Being Happy When the Bad Guys Lose

Tonight I made a somewhat controversial remark on my facebook page stating my satisfaction over success of the Israeli Air Force in Gaza and the fact that some of the most vicious Jew haters/killers in the world will no longer see the light of day. An acquaintance of mine whom I know to be a somewhat liberal Jew sent me a message remarking how they were upset over me making such a comment. now it's a hotly debated issue by some as to what kind of response and how much of that response we as Jews are halachikly allowed to have concerning the downfall of our enemies. I won't speak on the details of the halacha because that is the job of qualified rabbis and not a Joe-Schmoe such as myself, but I will say this- when the enemies of the Jewish people are victorious over us and cause us harm it is a chillul Hashem (desecration of G-d's name). Why? Because people will see such a thing and falsely believe that G-d forbid the Torah isn't true and Hashem has abandoned the Jews, breaking His eternal promises to us. Conversely, when Hashem grants us victory over our enemies (one of the main factors of the Channukah festival we happen to be celebrating right now) this is a great Kiddush Hashem (sanctification of G-d's name) because it shows that the Jewish people are truly meritorious and we have the support of Hashem on our side. One could say that Hashem gives the victory to us or our enemies based on how well the Jews behave which is true, but that doesn't negate the Kiddush/chillul Hashem aspect, for when the Jews follow Torah properly this is the greatest Kiddush Hashem they could do and if they don't G-d forbid, that's the greatest desecration, for the non-Jews will ask, "If G-d's own people don't follow His command, why should we?" With this in mind, I'd like to share my response to my more liberal minded Jewish friend...

I understand why you would feel upset. My question is do you believe that there is such a thing as actual evil in the world and evil people? If yes then we have what to discuss, but if not then no. I personally think it's compelling to believe there is such a thing as evil and evil people because otherwise one must say that a group of people like the nazis weren't truly evil and if everything is truly just all relative then the acts they committed can't be condemned because from their point of view they were justified.

Like I said, I believe there is evil and evil people in the world. Anybody who hates Jews and wishes to see them dead, and all the more so takes actions to kill or in any other way cause Jews harm simply for them being Jewish is evil. The fact is that the members of hamas, and the vast majority of residents in Gaza whether officially affiliated with hamas or not hate Jews and wish to see harm befall them. Therefore they are evil people in my eyes, and when evil people suffer and/or meet their end, that is a sign that there is justice in this world. According to reports, the vast, vast majority of these causalities have been official hamas members, so even if you want to say non-hamas gazans don't hate Jews, you would have a hard time arguing that these dead who WERE hamasniks didn't hate Jews. Pirkei Avot states that those who are kind to the cruel will end up being cruel to the kind. To take pity on those who are evil will, if that path is followed long enough, eventually lead to one supporting evil themselves against the innocent. I've seen it with my own two eyes.

I respect what I assume is your great compassion to be upset over such a thing, but I just hope that you have just as much compassion and get just as upset for your Jewish brothers and sisters who have had to suffer over 3000 rocket attacks at the hands of the people who filled up the morgues today and therefore won't fill up rocket launchers tomorrow.

Passaic Is Better Than Israel

Shalom Yishai,

I just got back from a beautiful Chasuna and had an interesting conversation with two fellow Jews I hold very highly from. They are both seriously committed BT's who learn a lot and both spent more than a year of full time learning in various BT yeshivas.

Anyhow, I am always trying to get people excited about making aliya even if I myself have no concrete plans (I have to justify myself here somehow). How would you respond to their main reason as to why Passaic is better than Israel:

As I think you are aware Passaic is unique on the American scene in that it his composed of seriously committed BT Torah Jews who happen to also have jobs and earn an honest living. They claim that such a phenomenon (or hashkoffa if you will) does not exist at the community level in Israel. In Israel, one is either Charadi and can't work but has Torah, or one is Dati Leumi and works but is not so "yeshivish" in the American sense or at least sincerely committed to the Torah.

As I personally have not spent any significant time there, I can only rely on what I hear from others. I must admit I hear this excuse a lot. A BT who is seriously committed and works is better off in a place like Passaic or maybe Baltimore or Atlanta. The cultural differences in Israel are just too much to contend with... Israel is too black and white.

Shalom,
Yisroel

Only Israeli Judaism is Authentic!

So said Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua in May 2006, at the American Jewish Committee's (AJC) Centennial Symposium.

He reiterated similar sentiments in the clip below.



Unsurprisingly, many both in Israel and the world Jewish community disagreed.

In response, the AJC complied a booklet of responses, both for and against what A.B. Yehoshua said, entitled: The A. B.Yehoshua Controversy: An Israel-Diaspora Dialogue on Jewishness, Israeliness, and Identity

It makes for a good read.

Did Gaza break my faith?

Did Gaza break my faith?

I don’t know. I have thought about this before. Often in fact. Losing one’s faith in God is no small thing. And I not only lost mine, it has died and been buried.

I literally had a dream as I was becoming secular where I was walking through the Judean Hills, a stream was within earshot, and I went to look for it. As I approached the stream, with a waterfall sounding the background I noticed a cemetery near the creek. I saw mourners, and as I approached they came to comfort me. Who had died? What was I mourning? Why was I being comforted? And then I saw it, a sefer torah was being buried, and it was my loved one, my sefer torah, that had died. I suddenly realized what was taking place, this funeral was for my loved one, these mourners were there to comfort me! Next to the sefer torah I saw the tombstones of my grandparents. My god! I cried. I said goodbye. I buried torah.


Please understand. I am not looking for theological reasons to come back to religion. It can’t happen. I have buried her. I loved her. Once. She was a major influence on my life, much like my grandparents. Will remain so. But she is gone now, dead. I am sad at this loss, but I can no more resurrect torah in my life than I can resurrect my dead grandfathers.

I woke up from that dream shaken. That was the moment when I stopped pretending that I could maintain my religious lifestyle. It was a lie, and I am not a hypocrite. From someone who dreamed of being a rav to a secular Jew. It was unforeseen. I believed so strongly, so completely. I never thought it could die. But it did.

How?

I don’t know.

I know that it happened the same time as the Gaza expulsion. I do know that Gaza still haunts me. Did Gaza cause it? Not entirely, but it certainly played a part. It must have. I wake up in the middle of the night usually once a week, deeply upset and hurt. I’m waking… what happened? What was I dreaming? Right… Yehuda was being expelled from the home he built in Shirat HaYam. My friends were being dragged from their homes. I am being dragged away from the beach house. By Jews. Because we are Jews. The orange flag flies against the orange sun on the horizon. The greenhouses spring over with their bounty.

Then.

No more. Houses torn apart, bulldozed. Greenhouses ripped asunder, crops turning brown without the water and love they were given by their caregivers.

I know that my friend’s children still wet their pants at the site of police officers. Imagine. Don’t just read the sentence. Imagine what that means. Take a minute, it takes a minute to imagine something so horrible after all. Jewish policemen, in a Jewish State, scaring children so badly for the crimes their colleagues committed that they wet themselves in fear. That their memory and understanding of a Jewish Army and Jewish police force is identical to the memory of someone grabbing them from their parents and dragging them from their homes.

I know that my belief in the power of what I assume to be a destiny to triumph over evil is not a given. That when good people do nothing evil prevails. That those who came and chanted near the gates of Gaza about how terrible this was but dared not enter Gaza chanted with empty voices. The song of canaries. It may have sounded right and beautiful, but it lacked any meaning.

I know that no one seemed to take it seriously. That at best it caused my fellow countrymen to lament how sad it was that Jews had expelled Jews, lacking any real empathy or understanding for the pain those Jews must be in. That Israel must be in. That the Jewish Nation should be in.

I know that I lost faith that I would be able to continue living where I was without facing the same fate. I would dream, no, I would nightmare, every night about the screaming and fighting and crying that would greet me, my wife, our future children, our loved ones, our neighbors, when our turn came. I suddenly feared that it would indeed come.


I know that my grandmother, a kind woman of over 90 years, a doctor, a healer, a liberal, a former German, a current American, a democrat, told me bluntly, that this was the first time Jews were being expelled from somewhere simply because they were Jews and she didn’t understand how or why Jews could do this. This, from a survivor of the Shoah. How it pained me. She never thought she would live to see it again. How empty the chant of ‘Never Again’. How empty.

I know that the beaches in Tel Aviv were full when Gaza was emptied of her Jews.

I know that we speak of Gaza and act (forget?) as if the four yishuvim expelled of their Jewish residents in Samaria are just an after thought.

I know that I still wake up with shivers, sweating, nightmaring of the expulsion of my people. I bleed orange. I love my people and my land and my heritage. I wish we had the courage to be what I know we could be.

I know we have learned nothing. Nothing. Our government is now ready to do to the Jews of Judea and Samaria, of the Jordan Valley, of my home, of the suburbs of Jerusalem, of our holy Temple Mount, of the Old City, of our most ancient graveyard, what she did to Gaza and North Samaria. Palestine must be Jew free. But Israel can have Israeli-Arabs. Why no Jewish Palestinians? If this is an issue of a majority people ruling their land? There is no logic here. No peace. Just hate. This I know. And what do we do? What do I do? Nothing.

When will this nightmare die? When will a new hope arise? Is the awakening of American Jews to the reality of Israel, to her realness, is the Arising of American Jewry as she returns Home the glimpse of this new hope amid the nightmare? Can we be our people’s savior? Certainly we have waited long enough for our turn to fight for our people (shame on us!). Are we ready for the challenge? I don’t know.

I know that when I am casually looking up fun Israeli music on the internet I can’t help but have search strings that return sites about the expulsion from Aza. And I know that I still break down and cry when I see those pictures. Those horrible pictures.

When one has buried God, has seen Torah buried, it becomes exceedingly difficult to find comfort in the words of our prophets, for all of their comforts rest on knowing that God loves us and will comfort us, will lead us out of darkness. I know that I can no longer believe that.

Man, excuse me, humanity, we make our fate. We make our destiny. We decide. And right now, we seem to be deciding to appease evil, to stand by evil, to ignore the plight of others, to pretend they deserved it, or that it is all part of a Divine Plan, and all will be alright, as if the damage has not already been done when children wet themselves at the site of Jewish police, or suicide rates among evacuees is through the roof, or divorces occur because of the trauma, or even, dare I be so self centered, a 27 year old man cries himself to bed when reminded about this trauma because he was foolish enough to think he could look up Israeli music without accidentally coming into contact with his nightmare.

I want to wake up.

Where Have You Come From - Where Are You Going?

This is the question that lies at the heart of aliyah. It is a question who was first asked by our sages as well as by Socrates. It is a question, that while seeming very simple to answer can prove incredibly complex.

For a Jew, the answer is even more complex. For I can not answer where I come from without also taking into account where the Jewish People comes from. While the why to that question may be complicated, in the briefest form, it is because the Jew is born into a covenantal community. The Jew is born with obligations and expectations. We are not a 'free people' in the sense that freedom is often used today. We are duty bound. To be identified as a Jew, at least in part, means to partake in the pains and triumphs of the Jewish Nation. To be Jewish is to be part of a nationality.

But that is not all. We all know much more obviously that to be Jewish is to be part of a religion. The covenantal community that is Judaism is a covenant of faith, of Sinai, of revelation, of God's truth as revealed in the Torah. So to be identified as a Jew requires our participation in torah as well.

But that is not all. The third prong to our identity is the hardest for Jews living in exile to recognize, as it requires a reworking of our own identities - a task that is never pleasant. The third aspect of Jewish identity is Eretz Yisrael.

The Land of Israel, pieces of rock, a geographical location, is part of a Jewish identity. It seems absurd, but it is true.

I will not go into the why. This is what usually attracts the most attention when someone is speaking to Jews in America and trying to prove to them why they must move. Why Israel really is so important. And everyone gives excuses ("Rashi didn't live in Israel" is always one of my favorites). People are not convinced by arguments, not when they have so much to lose, not when their hearts are telling them to stay in the rich lands of AmReika.

So I will not answer why Israel is so important. At root, my answers as to why the Torah or the Jewish Nation are so important are also weak - they fall flat on their face if you do not already agree with me. One does not partake in the torah because it was proved to him or her. One partakes in the torah because one has experienced the truth of torah, has experienced the truth of the Jewish God's existence. One has experienced reality.

To be K'Cholmim-As Dreamers, is to partake in the amazing path and mission that is Judaism. But such a path and mission is not an easy one. The reason for this is that we are entirely confused as to what constitutes a dream and what constitutes reality. We are unsure what the right path is for us to take as individual human beings. Therefore, we can not even imagine what is the correct path for us to take as Jews or any other specific group of people. We thus lack the capability to make a choice, let alone a meaningful choice about which path will lead us to take part in our greater community, in this case, to take part in the destiny of the mission of the Jewish People. This is the reason that those of us who are looked on as dreamers (by those who are so confused), and who have visions of a better future, those of us who do still believe in such things as that dirty word, 'idealism' or even worse, actually articulate such an *irrational * belief as our faith in God, or perhaps worse of all for American Jews dare to speak of our desire to make aliyah and join our people, are always met with a reply to "live in reality" and to be "realistic". It is for this reason that I am so attracted to that word K'Cholmim-AS Dreamers. For our vision and goal is not truly a dream, rather it is a goal and ideal of a better reality, a truer reality.

But not many are willing to see such a reality, or recognize its validity and existence. Such has always been the difficulty of those who speak wisdom and truth. It was the battle of Socrates, and it was the battle of the prophets. Rav Soloveitchik zt"l in the last chapter of his masterpiece "The Lonely Man of Faith" comments on our prophet Elisha, using Elisha as a model for all the prophets, that, " many a time he felt disenchanted and frustrated because his words were scornfully rejected." (Page 112) This great prophet Elisha had the same difficulty as all men of wisdom, that their words were "scornfully rejected" because most of us, are unable to tell the difference between true and false, between good and evil. We think Dream is Reality, and Reality a Dream.

Further on in "The Lonely Man of Faith" the Rav will comment on Elisha and his life, and will teach us how this relates to the great danger of living a lie and thinking it is a reality. Of confusing what is dream and reality, what is important and what is not. All of this relates to the vision required by someone living 'the good life' in America must have to even seriously consider aliyah - let alone make it. The Rav says that, "Yet unexpectedly, the call came through to this unimaginative, self-centered farmer. Suddenly the mantle of Elijah was cast upon him. While he was engaged in the most ordinary, everyday activity, in tilling the soil, he encountered God (the Truth) and felt the transforming touch of God's hand. The strangest metamorphosis occurred. Within seconds, the old Elisha disappeared and a new Elisha emerged." (Page 110)

It was not with arguments that Elisha was convinced of the falsehood in his life, but rather a life changing experience. It was the touch of God Himself that changed Elisha from the old to the new. From an Elisha of "an unimaginative, self-centered farmer" - a life of meaninglessness and falsehood to the Elisha of truth and prophecy. To an Elisha who would spend the rest of his days walking around Israel preaching God's truth, and this vision of idealism and Yahadut. And of course this is the greatest difficulty that we as K'Cholmim face, the battle for the truth and the ability to create moments of experience that will wake people up to that truth.

So the question is what experiences have you had? Elisha experiences God, and this changed his life. It wasn't with arguments that Elisha was convinced of what is true and what is not, it was with a simple but profound experience. Many of us are chozer b'tshuva, and we all have our own story about what mundane experience proved so profound as to reframe our entire existence and change the course of our life.

So too with Israel. Israel is to be experienced, not analyzed. Have you experienced Israel? Were you perhaps disappointed? When you were searching for God, were you ever disappointed there? I was. Sunday school is not a 'positive' experience of God and Torah for most Jews. But does that mean it doesn't exist, or that your teachers were inadequate? To experience the real Israel is not easy - especially when the places in Israel most laden with kedusha and history are considered 'too dangerous' to allow Jews to visit, or because low and behold, most of our holy places are on the wrong side of this magical green line and therefore we should not visit. Have you ever seen the mishkan in Shilo? Have you visited the hills of the Shomron? Have you looked over Shchem and imagined the fields in which Joseph and his brothers played, and ultimately, tragically, fought? Have you walked on the Temple Mount and infused yourself with the spirit of God - as you stand in awe of His presence? Have you sat in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, watching hundreds of religious children who at age 8 know more torah than you run around as they fulfill the words of our prophets that children will play again in the streets of Jerusalem? Have you seen the devastation caused to our people at a bus bombing because Jews don't care enough about Jewish blood to do what we must to protect ourselves? Have you seen a desert that after a year was greener because of your presence? Have you?

Israel is to be experienced. Home is a symbol - a symbol is something which has meaning underneath the apparent object. The rocks of Israel are a symbol - a symbol of our home. Chazal say that the redemption will only come when we yearn for the rocks and dust of Eretz Yisrael. Which means, when the Jewish souls remember where home is, when we return home. I can not convince you with arguments WHY Israel is your home. SHE IS! Kacha! And if you have the nerve then you will come and find out why that is true.

So for all those who don't know what the experience of Israel is - come and find it! KUMAH! ARISE! Return home.

But there is one last problem. What of those who HAVE had this experience and yet chose to live in galut? To them, I say, remember with all your might the intensity of that experience. The problem with dream and reality is we confuse them so quickly. My best friend in college and roommate woke me up one morning at 5:30 shaking me hard, "David David". "WHAT?" I asked him. We had been working together non stop to lobby for Israel and had just run two incredibly Aliyah Shabbatonim where we engaged over a 100 Chicago Jews to discuss aliyah - over 50 now live in Israel. So he woke me up and said, "David, I just had the most incredible dream." "Tell me about it" I said. "Well, I was in Israel David, and it was just amazing, I was there" and he started to cry. This friend is not one for tears and I was shocked, but I realized what had happened. He had experienced Israel - without even being there! Because of his commitment to her - she reached out to him. And he cried. And he said, "I have to go David, I have to, how can I go?" So we sat for an hour and a half discussing options and ways he could leave the prestigious education he was receiving at the University of Chicago without enraging his parents and make aliyah this summer. He was so excited. He called his parents. He went to the aliyah agency. And he never came. (I would like to happily add, that since this was written he has made aliyah, married and Israeli, and they are expecting their first native born daughter in the coming months, b?sha?ah tovah!)

But what happened that initially held him back. Why did he not come? He experienced it. There is no question about it. He experienced Israel - but in America he stayed. Why? Because dreams only last for a short while. The experience can shock us into reality, his dream made him wake up to reality - no pun intended. But it doesn't last. You must grab hold of it and act on it right away, or else it dissipates. My friend, for whatever reason, despite all his energies wasn't able to hold on to that dream - a dream with more meaning and reality behind it than many other people's lives. A tragedy. But God willing there will be other moment's of clarity for him (addendum: and there were!), and he will find his way home to Israel again.

I say to you who DO know the experience of Israel - DO NOT LET IT PASS! DO NOT LET IT SIT IN THE BACK OF YOUR MIND AND HEART. "One question I asked from God, to sit in the House of God all the days of my life?" The human mind is stubborn and complex, we prefer the easy 'reality' even if it is a lie. Don't live the sheker, remember your moments of clarity, remember what it felt like to walk down a street where there are more people wearing kippot than not, where there is a Jewish Army to defend us, where the air itself has a different taste - a Jewish taste.

Experience Israel, Remember Israel, Come Home to Israel. Your People await you.
Your people need you. Kumah.

Shabbat Shalom