Last evening, April 16, we heard that a ceasefire with Lebanon was scheduled to begin at midnight. Lebanon? Our fight has not been with Lebanon. Contrary to what the Pope and pundits like Tukker Quatarlson (according to news reports) say, Lebanon is not populated by a happily integrated Muslim-Christian population.

Lebanon is historically a Christian, west-facing country that was hijacked by Palestinian Muslim Arabs when they were expelled from Jordan in 1970-71 after having tried to overthrow that country’s government. In November 1969 the Lebanese government and Yassir Arafat had signed an agreement, called the Cairo Agreement, that protected the Palestinian enclaves and ceded virtually all control over them to Palestinian Muslim factions. The militant, anti-Israel Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) provided “security” while UNRWA provided “humanitarian” functions. That is,UNRWA provides the same anti-Israel education there that they did in Gaza and the parts of Judea and Samaria controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

In this agreement, these enclaves were guaranteed the right to continue to fight Israel.ⁱ

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The situation between Hezbollah, an Iranian Shia Muslim group, and the Palestinians, primarily Sunni Muslim, is complicated and not relevant here. What is important here is that Lebanon, far from being happily integrated, is a historically Christian country that lived peacefully with Israel, but now contains a very large population of Muslims whose allegiance is not to Lebanon but rather to Palestinian expansionistⁱⁱ groups and within which violent anti-Israel education and behavior has been protected.

Between Announcement and Beginning of the Ceasefire

The question in our minds: if we have a ceasefire with Lebanon, does that include Hezbollah?

We do not know and are behaving, in our private lives, as though this calm is temporary: keeping children close, avoiding travel, and planning no gatherings too big for near-by shelters.

So far (10 AM on April 17) there has only been report of one missile attack from Hezbollah since the ceasefire began. That was at 2:17 am, and it appears to have been a false alarm.

Meanwhile, communities in northwestern Israel (maybe farther east too, I am writing about what I know first-hand) were rocked—literally shaken—by Israeli actions near the border. Rumors were that Israel was destroying empty buildings formerly held by Hezbollah. Whether the guns were closer to us than previously or because a strong wind carried the noise, the booms made the windows, as well as brains, rattle.

Sleep was impossible. Even with my windows and heavy exterior blinds lowered, the apartment was shaken by booms. My town’s English WhatsApp group was full of discussion about the scary noises. Thankfully, they ended at midnight, and since then we have had quiet.

The ceasefire with Iran is scheduled to expire in one more week. We hope—pray—that by then the Islamic Republic of Iran and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) with have surrendered or been obliterated.

The Coming Weeks

Next week is Israel Memorial Day followed by Independence Day. Then comes Jerusalem Day, an Israeli national holiday celebrating the Six-Day War and Israel’s regaining control of the Holy City. It is celebrated on the Hebrew date of 28 Iyar. June 5, the date on the civil calendar, marks the 59th anniversary of the Six-Day War. (Two Jewish holidays, Lag b’Omer and Shavuoth also fall within these weeks.) This period is generally one of violence by Palestinians and their sympathizers against Israeli civilians and Jewish targets worldwide. Here’s what Gemini AI has to say about it.

AI on Arab Anti-Israel and Anti-Jewish Violence In Spring

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This is an AI-generated response to the promt: violence against Israel during period between Israel independence day and anniversary of 6-day war

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Meanwhile, I have to stop writing and get ready for the Sabbath. Our Day of Rest comes whether we are at war or not.

i https://www.palquest.org/en/historictext/9625/cairo-agreement-between-lebanese-authorities-and-palestinian-guerrilla-organizations

ii “Expansionist” is my politically incorrect word. They tried to take over Jordan and they definitely want to exterminate Israel. And they never, throughout history, were their own nation or ruled another country. To me that definitely looks expansionist. Another word for “expansionist” is “colonialist.”

If you’re new to these pages, an explanation: alerts mean an 8-minute warning via radio or telephone app that a barrage of ballistic missiles has been sent toward us from Iran, and we should get to a fortified shelter within that 8-minute window. An attack—a very particular public siren—means we have 30 seconds to get to shelter. The 30 seconds is new—it used to be 5, then 15. But now Hezbollah has been pushed back to the far side of the Litani River in Lebanon, so we’ve gained some seconds in which to find shelter.

Once in a shelter for either a Hezbollah rocket attack or an Iranian ballistic missile attack we wait for ten minutes, the time needed for the Iron Dome and the new laser defense system to destroy incoming weapons in the air, and for the pieces of the destroyed weapons to fall to ground. At the end of that time we receive an all-clear on the radio and phone apps.

Most injuries occur from falling shrapnel. Some pieces from Iran are huge and as heavy as an automobile; other pieces are very small. Some have explosive heads. Army teams rush out to clean up all shrapnel after attacks, and within hours people whose homes have been damaged are notified how and where to file claims.

March 31, 2026: Passover eve

To be honest, I do not remember how many alerts (Iran) or attacks (Hezbollah) we had during the day. We’d had one around 3:00 AM—that seems to be the favorite time for the Iranians to send off a barrage of missiles. They do it deliberately then to irritate us. I hope that because they’re keeping crazy hours, their families are also distressed.

I was supposed to go to my good friends’ for the seder: a ten- to twelve-minute walk. Part of the way I could walk through my apartment complex, where there lots of public shelters. A small part can be navigated along a street that has several open garages dug into the hillside: concrete shells, okay places to wait out an attack, although not ideal. But the rest of the way to my friends’ home? Down maybe 100 steps through a narrow passage with no safe place to shelter.

We Orthodox Jews don’t use electricity, which means we can make use of things that are already turned on, but we don’t use power to control them. At the beginning of the war we were told by the nation’s official rabbinical council that it was permitted, under the extreme circumstance of warfare, to carry our phones, turned on and set to pick up alerts, but not to use them for anything else. If I do not get the 8-minute alert by the phone app I will not know to duck into a shelter until the last-second public siren sounds. My coat has deep pockets; I will take my phone.

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Thirty seconds to get to safety while navigating 100 stone steps with no shelter along the way is simply unrealistic, especially for an 80-year-old woman who fell 16 months ago and spent the next 8 months recovering (healing and physical therapy). Half the afternoon I wondered, “Do I whip up my own Passover seder and stay home, or do I go to my friends?”

I went. I got there with neither an alert nor an attack.

We had a wonderful time, reading through the Haggadah, the retelling of the exodus from Egypt, asking and answering questions about the text and the story, laughing, singing songs, and eating. By the time we finished it was after 1:00 AM.

Then the question: do I stay overnight, close to their in-home safe room (in which a daughter, her husband and five children were sleeping) or do I walk home? I walked home. My friend and an adult son accompanied me up the steps and through the public streets to the entrance to my complex. No problems.

God is good.

_______________________

Friday, April 3^rd

We’ve had one or more alerts and/or attacks every day, sometimes multiples. The other morning—if you call 3:30 AM morning—we returned from the communal shelter just long enough to hang up our coats when we had a second alert. Between the two alert warning times and the times between alert and all-clear, we lost about an hour. After the startle of being awakened from a sound sleep (if we were lucky), rushing outside and down the shelter steps, then back up and repeat, who could return to sleep? Not me, for sure.

Today was a quiet day...until ten minutes before the Sabbath, when we had three attacks in quick succession. Thirty minutes wasted, if being safe is “wasted.” Usually the last half-hour before Shabbat everyone is busy making sure that their home is ready, everything is done that makes a day of real rest possible. We always hope that we’ll have time to take a few deep, calming breaths before we light the candles that usher in the day of rest.

Lighting the candles must be done before sunset, when the Sabbath enters.

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Here’s what, because of being interrupted ten minutes before candle-lighting time, I didn’t get done:

• Turn on the light in my bedroom, where I have a Sabbath light (one where I can block the light without affecting the electricity). I did not get the power turned on, so I had to undress in the dark.

• Fix the lights in the front of my apartment: I want the main light on, kitchen light off. The kitchen light was still on and the main light was still off when the first alert sounded, and they stayed that way.

• Light my Sabbath candles. I was in the shelter during the time to light. There’s a loophole: if someone intends to do something but is prevented by things beyond their control, they still are counted as having done it. So I said to God, “Sorry, this counts as beyond my control, and I certainly meant to light.” But it is the first time in years I have not lit my candles. Last time was several years ago when I had pneumonia, had just been released from the hospital because it was Passover, and on medical advice was staying with friends and not alone. I was sound asleep at candle-lighting time, and my hostess did not want to wake me.

Today was quiet. Until ten minutes before the Sabbath was out, when we had two alerts, again with just enough time between them to get home. But most of us milled around outside the shelter, just in case.

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Monday, April 6^th

The shelter was more crowded than I’d seen before. One child I’d never seen before was making a lot of noise, running around and creating disturbance and confusion. A woman I assumed was his mother tried in vain to get him to quiet down. Many obnoxious kids keep an eye out to see how their audience is responding, or they jerk their heads at the sound of their mother’s voice. This child’s frantic behavior was different, and I realized he was autistic.

It is hard enough for normal kids to function in this crazy world of alerts and attacks and no school, no clubs, no outings. What is it like for a child who cannot understand what is going on? How difficult for the child’s family!

And with the crowd in the shelter that night, and the child creating chaos, what did my little dog Dolly do?

She sat quietly on my lap. She has gotten used to the shelter. Former strangers have become familiar, and she seems to understand this is a unique situation. She no longer is bothered by the two little dogs that run around the shelter freely.

Even when we are outside walking she no longer acts aggressively when we meet other dogs. Today we met our nemeses (is that the plural of nemesis?), four dogs owned and walked by a former neighbor. During the two years I lived next door, my elderly dog Albert, whom I’d brought from the USA, was still alive. One of their dogs in particular hated Albert, and the rest of her pack picked that up. Even though Albert has been gone for four years and all four of my neighbor’s dogs have passed and been replaced, their hatred of me has been passed down. When I got Dolly last May, they transferred their dislike to her. She reciprocated. It got very loud. Five snarling, growling dogs is frightening. And embarrassing for the owners.

As always when that neighbor and I meet on a path, one of us takes our dog(s) up the nearest front walk and away from the other. Today, Dolly barely growled at them as they passed, and their barking was very subdued. Being taken to the shelters and exposed to crowds of other people and dogs has been good socialization for those dogs too. All five have calmed down when confronted by the other. A silver lining to this cloud that hangs over us.

Cease-Fire

The ceasefire we have now is with Iran. Hezbollah has not only continued to throw rockets at it, it has stepped up the attacks. The number 6,400 rockets1 since April first was mentioned a few days ago. The upside is that these rockets are much smaller than the ballistic missiles fired at us by Iran. The hallway of my house has been deemed by the civil defense officers as an adequate safe space for them, and because Israel has removed most Hezbollah sympathizers north beyond the Litani River, about 100 km from the border, we now have a full half-minute from the start of the alarm to the arrival of the rockets.

My town seems to have fewer attacks than surrounding locales. This has been explained in several ways: we don’t have soldiers billeted in town, the town is considered very unimportant, and my favorite: we have some very holy people whose prayers and godly acts protect us.

For the first day or two of the ceasefire I felt like a rubber band stretched to the limit, and one side suddenly released. When this happens, the rubber band snaps back and then flutters wildly. The tension is gone, but it takes time for the rubber to get back to normal. The first night, my eyes fluttered nonstop, a sign (I was told by a doctor years ago) of releasing tension. Lovely to know, but the fluttering made it hard to sleep.

Even with the ceasefire, I awaken around 2:45 and can’t go back to sleep until around 4:00—because for weeks we’ve been awakened between those hours by either alerts or attacks, or sometimes both. And we are still hearing booms.

I live in the “empty area” between Nahariya, Safed, Karmiel and the red border line. Sound carries easily over water, so we hear the booms from the Iron Dom when Haifa is attacked. Between the active port and the oil refinery on Haifa bay, the coastline there is a very frequent target.

Back to Normal?

My gas cooktop, old when someone gave it to me 7 years ago, finally quit just before Passover. (Luckily I also have a single-burner electric hotplate.) My new cooktop was delivered last Wednesday. But unlike in the USA, where appliances are delivered by installation technicians, here we need to make an appointment for a technician to install the item. Without a licensed installer’s signature the warranty is void.

The installer called for instructions on how to reach my apartment. Just as I left the house to go down to the street to get him, we had an attack. I directed him to a migonit, a small, portable shelter. We waited out the ten minutes it takes for shrapnel to reach the ground. Then I went down to the street and brought him up.

While the gas technician was here, the Amazon courier delivered a package I’d ordered in late February. I guess if Amazon has resumed delivery, normal has returned.

It may be copied and distributed as long as the title page is included. It may not be sold.

Pesach Stories 2026

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If you’ve been following this publication you’ve learned that we have two types of interruptions: alerts, which say you’ve got about 8 minutes until huge ballistic missiles from Iran come your way, and alarms, which mean two things: if preceded by an alert, you’ve got less than a minute to get inside your heavy-duty shelter; and if not preceded by an alert, you’ve got to get to your protected space (such as my apartment hallway) immediately. And we mean immediately.

My dog recognizes alert and knows it means “sit near the door and wait for the leash” (Iranian). She knows alarm means “go to the pillow in the hall” (Hezbollah, from Lebanon) and sit on mom’s lap.

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Incoming missiles from Iran: Slip into shoes, use bathroom, turn off stove, leash dog, put on coat, tuck phone into pocket, leave, lock door, and walk (at age 80 one doesn’t run) to the communal shelter. Sometimes while on the phone to friend from another part of the country, who just might be returning from a shelter.

Most nights have been interrupted by alerts and alarms. Some creative genius put together this song. It really does say it like it is.

In the cities, many underground parking garages have been turned into shelters for those living in the apartments above. Some families are camping down there. In the video you’ll see tents set up in the garages.

What’s it like to be sitting in pajamas talking to neighbors at 3 am in the communal shelters? Religious and secular, Jew and ethnic-whatever-else, old and young? It is weird. No other word for it.

Here’s a picture of my neighbor’s “vehicles” stored in the shelter because of days of heavy rains. If you’re an older woman (or married to one) you know what a problem it can be not to get to the potty quickly. When you’re 80 years old, gotta go, and have to move a heavy bike to enter the stall and close the door...grrrrr.

If mail were being shipped from overseas, Everdries would be doing a land-office business from Israel right about now. By the time shipping begins again, we won’t need them.

There are several Hebrew apps and websites where you enter your location and the app will tell you what percent chance you have of being interrupted by an incoming missile alarm. You can use the Go For Walk, Shower, or Nap versions to find out whether you (probably) have time for these three activities. A friend swears by them. She was caught once with shampoo in her hair and doesn’t want that to happen again.

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Right now, 45 minutes after we returned from the shelter, the app tells me it’s an okay time for a shower.

My friend in Jerusalem told me that she visited a hospitalized friend, who was in Parking Space 147 of the hospital’s underground parking garage, the Internal Medicine Department.

Someone is putting together a recipe collection of meals that can be made in spurts, such as stop mixing, or shut off stove for half an hour, then return to the heat.

Where I live, we are most likely to have attacks between 2:30 and 3:30 am, 6:00-7:30 am, and around 5:00-6:00 pm. Of course, they also come other times, but those times they are likely and not just sporadic.

We had two nights in a row without alerts, but on the second night my neighbors had a screaming fight in the plaza outside my windows at 3 am. It ended shortly, I fell back asleep, and then at 4:10 they resumed their fight. The next night we didn’t have an alert, but I couldn’t sleep. My body was waiting for either an alarm or a fight.

Other neighbors spent the Sabbath with his parents in a coastal city in the south. Drove home Saturday night, heard sirens several places but not directly where they were, so they just kept driving.

Another friend and her husband were in the USA for a 2-week vacation. Their plane actually left earlier than anticipated, but then did some detours over the sea before it was safe to land. They were rushed from the tarmac to the airport building quickly.

It’s wartime, and El Al, Israel’s national airlines, is still busy ferrying home Israeli citizens who were trapped overseas. When there’s a war on, foreign students and tourists leave. Israelis return, wanting to be home, helping.

The time between Purim and Passover is a big time for weddings, but since large gatherings are forbidden due to security concerns, many couples have ended up with very small weddings, as were held during Covid. But doing them on zoom? Not sure; not infrequently our internet is shut down or otherwise compromised by the war.

Having babies. In 2025, the number of babies born here broke all records. It’s not just because people might have been stuck home with not much to do. It’s because having more babies is a way of thumbing one’s nose at those who wish we didn’t exist. And because babies make everything sweeter.

Someone posted in a Facebook group for people contemplating moving to Israel that she’d like to live in the north when it becomes safe. I commented that that means she will wait until the Messiah comes, which may be a long time so she should just come anyway. As Psalm 127 says, “Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman watches in vain.”

Speaking of psalms, many people are filling empty moments, including time in the shelters, reciting them. One site lets people open recitations asking for any need; I’m using one that that asks for healing for all the wounded and sick in Israel. The site offers a psalm, you read it and click “read,” and it asks if you want to read another. You can choose not to read the one chosen—say, you have only a few minutes and the psalm up is 119 (the longest), and it will offer you a shorter one. You can choose your preferred language. When all 150 psalms have been said, the site rolls over to the next and begins again.

Three supermarkets are on one road, and the nearest bus line to me passes there. But I’ve taken more taxis in the last 3 weeks than in the last 6 months. Buses only run twice an hour. I don’t want to wait outside for the bus, even though there’s a little shelter nearby.

I was going to start making the pieced valance for my living room that I’ve been planning for a couple of years. Got the fabrics out, started figuring out which blocks will be in which colors. But the interruptions have made concentration too difficult. Grrrrrr.

Oh yeah—Passover is next week. Really. Today’s March 23; the seder (first seder outside of Israel) is April 1. So that means with all the other nutso stuff, we have to get rid of all the hametz (mostly grain-based foods, including crumbs), which means, at a minimum, cleaning the kitchen thoroughly.

After several years, I finally really organized my spices. I have both American seasonings (a variety of herbs and seeds like dill and fennel) and Middle Eastern (mostly tree and root spices like cinnamon, ginger, turmeric, and cumin, plus the peppers: hot Moroccan paprika, which substitutes for cayenne, which is not available where I live; sweek Moroccan paprika, regular sweet paprika, and other things I’d never used before). And I have lots of blends: two chili powders, several chicken rubs, ras al-hanout, curry powder, garam masala, and on and on. I’ll put a garbage sack over my spice cabinet for Passover because for the holiday I only use a few special “kosher for Passover” spices.

I can’t find any canned tuna that is kosher for Ashkenazi Jews over Passover. Labels for every prepared food have to be checked carefully if, like me, you’re Ashkenazi because the majority of people here are Sephardi/Mizrachi. I know, I know, the US media is filled with bull about Israelis being “white European colonizers,” but we are in the minority here.

On Passover, Sephardi/Misrachi can use kitniot, a classificiation that includes foods that are not hametz, but which Ashkenazi rabbis, generations ago, believed could be confused with hametz and so were forbidden. To be fair, until the last century these were mostly foods that were rare in Europe. I won’t go so far as to say that Ashkenazi women want to marry Sephardi men so they can eat kitniot on Passover, but it certainly is an appealing trait.

So…this is a very disjointed post. That’s because our thoughts are so often interrupted by alerts and alarms. Just before I finished this, we had an alarm because of a “hostile aircraft intrusion.” These are armed drones. Our wonderful airforce is great at shooting these down.

Speaking of shooting down drones, a good friend and her husband were traveling last week when the part of the highway they were on was under attack. Following instructions, they pulled over and ran away from the cars, toward a roadside shelter. My friend looked up because of the noise: the drone was almost directly overhead, being shot at by an airforce helicopter. She said if she hadn’t been so scared she might have enjoyed the excitement—like being in a movie.

And speaking of scared—back in 2024 when Hezbollah started firing missiles at us, I understood the meaning of the expression “His bowels turned to water.” That’s fear. But now—now these blasted alarms are annoyances, not terrors.

That’s how we Israelis manage. Disjointed or not, today I said my prayers, went grocery shopping, got my sunglasses fixed, walked the dog twice, cleaned my last food cabinet for Passover, played Bananagrams solitaire, made a pot of veggies and beans, and was in the communal shelter three times and my own “safe space” twice. We are used to this. We don’t like it. We wish the Muslims weren’t set on world dominance and would let us live in peace. But this is home, and living our best lives in spite of war is the price of living here.

Please keep your prayers coming, and please pass on this publication to friends of yours who might find the antisemites convincing. Let them read what Israelis are really like. They might be surprised.

Background

Israel has been at war since October 7, 2023. Everyone knows someone who has died, wounded, or is currently serving in this war. The war began because terrorists from Gaza brutally murdered over 3,000 people in a surprise attack that, they claimed, was the first of what would be many more such events. 3,000 Israelis is proportionally equivalent to around 43,000 Americans.

Anyone who says that Israel started this war needs to understand a few things:

1. Israel’s population includes strong leftists and strong rightists, secularists and religious, Jews and non-Jews. On one thing we are united: We want to live in peace. We have never tried to force our way of life on anyone else; within the pre-1967 borders of Israel, Jews live side-by-side with Muslims, Christians, secularists and others. Our army is called the “Israel Defense Forces” because their job is to defend the country. Israel does not, contrary to lies spread by antisemites, have imperialistic dreams.

   

2. The Arabs, who never in the history of the world controlled a government that ruled this land, were offered a state in 1947, when the land Britain was given to control for the Jews was to be divided into two nations, a Jewish and an Arab one. The Arabs refused and attacked.

3. The Arabs were offered nationhood four or five other times in exchange for peace with Israel. Every time they refused. This includes the 20-year failed policy called the Oslo Accords.

4. Egypt ruled Gaza from the time Israel was founded in 1948 until 1967, when Israel won the land in a war begun by the Arabs.

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5. Israel does not occupy Gaza. Until the Hamas massacres of Israelis on October 7, there was no Israeli military presence there. Every single Jew was removed from Gaza. Every Jewish town, community, and even cemetery was removed in 2005-6.

6. The Arabs living in this region have been called Palestinians since 1964 when Yasser Arafat, a power-hungry Egyptian, became the leader of the Arabs living in territories Israel won in 1967. He created the narrative that the Arabs living in Israel were their own nationality, Palestinians.

7. In a free election overseen by western countries, the Arabs living in Gaza voted in Hamas.

8. Hamas’s goal has been the destruction of Israel. The terrorism across the border by Hamas and its terrorists never stopped. Israel has retaliated; it has never attacked first.

The history of the relationship of the so-called Palestinians and the Jews to this land is documented in my article, Israel, Gaza and Palestine: a Quick History.

Israel has been at war since October 7, 2023. Everyone here knows someone who has died, was wounded, or is currently serving in this war.

During the intense fighting in Gaza, thousands of small businesses closed because their owners and/or employees were in active service. I buy my cooking gas from a small business. It took 2 weeks to replace a gas balloon because all his deliverymen were fighting (I have two balloons, one full and one I am using.) He was in the reserves but was able to take a day off each week because of hardship. This means he served 6 days and worked the 7^th day, long hours to serve his customers.

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Thousands of families have had to subsist on the small stipend paid to reservists rather than on salaries.

What would the USA be doing if Mexicans had rushed the border and killed 43,000 Americans? Probably eliminate Mexico.

The Second Iran War (The current conflict)

Everyone’s nerves are shot because this is a war zone. You must respond immediately to alarms to take cover. In my region, we have 5 seconds from the time a missile is released by Hezbollah to the time of impact.

Around 3,100 Israelis have been left homeless because of damage occurring during this latest portion of war, which we are calling the Second Iran War. Of those, 2,700 have been relocated in hotels and the others have found housing elsewhere. There have been approximately 40 civilian deaths, mostly in the city of Bet Shemesh, where an Iranian missile made a direct hit on a shelter and synagogue. And 70,000 Israeli men and women reservists have been called back to active duty.

Interesting and possibly relevant fact: Bet Shemesh has the largest American population of any place in Israel. Iran calls the USA “the Big Satan” and Israel “the Small Satan.” We know Iran has guided missiles. I strongly suspect that the missile that hit Bet Shemesh had targeted that city to make a political point.

Specifically during this phase of the war, here’s what I know.

• Besides being disturbed by alerts and alarms at night, we can hear mortar fire at the border: deep single booms that reverberate in the silence.

• My friend and her family live in a very old neighborhood in Beersheva with public shelters, not private saferooms. When an Iranian missile struck an open area in their neighborhood, no one was injured. Many neighbors volunteered to clean the debris.

• WhatsApp groups to say Psalms for safety for the country and for complete healing of injured soldiers have been opened. Prayers have increased. Many formerly unreligious people have begun following some of the commandments related to prayer and religious observance.

• People are fighting with humor. War humor is dark. A friend, who had once been given a small part of a destroyed rocket, found a dead mouse in his yard. He posted a photo of the mouse and scrap of rocket with the caption, “Mouse didn’t reach the shelter in time.” Widely assumed to be a joke, it was reported that a new app uses exact geographic location and time to determine, using statistical analysis, when are the safest times to use the bathroom and bathe. Babylon Bee, a satire site, did a youtube video on the assassination and succession to Khameni that we found very funny. A cartoon showed a woman with two lists: an “everyday” to-do list with things like “clean the attic,” “put all family photos in albums,” and more on one side, and on the “War” side: “Read” and “Listen for attack warnings.”

• A friend and her husband were driving home from Haifa after the Sabbath when there was a siren. Following protocol, they pulled to the side of the road, left the car, and ran towards a roadside shelter. She looked up: a drone was right above her, and an Israeli helicopter was shooting at it. She wrote, “OMG! I was literally in a movie. It would have been interesting had it not been so frightening.”

• Where I am staying, a 7-year-old was in the shower when an attack alarm sounded. Her father snatched her out of the water, wrapped her in a large towel, and carried her downstairs into the saferoom. The child told me that another time she was in the bathroom for “other things” when a siren went off.

• At the Sabbath table yesterday, we went around the table saying something good and something bad because of the war. The “good” of war? The unity among Israelis. The way so many secular Jews have seen the miracles that have kept them and others safe—for example when missiles that are not destroyed by our missile defense systems land in empty areas or fail to detonate.ⁱ

• We jump at loud noises. It will be a long time before we want to watch fireworks.

• We hate the ads that start up automatically on social media for violent game apps. The noises are too similar to war noises.

• It is very hard to concentrate on other things when we have to keep one ear tuned to alerts and alarms.

• The local Farmer’s Market, which has not recovered from last spring’s First Iran War, is closed because there is no shelter big enough for everyone. Farmers are suffering from the lack of markets and we are buying vegetables that have been stored instead of picked within 12 hours of purchase,

• People without cars are pretty much tied to their homes and shelters. It is unsafe to be on the street when an alarm sounds.

• We have become impatient with social media posts highlighting materialistic concerns, such as people who cannot decide between four shades of light gray for their living rooms. We, on the other hand, worry about whether this is a good time to use the bathroom, or if our “relief” will be interrupted by a missile attack.

Conclusion

Life in Israel has been difficult since October 7, 2023. While things in the north eased up between the end of the First Iran War in June and the start of this on February 28, they are very, very difficult now. We need your prayers.

But more than just prayers, we need you to speak up for us. The voices against us are strong and loud. We Jews are 8 million in Israel and 15 million in the world. There are close to 2 billion Muslims, of whom 15-25 percent are radical and want us dead. That is 300-500 million. We are 15 million. The strength of their propaganda is because of the difference in our numbers and do not prove that right is on their side.

Feel free to distribute my linked articles. I also have a powerpoint of the Quick History. It is too big to distribute through this medium. However, if any of you can invite a few friends over for a screening, message me privately with your email address and I will send it to you.. We need your help to win this war, both the one in the air and the one of popular opinion.

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i Please do not ask me why 38 civilians have been killed. We cannot know or understand God’s ways, but sometimes we can see His mercy and grace.

Alerts and Alarms

An alert is sounded on the cellphone of anyone with the civil defense app. It says to prepare for attack. Where I live, the alarm will sound between 5 and 10 minutes after the alert.

An alarm means “missile or drone on the way.” It sounds both on the phone and also outside. Where I live we have 5 seconds (you read that right) from the start of the alarm to impact, if we are indeed in the trajectory.

Frequent alarms during the active part of the Hezbollah-Israel war taught us that our alarm was short. We live so close to the border with Lebanon that we have just 5 seconds from the time an incoming missile is launched until it will hit, so as soon as the alarm begins we rush to safety.

That alarm in the synagogue went on and on.

After a couple of minutes, we returned to the sanctuary. Now, on the Sabbath we do not turn on (or off) anything that uses electricity except to save a life. This meant that although no one had been using their cellphone, any medical people on call, including doctors and emergency workers, had phones that were charged and turned on. By the time we had returned, someone had learned what was going on.

Before resuming the religious service, the rabbi announced that Israel was at war: we had attacked Iran. We would complete the service, but quickly. We were then to return home and not go out: we needed to stay near a shelter.

Anyone following this blog since the war began will know that I do not have a shelter. When we have alarms from Hezbollah’s attacks, I am to close all the doors to the long hall in my apartment and sit at the end for ten minutes. This is how long it takes for shrapnel from missiles blown up by the Iron Dome to fall to earth, the dangerous time. Outside of the massacres of October 7, most injuries to Israeli civilians during the Hezbollah portion of the war were caused by shrapnel.

But now we are dealing with Iran, which has much more sophisticated weaponry: guided as well as unguided missiles, all of which carry warheads that explode on impact, start fires, and deliberately spray out vast amounts of deadly shrapnel. Because of the distance, these take 10-15 minutes to arrive and our defense forces cannot tell exactly where they will land until about 10 seconds before impact.ⁱ We receive an alert when the missiles are sent: you have less than 10 minutes to get to your shelter, so put on your shoes and go now.ⁱⁱ

Since Hezbollah joined Iran in this war, we get both kinds of alarms. Type one is two sounds: the alert telling us that an alarm is imminent followed by the alarm itself. The second is the sudden alarm that says Hezzy has sent us presents, and we need immediate cover.

Day 1

Part 1 on this second Iran wardetailed the significance of the date: the Sabbath when we read Parshat Zachor as part of the Torah reading, so I will not repeat that here.

I live a 6-minute walk from the synagogue. The home where I was expected for the Sabbath meal was a ten-minute walk from my apartment, farther from the synagogue. I knew I could not go. I had not prepared a meal, but my hostess for Friday night’s meal had pressed leftovers on me. I would not be able to heat them up, so I was facing cold meatballs, rice, and beans. Then the woman who sits across the aisle from me, a widow and one of my first friends in Israel, invited me.

We hurried to her house after the service. Since we weren’t expecting an emergency that day (we all thought the war would begin on the Purim festivalⁱⁱⁱ) her saferoom was dark except for a little light creeping around the tightly-closed window.

One of her daughters arrived with her family. We made the special Sabbath table blessings and almost immediately an alarm sounded. Without a turned-on cell phone we didn’t get an alert, if there was one. We rushed to the saferoom, recited Psalm 121^iv, and waited ten minutes in the dark.

Did I mention that our enemies love to irritate us? This alarm, and the four or five (I lost count) following, fell exactly during the 1.5 hours that would be mealtime for the vast majority of synagogue-goers. Then thankfully we had a long stretch of quiet. That daughter and her family went home; they have a saferoom.

Shortly after they left we had another alarm. A few minutes after the all-clear, another daughter and family, whose apartment doesn’t have a saferoom, came. They came planning to stay the night. They told us that when that alarm had sounded they had been on the steps of their building, starting to come. Instead, they went the short distance to the public shelter, staying there until it was safe to leave.

During the 12 days of the first Iran War I had stayed with good friends who live in the same neighborhood.^v My friends and I had already decided I would return there when hostilities with Iran resumed. So around 4 pm my hostess walked me over, showing me a short cut that reduced the length of the walk by half.

Becoming an Evacuee

As soon as the Sabbath ended, one of the family members drove me to my neighborhood to collect my dog and whatever I would need for a few days. We had an alert just as we pulled into the parking lot, but at the top of the steps, halfway to my apartment, was a public shelter. When I got there several people were bringing their leashed dogs inside while others waited outside for the alarm. We stood there for more than 10 minutes waiting for an alarm that did not come. I took off for my apartment.

The suddenness of the alarm got my adrenaline flowing. I grabbed my little overnight bag and followed my mental list: enough underwear for four or five days, tops and skirts that I could mix and match, nightwear, etc. I grabbed the bag for my laptop, which was resting on top of the big suitcase I bought at the beginning of the war in case I had to evacuate from my town.

It didn’t occur to me until I was on my way back to the car, on the next-to-last step (past the public shelter where I waited on the way up), with my little overnight bag, the computer bag, and a small duffel, that I was evacuating my home. I should have taken the big suitcase and more clothing.

This was my second evacuation; the first was the 12-day First Iran War. That time, it never—NEVER—occurred to me to use that big suitcase. This time, it occurred to me too late to take it; I wasn’t about to drag the dog, suitcase, duffel and computer bag back up about 60 steps and the long path, repack, and drag the big bag and dog back down to the street.

But the truth: I am an evacuee. Granted, I am close to home, but my home is not safe at this time.

Public Shelters

Public shelters are common, but they were built for a different threat. They have toilets, sinks, and a shower. Many of these have a children’s play area outside, with a few benches. In those days warnings were only when attacks were imminent. There was then no Iron Dome to blow missiles apart in the air. Older people remember spending hours and sometimes days in and near these.

Between wars, many of these have been rented out. In my neighborhood, two are synagogues and two are gyms. But when there is danger, they are opened to the public. I have heard it is law that if during an alert or alarm there is no public shelter in the immediate area and a stranger comes to the door seeking refuge, they must be allowed in, even if they bring a leashed dog.

I have read how spending time in a public shelter can draw neighbors together. This may be true of shelters in homogeneous neighborhoods. But I live in a community that is home to many kinds of people, Jews and non-Jews. It was built in the 1990s specifically to provide housing for some of the million Jews and non-Jewish family members who escaped when the Soviet Union fell.

In the public shelter nearest to my apartment, people congregate with people from their group or their families. I am the only native English-speaker in the neighborhood. And I have no family. Everyone is cordial, but I am not part of any conversation group. Plus, by the time I get my 80-year-old body out of bed, find my glasses, slippers and robe, and leash the dog, I would have to dash to get to the public shelter in time. It is not comfortable and really not safe for me.

Saferooms

A saferoom is a reinforced room which in most cases will protect whoever is inside. In many buildings, owners voted to convert certain rooms (in a stack) to saferooms. People owning private or row houses who have enough yard space often have them built from ground up. The permit system could take up to two years in my area before construction could begin; at the start of the war permitting was expedited and now takes just days and costs much less.

The saferoom where I am staying has a full-size bed, a sofa, a pile of thin foam mattresses, and a number of heavy blanket-filled duvets. On one wall are bookcases with games and puzzles. The one where I spend most of the Sabbath day noon hour was a workshop filled with a drill press, workbench, and boxes with other tools and materials. One woman I know uses her saferoom as a sewing room. They may also be used as home offices, laundry rooms, craft rooms, guest rooms, or bedrooms.

Many families say psalms, or at least one psalm (I’ve heard both 20 and 121 are popular), when they enter their saferoom. I have a psalm app on my phone and often recite some while waiting. Some families sing, tell or read stories, watch TV, and so forth. On Purim day, someone brought and played a drummed while we sang and the littlest ones danced.

Solitude and Company

Being alone at a time like this is hard; people find ways to cope.

Children

Keeping kids occupied is of major importance. Since the Corona teachers and students are used to zoom classes, which now are often managed on smartphones. But now they are not full days, rather just an hour or so of check-in time. These provide a little structure and the ability to visit briefly with the children and adults with whom kids spend many of their waking hours.

During this time, the home where I am is housing 7 adults, 3 teens, and 3 children under 9, plus one 13-pound Italian greyhound mix dog.

My dog is a distraction for us all, especially the children. Before I adopted her she lived with a large family. Now she lives with me and two cats. She and I are accustomed to walking for about an hour daily: two long and one short walk. Those long walks aren’t possible now, but the kids like playing with her.

Today a third-grade girl, Roni, and I sat on the sofa for an hour using two game apps on my phone—one English word games and one Hebrew. We did one round in one language, then did a round in the other. Yesterday, Roni’s not-quite-five-year-old brother told me the Hebrew names of many of his plastic animals, including a large array of dinosaurs.

I finally learned the popular Israeli game Rumikub, which Roni taught me, as well as another game. Like many Israeli children’s games, the purpose is to complete a task, not for one person to win but rather to cooperate. I like games where there is plenty of laughter and no winners and losers.^vi

Adult Visiting

We are pretty much confined by circumstances to a very small place, but that does not mean being alone. Sunday night we had a big dinner with the next-door neighbors. With all the kids and grandkids and me we were 25. Hamburgers were done on a charcoal grill while fries were made from scratch. Every possible topping was on the table. During and after the meal we sang patriotic songs. A big speaker had many playlists, including one with Israeli “golden oldies.”

Purim afternoon a festive meal with friends is traditional. I had planned to be at my friend Rivka’s; she had invited several others for a potluck at 3 pm. My hostess where I am staying planned for her friends to come at 1:00. So I had two parties.

At the first, we ate and sang. The speaker blared out holiday songs for awhile. Later one of the men drummed; the youngest child pounded on the table to help. It was raucus and fun.

We had one alarm/alert—at 2:45, right in the middle of party time. (I told you they like to disrupt our lives.) As soon as the all-clear came I left for the second party. This party—one English family and the rest American—was more sedate. Music was provided by the neighbors; we finally closed the window for relief.

Last night a nephew of my host was here for an hour or two. The father of three small children, he was called up to reserve duty. He brought a load of laundry in from the field, picked up some of the goodies from mishloach manot (explained in this story), visited awhile, and when his laundry was done went back to his base.

Conclusion

Visiting neighbors, sharing meals, singing, telling stories, playing and praying together—all of these provide not just distraction but also a veneer of normality to our lives. I wrote a lot about resilience in Part 1 earlier this week.

This is life in Israel. Everyone has his or her own story of these days. Mine is lived in a community where most people have lived in the same home for 20 or 30 years, families have grown up together and often married within the community. We are deeply religious people whose faith helps give us strength during these times. But it is also true that the civic culture is one of cooperation and nationhood. All of these give us the strength to live in this difficult Middle East.

May this war be successful. May a new regime in Iran arise that will work for cooperation with Israel, and may the hate supported both financially and in every other way by the government of the Islamic Revolution of Iran be discarded forever into the trash can of history.

i To understand this, think of a wedge of pizza. The point of the pizza is like the launching point of the missile. The farther from this point, the wider the piece of pizza, or the targeted area. Exactness cannot be traced as well as it can on a missile from Hezbollah, where only a few kilometers may separate launch pad and point of impact.

ii During the Hezbollah part of the war countless people ran to safety dripping from the shower with just a towel around them. Amazingly, there was a bump in births following this part of the war, in spite of these interruptions.

iii Our enemies have a pattern of attacking on our holidays. Within living memory, those have included the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto on the eve of Passover 1943; the Yom Kippur war 1973; October 7, both Sabbath and Simchat Torah, 2023.

iv​ Psalm 121:

1) A song of ascents. I lift my eyes to the mountains from where will my help come?

2)My help will come from the Lord, maker of heaven and earth.

3)He will not let your foot falter; your guardian does not slumber

4) Indeed, neither slumbers [naps] nor sleeps, the Guardian of Israel.

5) The Lord is your guardian; the Lord is your protective shade at your right hand.

6) The sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night,

7) The Lord will guard you rom all evil: He will guard your soul.

8) The Lord will guard your going and your coming from now and for all time. (Psalms, Ohel Yosef Yitzchak, Kehot Publication Society, New York, 2020.)

v One benefit of not riding on the Sabbath is that we tend to live close together. This is called by antisemites “clannishness.”

vi I support competition when skill is involved, but not in games that depend on “chance.” I do not believe in pure chance; in my experience people have different amounts of luck and this is beyond their control. To this day, when I play board games I land on squares where I have to pay out, go back, or miss a turn about 5 out of 6 turns. The last time I played with my sister she didn’t believe it so started keeping track. Finally she said, “I always thought you were a sore loser, but you really do have the worst luck I’ve ever seen.”

Well, honestly we knew the war hadn’t ended; we still have men and women in Gaza and the north, as well as those searching out terrorists in Judea and the Shomron—the infamous West Bank to the outside world. But for families who don’t have sons and daughters serving in the army at this time, during the last eight months the war wasn’t top of mind.

This time, a mere eight months after we seriously damaged Iran’s military capability, they rebuilt stronger than ever. Their missiles are faster—formerly they took about 15 minutes to reach us and now they take about 10 minutes. This gives us less time to get to safety between the warning and the “incoming” alarm.

The missiles are also stronger. They carry exploding warheads that create damage from shock waves from the explosion, start fires, and spread large amounts of shrapnel (scrap). They are also guided, whereas the vast majority of Hezbollah’s are not.

It’s important to note that the effort and expense of this Iranian weapons build-up has had a significant impact on the daily lives of Iranians. Citizens are suffering from water shortages and power shutdowns, extremely high prices and not much to buy, and even greater repression than previously. Just as in Gaza, all resources have gone in the effort to destroy us, not to support its citizens.ⁱ,ⁱⁱ

The Start of This War

A word about traditional Judaism: on the Sabbath and the major holidays we do not touch anything that requires turning electricity on or off. This means the only folks carrying phones were those who were on-call (doctors and volunteers of the emergency medical organization, Hatzalah).

Around 8:25 am on Saturday, when I and many others were in the synagogue praying the morning service, a siren went off, startling all of us. We immediately took the stairs to the basement of the synagogue building. But the siren went on and on. After the Hezbollah portion of the war, when northern Israel was bombarded by rockets, we got very used to a short alarm.

This was much, much longer: clearly something else. We went back upstairs, and the rabbi reported that we were at war. We would complete the service and then we were to return home as quickly as possible and, if we didn’t have an in-home safe room, stay near a communal shelter.

Many attacks against us have been on holidays. Just within the memories of people still alive today are: the attack on the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II on Passover 1943; Yom Kippur War on the Day of Atonement 1973; the October 7 war on a day that was both Sabbath and Simchat Torah, a holiday whose name means literally “Rejoicing because of the Torah” 2023. Because the talks between Iran, Israel and the USA were held so close to our holiday of Purim, we assumed that this war would begin on that day.

Purim celebrates the time that we weren’t massacred. A time when the Amalek of that generation was destroyed before his genocidal plan could be launched.

What we did not expect was that the war would begin on the day we read Parshat Zachor.

Amalek

Those who study the Five Books of Moses will remember that Amalek was a king whose army attacked the Jews from behind as they fled Egypt. We had not gone near his territory; we had absolutely no quarrel with him, his nation, or his people. He attacked with the intent to destroy us just because he thought he could. He was the first antisemite.

History has been replete with others who have tried to destroy us. We believe that the big-name enemies of the Jews are incarnations of Amalek—either by blood or by spirit. Besides the Biblical Amalek, there was Haman, whose downfall is remembered in the Jewish festival of Purim, which this year begins tonight (March 2), and certainly Khameni, whose name is so similar to Haman’s.

The connection between Hitler and Haman was brought to sharp focus by the result of the Nuremberg Trials, when 13 of Hitler’s top echelon involved in the effort to destroy the Jews, as well as other war criminals, were tried. The last words of Julius Streicher, founder and publisher of the antisemitic propaganda newspaper Der Sturmer, before he was hanged, were “Purim Fest 1946.” He clearly saw that he had been a modern Haman.ⁱⁱⁱ

On the Sabbath before Purim we add to our Torah reading the three verses from Deuteronomy that instruct us to remember Amalek. Deuteronomy 25:17-19, called “Parshat Zachor,” remind us not to be taken by surprise again, to be aware even when times are good that there are those who hate us. As Miguel Cervantes wrote in Don Quixote: “Forewarned, forearmed; to be prepared is half the victory”.

Parshat Zachor is so important that besides reading these lines at the end of the complete portion reading, the brief passage is repeated following the regular service. Late-comers who missed it during its regular reading have the opportunity to hear it then. Many women, who are not obligated to pray in synagogue, come just for those few minutes. That is how important these three lines are.

Resilience

For most of the last 2000 years,^iv Jews held absolutely no political power. Although as a people we have been powerless, our children have been raised to be resilient and to not take antisemitism personally. Our Passover seder, the service read around the dining table, includes the following:

Jewish children learn in earliest childhood that being picked on because of our origins is not personal. As a people, we have no patience for the victim mentality. We are survivors. Within 10 years of the liberation of the concentration camps, many former inmates had rebuilt their lives and started successful businesses in the USA and other places, including Israel. Refugees from the Arab lands also built strong new lives although having arrived in Israel with just the clothes on their backs and, if lucky, one small suitcase.

Tragically, yesterday one Iranian missile struck a synagogue in a city called Bet Shemesh yesterday, killing 9 and injuring many more. Bet Shemesh, it is important for westerners to know, is predominantly populated by Americans.

Bet Shemesh was not an accidental missile strike. It was a deliberate targeting that gave Iran a twofer: they killed Israeli-Americans (American-Israelis). Citizens of the Big Satan along with those of the Little Satan.

To Be…

I had intended to write about daily life during this national emergency, but as I started I realized there were too many things that non-Israelis, especially non-Jews, needed to understand. If all goes well, the day after tomorrow I will publish an essay about living through this. A second follow-up piece will be my answer to the so-called newsman who was interviewed by American ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee in the Israeli international airport last week.

i As I wrote this paragraph, we got a warning to move toward a shelter. If and when the attack is imminent, we will get the attack siren and rush to a protected place. Think of a piece of pizza, a point at one end and a large piece of crust. Iran is the point, we are the crust, and when the missiles are still near the point it’s too early to say where in the crust they will land. The warning is when we know they’ve gone out, the attack alarm is if and when our defenses know our small area will be the recipient.

ii https://www.ncr-iran.org/en/news/economy/irans-regime-faces-mounting-economic-collapse-as-prices-soar-and-capital-flees/

iii Last week’s Sabbath newsletter from the publisher Artscroll/Mesorah included a fascinating, brief article about the Nazi connection to Purim on page two of their newsletter, https://blog.artscroll.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/artscroll-shabbos-newsletter_tetzaveh5786_pgs.pdf

iv Nearly 2000 years have passed between the destruction of the Second Temple and enslavement/population transfer by the Romans of Jews to Italy as slaves, and the establishment of modern Israel. Jews living in Europe were subject to Christian persecution. The term “wandering Jews” is because in Europe we were thrown out of one locality after another. After years or generations we were were allowed back in, often to be thrown out again a few generations later. Jews living in North Africa and the Middle East were subjected to Islamic repression. Many of them lived in the villages and cities of their ancestors; some still have family stories of having lived in a particular city in what is now Iran, Afghanistan, Tunisia for 2,000 years. Some know their regional roots were planted after the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE, approximately 2600 years ago. Others know that their families settled in their places after the Expulsion from Spain in 1492, a “mere” 534 years ago. Those in Europe are mostly Ashkenazi; those who found new homes following the Spanish Expulsion are Sephardi; and those whose families found new homes in North Africa/Middle East 1500 years earlier are called Mizrachi. There are others, such as Yeminite. Paul Johnson’s History of the Jews is the best recent history of my people, although first published in 1987.

The Problem

Replacement theology is the concept that the Jews, having rejected Jesus, angered God so badly that He removed their chosenness and gave it to the Christians. In the name of this belief, over the last 2000 years millions upon millions of Jews have been murdered or forced to convert to Christianity. Rabbi Tuvia Singer, whose mission is outreach to bring Judaism to searchers, explains this in a recent podcast.

Replacement theology is very problematic logically. The Torah (the “Old Testament” of Christianity) expressly says that God made an eternal covenant with the Jewish people. It isn’t eternal if it is removed. If God removed it from the Jews and gave it to the followers of Jesus, then He lied when He said it was eternal. How can you believe in a liar, even if he is a god? And if God truly removed the covenant of chosenness from the Jews and gave it to the Christians, why mightn’t He remove it from them and give it to the followers of Mohammed, as the Muslims claim?

The question, at its core, can be reduced to this: which of the three Abrahamic religions is true? In other words, do the Jews, Christians, or Muslims have the true covenant with God?

Background

As a practicing, traditional Jew, I believe that Judaism is true and that the Torah was given by God, written down in shorthand by Moses as the Five Books of Moses, taught by Moses, and then by other teachers until written down as the Talmud. According to the “Old Testament,” God made an eternal—lasting forever—covenant with my ancestors that we accepted at Mt. Sinai, and He expects us to do our best to follow it to this day.

I believe that Judaism is the only belief system given directly by God. But—and this is a huge but—I do not believe that only Jews are “saved.”

Salvation

Judaism does not believe in salvation the way Christians or Muslims do. It is not a focus of Judaism. Judaism focuses on this world that God created and for which He created people. We do not believe in eternal damnation of burning forever. We do not believe that people who do not accept God (in whatever form) will face a grim eternity. We believe that actions are more important than beliefs” giving to the poor means more to God than asking God to help the poor.

The part of daily Jewish prayer that asks God’s help is written in the plural. Save us, not save me. And the salvation for which we pray is salvation from earthly ills such as illness, flood, loss of livelihood, war, hatred, and the temptation to live selfishly.

Heaven and Hell

Jews believe in an afterlife, the “world to come.” We believe that upon death, our soul leaves behind its physical shell (the body) and returns to God.ⁱ Anyone who does his or her best to follow the Seven Laws of Noah, explained below, has a share in the world to come. We might end up on different levels depending on our earthly behavior, but we all will end up in the world to come eventually.ⁱⁱ

However, I am also very much aware of three additional facts:

1. God created us to have free will, to make choices in this life. This means that sometimes we choose correctly and sometimes we make errors. He expects us to try. He does not expect us to choose perfectly. This is different from at least some branches of Christianity. When asked, “How are you?” financial guru and devout Christian Dave Ramsey replies “Better than I deserve.” This is not a Jewish reply. While we Jews err, we do not believe we are born sinful. We do not call ourselves sinners except in specific prayers designed to help us evaluate our behavior. Our job is to not focus on our mistakes but to continually strive to be better—to focus on the positive path, not to look backward or to kick ourselves for a trait that we were born with and cannot change (although we choose how to live with our inborn traits).

2. Judaism is difficult: we have 613 laws, some positive (do this) and some negative (don’t do this); some which I can keep (i.e., supporting the needy) and some which I cannot (laws specifically for the opposite sex). And since the beginning, Jews have faced persecution. Conversion to Judaism is not impossible, but it is difficult. It involves learning the basics of the religion and the way of life, and promising to live according to them.

3. Before God gave the Jewish people the Torah, He gave the world the Seven Laws of Noah, the laws necessary for a civil society:ⁱⁱⁱ

• Do not profane God’s one-ness in any way.

• Do not curse the Creator.

• Do not murder.

• Do not eat a limb of a still-living animal (i.e., respect the life of all of God’s creatures)

• Do not steal.

• Sex is a gift to be used to build and strengthen families; use it responsibly according to God’s guidelines as spelled out in Leviticus.

• Establish courts of law and ensure justice in the world.

These are the foundation stones of civilization. Without them there are anarchy and barbarism.

Belief in God

The Seven Laws of Noah do not include belief in God. They do preclude being disrespectful to God, but there is no requirement of belief. In other words, you don’t have to believe in God, but if you can’t say anything nice about God, don’t say anything at all.

The Tower of Babel

Long before the Ten Commandments were given at Sinai and after the Great Flood, when Noah saved humanity and the animals in the Ark, people spoke one language and understood each other. They decided to build a tower to reach heaven. They wanted to be equal to God.

“G-d decided to destroy their arrogance by destroying their ability to understand one another. He, therefore, confused the people by splitting them up into seventy different nations and tribes, each with a language of its own.”^iv

It seems to me that if God had only one way of reaching Him, and wanted only one way of reaching Him, this would have been revealed at the Tower of Babel. But there is no mention of Him mentioning this exception. Rather, the text states that he divided humanity into 70 groups that could not communicate with each other.

It is clear to me that God meant for each of the seventy nations to find its own way of reaching Him—in accordance with the 7 Laws of Noah; and within that broad framework, in accordance with each nation’s own cultural framework and reality.

Which Is The True Religion?

God is infinite.

Infinite means without end, without limits.

We learn from the fall of the Tower of Babel that God saw the dangers of a monolithic humanity and divided people to avoid this problem.

If we look at the world through the lens of history, we can see that when religious (or anti-religious^v) power becomes too centralized, it becomes dangerous. The Inquisition of Spain did not happen in a vacuum. It was only one, and perhaps the worst and longest, of numerous inquisitions begun in Rome by an administrative entity that used religion as a way of civil control.^vi Communism, the anti-religion, killed more people in the 20^th century than Hitler. Communist revolutions in Russia culminating in the USSR; Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia; Castro’s Cuba; Maduro’s Venezuela; and many other smaller and/or less successful attempts attacked religious communities first. Islamic terror is a real force in many parts of the world; Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians are all among its targets.

Jews do not actively seek converts. We do not believe we have the only path to God. We believe we have a special relationship with God, with special responsibilities. In a healthy family, each child has a special relationship with each parent, based on the child’s special talents and needs. Why on earth (or in Heaven) wouldn’t the infinite, loving God care for all His children and allow them all to reach Him? Why would He create a reality where He would demonstrate His...love?...by damning for eternity anyone who lived a strictly moral life (the 7 Laws of Noah) but didn’t accept one specific way of speaking to Him?

I believe that God loves all His creatures. He divided us into different cultures for a purpose. That purpose did not involve setting up millions to be damned because they didn’t adhere to one particular belief system. I believe He gave each people special tasks and traits, although unfortunately most groups have forgotten this. The rich, tuneful voices of Black Africans and the Welsh; the meticulousness of Germans; the spare art of Japan and the incredible woven silks of China—today we call these stereotypes, but if we back off from political correctness we can recognize that there are cultural differences, with different groups excelling in different things.

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We Jews have the tasks of bringing holiness into the world by following God’s instructions (“commandments”) and of modeling a society that works well. In spite of all its problems, Israel consistently comes out as one of the top 10 countries in the world happiness ratings. This is not a coincidence; it is a result of Jewish culture that is based on our focus on creating a civil society.

Christianity has done a better job than Judaism of educating the world about the Seven Laws of Noah: they brought civilization to nonbelievers across the globe. Many if not most of the great ideas spread by Christianity came from Judaism originally.^vii

The Seven Laws of Noah are missing or only partially understood in many parts of the world. In them, lying, cheating, stealing, raping, and other horrible activities are considered normal. When a religion accepts or even promotes behaviors opposite the Seven Laws, in my opinion that is proof that the religion cannot be truly the word of God. For us to accept those beliefs in the name of “multiculturalism” is breaking the first of the Seven Laws: to say God wants a man to send his son to blow himself and others up is to worship a different god, a god of death.

Solution

It is time for Christian and Muslim leaders to recognize that God does not want monolithic groups among people. He discovered millennia ago that when societies or factions get too large, bad people take power and bad things happen. Carrying this over to religion, it means that He loves and accepts any people who follow His basic laws for a civil society, whatever they call Him or however they worship Him—or whether they pray at all. He wants His creatures to live good lives in the good world He created, and this can only happen when the same basic laws are followed by all.

To simplify: why would a god, a loving god, divide humanity into many different cultural/linguistic groups and then demand one monolithic way of speaking to and with him? This belief simply does not make sense. It breeds hatred and fear, two emotions that are contrary to the kind of civil society created by the Seven Laws of Noah.

The Seven Laws say Don’t Disrespect God. They do not say Pray to God. They say There is only one God. They don’t say There is only one way to approach God. They say, if you don’t believe, fine; just accept that God is a possibility, don’t go out of your way to disrespect Him (on the “off-chance” you are wrong and there is a God), and don’t go worshiping trees, stones, gold, or power.

If we could get to this point, it would be easier to respect each other. Maybe then we would actually have universal peace, and people around the world could live happy, productive, secure lives.

i https://aish.com/heaven-and-hell-explained/

ii The exception is the truly evil like Haman, who wanted to exterminate the Jews because of jealousy; or Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot, who killed or whose policies killed millions for reasons based on politics and power. Our sages say that their souls end suddenly; they have no afterlife. Personally I hope that their souls see and comprehend what they are missing and why before they are zapped.

iii https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/62221/jewish/The-7-Noahide-Laws.htm

iv https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1013006/jewish/The-Tower-of-Babel-What-Was-Up-With-lt.htm

v Every coin has two sides, but they are the same coin. Religious excess is backed by anti-religious excess.

vi Confession to a priest opens the door to blackmail and coercion. In recent years, improper sexual behavior by priests damaged hundreds if not thousands of young men (and possibly women). Who is to say that the occasional bad player has not stooped to other forms of control through misuse of a valuable spiritual exercise.

vii Many ideas are not explicit in the “Old Testament,” appearing in compilations of the Oral Law such as the Mishneh and Talmud. Jesus and his Jewish followers were well versed in the Oral Law so it makes sense that they taught what they had learned.

Jealousy and envy are antithetical to what Judaism teaches. The last of the Ten Commandments, thou shalt not covet,” addresses this. If these emotionsⁱ weren’t a natural part of the human makeup, the Ten Commandments would not include them. That wording, however, is negative: what you shouldn’t do. Where do we learn what we should do?

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As early as the first book of the Bible, Genesis, we find lessons about gratitude and plenty: the opposite of jealousy or envy. One example is the difficult life of the patriarch Jacob. At his mother’s urging and using trickery, he stole his brother Esau’s blessing and had to flee. He fell in love and worked 7 years for permission to marry his beloved. His father-in-law, Laban, tricked him into marrying her sister instead, and required another 7 years of work to finally marry his true love. Laban cheated him in other ways as well. Jacob finally took his wives, concubines, children, and herds and returned to his homeland. On the way, he met his estranged brother. Jacob gave Esau a very generous gift of livestock. Esau bragged, “I have enough.” Jacob replied, “I have plenty.ⁱⁱ”

“Enough” complements “not enough,” a common expression. There’s not enough milk for tomorrow’s breakfast. My pay isn’t enough for me to buy a new car. Your test score isn’t [good] enough to get an A. Esau’s “I have enough,” indicates that he counted the amount that he had.

On the other hand, I have never heard someone say “not plenty.” We use “plenty” often to indicate a sufficiency without suggesting it might not be “enough.” “I’ve got plenty of time.” “A small slice of cake will be plenty.” Jacob’s reply, “I have plenty,” indicates that the herd he had left after giving Esau a large portion was enough, maybe more than enough. Just a moment’s study of his life shows us that Jacob didn’t whine, complain, or consider himself a victim. He was satisfied with whatever he had.

The concept of being satisfied is taught many times in the Torah. One of the most famous teachings of Pirke Avotⁱⁱⁱ is, “Who is rich? The person who rejoices in his lot.” This phrase is just part of the teaching; it continues, “as it is said, You shall enjoy the fruit of your labors, you shall be happy and you shall prosper” (Psalms 128:2).^iv

A person needs to be at a high spiritual level not to feel something negative when confronted by someone or something with more. When a person has not reached the spiritual level of “I have all I need,” he feels that something is missing and therefore lacks serenity. Lack—not having everything one needs or wants--is one of the primary causes of sadness,^v according to Rabbi Menachem Mendel Hager of Kosov (1768-1825).^vi On the other hand, those who have reached that level feel contentment. Those of us less perfect at least feel contentment when we are aware that what we have is “plenty.”

Israel and Happiness

Israel consistently falls into the list of the top ten happiest countries. In 2024, according to www.worldatlast/com, Israel dropped from 4^th place to 5^th place. This was just months after a ghastly terror attack in which the equivalent of around 35,000 Americans were killed and hundreds more wounded. It was in the middle of the country’s longest war, with over 250 residents held hostage in Gaza, a huge percentage of men and women from 18-45 serving active duty as a regular or reserve soldier, thousands of border-dwellers who were refugees within the country, and missiles flying into our land day and night.

How could we be happy? WorldAtlas.com says it’s because of a strong sense of community. While Israelis have a strong sense of community, it is also important to recognize that our Jewish culture teaches the concept of “plenty” over “enough.” Accepting what one has is a cornerstone of Israel’s dominant religion and a reason people are happy in spite of troubles.

Recently I was at a bat mitzvah party, a women-only party for Sapir,^vii a young girl who reached the age of 12^viii and is now, according to Jewish law, a woman responsible for following the commandments. Like many Israelis, the family struggles financially. The party reflected this: it was held in the small, simple social hall of a local synagogue. The family provided “mains,” while salads and desserts were provided by friends. The décor consisted of a large balloon construction, a rather inelegant golden carpet, and decorative napkins.

It was the opposite of the fancy sit-down dinner affairs I’ve been to where guests try to out-do each other in the garment-and-jewel department and even at the dining tables strangers do not talk. It was one of the best parties I’ve ever been to—full of conversation with old and new friends, laughter, and spirited dancing. Not to mention healthy food.

I have known the bat mitzvah family for six of the eight years I’ve been in Israel, and I have never heard any of them complain about having less than others. (They might occasionally complain about the landlord who doesn’t fix anything.) Like many people I know in this community, their friends share the attitude of “plenty.” When people are in the “plenty” mindset they can live and let live. This sense of contentment translates into the friendly “we’re all together celebrating” attitude that made the party so much fun.

A Woman Who Exemplified “Plenty”

This party also included a custom that I have seen at other women-only get-togethers: yeast dough is prepared so that the special women’s blessing on dough will be said. At Sapir’s bat mitzva party, challah dough was prepared. Then all the guests sat down and watched as the bat mitzvah girl separated a bit of the dough and made the blessing for the first time. The family then took the dough home, shaped it and baked it for the following Sabbath.^ix

Watching Sapir take challah for the first time, I remembered the first woman I knew who took challah.

Julie was about 45 years older than me, but she was a frequent guest when I and my circle of younger adults shared Sabbath meals. What I knew about her boiled down to this: she had worked as a lab technician in a medical research laboratory in a city with a small Jewish community, she had never married, she was a vegetarian, and she always brought home-made challah for the Sabbath meals.

After a little over a year in her community I moved and began studying traditional Judaism. That was when I first learned about the mitzvah of challah. A few years after that I attended a conference in Julie’s city, and stayed with her. That was when I learned more of her story.

She was raised in Alsace, a region now in northeastern France but which was under German rule until her teen years when it was returned to France. She had attended a Jewish school and practiced traditional Judaism. She knew there were three mitzvot which were more important for women than for men. One was lighting Sabbath lights, one was observing the family purity laws,^x and the third was “taking challah.”

Around that time, her mother’s sister, mother of a large family, was in poor health. At the age of 16 Julie was sent to help the aunt and uncle, who owned a general store in a small town in Oklahoma.^xi Julie lived there for a number of years, learning English and attending high school. But in the small Oklahoma community where her aunt’s family lived, there was no Jewish community. Julie did her best to follow the Jewish laws. Kosher meat was not available, so she became a vegetarian. She continued to light candles in honor of Sabbaths and holidays and refused to date non-Jews, making the family purity laws irrelevant.

That left the third mitzvah for women, taking challah. A portion of any dough is taken in remembrance of the offerings when the Temple stood in Jerusalem. However, the blessing is only said when at least 5 pounds of flour (2.26 kg) is used. That is a lot of bread for one small woman to eat in a week. But taking challah and making the blessing was one thing she could do, even though she didn’t live near a synagogue and had no religious community.

To do this without waste, she began giving the bread away. She told me that she had a long list of recipients. One or two families with which she was very close received challah weekly. But most people she gifted just once a month, so they wouldn’t feel uncomfortable accepting it.

I realized that most, if not all, of the people receiving her challah did not know that this was one of the mitzvot that this woman had fulfilled diligently, with as much hiddur mitzvah as possible: enhancing it with beauty and special care.

Julie was “alone,” but she had, a huge family of people whom she treated with affection, many of whom, like me, loved her. By comparison with Sapir’s rich religious life, she had nothing. But she didn’t count like that. She had her “plenty.” She filled her “plenty,” the mission she had been given, with grace, generosity, and kindness.

Having plenty

Julie could have been an object of pity. She was at that time a 79-year-old childless, never-married woman on a small pension who had lived in the same small, old apartment for many years. Her only living family was a niece whom she hardly knew in a distant state. But she would have raised her eyebrows at anyone who dared to categorize her like this. She exemplified “plenty.”

The last time I saw her we just had time for a quick visit and lunch. I could only arrive around 11 am, and she was expected at 1:00 at the nursing home where she volunteered several afternoons a week. She visited as she said, “lonely old people who have no one.” She wouldn’t be home until 4:30 pm. I had to get to the airport by 5 pm, so we said goodbye after lunch.

But that morning I learned there was one thing she lacked. She showed me her treasures: a coverlet her mother had embroidered and the silver candlesticks her mother had given her before she left for America. In a kitchen cabinet, to get to something else she wanted me to see, she also pulled out a large plastic bowl. She said with a sigh, “This is the bowl I use to raise my challah dough. It doesn’t hold the heat as well as a ceramic bowl would, but it works.”

Think about this: The only thing Julie lacked was a ceramic bowl to help her fulfill the mitzvah of taking challah.

In the short time between lunch and 4:30, I found exactly the kind of bowl she needed, and gave it to her when she got home. I still made it to my plane with a few minutes to spare.

A few weeks later, Julie sent me a little gift. When she was young, her mother had sent her to the near-by convent to learn knitting and embroidery from the nuns. This is what she sent, a true labor of love from an elderly woman whose fingers were not as flexible as they’d been when she was 9 years old.

In the end...

In the end, the important question is not whether you or I take challah. The question is, do we accept our “plenty,” or do we dismiss it as not enough? Do we use our “plenty” just for ourselves, or are we generous? And are we grateful to our Creator for the “plenty” that we have been given?

In a world surrounded by people who are sure they do not have “enough,” let us strive to feel that what we have, whatever it is, is “plenty,” and let us share our plenty, and our understanding of plenty, with others.

i Hebrew has one word for both jealousy and envy. It also means zealousness.

ii Genesis 33:9-11, https://www.sefaria.org.il/Genesis.33.11?lang=en&aliyot=0&p2=Genesis.32.1&ven2=english|The_Contemporary_Torah,_Jewish_Publication_Society,_2006&lang2=en&aliyot2=0

iii Altein, Y., https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/6410436/jewish/12-Facts-You-Should-Know-About-Pirkei-Avot-Ethics-of-the-Fathers.htm

iv Pirke Avot 4, translated by Dr. Joshua Kulp, https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.4.1?lang=en

v Quoted in Rabbi David Chai Abuchatzeira on Emunah and Bitachon (on Faith and Trust), Adapted from the Hebrew by Rabbi Avrohom Wagner, edited by Mrs. Malky Heimowitz, pp. 137-138, Mesorah Publications, Ltd., New York, 2025.

vi Enai, G., The AhavadShalom: Charity, Covenant and Shabbat, Nov. 12, 2024, https://inner.org/the-ahavat-shalom-charity-covenant-and-shabbat/

vii The name Sapir means sapphire.

viii In the USA, liberal Jews, who celebrate egalitarianism in religion, celebrate the bat mitzvah at age 13, which is the age when boys become responsible for the the mitzvot. Since liberal Judaism is not concerned about the particulars of Jewish law, the change of date for girls is irrelevant.

ix There are three specific commandments that, while men can also do them, women have priority: lighting the Sabbath candles; following the family purity laws; and separating the first portion of dough as an offering.

x For an explanation of the family purity laws, see https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/465166/jewish/Mikvah-Jewish-Family-Purity.htm

xi “Jew Stores” were common throughout the south and midwest for many years. Jewish-owned wholesalers worked with new immigrants, refugees from the pogroms and wars in Europe, setting them up in business in small communities where shops were needed. These stores are described in the memoir, The Jew Store, a family memoir, by Stella Suberman, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2001. I have known several people whose families owned “Jew stores.” Minorities themselves, often their shops were boycotted by many of the whites; some were targeted by the Ku Klux Klan. In some places they were the only shops that served Black and Native American customers as well as whites. They were known for their honesty and charity, often extending credit and not collecting from widows, elderly, and disabled. The infrastructure that thriving Jewish communities need, like synagogues and kosher butchers, were not available (commandments between man and God), but these merchants usually lived by the commandments regulating relations between people, including using honest weights, paying bills promptly, and so forth.

Instead, the boys found other ways to bother him. This week they were stealing his lunch. When Mason told the lunch teacher, the man had fingered the Palestinian flag pin on his shirt. “Toughen up. Boys will be boys.”

“Earth to Mason,” said Dad. “You lighting your menorah?”

Mason sighed, took one of the long Shabbat matches, lit his candles and said the blessings.

“What’s wrong?” Dad put his arm around Mason and led him to the sofa.

Mason recounted the week’s events. “What can I do? There are four of them, and they’re big sixth graders.”

“You have to fight smarter,” said Dad. “Did you hear about the beeper attack that Israel used against Hezbollah during the Hamas war?”

“Beeper?”

“Yes, like doctors wear. It’s much smaller than a smartphone. Someone calls it and it beeps. Its little screen shows the name or number of the caller. The owner of the beeper knows who needs them, and calls back.

“Hezbollah is a terror group in Lebanon. During the recent Hamas war in Israel, it sent countless rockets into northern Israel. Thousands of Israelis—Jews and Arabs alike—became refugees in their own country to escape the attacks.

“Israel named its army Israel Defense Force because it is a defensive army: it does not attack first. Its only purpose is to defend Israel. Most of the soldiers are reservists. That means they are former soldiers, up to around 45 years old, who serve in active duty when needed. The IDF is smaller and, if you count only full-time manpower, weaker than Hezbollah.

“The IDF wins by fighting smarter. It planned the beeper attack carefully. Somehow it sold beepers to Hezbollah —beepers that worked just fine. But they were programmed to explode when the right message was sent. One day, at the exact same time, all the beepers exploded. Between 12 and 45 people were killed and about 3,000 were injured, many seriously. Hezbollah was greatly weakened by this. Maybe more importantly, it scared other Arab soldiers and leaders.”

Mason scrunched up his face in thought, then shook his head..“I like that, it’s really smart. But what does it have to do with the Macabees?”

“The Macabees had only a small number of fighters with poor weapons when compared to the Syrian-Greek army. The enemy had a large army and plenty of weapons. They even had a bunch of elephants that they used in battle. But the Macabees had two secret weapons. Can you guess what they were?”

“Hmmm.” Mason looked toward the ceiling as though the answer was written there. Then he said, “God was on their side, like in the Chanukah song Maoz Tzur.”

“Right,” said Dad. “The second is that they fought smart. They looked at what they could do, not what they couldn’t. They used the advantages of being small.

“The Macabees had an important secret weapon. They knew that they had to win. They were fighting for the right to practice Judaism and to return the Temple in Jerusalem to their hands. They knew they were fighting for God, and that He would help them. They were united and determined. But they also fought smart.

“First, they were local. They knew the land well. The army they were fighting didn’t. This gave them several advantages. I remember when I visited Israel, how close together the hills are. Some of the hills are very, very steep. Elephants can’t be used in these places.

“Because they fought in small groups, they didn’t need much food or supplies. A large army needs a lot of food and weapons. Because the Macabees knew the land, they were able to ambush both the fighters and the supply convoys. They knew where they could hide before the attack and then disappear after it. They could do sneak attacks at night, too. All these things made their victory over the larger, powerful Syrian-Greek army possible.”

“Latkes are served,” called Mom from the kitchen, ending the conversation. Dad and Mason joined the family at the table. Mom brought over a big platter of hot, crispy latkes and sat down.

Dad said the blessing over food and everyone began to eat. Dad swallowed and put his fork down. “Ummm, did you forget something?”

Mom swallowed, then slapped her cheek lightly.. “Oh no! I forgot to add salt and pepper! Mason, could you get them?”

Mason pushed away from the table and went to the counter. “Mom, the pepper shaker is empty,” he called.

“Just bring the can of black pepper from the spice shelf instead.”

Mason looked at the spice shelf. A jar of brown powder next to the large can of black pepper caught his eye. “Cayenne,” said the label. “Is cayenne a kind of pepper?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Mom. “It’s very hot. Why do you ask?”

Mason looked at Dad and then at Mom. “Those boys found a new way to bother me at school,” he said. “They stole my lunch every day this week. I was thinking about the Macabees fighting smarter.”

He brought both peppers over to the table and sat down.

“I want to make chocolate chip cookies,” he began slowly.

“Cookies! Cookies!” shouted little Naomi.

“We made cookie dough after school,” said Aviva. “The dough has to be cold before we can cut out the cookies. Can we finish them tonight?”

“Sure, as soon as we clean the kitchen from dinner.” Mom stood up and started clearing the table. “They won’t be chocolate chip, but we can decorate them so they’re really pretty.” She scrunched her forehead. “But why did you suddenly decide you wanted to make cookies?”

“I want to put the hot pepper in the stars of David.”

The finished cookies were great, Mason thought. All eight blue Star of David cookies were spiked with hot cayenne pepper. Mason had tasted a crumb. It made his mouth burn. He grinned what he hoped was an evil grin. “This should stop them!”

The next day, every class seemed twice as long as normal. Mason squirmed, doodled, and pushed his pencil around all morning. Finally the lunch bell rang. Mason hurried to the lunchroom and set his lunch bag down on the table. He turned to talk to another kid—slowly, to give the bullies time to act. When he turned back, his lunch was gone. The ringleader, Liam carried the bag, and the others swaggered towards the other end of the lunchroom. Liam turned back, looked at Mason, and wiggled his fingers in a sort of “hi there” motion.

Mason reached into his jacket pocket and took out a sandwich. Out of the other pocket he took a packet of the regular Chanukah cookies. Then he waited.

In just a few minutes, Liam and Amir jumped to their feet. “Ah, ah, ah,” they screamed, waving at their mouths.

Then Patrick stood up “Mason! What did you do? You poisoned them!” Moh joined in. “Mason’s a poisoner! Mason’s a poisoner!” The lunchroom erupted with noise.

The lunch teacher ran to Liam and spoke with him and Amir. Mason saw him break a piece off one of the cookies and taste it. Then the teacher strode over to Mason. “Why did you give them cookies with hot pepper in them?”

“Me?” Mason struggled to look surprised. “I didn’t give them the cookies. They stole them. Serves them right for stealing, if you ask me.”

The next day was Friday. It passed without any problems for Mason. All Shabbat and Sunday he worried about what the bullies would do next. He tried to think of other ways to stop them. But Monday he learned that Liam, Patrick and the other two boys had been suspended. Mr. Prather, the principal, called Mason into the office. “I cannot condone your prank. Someone could have had a real problem with that hot pepper. But since then we have had complaints from several other families about those boys. I have one question: where did you get the idea?”

“It was the Macabees,” Mason smiled. “They are the heroes of the Chanukah story. They won an important war against a much bigger, better trained army with lots more weapons and even some elephants. They won by fighting smarter. And of course, having God on their side didn’t hurt.”

For Parents, Teachers, and Others

Here are some interesting background articles.

Chanukah

https://www.chabad.org/holidays/chanukah/article_cdo/aid/102911/jewish/What-Is-Hanukkah.htm

https://warhistory.org/@msw/article/revolt-of-the-maccabees-168-143-b-c-e

Pagers

https://lieber.westpoint.edu/well-it-depends-explosive-pagers-attack-revisited/

https://www.timesofisrael.com/several-killed-thousands-hurt-as-wave-of-pager-explosions-strikes-hezbollah/

Other Chanukah Stories and Articles on TanteHannaWrites.com

Note: All stories are free and may be copied and reprinted, as long as attribution is given (© Hanna Geshelin, www.TanteHannaWrites.com). I have focused my efforts on Chanukah stories for older kids because there are many printed books about Chanukah written for younger ones.

https://www.tantehannawrites.com/p/hanukkah-then-and-now - for adults

https://www.tantehannawrites.com/p/a-maccabee-in-iowa - for kids 9-14

https://www.tantehannawrites.com/p/mercys-hanukkah-visit - for kids 9-12

https://www.tantehannawrites.com/p/menorah-lights - for kids 8-12

The Problem

It seems like every week that Israelis hear of another suicide related to October 7. In October it was a young man who survived the massacre at the Nova music festival after seeing untold horrors and losing friends and quite possibly loved ones. Last week it was a close friend of my friend’s daughter. The woman, around 30 years old, had known my friend’s daughter since they were 18; they did their national service together and stayed close. A children’s social worker living in the south of Israel, she had been treating internal refugees (those whose homes were under nearly constant missile and mortar attack who fled to safer places in Israel), survivors of October 7, and those orphaned by the war. For the last six months she had been sinking farther and farther into despair, and this past week she ended her life.

The hostages will need mental health assistance to recover from their trauma; we’re all aware of that. But it has been too easy to forget others. One important group is the men and women who went into the destroyed communities looking for bodies so that the dead could be identified. Many of them were volunteers from the ZAKA organizationⁱ ; rabbis serving in the Israeli army and many others were sent or volunteered. Those who were tasked with identifying the dead and those preparing them for burial were also traumatized.ⁱⁱ I will not publish here any of the places that they found remains; many are unspeakable.ⁱⁱⁱ

Others on whose hearts the atrocities are imprinted are journalists and photographers who went into the affected area to document what occurred. The families of the hostages, both alive and dead; parents, spouses, children, and friends of the 1200 murdered on October 7 and of the more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers who have died, and the thousands of injured and their families have also suffered. Many of the injured are dealing with life-changing injuries including paralyzation, amputations, and brain injuries; blindness and deafness; and disfigurement and organ damage affecting their future lives.

Besides victims themselves, therapists are spending hour after hour listening to adults and children recount the unbelievable evil of which they were victims or observers. The therapists, who are not immune to the stories they hear, are tasked with helping the victims find their ways back to some semblance of normality. But there are not enough therapists for the victims, much less the therapists who cannot get the inhumanity and suffering out of their minds.

What We Can Do

We have heard from many former hostages that they could feel the power of the many prayers and psalms said for them. Even in the black tunnels the awareness of these prayers gave them the strength to hold on. The prayers came not only from Israel, not only from Jews, but from caring people of all nationalities and religions around the world.

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Now we need to mobilize prayers on an ongoing basis for all of the forgotten sufferers.

Jewish Prayers

When we Jews pray for another living person, we use their name and the name of their mother. The names are joined by ben (son) or bat (daughter). When the sufferer or mother does not have a Hebrew name, their common name is used. Examples of each: I prayed daily for Ziv ben Sylvia Monica^iv as well as for Segev ben Galit.

Using the names of the people is the strongest way to pray for them. However, we cannot know all the names of those suffering. We must still pray for their complete healing. “Complete” means, as our prayer says, healing the spirit and healing the body.

Much of Jewish prayer is formal. Our traditional prayer book goes back, in various forms, over 1,000 years. According to Jewish law, women, who traditionally had extensive familial and social responsibilities that cannot easily be compartmentalized by time, are exempt from time-bound commandments. This includes praying the three daily prayer services. At the same time, many women need little or no encouragement to speak to God informally, although often women who become religious after being raised in secular or nontraditional homes may not be aware of this. Today, with fewer women in the home full-time and many with schedules similar to men’s, formal daily prayer is encouraged.

The Jewish weekday prayers include a prayer for a complete healing of all of our sick and injured. After reciting this blessing, one can add the names of people suffering from physical, mental, or emotional ills. This is also the time to request restoring the broken bodies and spirits of members of the groups mentioned above.

According to Jewish law, personal petitions (specific requests) are not made on the Sabbath except in emergencies.

Jews do not have a tradition of speaking personal prayers aloud to others, unlike many Christians who often use their own words to bless people, meals, or events. Personal prayers in Judaism are generally silent.

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Psalms

If you are not familiar with the Book of Psalms, this is your opportunity. These are poems on different themes. Many of the psalms are attributed to King David; others were written by others. Some are songs of praise, others are petitions and cries for help from God, and others have a theme of thanks and gratitude. Several are historical, listing important moments in Jewish history. Some go from pain to joy in one poem. They go from four or five lines to 176 lines (Psalm 119). In Hebrew, several are acrostics: the lines are arranged alphabetically according to the first word.

Reciting psalms is a form of prayer. For women, who are not obligated to the three formal prayer services, psalms have traditionally been an important way to communicate with God. There are also many stories about men who filled the boring hours of tedious work by reciting psalms that they had memorized.

If your church does not have any customs regarding reading psalms, feel free to borrow one of the Jewish customs below, use the psalms in the graphic, or create your own. The important thing, from the position of this essay, is to say, before you begin, that you are asking for a complete healing of body and soul for those still hurting from the events of October 7 and its aftermath.

Here are the major Jewish customs regarding reciting psalms.

• Many Jews recite a preparatory prayer before reciting psalms, and some say both a preparatory and final blessing, but many do not.

• According to some, psalms should only be recited in Hebrew. But Judaism teaches that God hears everyone’s prayers, Jewish or not, and in any language. After all, He himself destroyed the Tower of Babel and separated people into different language groups.^v

• One way of dividing the 150 individual psalms is into days of the week. For example, Psalms 120-150 are classified as for the Sabbath day.

• A second way of dividing the psalms is into 30 groups of roughly equal length for the days of the month. No Hebrew month has fewer than 29 days and none more than 30. On months of 29 days, the psalms for days 29 and 30 are recited together.^vi

• Some say the psalm one number after their age. For example, a 35 year old would say Psalm 36 every day until his or her next birthday.^vii Using this formula, many mothers say the psalms for each of their children, their husbands, and themselves. For many months I was part of a group who said psalms daily for all the hostages. I was assigned the names of the two hostages who were 25 years old and the one who was 26, so I recited Psalms 26 and 27 daily. Since I knew the names of these three young men, I mentioned each of them before reading their psalm.

I have written a prayer that can be said before reciting one or more psalms or a personal prayer in your own words. Here are two printable versions, one for people outside of Israel and one for those inside the country.

The minor differences are that the version for “outside” mentions Israel as a distant place, whereas that for “inside” uses more immediate language.

Prayer For Use In Israel

168KB ∙ PDF file

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This prayer is to be used alone or to direct personal prayer or psalms toward Israelis still suffering physically, mentally or emotionally from the attacks of October 7, 2023, and the ensuing war.

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Prayer For Use Outside Israel

123KB ∙ PDF file

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This prayer is to be used alone or to direct personal prayer or psalms toward Israelis still suffering physically, mentally or emotionally from the attacks of October 7, 2023 and the ensuing war.

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While there are still soldiers protecting our land in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, the worst of the war is over for most of us. But for the thousands traumatized, physically injured, and bereaved, the war continues. These people—men, women and children, Jews, Muslims, Christians, citizens of Israel and foreign workers—need our prayers as badly as did the hostages.

I encourage all my readers to share this post as widely as possible to friends, members of prayer circles to which you belong, teachers and administrators of religious schools, and anyone else you know who might care. Your prayers are all welcome.

i The ZAKA group, a largely volunteer organization, collects remnants of bodies after terror attacks because according to Jewish law all the parts of a body are holy and are to be buried in consecrated ground. Read about them here: https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/779329/jewish/ZAKA-Volunteers-A-Mission-of-Selfless-Kindness.htm

ii An article written in late October 2023: https://www.chabad.org/news/article_cdo/aid/6150640/jewish/The-Painful-Painstaking-Work-of-Israels-Burial-Societies.htm

iii If you are not aware of the events that precipitated the Israel-Hamas war,, I suggest that you search in YouTube for live videos of the October 7, 2023 attacks. These are go-pro videos taken by the terrorists. Be sure no children are in the room if you watch. If you are more sensitive, look for reportage rather than the live videos.

iv If praying for the soul of someone who has passed we use the father’s name, as Chaim ben Yoel or Yehudit bat David. I also prayed daily for Ziv’s twin brother, Gali ben Sylvia Monica.

v https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1013006/jewish/The-Tower-of-Babel-What-Was-Up-With-lt.htm

vi The majority of Jews reciting psalms on a regular basis are observant Jews for whom the Hebrew months are still relevant, although we use the secular calendar for secular things like work.

vii I looked into and began the practice of saying psalms when I was 44 years old because a rabbi I had consulted on a personal matter told me to say either all of Psalm 45 or at least one “letter” from Psalm 119, which has eight verses for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, daily except on the Sabbath, when I should recite the 15 Songs of Ascent—Psalms 120-134.

I recently commented on a post by an antisemite who showed tremendous ignorance. GW apparently read the post and my comment, then responded with a question that I think many others might also have. Here is my answer.

GW Asks:

“Would you mind clarifying for me what it means to convert to Judaism? Is that the religious part or is there more to it? In case it matters, I am married to a non-religious Jewish man. My kids are not considered Jewish since I am not Jewish. I have always wondered about the distinction between peopledom vs religion vs ethnicity. For example, his family can trace roots to Poland, Germany and other places but will answer “I’m Jewish” to the question of “what are you?” Thanks in advance. Feel free to decline.”

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Disclaimer

Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox1 conversions are available. I cannot speak in any detail about Reform and Conservative conversions. But as administrative assistant I was tasked with turning an amorphous group of rabbis into the nonprofit Rabbinic Association of Greater Dallas and I managed the group for two years. Based on what I saw and heard there, it appears to me that Reform and Conservative Judaism are basically religions: they focus largely on prayer, prayer services, and holidays, plus their own interpretations of “tikkun olam,” or repairing the world.

Reform is actually based to a large degree in style and general outline to the Lutheran church (not at all to belief!), which was one of the two primary churches in Germany, where Reform began in the 1800s. Reform and Conservative Judaism, and other liberal strains, do not put much if any value on halacha, the Jewish law on which the Jewish lifestyle is based.

They have many customs which are not generally accepted in Orthodox Judaism, although there may be a few references to some people, in some circumstances having done these things. Some liberal rabbis do not put any value on God, believing that God created the world, set life in motion, and stepped aside. And one of the Dallas rabbis told me that he did not believe in God. When I was a Jewish storyteller, I actually had two women ask me after a performance if God was important in Judaism, because on Rosh Hashana in neither the sermon nor in a class following the service did the rabbi mention God.

Conversion

I have been Orthodox for many years, having been raised in a very secular Jewish family. When I was 10 years old, a neighbor invited our family to her church. My mother replied that we were Jewish, and the woman said, “That’s alright, we have several of your people in our church.” I asked my mother how they could still be Jews if they were Christians. She said, “Once a Jew, always a Jew.” This began my interest in the concept of conversion to and from Judaism.

I have many friends who converted to Orthodox Judaism from Christianity and have known others who converted from Hinduism and Taoism. Two good friends volunteer with the conversion courts in their Israeli communities as teachers and friends to potential converts, bringing the personal into a process that includes formal classes taught by rabbis.

The Orthodox do not recognize the conversions of people converted by the Reform and Conservative movements. This means that their children are also not considered to be Jews. I know several people who have three conversions—Reform, and when they learned more Conservative, and a few years later Orthodox. Each conversion brought them to a new level of knowledge and observance.

Conversion is the process of joining the Jewish people. Anyone who is serious about joining the Jewish people can apply to become Jewish—to convert--in spite of the prevalence of antisemitism and the likelihood that sometime in their or their children’s lives they will be discriminated against on the basis of being Jewish. Traditional Judaism teaches that the formal conversion process changes the spiritual makeup of the person from non-Jew to Jew.2

The process begins when the person asks the rabbinic court to convert. They will be turned down several times. This is to ensure that the convert is serious. Once the rabbinic court accepts someone as a potential convert, they undergo a period of extensive study.

Fluency in Hebrew is not required, but they need to become well informed about both the religious aspects of Judaism and those aspects of Jewish law that do not directly involve God. Jewish law covers family law, civil and commercial law, and criminal law. Converts are not expected to learn the laws, but they need to know that they exist, and they need to know those that affect everyday life. Converts to Orthodoxy generally know more about Judaism as a way of life, the Jewish lifecycle, God, etc. than the majority of people born Jewish who identify as liberal Jews. Orthodox converts are expected to live according to traditional Jewish law, the same as other Orthodox.

After completing the course of study they undergo an exam and then a ceremony using the mikvah.3 In cases where the person is married to a Jew, or when a couple converts together, they have to undergo a new Jewish marriage ceremony.

Jewish Laws

Jewish communities for generations were maintained through Jewish courts; in Europe the alternatives were Christian courts and in Muslim countries Sharia courts.

What kinds of laws are Jewish but not “religious” laws? Note that some have become western values, but they were codified and popularized through Judaism and, through Judaism, Christianity. Here’s a very, very small sample:

• What do you do if you find something lying around in a public place? Do you keep it? Do you look for the owner? Some other alternative?

• What’s your responsibility if your dog bites someone? The Talmud doesn’t go into detail about dogs, but it does about an ox that gores, and the rabbis extrapolated from the ox to the dog.

• What responsibility do you have to support poor people? What if you’re poor yourself?

• Can you get out of a bad marriage? When? How?

• You should wash your hands (the religious say a blessing too) after using the toilet and before eating bread. These resulted in fewer Jews dying from epidemics over the years, thus opening the community to charges that Jews poisoned wells to make others sick, or that they trafficked in witchery against others.

• All Jews are responsible for each other. We are descended from Jacob’s 12 sons, so we are all one family. Converts are the sons and daughters of Abraham and Sarah.

So, these are the laws that all Jews, including atheists of Jewish parentage, are (according to Jewish law) supposed to keep. This is part of the “Peoplehood” aspect.

European Colonialists?

We Jews were never considered part of any other people unless we converted to Christianity, and Hitler still considered t hem Jews. He eliminated thousands of converts to Christianity who were Jewish by parentage. Jews had special taxes levied against them almost everywhere. Ever heard the term “wandering Jews”? That’s because we were expelled from countries, especially in Europe, or our communities were destroyed by massacres, and we had to move on. Citizens are protected by their country; security is historically one of the major functions of government. The governments where we lived were usually the ones to throw us out or to permit the massacres. We were definitely not citizens.

The strict guild laws and feudal systems in Europe in medieval and Renaissance times did not generally apply to Jews.4 The feudal system was related to security the guilds were economic; they were privileges of the English, German, Dutch, etc. My grandmother, who came to the USA from Ukraine in the late 1800s, remembered that she was considered a Jew there. The family was definitely not considered Ukrainian.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the Jews who left had identity cards identifying them as Jews, not Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Belorussian, etc.5 Outside of the USA, we Jews were not citizens of the countries we lived in until Napoleon extended citizenship to Jews in France in the late 1700s-early 1800s, and other European countries followed.

This was a problem in Israel. Many people whose identity cards called them Jews had Jewish fathers but non-Jewish mothers. They came to Israel expecting to be full Jews, only to find out that by Jewish and therefore Israeli law they were not Jewish. The reality was a shock and profound disappointment to thousands. There is now an expedited conversion process for Israelis from families like this, but when they began coming in 1991-2 there was not.

Ethnicity

Ethnicity seems to be related to nationality in Europe and tribalism in other parts of the world. An example: before the 20^th century, most Germans were either Lutheran or Catholic. Those were their religions, and they needed to be baptized to belong to those groups. Their ethnicity was German; they were born that way. In Africa there are language groups and tribes with their own cultures. I have a friend who is a Shoshone-Bannock Indian (with a little French). Her husband’s family is Mexican. Those are their ethnicities. Their religion is Christianity and their citizenship is American.

Conclusion

Jews are Jews because they are born to Jewish mothers, regardless if they ever pray or not, and regardless of where in the world they live (or lived). Jews in North Africa, Beluchistan (now northern Afghanistan), and Brooklyn wash their hands before eating and after the bathroom, the religious ones say the blessings to do so, and the rest assume that these are simply international laws of sanitation (wrong!).

Jews have come to Israel from over 100 countries. Some are blond and blue-eyed (probably gifts from the rapes that occurred with the Oct. 7-type massacres perpetrated over the generations by Cossacks and many, many other groups). Some (mostly but not only the Ethiopians) clearly hail from Africa. The majority of Israelis do not look European; I was asked as a child, many, many times, whether I was white, and if not, what was I? So we have people with all kinds of appearances, all kinds of geographic variation and cultures, one set of societal laws, and one religion to which many but not all adhere, and call it peoplehood.

I hope this rather lengthy essay answers your question. Feel free to contact me again for more information.

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Two stories about “apartheid Israel”

1. Last week I was at an inspirational program in memory of a beloved community member who had died about a year ago after a long battle with cancer. One speaker had been a frequent hospital visitor. One day when the woman was in great pain, the hijab-wearing Arab doctor handed the visitor a copy of the Book of Psalms from the bedside table and said, “Why don’t you read to her from this book? These holy words give her the most comfort.”

2. Last Friday as I was walking through a shopping center, a Druze man was walking in the opposite direction toward me, singing. I could hear music playing a little bit behind him A few yards after he passed me I came upon a man with a tefillin stand; that is, he was helping men put on tefillin—prayer boxes—and say some blessings, and handing out Sabbath candles to women. On the boom box was a Jewish religious song—the very that the Druze man was singing.

Even wild animals know whose land this is…

In my neighborhood, in the weeks before Rosh Hashana several children and adults spent a lot of time practicing blowing the shofar, the ram’s horn that is an important part of the Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur services; you can hear it on this YouTube video.

Now, I live in a small city on the top of a mountain, and we have lots of wild animals. A few years ago I saw a snake about half-meter long (20 inches) on a path in my neighborhood, although the feral cats keep the snake population down. Geckos are common, inside and out. Hedgehogs are also not uncommon here.

We have larger animals as well. We have many hyrax or rock rabbits—nasty rodents that look something like groundhogs. Occasionally wild boars that live mostly in the valleys wander through as well; a couple of years ago a friend and I encountered one when we were on a dawn walk through town. And all around, including right in town, live many jackals. These are nocturnal dog-like creatures brought right into neighborhoods by the combination of lots of overgrown woodsy patches and food put out for the feral cats.

Before Rosh Hashana, children in my neighborhood were practicing to blow the shofar. Lately I’ve heard jackals mimicking the three sound of the shofar:1 tekiah (a straight sound), shevarim (three medium sounds), and teruah (traditionally nine quick blasts in short succession, but the jackal I heard wasn’t counting). The sounds weren’t exactly in the order that they are sounded during the religious service, but the pattern wasn’t like the regular jackal songs. What was interesting to me was that while the first time I heard them right outside my window, the second time they were soft, as though coming from across the valley.

So, our jackals turn out to be Jewish too, as well as Israeli?

A few miracle stories of the war

Women tankists

A friend’s son was studying at a yeshiva (a religious college) near Gaza and on October 7, the day the war began. He, with the other students, was in the synagogue for the Sabbath-Simchat Torah service. An Israeli tank appeared just as a group of about 20 Muslim terrorists approached the school. The tank’s crew consisted of women soldiers with no combat experience. The women killed all the terrorists, saved the yeshiva and its students, and then drove further north, where they saved a kibbutz.

What were women doing in a tank at that location? They were combat soldiers stationed at the Egypt-Israel border in the Sinai. Women in combat units are generally in support positions, such as my former student who was a driver. As a concession to feminists, the women in question were learning “tanking” skills, but no one ever expected them to actually see combat. The tanks were an old, out-of-date model kept around just for training the women.

But this was an unprecedented emergency, so these women were instructed to go north to see if they could be helpful. They drove north along the fence between Gaza and Israel.

One of the first places they came to was my friend’s son’s yeshiva. If they had arrived at the yeshiva five minutes later, they would have come upon a massacre, but the terrorists were still a few moments away. The commander told them to drive right over the terrorists, so they did, eliminating those they did not shoot.

One of the tanks was outfitted with a kind of weapon that the women had never seen. It took them just a few minutes to figure it out, with all its quirks, and a few moments after that to become expert in its use.

There were at least two tanks “manned” by women. They killed between 50 and 100 terrorists and saved hundreds of Israelis.

This is the first recorded incident in the world of women actually using tanks in combat. These girls, average age 20, fought for 17 hours straight. One of the women said, “We just did what we had been taught to do. It was mostly muscle memory.” For a great interview with the women, search youtube for “Israeli women tanks”. There are several in addition to this one.

Supernatural occurrences

Interrogators reported that several Hamas terrorists who were captured said that they had instructions to burn down a yeshiva (not the one in the story above). When they got there, it was in flames. They assumed another group had gotten there first, so they moved on. In fact, the yeshiva was completely untouched. There had been no fire, at least not on the temporal plane.

At another location, terrorists surrounded a synagogue with instructions to kill everyone inside, but the building was absolutely silent. They decided they were late, and everyone must have left. In fact, they came during the Silent Prayer. During the time they were outside, apparently none of the congregants even sneezed.

Other terrorists reported they saw a huge person dressed in white on the roof of a building; it looked supernatural and scared them, so they ran away.

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Free publicity for an Israel-hater

Ana Kasparian, one of the loudest antisemitic mouths on the left, gave an internet rant on how terrible the Jewish people and Israelis are. She tried hard to intimidate and embarrass us by calling us terrible names. Something she needs to know about Jews: When you are called Christ Killer and Kike by the age of 6, as happens to Jewish kids living outside of Israel, or when by the age of six you’ve run for shelter or been to funerals for an uncle killed in the army or a grandma blown up on a bus, as happens to Israeli kids, a rant by a loudmouth on the internet is meaningless.

It strikes me as curious that a woman with an Armenian name is affiliated with a podcast called the Young Turks, seeing as at least 44% of Armenian Christians were massacred or starved by the Muslim Turks between 1915-1916.2 There is a perverse psychological twist with her identifying with the murderers of her ancestors. Some kind of Stockholm syndrome at work here?

A few things struck me about her rant:

• She sounded very jealous. She kept repeating that we think we are the chosen people of God and therefore think we are better than everyone else. Rubbish. Judaism is very clear that there are good and bad people in all groups. This is, however, what non-Jews and religiously ignorant Jews believe “chosenness” means.

• Kasparian apparently never thought to ask what Jews think being the “chosen people” means. What we believe is that we “have been given the opportunity to sense G-d’s closeness, hear His truth (directly from him), and relay his message to the world.”3 To relay that message we have been given 613 mitzvot that when we do them (positive mitzvot) or don’t do them (negative mitzvot) help bring God’s presence more clearly into the world. This will benefit all people.

• Remember the Tower of Babel? Here’s Genesis 11:6-7: 4 (6) And the Lord said, “Lo! [they are] one people, and they all have one language, and this is what they have commenced to do. Now, will it not be withheld from them, all that they have planned to do? (7) Come, let us descend and confuse their language, so that one will not understand the language of his companion.” Clearly, God does not want monolithic thought because it leads to human arrogance, which we see today in the universal availability of social media. Jews do not believe God wants everyone to be Jewish; as long as they follow the Seven Laws of Noah,5 which means they create civil societies, He is happy.

• Kasparian believes that chosenness is only open to Jews. While this may be true, anyone who sincerely wants to become Jewish can. Conversion, while not easy, is open to everyone. I recently read about a former 6 who converted to Judaism and is living a Torah-true life in Israel today.

• She also does not apparently know that the Jewish God is not ethnocentric: unlike Islam or Christianity, we do not believe that only those following our faith are beloved by God. Judaism teaches that the God who created humans loves all His children. All will be welcomed by God in the next world if they follow the Seven Laws of Noah.

When a loudmouth proves herself unable to think…

Kasparian is positive the Jews are the most blood-thirsty people on the planet. She conveniently has ignored all the evidence, such as that it is not Jews who perform “honor killings”7 ^, 8on teenage girls whose skirts are too short or who come home too late in the evening; throw gays off rooftops; and massacre Christians in Nigeria and other places. Ignoring the evidence that perhaps our accusers are projecting their behavior onto us is a very particular type of stupidity.

Wishing you all a happy, healthy, peaceful year!

In cold, foggy, or rainy weather my coworker and I often ate lunch at a little cafe run by some Chinese men. It was the kind of place where strangers shared tables, and where you could bring a sack lunch if you purchased something additional at the cafeteria counter.

A few weeks after my coworker quit, the cafeteria line server asked me where my “little friend” was; he was concerned that they had somehow offended her. When I explained that she had quit and no longer worked in the area he said, “We get used to seeing people, and then they leave and we never know what happened.”

With this in mind, on my last day of work before I was leaving for Israel I said to him, “I want to thank you and your coworkers for this cafeteria, and to let you know how much I have enjoyed eating here. The food is great and the atmosphere is terrific. But today is my last day, and I wanted you to know I’ll miss you all.”

A few minutes later, an older man came from the kitchen to my table. Clasping his hands under his apron, he bowed in an old-fashioned way and said, “Little missy be very, very careful. Many bad mans in world, want come to America. Bad mans trick little ladies, get visas. Little missy be very, very careful.”

I thanked him, but in my mind I thought, “I’m a college graduate, a smart person. This won’t happen to me.”

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But things change. My mother decided to sell her house and move to a place I’d never been, my father got deeply involved with a gold-digger—I met her before I left; she appeared to be an alcoholic who was dragging Dad down that path—and my newly married brother (who had been a great correspondent when he had gone to Europe a few summers earlier) wrote me exactly zero letters. I felt abandoned by my family. I was alone in a strange country where I knew no one.

The inevitable happened to this young, lonely American woman: I fell prey to a charmer who wanted an easy green card. The abuse started immediately after the marriage, and five weeks in he threatened my life. As I lay on the bed following the attack, that Chinese restaurant owner popped into my head. “This is what he meant,” I realized. As soon as my husband was asleep, I took a few things and left, walking across Tel Aviv after midnight to my former landlady’s, where I knew I’d find shelter.

Had I stayed with that man, I am certain he would have killed me—perhaps not deliberately, but those fingers were only a centimeter or two away from doing the job that night. (For years I could not even put a scarf around my neck because even soft silk brought back the pressure of his fingers.) Women stay with abusive men for many reasons,1 and the statistics of abused wives staying with their abusers are frightening.2 Without my mind filled with that heavily accented voice and the sincere bows of respect that the Chinese cook had given me, I doubt I would have left so early in the marriage, and I am not at all sure I would have survived to leave on my own two feet.

Gratitude

Since then, gratitude has become important to me. When I became religiously observant, I discovered that a large part of the morning prayers—the ones that set us up for the day—express gratitude for all of God’s blessings, from the ability of our bodies to process air and food3 to the beauty of nature and the support of friends. But there are also many other moments.

Years ago, on my way to synagogue in Cambridge, MA after I returned from Israel, I passed a lovely garden. One day a woman was pulling weeds there, and I thanked her for the garden. From then on, almost very week we chatted about gardens and other inconsequential things as she worked in the lovely perimeter of her yard. Later I learned that my friend was Julia Child, the food goddess and TV star. I think she had enjoyed those moments with someone who saw her as a neighbor, not as a famous personality.

My now-ex-husband, whose home office fronted on the street, would listen for the rubbish truck just before Christmas and July 4^th. When he heard it, he would run out and bring the driver a bottle of bourbon as a thank-you. After Ira moved out, I sometimes forgot to put the barrel out by the street. When I heard the truck I’d run out, but a few times I was a little late, and the driver had already moved to the house ahead of ours. But when I ran out, he ignored the rules and backed the truck up so he could collect my trash.

At a little kosher pizza place, the employees cleaned tables but expected customers to pick up their orders at the counter. Ira and I learned the names of the people behind the counter and always called them by name. We also always left a tip on the table. After awhile, they told us to sit down after ordering, and they would bring our orders to us. My friend, who had a shop in the same group of stores and had been their customer for years, was surprised that I got table service until she saw the tip. Gratitude on my part was returned by gratitude from those usually-invisible workers.

My present apartment is on a small path at the edge of a little plaza. Most people who use the main path that cuts through the plaza do not notice this path, and it used to be ignored by the city crew that keeps paths clean. Once I began thanking them for their work and for keeping the plaza tidy, it suddenly began being much cleaner, and the little path by my door began to be cleaned too. On the other hand, I have an acquaintance who told me that she hates how dirty the area in front of her home is, and how no matter how often she reprimands the city workers, it doesn’t improve. The answer, I would tell her if she asked, would be gratitude.

Gratitude can be expressed even in situations like hers, without lying. I would not say of a dirty place, “Thanks for your hard work.” But I would say, “I know you are working hard, but if you could manage to get that path over there cleaned too, I’d really be grateful.” And there’d be a 98% chance that when I went out next, they would have cleaned it.

The habit of gratitude

Creating a habit of gratitude was not difficult for me. One thing that helped me when I was in a very difficult situation was that my therapist suggested that every night I write down five things I was grateful for. He said, “Even if the day was dreadful, you can thank God for breathing, for having had supper (even if it wasn’t enough or wasn’t tasty), and so forth.”

After a few nights of writing “Thanks for keeping me alive, thanks for giving me food, thanks for giving me water, thanks for giving me clothes to wear, thanks for having a job to earn a living with,” I began looking for good things during the day so I’d have something new to write. And soon, even though the difficult situation didn’t resolve, I was noticing good things more often than bad.

Our world is full of bad things: evil people, good people doing and saying stupid and hurtful things, storms and more. But it is also full of good things: the Muslim Arab woman who helped lift my heavy grocery cart off the bus, the man who got the can I needed off the (to me unreachable) top shelf, the bright sun, the flashes of the iridescent, tiny Israeli Sun Birds as they flit through the trees.

By noticing the good things and thanking God for them, we show our appreciation. And by noticing and verbally appreciating things that other people do—even things they are paid to do--we are imitating God. Our generous words brighten people’s day, so they are more likely to be filled with good, positive feelings. In so doing, we are helping to bring peace to our homes and neighborhoods, and by extension to the world.

Wishing you a happy, healthy New Year.

When I read the weekly Dvar Torah from www.ravkooktorah.org1, I realized how timely the essay is. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Somehow, no matter when or where, the ancient weekly Torah portion is relevant to current events. In this essay, Rav Kook speaks of learning alone. This can be extrapolated to mean learning in a place where only one opinion is permitted.

Charlie Kirk’s tragic death exemplifies the truth of Rav Kook’s words. Since the 60’s, universities have been increasingly “progressive” to the extent that now students and faculty can be disciplined, fired, or failed for disagreeing with the official dogma.2

Rav Kook did not write specifically on the Torah portions, but his thought and writings were firmly based on the Torah. Here is Rabbi Morrison’s elucidation of some of Rav Kook’s writings that pertain to the Torah portion of Ki Tavo. This is a word-for-word copy of Rabbi Morrison’s essay. I have footnoted vocabulary and ideas that may be unfamiliar to my readers.

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Ki Tavo: Don’t Study Alone!

Moses commanded the people, “Pay attention (כתסה) and listen!” (Deut. 27:9).

The word has-keit - pay attention” - is unusual. The Talmud reads it homiletically:

“Form groups (asu kittot) and study Torah; for Torah knowledge is only acquired through group study.” (Berachot 63b).3

Intolerance, Ignorance, and Iniquity

Rabbi Yossi went further still. He warned that scholars who study in isolation are liable to acquire three destructive traits: intolerance, ignorance, and sin.

What is so terrible about studying by oneself?

The answer lies both in practical experience and in the very essence of Torah study.

On a practical level, there are three benefits when we study with others.

First, encountering opinions different from our own cultivates greater openness and tolerance. Those who study by themselves are not exposed to other perspectives and grow to be intolerant of dissent. This rigidity fuels disputes, hardens divisions, and breeds hostility.

Second, scholars who study alone or in small groups risk failing to properly understand matters of faith and fundamental Torah views. In these essential areas, they will remain ignorant and uninformed.

Third, solitary study can produce errors in Halachic4 judgment. Scholars who bear responsibility for others can cause harm when their legal decisions are misguided. Sometimes, their very isolation may lead them to needless stringency. These excessive burdens, like the case of the Nazarite,5 are counted as a form of sin.

Torah of Life

On a deeper level, isolation runs against the grain of Torah itself. The Torah is not a path of retreat from the world, but a Torat chaim, a Torah of life. It sanctifies the joys that enrich life and strengthen human connection. Its laws and mitzvot6 are designed for the home, the marketplace, and the community.

To withdraw into solitude, imagining that this leads to closeness with God, is foreign to the Torah’s vision. Such a path runs so contrary to Judaism, that even the pursuit of Torah wisdom is not meant to be a solitary quest, but a journey we take together.

(Adapted from Ein Eyah vol. II, pp. 389-390, by Rav Kook.)

A Dvar Torah is a lesson about the Torah. Each week a portion of the Torah is read in synagogues across the globe, usually the same one everywhere. This week’s portion is Ki Tavo, Deuteronomy 26:1-29:8. It is near the end of Moses’s address to the Jewish People just before he died. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), from whose writings this dvar was adapted, was the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of the land of Israel in modern times.

It was market day, and buyers and sellers were already at the market. He traded his car for a donkey and followed directions to a path that, he was told, would take him to the border with the next country. He could cross over on a little-known path. No one would know.

He knew that if anyone found him, they might kill him. Two friends had been killed and another had disappeared because they were Christian journalists. Radical Muslims were killing Christians and they didn’t want people to know. Getting rid of journalists was one of their ways of keeping their activities secret.

Momo was scared, but he knew if he got to the big city, journalists there would help him. He used the last of his money to buy food for himself and the donkey, and he set off.

Two days later he was safer, but he couldn’t stay where he was. He went to the U.S. embassy and told his story to an officer there. He had lots of information to prove that his life was in danger, so he was permitted to go to the USA legally.

In the USA, Momo got a job as a janitor in an elementary school. At the beginning of the next semester, Momo enrolled in a community college program. He wanted to learn enough English to go to college and get an American college degree so that he could get a good job.

When the semester started, Momo was in the class I taught. Students in the class were mostly a lot younger than him. None of them came from Africa. He didn’t know Americans, and he was lonely. I was one of the first white American adults that he talked to. Sometimes he stayed after class to ask me questions. Sometimes he stayed just to chat.

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Momo’s Ideas About the USA

One day Momo said, “America isn’t like I thought it would be. It is true, everyone has lots of things. Big, fancy houses. Cars that are so new that they still work right, without needing to be fixed every few weeks. Fancy cell phones. More things than I could ever imagine. But Americans are poorer than the poorest people in Africa.”

I asked what he meant. He said, “People from my church have invited me to their homes for dinner. Each time we sit in a beautiful room that is just for eating. There is a big table and chairs that match, and everything looks like pictures in fancy magazines. There is plenty of good food. Everyone has nice clothes.

“But the people are not happy. People talk about problems and about everything that is wrong in their lives.
I grew up in a grass hut in a tiny village. The hut was one big room with a dirt floor. We didn’t have a lot of choices. We ate the same thing day after day because our food depended on the growing season. But we were always glad to see each other. We laughed and joked and talked about happy things. Sure, bad things happened. Bad things happen to everyone. But we thought about and talked about the good things. We helped each other, not just family but in the village.” He paused, a long pause. Then he said, “We were richer than Americans.”

What Matters to You

What matters to you? Do you need the same kind of jeans as other kids you know? Do you talk with your friends about the latest, greatest video games, seeing the newest movies, and taking the nicest vacations? Do you gossip about kids who can’t or don’t do those things? It’s easier to follow the crowd. Sometimes, though, what everyone else is saying, buying, or doing is leads you on a path that, deep in your heart, you really don’t want to take.

Instagram and other social media programs are full of pictures of beautiful places and things. It’s easy to think everyone else’s life is beautiful. No one publishes pictures of the chair that their cat scratched to bits, or their dad’s 18-

year old Hyundai. The truth is, though, lots of folks—maybe most—live with old and worn-out stuff. It’s easy to get confused and to think that the beautiful Insta photos are reality. They aren’t reality for most people.

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Getting What You Want

There are two honest ways to get things: one can pay with money one has right then, or one can borrow money to pay. (Stealing is a third way to get things you want. It is dishonest and hurts other people.)

People who borrow money so that they can have nice things look rich. But buying new things only makes someone feel good for a very short time. Soon they’ll see other beautiful, trendy or fun things on Instagram or other social media, and they‘ll want them.

One big problem with this is that they actually do not own the things they have. Whether they use credit cards or other kinds of borrowing, the credit card company or bank owns the things. If they can’t pay, they will lose their things. Proverbs 22:7 describes it this way: “A rich man will rule over the poor, and a borrower is a slave to a lender.ⁱ”

Here are examples of what that means.

• If you can’t pay your car payment, the car will be repo’d, or repossessed. That means whoever lent you the money for the car takes it back. They sell it for a low price, and then you have to pay the difference between what you owed and the price they got when they sold it again.

• When you can’t pay for your house, the bank forecloses on it. Like a repo, the bank or whoever lent you the money takes it back and sells it to someone else.

Sometimes people decide that the tension of having to pay all their credit bills is terrible. They get so tired of owing money—of being slaves to the lenders—that they decide to pay off all their debt. To do this, they usually “tighten their belts.” That is, they go on a spending diet. They stop buying things they don’t absolutely need. They use the money they save to pay off their current debts. Things they stop buying often include:

• kids’ athletic and dance classes

• music lessons

• new clothes

• steak, fancy coffee, and ice cream

• take-out food

They might stop going to:

• professional sports events

• movies and theater programs

• vacations

• restaurants

And they might start working a second or even a third job to make more money.

How To Stop Spending

When a family decides to pay off their debt, one of the first things they need to do is stop spending so much. This means deciding what is a need and what is a want.

When you stop thinking about having the newest and best, you learn to be content with what you have. You start to realize that new stuff isn’t very important. What other people think isn’t important, either.

In general, Americans who do not owe money live simpler lives than people who live with debt. Even when emergencies happen, people who do not use debt are okay because they have put aside money, sometimes just a little bit every month until they have a sizeable emergency fund. Then when things suddenly go wrong—which they will do—they have money to pay for them.

Because they don’t have bills, they never have bill collectors calling them asking for money. They don’t lie awake at night and worry how they’re going to pay the electric bill because they have a big emergency fund.

If Stuff Isn’t Important, What Is?

“One who is slow to anger is better than a mighty man, and one who rules over his spirit [is better] than one who conquers a city,” according to Proverbs 16:32. Pirke Avot 4:16 speaks of a good name: “Rabbi Shimon would say: There are three crowns—the crown of Torah, the crown of priesthood and the crown of sovereignty—but the crown of good name surmounts them all.” Not every Jewish person can be a priest—that is reserved for Cohanim. But everyone can learn Torah, which teaches behavior, and everyone can work to have a good name. Here are some ways:

• Develop a good character:

  • tell the truth

  • don’t gossip about others

  • help others

  • visit the sick or send them get-well cards or funny texts

• Be generous with time

• Be generous with money

• Be grateful for what you have—even simple things like enough food, a clean house, or comfortable shoes. Be grateful for what others do for you. And even if you get angry at God because of hurtful things in your life, you can still be grateful to Him for creating the world.

Thinking, doing, and learning to do these things will help you get along better with the people in your family as well as other people. It feels good to know you’ve helped someone else.

Of course, everyone makes mistakes, feeling envy, sadness, and anger sometimes. But unlike a new toy that you might love for a moment but which gets boring soon, striving to have a good character gives you lots of moments to remember with gratitude and joy.

So What’s Important About Momo’s Story?

Momo’s story shows a picture of life with almost no possessions, but filled with love and happiness. It reminds us what really matters, and that’s not the latest and greatest.

Pirke Avot also tells us that these things matterⁱⁱ:

Simon the Just… used to say, “Upon three things the world stands: on Torah, on Serving God, and on Deeds of Lovingkindness.” (Pirke Avot 1:2)

Hillel used to say, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” (Pirke Avot 1:14)

What Can A Kid Do​?

Children can’t pay off debt or convince their parents to change their lives. They can’t convince parents to stay married or make their cousin stop teasing them. What they can do is change their own behavior.

You can choose to treat your family the way Momo’s family treated each other: with love, gratitude and caring.

• Be patient with your brothers and sisters.

• If a sibling messes up your things, you probably get mad at him or her. Instead, find a better way to store your things so that the pest can’t get into them.

• Get in the habit of doing your chores without being asked.

• Get a little notebook and every night before bed write down three or five good things that happened that day. This is especially important to do after a bad day or if your family situation is difficult. It trains you to be a positive person and not think of yourself as a victim.

• If your friends encourage you to do things that you know aren’t right, find better friends.

Today is the best time to start: If not now, when?

For parents, teachers, and others

I’ve been debt-free and have not had a credit card since 2010, and it has given me a great sense of peace. Here’s some background information that you might find interesting.

Credit cards can be paid off monthly, but research shows that only 40-45% of Americans pay off their credit cards every month.ⁱⁱⁱ The rest pay interest on the balance. This interest averages 23%. Interest is money paid to the lender for the use of the money.

Paying off debt can take a long or short time, depending on how much debt, what their income is, and how deeply they cut into their expenses. A plan like the Ramsey Baby Steps helps people pay off debt.

The months and years people spend paying off debt can be difficult. Children can be bullied when they don’t have new clothes and can’t participate in after-school programs. Adults say things like, “Spend what you have, you only live once (YOLO).” By the time all the debt is paid, though, the family has learned to control their spending. They only buy what they have money for, they have savings, and they don’t worry about paying bills anymore.

They are no longer enslaved to the credit card company, student loan company, or bank. They are financially free.

i https://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/aid/16393/jewish/Chapter-22.htm

ii https://studylib.net/doc/9033258/ten-quotes-from-pirke-avot

iii https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2025/03/why-are-credit-card-rates-so-high/

1. What and Where is Palestine?

• Palestine always referred to a region, not a nation.

• The reference to Palestine with the most recent date in Historical Atlas, 9th Ed., by W. R. Shepherd, Barnes & Noble © 1964, is entitled “Development of Christianity to 1300”

• The name “Palestine” is not used on the maps of Shepherd’s, the atlas used even today by history scholars. The name only in a list of Roman provinces

• The Romans renamed Judea and Samaria “Palestine” after they finally defeated the Jews

  

There never was a Palestinian nation.

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2. Philistines

• The name is used in Genesis for a farming society 1700 BCE and in the Book of Samuel as a city-state society. They were not the same people.

• The Hebrew name of those people was “Plishtim.”

• Plishtim is the biblical term for foreigners who invaded the land.

• Emperor Hadrian changed the name of the land from “Judea” to “Palestina” to erase the Jewish identity of the land.

• Since then, this name stuck to this land. The land was also known as “The Jewish land.”

• For generations, Jews living in Europe were taunted, “Jew, go to Palestine.”

• In the early 20th century, Arabs called the land “Southern Syria” because the name “Palestine” was identified with the Jews.

• After Israeli statehood, Arabs invented the “Palestinian People.”

“Palestinians” have no historical right to the land.

3. Who Ruled Ancient Palestine?

• Jews have lived in this land continuously for almost 4,000 years.

• Around 3,000 years ago, Jews established a monarchy over a much larger area than modern Israel.

• The land was unified by King Saul as shown on the map.

• Gaza here is labeled “Philistines.”

  • Philistines lasted from 12th century BC to 640 AD. Palestinians are not descendants.

The ancient Philistines were not today’s Palestinians. There was never a Palestinian nation!

4. Who Ruled the Gaza Region After Rome?

• Archaeology confirms Jewish communities existed in 70 AD, possibly earlier, probably under self-rule after the Romans left.

• Byzantine and, later, Muslim rule lasted until late 12^th century

• 1170 Crusaders conquered and ended Jewish settlement for centuries

• Ottoman rule from 15^th century; Jewish communities flourished

• Britain took over after World War I (1917)

• The Jews were forced out of Gaza by anti-Jewish riots in 1929 under British rule

Even in modern times, there was never Palestinian rule in Gaza.

5. But There Must Have Been a Palestinian Nation!?

• Judea was conquered by Rome, but Jews resisted, infuriating Rome

• No other conquered people resisted Roman rule.

• Romans destroyed the Second Jewish Temple 70 AD

• Jerusalem’s Jews were taken as slaves to Rome

• Romans renamed Judea “Palestine”

• Rome wanted to erase memory of the nation “Judea” from the world

There has never, since the beginning of time, been a nation of Palestine nor any self-governing group using that name.

6. Where Did Today’s Palestinians Originate?

Arabs, under Mohammad’s direction or influence, invaded the land around 637AD. It is important to recognize that Arabs have traditionally been nomadic shepherds. “Nomadic” means people who do not settle in one place, but move from one appealing location to another.

• Author Mark Twain & LDS (Mormon) missionary Orson Hyde visited Palestine in the 1800s

• Both wrote the land was desolate, almost uninhabited, and filled with disease. The Ottomans deforested the land and did nothing to help the residents

• There were some small Jewish communities throughout the land. Even though it was poor and unhealthy, it was their land, and they remained.

• Most Arabs had abandoned their homes and moved to more hospitable places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq—where their ancesters had come from

• In the late 1800s, Jews fled Russian massacres. Many came to Palestine

• In Palestine, they drained the malaria swamps and started building a modern economy

• In 1912 American Jewish nurses came and provided health care and health education to all

• Arabs came from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other places for both healthcare and economic opportunity

Most of today’s Palestinians’ ancestors never lived in the land

7. Why Do They Call Themselves Palestinians?

• The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was established in 1964, three years before the “occupation” of 1967.

  • 1964 was before Israel “occupied Palestinian land.” The so-called occupation occurred after the 6-Day War in 1967. A cease-fire then left Judea and Samaria, now often called the “West Bank,” as well as Gaza, in Israel’s hands. This was land assigned to Israel by Great Britain in 1917 and developed by the Jews following 1917, but which after its War for Independence in 1948 was assigned to Jordan (Judea and Samaria) and Egypt (Gaza).

• With no “occupation,” what did they want to liberate? All of Israel, and they said it openly in the PLO charter.

• The PLO was established on behalf of Egyptian leader Gamal Abed El Nasser. Yassir Arafat was its second leader.

• Today’s Palestinians cannot even pronounce the name Palestinian because Arabic has no “P” sound. What nation has a name its people cannot pronounce?

“Palestinian” is a huge scam

8. So Who Are Palestinian Refugees?

• They are descendants of Arabs who lived in what is now Israel and who fled when five Arab nations invaded Israel, starting Israel’s war for independence

• Slightly more Jews were expelled from Arab nations when Israel was founded; they now make up the majority of Israeli citizens

• The United Nations has two refugee agencies

• UNRWA, U.N. Relief & Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, works to destroy Israel so these refugees can “return home” after 75 years

• UNHCR, UN Refugee Agency works with all other refugees to resettle in new homes as quickly as possible

No other people are considered refugees after three generations. They are sent home or resettled elsewhere

9. Gaza After Israeli Independence

• Egyptian rule after Israeli independence (1948)

• Israeli rule after 6-Day War (1967)

• 21 Jewish communities in the northern Gaza Strip (Gush Katif) were developed after 1967

• Many Palestinians were employed in Gush Katif

• Many more worked inside Israel

• Israel built schools, provided sanitation, and brought electricity to all of Gaza

Israelis and Gazans got along peacefully for 38 years

10. What Changed?

• Yasser Arafat and PLO started lying about Israel

• World pressure for Palestinian self-rule built

• Israel unilaterally pulled out of Gaza in 2005

• Israel hoped this would bring peace

• Gaza Arabs voted for rule by Hamas in free election

• Hamas could have declared  independence but did not

• Hamas is an extreme Islamic movement seeking an Islamic empire

Israel has not “occupied” Gaza since 2005

11. 2005: Israel Pulled Out of Gush Katif

Jewish settlement was in a region of northern Gaza called Gush Katif. All Jews were evacuated in 2005. Within days, it was leveled by the Arabs.

12. Gaza Since 2005

• Israel provides water at no cost

• Israel provides electricity at no cost

• Israel has a blockade of ships to stop the smuggling of arms and other materials used against Israel. The blockade does not generally affect consumer goods or food.

• Israel had to remove the bones from all Jewish cemeteries in Gaza to prevent desecration of the graves

• Hamas has sent tens of thousands of rockets into Israel

Gaza has self-rule, but Hamas uses it for power and to destroy Israel and Jews, not to benefit its people.

13. Support from East and West

Gaza receives billions in aid:

• Since 2012 Qatar has sent $1.3 billion

• Iran sends $100 million per year plus weapons and military training

• From 2014 to 2020, UN agencies spent close to $4.5 billion

• Denmark pledged $33.5 million for Gaza and West Bank

• EU pledged $1.9 billion between 2021 and 2024 for Gaza and West Bank

• Citizens send millions—both good-hearted and those wishing death to Jews

• NGOs (non-governmental organizations) such as Amnesty International, send millions

The government has plenty of money

14. After Each War with Israel, What Happens?

Example: May 2021, Israel retaliated after heavy missile attacks. After that…

• Palestinian Authority spent $1.7 billion in Gaza

• Egypt pledged $500 million

• European Union countries pledged $80 million for water projects

• All this was in addition to normal donations from Muslims and well-meaning people from around the world

Gaza rebuilds and rearms—but does little to help citizens

15. What Is Done with the Aid?

Hamas has built a huge network of tunnels and an underground city

• Weapons caches

• Bunkers

• Command centers

• Concealed roads to transport terrorists, rocket launchers, etc.

• Cells where Israeli hostages have been kept

Pay-for-Slay

• Families of “martyrs” (suicide bombers and others who die killing Jews) receive liberal pensions for their lives

Pay to Hamas’s leaders

• Hamas leaders live in luxury in Qatar on money sent as humanitarian aid to Gaza

Most humanitarian aid goes to harm Israel and Jews, not to support Gaza’s citizens.

16. Tunnels? With Aid Money?

• Some tunnels lead directly to Israeli communities

• Easy for terrorists to infiltrate, kidnap, murder

• Built under densely populated areas within Gaza

• Access points hidden between schools, mosques, hospitals

• Located so as to maximize civilian deaths if Israel tries to destroy them

The IDF has found hundreds of miles of tunnels under Gaza

17. Why Did Israel Build a Wall Around Gaza?

Israel’s need for security is ignored by the world

18. Attacks on Israel from Gaza

• Rocket attacks on Israeli communities are common, more than 3,000 just on October 7-8, 2023

• Israel only attacks Gaza when provoked by mass rocket fire

• Israel drops leaflets in Arabic over target areas telling people to leave before Israel bombs the place

• Hamas often prevents people from leaving so as to drive up the number of civilians killed

• “Moral equivalency” is a myth based on current western thought that divides the world into “oppressors” and “victims.” In that world, “victims” are people of color who have the moral right to attack people of whom they are jealous, i.e., those they call “white oppressors,” regardless of any other factors including the races of those so-called oppressors or any history of attacks.

• In a truly moral world, the number of deaths from unprovoked attacks has no correlation to the number of deaths of perpetrators of those attacks

• Civilian deaths due to rocket launchers Hamas places in schools and hospitals cannot be blamed on Israel. They are direct results of Hamas’ use of civilians as human shields.

Israel cannot create peace since Hamas wants war

19. Why Did Israel Respond So Strongly This Time?

• The October 7, 2023 attacks were completely unprovoked and incredibly brutal

  • Occurring on one of the holiest days of the year, the holiday of Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah,

  • At 6:30 AM, on sleeping villages and young adults camping at a music festival

  • Babies were burned alive in kitchen ovens, women were gang raped and then murdered, people were beheaded in their beds.

  • The 1200 deaths is equivalent, by population, to 44,000 Americans

  • Over 250 Israelis were taken hostage; 6 months later around 130 remain.

• This was the worst, but by no means the only, attack on Israeli civilians from Gaza

• Links to just a few examples:

  • Rockets following border clashes

  • 2021 Gaza War

  • List of Palestinian Rocket Attacks in 2018

The October 7 attacks ended Israelis’ hopes that restraint would eventually result in peace.

20. What Alternatives do the Occupied Have?

• Gaza is not occupied. Hamas is a government that was democratically elected

• Israel provides electricity and water at no charge

  • Shutting it off briefly has been a non-violent way Israel could signal to the masses its displeasure and anger at attacks on its civilians

• Israel sends building materials; in the first half 2014 Israel sent 181 thousand tons

  • Meant for houses, hospitals, schools and libraries

  • To improve the quality of life of citizens

• Israel also provides vast amounts of consumer goods including food

• The only restricted goods are weapons, war materials, and certain things with both military & civilian uses

• Aid could be used to develop a healthy economy, not war

Should Israel Do More for Them?

21. What Should Israel Do?

• People say, “Give peace a chance”

• Israel returned Gaza to Palestinian control and the situation got worse

Next suggestion?

22. The Myth of Multiculturalism

Has multiculturalism benefitted society or hurt it?

23. Compassion?

• The ancient sages of Israel wrote that those who have compassion for evildoers will in the end do evil to those who deserve compassion.

• We have seen this play out in the history of Israel, the Arabs living in Gaza, and the compassionate around the world who have funded Hamas.

• Use your compassion wisely, do not throw it at everyone who hurts, or in the end you will hurt others.

  • A ceasefire because of the Gazans’ situation will result in Hamas rearming and returning to strength, which it will use against Israel.

  • If this happens, all the death and suffering—on both sides—will have been in vain.

Standing with Israel today may be unpopular, but it is the moral thing to do.

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24. How Can You Support Israel?

• This essay is free. Share it with friends, church groups, etc.

• Personal prayers help

• Lead congregational prayers if you are a prayer leader

• Read Psalms, especially 20, 79, 83, 121, 123, 130, and 142.

• Write to your congressmen and women

  • Do an internet search for “write senator (or representative) for [state]” and you will get a link to write an online letter

• Write to your local paper

  • With enough local letters supporting Israel, an editor might find it necessary to publish one or two.

  • 2-sentence letters from ten people are better than a 20-sentence letter from one person.

• Donate. These are excellent organizations (there are others).

  • Zakaworld.org  (humanitarian aid and rescue)        

  • Hatzalah.org (emergency medical aid—all volunteer)

  • afmda.org  (Magen David Adom [like Red Cross], emergency ambulance)

  • Kkl-jnf.org (repairing and rebuilding in areas damaged by terrorism and rockets)

• Write to your (or your children’s) college or university and demand that they punish professors who teach anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism and students who harrass Jewish students and professors.

Share Tante Hanna Writes

Sources

https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_Authority_Martyrs_Fund, accessed 12 October 2023.

https://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/Israeli-humanitarian-aid-to-the-gaza-strip, Israeli Humanitarian Operations, accessed 12 October 2023.

https://jfedsrq.org/did-israel-create-the-palestinian-refugee-issue/  Millstone, David, Did Jews Take Israel away from Palestinians? Blog, Jewish Federation of Sarasota & Manatee Counties (FL), Dec. 8, 2020, accessed Oct. 11, 2023.

https://www.blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-invention-of-the-palestinian people/, Meyer, Alan, 9 August 2019, accessed 12 October 2023.

https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/hamas/everything-you-need-to-know-about-hamas-underground-city-of-terror/, Israel Defense Forces Editorial Team, accessed 11 October 2023.

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-funding-to-Palestine-in-question-following-hamas-attack, Lynch, Suzanne, Sorgi, Gregorio, EU halts Palestinian funding following Hamas Attack, October 9, 2023, accessed 12 October 2023.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/10/09/uk-has-no-plans-to-suspend--millions-in-aid-to-Palestine/, accessed 12 October 2023.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/10/eu-aid-to-Palestinians-will-not-be-cancelled-as-decision-reversed?ref=upstract.com, Wintour, Patrick, O’Carroll, Lisa, 10 Oct. 2023, 10.14 BST, accessed 12 October 2023.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/where-do-the-billions-of-dollars-in-foreign-aid-really-go, accessed 11 October 2023.

Shepherd, William R., Historical Atlas, 9^th ed., Map, Barnes & Noble, Inc., New York, 1964.

Permission has been requested for illustrations.

Thanks to B.E. for reviewing and A.W.W. for proofreading this essay.

A cheshbon is a bill. At a restaurant, when you’ve finished eating, the server brings the חשבון. It lists everything you ordered, the price, tax, and final amount you owe (usually not including a tip). When you pay, you receive a קבלה, a receipt that shows how much you paid.

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How do these words apply to your soul?

The cheshbon is a list of the good and bad things you did during the last year. Some people write this list down. For others, it’s a list that they keep in their heads.

But I don’t like thinking about what I’ve done wrong.

When we do things we know we shouldn’t, sometimes we feel great: I showed him! Or Now she knows how she made me feel! Or even Serves him right!

But later, we often feel bad.

• I shouldn’t have done that!

• I wish I hadn’t gotten so angry!

• I wish I hadn’t hurt her.

• Now I have an enemy. That wasn’t what I wanted.

• I shouldn’t have lied about that. When Dad found out I lied, he was madder than if I had just told him I messed up.

Things we should have done but didn’t also can make us feel bad:

• I should have sent a thank-you email to Grandma and Grandpa for my birthday gift.

• After I ruined the sweater I borrowed from my friend, Mom paid for it. But I should have told my friend I was sorry.

When we do a cheshbon ha-nefesh we think about those things we did, the things we wish we hadn’t done, and the things we didn’t do but wish we had. Then… (drum roll)

...because we admitted to ourselves (and to God) what we did wrong, we can plan to do better in the future. The truth is, until we admit we make mistakes, and think about what those mistakes were, we can’t really change.

Many of our mistakes are habits: Getting angry when Dad tells you how to do something. Leaving your underwear on the bedroom floor. Continuing to read, text your friend, or play a video game after your mother calls you to help her, which makes her mad at you so you speak to her disrespectfully. “Identifying and understanding your bad habits is the first step toward positive change,” according to How to Stop Bad Habits, an article from powerofpositivity.com.ⁱ Cheshbon ha-nefesh is the ancient Jewish way of doing something that’s become popular in today’s culture.

What do I do after I remember stuff I did wrong?

First, the Jewish thing to do is speak directly to the person involved and tell them you’re sorry. Ask them to forgive you. But an apology isn’t just about you. “[An apology] is about the person you hurt. You don’t apologize just to absolve yourself from guilt, but to acknowledge that you are the cause of someone else’s pain, and to take responsibility for your role in that.”ⁱⁱ Judaism teaches that God will not forgive you on Yom Kippur until you’ve said you’re sorry and have asked forgiveness from the person you wronged. And you have to really mean it—God can tell, and the person you speak to usually can, too.

This can feel weird to you, especially if you did the wrong thing months ago. In fact, the longer you go without saying “I’m sorry,” the harder those two magic words are. But Elul gives us an excuse. You can say, “Before Yom Kippur I’ve been thinking of mistakes I’ve made and stupid things I’ve done. I remember that I xxx. I’m really sorry that I hurt you. Please forgive me.”

If the person you hurt isn’t Jewish, you can say something like, “Before our holy Day of Atonement next month it’s a Jewish custom to apologize to people we’ve wronged, and ask them to forgive us. You might have forgotten, but I xxx. It’s been bothering me since I did it and it might still be bothering you. I realized that until I tell you I’m sorry, it will continue to bother me. I really am sorry, it was a dumb/hurtful/stupid thing to do. I know I hurt you, and I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done it. Please forgive me.”

Besides apologizing, promise yourself that you will learn from what you did wrong so that you do not repeat it. A wise person once said that the real mistake is not learning from your mistakes.

What if they don’t accept my apology?

Judaism teaches that we are only in control of our own behaviors. By apologizing you are doing your part to correct the situation. If they don’t accept your apology, go back to them again in a few days and ask again. Ask a third time if they still don’t accept the apology. If they refuse to accept a third sincere apology, the weight of the sin transfers to them, because it’s wrong to hold a grudge after someone sincerely says they’re sorry.

What if I didn’t do what they think I did?

What matters is how the person felt about the situation, not what you actually did or meant to do. This means that sometimes we have to apologize for things we didn’t do, or things that were misunderstood.

Before I moved to Israel I owned a sewing school and fixed clothing for people. Once someone told me something. They wanted sympathy,ⁱⁱⁱ but I responded as a tailoring professional. While from my perspective this was the right way to respond, he and his wife took it as an insult. I had a very, very difficult relationship with them until I learned why they were so upset with me. Then I explained why I had said what I did and assured them that I absolutely did not mean to call him a slob. I took full responsibility for the misunderstanding, and said that this situation taught me to be more careful in how I spoke because I didn’t want to insult anyone else. At last he and his wife forgave me.

Before I learned the Jewish attitude towards apologies and forgiveness, I would not have taken responsibility for something I didn’t mean to do. All it cost me was a little embarrassment, but it removed a burden from the couple I had accidentally insulted. I knew then that this is an important part of apologizing and being forgiven.

So, what should I do now?

During the weeks before Yom Kippur, do your own cheshbon ha-nefesh, counting your sins and the hurts and wrongs you did to other people (and to God). Apologize for your actions. Admit to them that you hurt them, and that you’re sorry about that. Ask them to forgive you.

If they don’t forgive, ask them two more times—gently and kindly. If they still don’t accept the apology, the sin becomes their problem. Judaism teaches that after three attempts to apologize, a sin transfers to the person who won’t forgive. God accepts your apology.

It’s also a great idea to make a new habit. Start doing something new and positive. Choose something small that you can actually do every day or every week, not a huge, vague plan like “work for world peace.” Some suggestions:

• Send your grandparents an email or FaceTime them once a week.

• Read something from the Book of Psalms every day. English (or any other language, if you don’t read Hebrew) is fine.

  • Psalm 119 has 8 sentences for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. You could choose a different letter each day and say the 8 sentences for it.

  • Say the psalm for the year of your next birthday. If you are 14 years old, read Psalm 15 every day.

• Put your dirty laundry in the hamper and clean clothes back in the closet or drawer every night.

• If you bring dishes into your room for snacks, take them back to the kitchen every night, rinse them out, and if the dishwasher has dirty dishes in it, add yours. (Careful—don’t put dirty dishes in a dishwasher of clean ones!!)

And remember: besides sins against other people, your cheshbon ha-nefesh should include sins against God: things you did wrong that didn’t hurt other people, but that broke God’s commandments. Ask God to forgive you for them, and try hard not to do the same things again.

i How To Stop Bad Habits: 12 Proven Strategies for Lasting Change, Nov. 10, 2024, https://www.powerofpositivity.com/stop-bad-habits/,

ii Moss, Rabbi A., “My Wife Won’t Speak to Me!” Chabad.org, https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3469546/jewish/My-Wife-Wont-Speak-to-Me.htm

iii When the man mentioned that he didn’t get repeat business, I interpreted it as a question about why. He had recently lost a lot of weight and had not had his clothes altered to fit his new shape. Because my business was fixing clothes that didn’t fit, I noticed this and thought people coming to his business might wonder if he were as careless professionally as his ill-fitting clothes suggested. So I recommended he have his pants shortened and taken in to fit better. He really had not meant to ask for help, he wanted commiseration and was insulted that I thought he looked like a slob.

The news in 1912 was full of the Titanic: a steamship where the second-class cabins were more opulent than the first-class cabins on other ships. This ship was billed as larger, more opulent, and safer than any other steamship. It was considered unsinkable.

On its first voyage it hit an iceberg and went down, taking 1500 lives.

Liberal Jews in America have a similar arrogance. Largely made up of Reform, Conservative, and unaffiliated Jews, many are graduates of elite colleges; most are white collar and professional workers. They consider themselves smarter, kinder, and better than the primitive, passe, obsolete, and archaic Orthodox. I know; I was raised in a typical liberal family. These negative words were used frequently in my Sunday school classes to describe traditional Jews.

Even at 10 years old I recognized the truth behind Queen Gertrude’s famous line from Hamlet, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Yet Liberal Judaism’s unflagging belief in the righteousness of Hamas’s claims has them dancing as the Titanic begins to sink.

Disbelief in the Atrocities of October 7, 2023

Although Jews are only about 2% of the US population, Jewish students have made up around 25% of undergraduates at Ivy League schools, according to the Jerusalem Post.ⁱ Many top public colleges, such as the University of Michigan, also have had high numbers of Jewish students. In a study published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communication and quoted in Nature, "The most successful and influential Americans come from a surprisingly narrow range of 'elite' educational backgrounds." And as we have seen from campus uprisings and the responses of their leaderships, these universities and colleges have been overwhelmingly left-leaning.

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The legacy media--traditional online, print and broadcast news sources such as the New York Times and CNN, as contrasted with new online sources such as Blaze Media and Daily Wire, have for many years been extremely liberal.

The pro-Hamas, liberal line has consistently been divided between "There was no massacre on October 7," and "Hamas defensively attacked Israel in response to years of genocide, and the videos of atrocities were generated by the Israelis to gain sympathy. The magnitude of the attacks was greatly exaggerated."

Interestingly, when I asked Copilot AI to find me these reports so I could document what I remembered, I got a message that an AI overview was not available. Almost immediately Google shut down, I was closed out of Copilot and blocked from Microsoft for 24 hours.

Troubling Events

According to a Tel Aviv University study by Derek Lief and others, there were nearly 3900 demonstrations regarding the war within its first month. Of those, 69% supported Hamas and only 31% supported Israel. Many call for the killing of Jews and damage to Jewish communities around the world, as well as the destruction of Israel.

One has only to look at video coverage of riots in the USA, beginning with the George Floyd riots of 2020, to see the propensity for intense violence by young Americans. Reports of incitement of violence against Jews in many Muslim mosques in the USA, documented as long ago as 2017, also exist, although finding evidence on the Internet may be difficult. Many of my American friends heard of the riots only through my Facebook page as the American legacy media did not give them much, if any, coverage. This suggests that many liberal American Jews are not aware of the magnitude of violence of today's mobs.

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The Israeli news in November 2024 included reports of destruction of Jewish property in the USA and around the world on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. That night in 1938, thousands of Jewish businesses were destroyed by mobs across Germany in what was clearly an orchestrated event. Many consider this event the beginning of the Holocaust.

The destruction of Jewish property on Kristallnacht’s anniversary should be very troubling. Hamas is clearly aware of this date, as it is of the significance of Jewish holy days and, now, not only October 7 but also the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. In 2023, October 7 fell on Simchat Torah. In 2025, the holiday falls on Tuesday, October 14 in Israel and Wednesday, October 15, outside.

Another troubling fact is that although since Oct. 7 more Jews than ever have been buying guns, there is still a relatively low percentage of Jews owning guns and who might actually be able to use them against other people. This means that most Jews and Jewish communities must depend on the police to protect them. More about this later.

The combination of these factors is, to me, frightening.

Islamic Terrorism Outside of Israel

Before I retired in the USA I taught adult immigrants English. Students from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Nigeria, Kenya, Mali, Montenegro, Greece, Albania, and southern India told me they had fled their homelands because of Islamic terror. This was confirmed (if numerous first-person accounts--empirical evidence--do not count) in many places.ⁱⁱ I was told that in their communities, non-Muslim children were often killed by hit-run drivers on quiet streets on good-weather days--"accidents" that could not have been accidental. When families converted to Islam, their children were safe.

Independent news sources report on Islamic massacres of Christians throughout Africa and Asia. All the reports sound like what happened near Gaza on October 7, 2023: hordes of masked men flood villages and brutally rape and massacre men, women and children. According to Open Doors, a Christian organization supporting coreligionists who are persecuted for their faith, 2024 saw almost 5,000 Christians killed in faith-related attacks, with the likelihood of many additional unreported deaths. Between 2023 and 2024, attacks on Christian homes rose 371 percent to 21,431. These reports do not make the front pages of legacy newspapers; if covered at all, the reports are brief accounts on inside pages.

The Current Danger

Believing the legacy media's lies about Israel, especially that the Hamas massacres were engineered or greatly exaggerated by Israel, and the fact that it ignores Islamic terrorism in the rest of the world, is setting up American Jewry for disaster.

Many American Jews remain confident that they have nothing to fear, despite huge ongoing rallies at which calls for the destruction of Israel and death to Jews are prominent. They apparently have confidence in the morality and righteousness of their Muslim neighbors and in their local police departments. However, police departments across the USA have been reluctant to call anti-Jewish violence "terrorism," or even "hate crimes," although this may be slowly changing.

As a result, many liberals do not take the threat of Muslim extremists seriously. At the least, they have believed that while Zionists may be targeted, they will remain safe. Adina Vogel Ayalon, a spokeswoman for J Street, one of the leftist groups that pretend to support Israel but are actually far-left, anti-Israel groups, made this very clear in a comment reported by the BBC. "These types of hate crimes are not distinguishing between where you fall on the political spectrum about the war...and that is something very unsettling,"ⁱⁱⁱ she is reported to have said.

The far-left bent of US courts provide cover for leftist violence. Symptomatic of this is the recent case of a Maryland judge's sentence of a man who, unprovoked, brutally beat two elderly people who were merely praying near an abortion clinic.^iv One of the victims was treated for three fractures, blindness in one eye, and other injuries. Prosecutors requested 10 years in prison, but the judge, Yvette M. Bryant,^v gave the perpetrator one year of home detention, which gives him freedom to live with his family and travel for work and medical care. While the case has nothing to do with Jews or Islam, it demonstrates that some US courts are incredibly biased against those with whom the leftist judge disagrees.

The Probable Result

Major, coordinated attacks against Jews and Jewish communities are almost certainly coming to the USA.

I believe it is highly likely, unless the US government applies draconian measures against the frequent demonstrations, their leaders, funders, and participants, that an October 7-type massacre will occur within the next year or two in the USA. The incredible atrocities of October 7 might not occur because Americans involved in the riots have not yet been desensitized to the extremes of violence. But even so, I can envision mobs of young, masked rioters causing untold destruction and even death in Jewish neighborhoods across the USA, and probably the world, in an orchestrated day or evening of violence. Social media makes this kind of orchestration easy and common, and it has been practiced successfully against Christian and other minority groups around the world.

Even without a lack of will to prosecute the enemies of Israel, American police forces will be handicapped. Funding in many areas has been cut since the Defund the Police movement. Many experienced officers have left the field, and DEI-appointed police chiefs who sympathize with "the oppressed" have created weak forces unequipped to handle riots in general and terrorism or antisemitism in particular. This situation has been made worse by the strident lies about the prevalence of police brutality and the way liberal judges and juries have handled cases between police and violent offenders, especially when those offenders fall into the DEI category of "oppressors."^vi

The Solution

I call on American Jews to do four things.

• First, leave religious congregations whose rabbis do not support, and preach support for, Israel and Zionists. Start your own minyanim (prayer groups) meeting in homes; this is a well-known and accepted practice.

• Second, leave Progressivism and the Democrat Party. They have abandoned you; stop supporting them.

• Third, band together to take political action against all governmental leaders, no matter how much support you gave them in the past, who do not support Israel and Zionists. This support needs to be across the board, not nuanced, that is, not "depending on the context." If there ever was a time for nuance, it has passed.

• Fourth, make aliyah--move to Israel. My next essay for adults, to be published Sept. 10, will expand on aliyah.

We in Israel protect our own--at home. But we cannot protect you in the USA. This, you must do yourselves. And first, you need to accept that the philosophy you supported with your money, your votes, your emotions and your thoughts has deserted you. The leaders of Progressive movements such as DEI and feminism have not only abandoned Jewish expressions of progressivism but have taken active roles in fomenting anti-Zionism, anti-Israelism, and anti-Semitism. Continuing to support them because of the past is foolishness at best and dangerous, possibly fatal, if carried to its logical conclusion.

Judaism teaches that all of us--religious and not, Jewish and not, are made in the image of God, and that alone gives us each value. Recognize that the values proclaimed--but no longer (if they ever were) lived up to--by the Left and Progressives come directly from the Jewish moral code. You can maintain most of the values you have always upheld, such as support for the poor, orphans, and widows; for the environment; and for life. Peruse past essays from this blog, where I have addressed many of these issues from a traditional Jewish viewpoint.

Progressivism has sold not only Israel and Zionists, but every-day Jews, down the river, but the basic values on which that philosophy purports to have been built are eternal. It is entirely possible to support traditional expressions of these values without practicing traditional Judaism.

Come home to the traditional Jewish view of morality. And come home to Israel.

i Friedman, G., The Jerusalem Post, Dec. 18, 2015, https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/the-most-heavily-jewish-us-college-and-other-facts-about-jews-at-american-colleges-437701

ii Just one example: https://zenit.org/2025/01/18/the-50-countries-that-persecute-christians-the-most-today-and-the-role-of-communism-and-islamism/

iii https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9915k219r8o

iv https://www.dailywire.com/news/man-who-brutally-beat-elderly-pro-lifers-dodges-prison-time?author=Leif+Le+Mahieu&category=undefined&elementPosition=27&row=3&rowHeadline=Latest+News&rowType=Vertical+Carousel&title=Man+Who+Brutally+Beat+Elderly+Pro-Lifers+D

v https://omny.fm/shows/the-daily-controversy/outrageous-injustice-marxist-judge-yvette-m-bryant-slaps-thug-with-home-detention-for-brutally-assaulting-elderly-pro-life-heroes-proving-democrats-war-on-pro-life-americans-8-8-25

vihttps://www.tantehannawrites.com/p/dei-and-why-it-is-a-problem

Mom put down the pot she was washing and went to the back door. "Sharona, get in here right now. Alana, time for you to go home. I'll tell your mother you're coming," said Mom as she picked up her phone.

Dragging her feet, Sharona went inside.

"You cannot call anyone poopy head," said Mom. "It's not a nice name."

"But Alana didn't play nice." Sharona stamped her foot.

"We do not have to like everyone. We can get angry at them. But we cannot call them names." Mom took Sharona's hand and went into the living room. "Let me tell you a story." She sat down and pulled Sharona onto the sofa next to her.

"A story about you?" asked Sharona hopefully.

"No, a story that happened a long, long time ago." Mom turned and pointed at a wall quilt hanging above Dad’s chair. "What's that building?" she asked.

"That's the Temple in Jerusalem," said Sharona.

"Right," said Mom. "And what's that photograph next to it?"

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Sharona bounced up and down. "That's the picture Daddy took when we were walking to that wall in Israel," she said.

"Right," said Mom. "What’s that wall, do you remember?"

Sharona bit her lip, thinking hard. "I don't remember," she said slowly. "But it’s important."

Mom nodded slowly. "It's all that's left of the Temple in Jerusalem."

"All that's left is one wall?" Sharona opened her eyes wide. "What about that beautiful building? Isn't it there?"

“My wall quilt is what many people think the building looked like," said Mom. "That wall and some pillars are what is left. The rest was destroyed long, long ago."

"Why?" asked Sharona.

"Because people said bad things about each other," said Mom. "That's the story I am going to tell you."

A long, long time ago there were two men whose names were almost the same. One was Kamtza, one was Bar Kamtza. Kamtza and his friends were not friendly with Bar Kamtza. They didn't have a good reason, they just didn't like him. One day, one of Kamtza's friends was having a party. He invited all his friends. But his servant made a mistake. He invited Bar Kamtza instead of Kamtza.ⁱ

Bar Kamtza came to the party. Maybe he thought that the friend was sorry that they had been enemies. We don't know. But he came to the party.

When he came, the man having the party got mad. He told Bar Kamtza to leave. Bar Kamtza said, "I'm here now, please let me stay." He begged and begged, but the man having the party said no.

Everyone at the party heard the argument. No one said, "Come on, Joe, let Bar Kamtza stay!" Not even the important rabbis, leaders of the city.

Bar Kamtza's feelings were hurt. He was embarrassed in front of the most important people! So he went to the government--the Romans--and lied to them. They got mad at the Jews and destroyed the Temple. Thousands of Jews were killed and most of the other Jews of Jerusalem were made slaves and taken to Rome. Jerusalem was destroyed." Mom was silent.

Sharona bit her lip.

"Why was Jerusalem destroyed?" asked Mom.ⁱⁱ

"Because that man lied?" asked Sharona.

"Well, yes," said Mom. "But that wasn't the first reason."

"Because that man didn't just go home?"

"Before that."

Sharona thought hard.

"Because that man went to the party?"

"Even before that."

Sharona scratched a mosquito bite on her leg and thought some more. She thought about playing with Alana and calling her names.

In a very little voice she asked, "Because the men called each other bad names?"

"Excellent!" exclaimed Mom. "We don't have to be friends with everyone, but we need to treat everyone with respect. We don't have to be friends. We can get angry at people. But we should never call them bad names and we should never be mean to them. Even bad people like robbers who need to go to jail. They need to be punished, but the punishment is enough. We don't have to be extra mean to them.

"Even good people make mistakes. I do, Dad does. We can tell people, 'I don't like what you did.' But Hillel said we shouldn't do things or say things to people that we don't want them to do to us."ⁱⁱⁱ

"So the party man should have invited that man?" asked Sharona.

"No, he didn't have to invite him. But when that man came, the party man should not have embarrassed him. He should have invited him in and treated him okay. Bar Kamtza made an honest mistake. He was invited by mistake, but he did not know that.

"And when the party man started to get mad, some of the other people should have said, 'Hey, Joe, cool down, let him stay!'"

Sharona drew fingernail circles around her bug bite. "And then Bar Kam... then he wouldn't have lied and the Temple would still be there?"

Mom nodded.

They were quiet a long time.

"Can I go next door and tell Alana I'm sorry I called her a bad name?" Sharona whispered her question.

"Good idea! Let's take a plate of cookies," said Mom. "Sometimes a little gift makes it easier to say 'I'm sorry.'"

For Parents, Teachers, and Others

Tisha B'Av, the ninth day of the month of Av, the date that the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed twice, has been a day that our enemies have used to torment us throughout the generations.^iv Seven major incidents affecting the Jewish People occurred on this day. The first was the Biblical incident of the spies that Moses sent out to report back on the land. They gave a bad report that showed little or no faith in the God that had just opened the Red Sea to let the Jews cross. The most recent was the beginning of World War I, which unleashed unprecedented destruction on Europe culminating in the Holocaust, when one-third of all Jews in the world were killed.

Three weeks before Tisha B'Av, the 17th of the month of Tammuz, was the day that the Romans breached the walls of Jerusalem in the year 70. This marked the beginning of the destruction of the Second Temple, which fell on the 9th of Av. Five calamities befell the Jewish people on this day as well.^v

The 17th of Tammuz is a partial fast: from shortly before sun-up until shortly after dark, observant Jews neither eat nor drink. Special prayers are said. Observant Jews observe some of the practices of mourning the death of a loved one.

From the first of the month of Av, additional mourning practices are followed. The 9th of Av itself is a full fast. That is, from before sundown on the 8th of Av until shortly after sundown on the 9th of Av, no food or drink passes the lips of most observant Jews. (Jewish days are counted from nightfall until nightfall rather than midnight to midnight as westerners do today.)

Many people make a special effort to avoid speaking badly of others during this period because causeless hatred began the spiral of events culminating in the destruction of the Second Temple.

Relevant Stories and Articles

Last year I published several articles about Tisha B'Av and its role in Judaism as well as two stories for older children.

Why Remember the Past​? is about Judaism's emphasis on remembering our history. For adults.

Baseless Hatred: What It Is, How It Hurts discusses several causes of hatred and the Jewish response to each. For adults.

The Catholic Jew, based on a family story that I heard when I worked in a Jewish nursing home, deals with baseless hatred and how it can sometimes come back to bite the hater. For teens.

Jerusalem Tunnel is reprinted from Ghosts and Golems, Jewish Publication Society, 2001, (c) Hanna Bandes Geshelin. It is a time-travel story set on Tisha B'Av, 70 CE. For kids 9-14.

Notes

i Kamtza and Bar Kamtza: The Story of Tisha B'Av. https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/404863/jewish/Kamtza-and-Bar-Kamtza.htm

ii At this point, the reader can stop reading and ask the listener(s) the questions.

iii Nightengale, T., Whatever is hateful to you, donot do to your fellow man. https://aish.com/judaisms-golden-rule/

iv What Happened on the Ninth of Av, https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/946703/jewish/What-Happened-on-the-Ninth-of-Av.htm

v Simmons, Rabbi S., 17th of Tammuz, https://aish.com/48943446/