudden surprise lightning strike, on June 24th 2022, a majority of five of the United States Supreme Court Justices overturned the notorious Roe v. Wade ending the Federally mandated right to abortion that was upheld for five decades since 1973, (Note: Sixteen states still have state laws protecting the right to abortion after Roe v. Wade was overturned and made the purview of the states).
Who are these people who are coming here to tell Americans that unborn babies also have basic human rights to life and limb? They are the current six-person conservative majority on the United States' Supreme Court , who are Associate Justices Clarence Thomas (b. 1948); Samuel A. Alito (b. 1950); Neil M. Gorsuch (b. 1967); Brett M. Kavanaugh (b. 1965); Amy Coney Barrett (b. 1972); Chief Justice John G. Roberts (b. 1955).
These six brave conservative judges have been subjected to unprecedented harassment and bombardment of all sorts of protests at their homes and at the location of the Supreme Court itself, That has led to having steel barricades built around the court as protection from wild mobs determined to do by violence what the American political system has created by the rightful process, the results of the democratic working of the three branches of the federal US government consisting of the legislative, executive and judicial branches of the government within the constitutionally defined separation of powers of each of these three.
No wonder the Democrats have been going nuts and "crying foul" and scheming to upend this legitimate system when it does not do their bidding by pursuing plans to pack the court with more than nine justices so that their liberal agenda can get its way as the anti-democratic Democrat FDR had tried in 1937!
For now the Democrats are faced with so many problems, including the downward-spiralling out-of-control unpopularity of the Biden-Harris duo who are surrounded by a collapsing American economy and an unending war in Europe with an intractable Russia led by the wily strongman Putin, and a midterm election year looming. That means they cannot pursue their court-packing scheme for the foreseeable future.
In this foggy and dangerous leftward-tilting toxic political atmosphere, the Supreme Court's six conservative justices have seized the moment to flex their judicial muscles and assert their moral leadership within an amoral and immoral societal and national vacuum. They struck clearly and firmly pulling America towards a more centrist path away from the leftward political brinkmanship practiced by the Democrats.
A sign that the conservative justices are on the right path was that, within four days of the latest ruling, in far off Israel, the then standing Bennett-Lapid leftist government's health minister, a member of the radical left Meretz Party, approved more lenient abortion procedures for Israelis as a sign of "protest" against the 5 to 4 ruling of the US Supreme Court
(Note: Chief Justice John Roberts voted with the majority to uphold [the Mississippi] abortion restrictions and he did not support the tossing out of Roe completely, but he still remains as one of the six conservative justices on the highest court).
It was a kind of childish oppositional behavior counter tantrum motion of monkey see-monkey do, because why in heaven's name should Israel be involved in America's internal political issues when they have so much to worry about on their own doorstep? Is it now also an in thing to kill unborn Jews as well in Israel? A sad subject that needs to be explored and stopped in and of itself.
Classical Judaism teaches that a society must be bound by moral laws AS DEFINED BY THE TORAH and not as defined by any current trendy fads of do-goodism or as is now so popular with gay rights and switching of gender rights, one of the most bizarre things to afflict the world, that men should want to be women and women desire to be men. Worse yet, they are pushing this agenda on children and educational institutions saying that little boys should be encouraged to be little girls if they so wish and that little girls can call themselves boys and go to the boys' bathroom. That is not "morality" it is plain and simple immorality. The Torah also clearly twice calls the homosexual act an abomination (Leviticus 18:22 and Leviticus 20:13) The mixing up of genders flies in the face of the order in which God Himself set up the world at Creation: "Male and Female He created them". See Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:22-24.
It is into this macabre genre of sickening issues beloved by the left that allowing inlimited abortion on demand is part of the causes so dear to the leftists as they see a woman's right to an abortion on demand as equal as to being allowed any democratic privilege and as freely as breathing air. But along come the guardian angels of morality in America to tell them that they are dead wrong! That, no, there is a higher moral code and standard and that there is something called the sanctity of life that a human being is entitled to from the moment they are formed in their mothers' wombs.
In serious Judaism it is only serious Poskim, meaning great scholarly rabbis who are Halakhic (Jewish Law) decisors in consultation with top medical opinion and taking into account the health and threats to the life of an expectant mother, as well as determining at what stage the pregnancy is at, who can decide if and when an abortion is permitted or not. There is definitely no such thing as abortion on demand or flushing down the toilet or garbage can of an unborn fetus/child.
This notion seems alien to a secular modern person who has been brainwashed by TV, movies, novels, magazines, their leftist-leaning teachers, the X-rated part of the internet and other popular media into thinking that they can indulge in wanton and random sexual relations, letting women become pregnant and then running to get abortions because they don't want to carry the burden of the pregnancies from their amorous sex exploits in real time and in real life and to add insult to injury and call it a "new morality" when it is the complete opposite
The secular, Conservative and Reform Movements are pro-abortion, and they have had and still have their representatives on the US Supreme Court itself to this very day. It is very sad to see these so-called "Jews-for-nothing", the ones who should be aware of and upholding the Torah's form of morality doing the exact opposite and justifying it by proclaiming a sort of "holier-than-thou-moral-high-ground" secular liberal humanism that allows otherwise healthy unborn Jewish and non-Jewish babies to be flushed out of expectant mothers' wombs and then literally flushed down the toilets of abortion clinics.
Well, thank God for the gentile six conservative justices on the US Supreme Court who have the moral vision, clarity and fortitude, the plain guts to call a spade a spade, that abortion is close to to if not an outright form of murder and must be held back and stopped. Hopefully they will do for the other crazy issues what they have now done to stop the addictive abortionist kick.
As for Orthodox Judaism: "Most of Orthodox Judaism opposes most abortion, considering it a form of murder. In general, however, it allows abortion when the pregnancy endangers the women's life." (Wikipedia). This then is the realm of morality as viewed and practiced according to the Torah. But, like in everything else, there is another kind of oppositional "morality" that is actuality immorality that hides itself in the guise of a "morality" like a wolf in sheep's clothing that Jewish tradition refers to as the "laws of Sodom" ("hilchot" Sedom) that turns what is normal on its head and declares what is perverse to be "right" and that doing the right thing deserves to be punished. In other words, the world of evil.
For example, the "judges" in ancient Sodom, that was destroyed by God for its wickedness, would severely punish anyone for hosting strangers in town or offering them any comfort or lodgings. They would deliberately place a tall guest in a small bed and cut off his legs to "fit" the bed and a small guest they would place in a larger bed and "stretch" his body to fit the bed. It's a warped mentality out there in the world but it exists, especially if it casts off the solid moral mooring of what is known even to non-Jews as the so-called Judeo-Christian heritage.
The current six guardian angels of the US government's judicial branch have a clear moral vision rooted in the classical Judeo-Christian heritage that is one of the two pillars of Western Civilization -- The other being the Greco-Roman world. The ultra-Democrat, WOKE, pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ+, ANTIFA, environmentalist, Marxists and anarchists wish to destroy both pillars of the Western World that would have dangerous and disastrous consequences for humanity.
May God protect and bless the six guardian angels of the US Supreme Court: Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, John G. Roberts with good health, happiness and long life and may they continue to serve as the sword and shield of all that is the best in classical morality rooted in the Torah.
Rabbi Yitschak Rudomin is president and founder of the Jewish Professionals Institute. An alumnus of Yeshiva Chaim Berlin and Teachers College, Columbia University, he has dedicated his life to Jewish outreach and education, served for 7 years as full-time director of Sinai Heritage Centers in Manhattan and 3 as an AJOP trustee, .among many oher endeavors. izakrudomin@gmail.com
KKL-JNF Releases Old Maccabiah Images to Celebrate the 2022 Games
The 2022 Maccabiah Games, a.k.a. the 21st Maccabiah Games, are scheduled to start on July 12 and continue through July 26, in Israel. The Maccabiah Games are open to Jewish athletes from around the world, and to all Israeli citizens regardless of their religion (bet you didn't know that – DI). 10,000 athletes from 80 countries are expected to compete in 42 sports categories.
In celebration of the 2022 Maccabiah, KKL-JNF released historical photos from the first years of the Jewish Olympic tournaments, among them a unique photo from the first Maccabiah in 1932.
Lea Fadida, KKL-JNF Director of Public Relations Division, said: " KKL-JNF is proud to be part of the Maccabiah. The importance of the Maccabiah is not only in the fields of competitions and sports but also in the connection of the Jewish people to the State of Israel. We invite the public to enjoy sports games, activities, and competitions all over the country."
The name Maccabiah was chosen as an homage to Judah Maccabee, the fierce Jewish leader who defended the faithful Jews of his country against the Hellenized Jews and the Greco-Syrian armies of King Antiochus. Modi'in, Judah's birthplace, is also the starting location of the torch that lights the flames at the opening ceremony, a tradition that started at the 4th Maccabiah.
The Maccabiah Games were proposed by Yosef Yekutieli in 1929 at the Maccabi World Congress. Yekutieli (1897 – 1982), who was inspired by the Stockholm Olympics and wanted to establish a similar event in Eretz Yisrael. The new British High Commissioner for Palestine, Sir Arthur Grenfell Wauchope, gave the go-ahead to the Maccabiah. Incidentally, Yekutieli was also the founder of the Israel Football Association, and the Israel Olympic Committee.
The 1st Maccabiah opened on March 28, 1932, in the Maccabiah Stadium in Tel Aviv, which was built with donations and filled to capacity on opening day. Roughly 400 athletes from 18 countries took part in competitions that ran from swimming, soccer, and handball, to athletics.
