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.

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.

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.

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

In catering to the new multicultural market, the publishers apparently decided to keep the percent of books for non-white, non-Christian children the same and to use most of that percentage for books for African-American children.ⁱ

When multiculturalism was introduced, immigration was still strictly managed. The numbers of immigrants from Central and South America were low, Asians had been specifically excluded for a long time so the number of children was low, and there were still very few Muslims in the USA. Arabs were largely Christians who had escaped from the Middle East after the British and French created individual nations after World War I. This had been done without regard to the ethnicity or tribalism of the regions concerned, leading to the persecution and even massacre of Christians.

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As a purveyor of Jewish books, my business was drastically affected by this change. Over the fifty years since, we have seen how pretending that all cultures are equally valid has damaged the world and set the West up to become part of a Muslim one-world "caliphate." The emphasis on multiculturalism created an environment that led to a lack of will to call out a culture that focuses on death and repression by unelected religious leaders. In turn, this has created a "soft revolution," a slow and subtle change in values and beliefs because for years it has been "wrong" to oppose that culture and those values.

Cultural Differences

All cultures are not alike. During the ten years I taught English to immigrant adults in the USA, I taught people from 48 nations. And I found tremendous differences between students from different places. Here are just a few examples.

• The most blatant cases of cheating in my ten years were with Pakistanis and Saudis. A Saudi student told me that copying from others is expected in his country.

• My Cambodian students were employees at a factory that was taking advantage of a grant to offer English to foreign-born employees. These students had grown up in youth camps under Pol Pot's communist regime, where the rule was cooperation in all things. When I tried to explain the concept of cheating they did not understand; not helping others seemed weird to them. I think that this trait made them excellent employees in the factory because focusing on the end result and helping others to meet that goal was second nature to them.ⁱⁱ

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I was unable to reach a few students. Although they appeared to be of average intelligence, they did not seem to grasp the concept of cause-and-effect. They appeared to react to whatever happened, did not seem able to plan, and were confused by simple assignments that required thought and planning. They seemed only able to learn by rote. A few students like this were from Central Africa and one was from Brazil. Every student of mine from the Dominican Republic (all workers at the factory) had this trait.

• My Hindu Indian students were wives whose husbands were on work visas for hi-tech companies and did not have visa status permitting them to work and men with hi-tech jobs needing to improve their conversational English. They were all highly educated, gracious, gentle people.

• Many of the village Mexicans were very poorly educated and just wanted enough English to cope with their manual labor jobs. They tended to be terrified of failure. I learned that, although technically corporal punishment is illegal, in remote villages beatings were common for school mistakes. This may be a reason so many Mexican laborers do not attempt to learn English. Many of those village people are very traditional and discourage girls from attending college. They tended to spend any financial windfall with their community in a big party with lots of food and music rather than saving or planning for the future.ⁱⁱⁱ The Mexicans from the cities who ended up in my classes were different: they were educated professionals who were improving their English in order to move up in their careers.

• In Cameroon, which has a very low literacy rate, books are very uncommon; even in schools sometimes only the teacher had a book. Learning for them is through listening.

• My student from Mali, a refugee journalist whose friends had been massacred by radical Islamists for their political views, said that in his country, villagers lived in straw huts with dirt floors and shared one-dish meals where everyone ate with their hands out of the same serving dish. He said people tended to be relaxed and content. He told me, "Americans are rich with things but poor in spirit."

All of these people were human. All of their lives had the same infinite worth. But their cultures were very, very different. The differences between cultures cause problems. Here are some examples.

• In many countries, private property is unknown or disrespected. Immigrants from those countries have no problem with stealing. If you don't respect private property, then you can simply take what you want.

• In some countries, when a wife or daughter behaves in a way that the father believes dishonors the family, such as dressing in a way that was forbidden in the home country, the father has a religious obligation to kill the offender. Honor killings^iv are not uncommon in Muslim communities around the world and even occur in the USA.

• England has a big problem with rapes by immigrants, primarily from Pakistan, a primarily Muslim country. In Pakistan, outside of major cities, women only leave home completely covered in a burqa and killings of women and girls are not uncommon. Just as Hamas terrorists called young Israeli women "prostitutes" and gang-raped them before killing them on October 7, 2023, the Pakistani gangs in England probably assume that young women wearing western clothes are "asking for it."

The Problem with Multiculturalism

"Multiculturalism" was a simplistic but wrong solution to a real problem. A better response would have been "diversity" in the largest, most positive sense: that all people should be respected as human. The individuals, not their cultures. The movement should have focused on people while validating traditional Western values of individual rights and liberties (including private property rights) and the moral code taught by Judaism and Christianity. Had this occurred, the United States and European countries would have provided cultural education such as that available to my grandparents, who immigrated to the USA in the late 1800s.^v At that time, learning American values and civics were part of becoming a citizen, and passing the citizenship exam involved real learning.

Forcing Assimilation

Mistakes were definitely made under the "melting pot" philosophy that was prevalent in previous generations. That movement was handled by deliberately embarrassing school children who used their first language in school, spoke with accents, brought ethnic foods for lunch, and dressed ethnically. I once read that years ago, social workers and teachers were taught to force children to assimilate by denigrating their origins. Children caught speaking their native languages during recess were punished, sometimes corporally. Lunches containing immigrant foods were confiscated. In some places Jewish children's lunches were replaced by a school-provided ham-and-cheese sandwich. This had the double effect of making them ashamed of their origins and forcing them to break the Jewish kosher laws that forbid both mixing meat and milk at the same meal and eating pig.

This was the same mentality that had Native American children forced into boarding schools far from home, often where students came from several tribes that had perhaps been ancestral enemies and certainly did not speak the same language. Since these schools were in remote places, they often attracted teachers who were unable to keep jobs in more populous places: teachers with alcoholism and a tendancy to violence. There is evidence that the prevalence of alcohol and drug abuse, as well as violence, within Native American communities today stems from students being demoralized by the efforts to eradicate their cultures and from learning these behaviors from their teachers at the boarding schools.^vi

A product of this type of education, author Philip Roth grew to hate his Jewish heritage. An example of this humiliation appeared in his famous book, Portnoy's Complaint. The main character was asked in kindergarten to name a specific kitchen implement that the teacher held up: a spatula. This child, whose first language was Yiddish, knew the tool was a spatula. But he was also sure it was a Yiddish word. He chose to say he didn't know, preferring the ridicule of classmates to the ridicule of his teacher for using a forbidden language.

The foods that girls prepared in the mandatory Home Economics course I took in the mid-1950s included mostly foods mixing meat and milk, containing pork, or using shellfish. Not only were these foods forbidden under Jewish law, but they were recipes that none of my Christian friends normally ate. In retrospect, I have a strong suspicion that the curriculum had been set up years earlier, when the "force to assimilate" philosophy was strongest.

I also remember receiving a low grade in music in fifth grade. For the last two music classes before Christmas my class sang traditional carols from memory. When the teacher didn't pass out the words, I asked for them. The teacher ridiculed me, assuming I was trying to make her look bad. But in New York City, where I had lived until that year, there was a large Jewish population and Christmas carols were not sung in school. I knew the melodies from hearing the songs on the radio, but had never paid attention to the words.

A Solution

A generation of teachers has been educated to promote wokeness and the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion philosophy, causing great unrest. That philosophy is being removed by the Department of Education and the Trump administration. What will replace it?

I would like to see multi-peopleism: respect for the humanity of all, but education for America's traditional values. Barbara Cohen's classic children's story, Molly's Pilgrim, tells of a third grade classroom's interaction with a Jewish refugee child from Russia. The book illustrates how differences can be acknowledged and and children taught to respect them.

Additionally, American values and culture need to be taught as the positive things they are, both in schools and in citizenship programs for immigrants. Private property, respect for all lives, and traditional capitalism--the kind where small businesses flourish and quality is policed by reputation^vii--need to be taught and respected by people across the political spectrum.

Is this a naive pipe dream? Probably. But by keeping these ideas in mind and living our private lives within this framework as much as possible, we can all help nudge our culture to improve.

i "Jewish" was conveniently left out of the definition of "multicultural." As we now know, that is because Jews are seen by the academic inventors of multiculturalism as white oppressors, while people of color are seen as oppressed. This in spite of the fact that the majority of Israeli Jews are as dark as most Arabs, Ethiopian Jews look Ethiopian, and Indian Jews look Indian. In the USA, many Jews, such as myself, do not look like people of European descent. We tend to have darker coloring, non-mainstream-European hair and features, and are shorter and broader.

ii There was a qualitative difference between their cooperative work and the Saudi-Pakistani cheating. In the former, the end result--everyone learning--was the goal. They worked together until everyone learned. The Saudis and Pakistanis did not learn, they simply copied from other students. The very independent USA could benefit from learning from the Cambodian model. Group projects in the USA often consist of one or two students doing all the work, i.e., learning, and everyone in the group receiving credit for it, including those who did nothing and therefore learned nothing.

iii I wonder whether this trait was because during the Inquisition, which moved from Spain and Portugal to their colonies in the New World, a person who turned in someone that they thought was a heratic got half of the person's estate if (when) the person was convicted. It was dangerous to be successful and to live at a different level than one's neighbors. Sharing successes was therefore a way of endearing oneself to the neighbors while spending that money on everyone, instead of letting the family stand out. These Inquisition laws may also be at the basis of the stereotype of the lazy Latino whose motto is "manana" or tomorrow.

iv https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364649122_Honor_Killings_in_the_United_States_From_1990_to_2021_Primary_Victims_and_Corollary_Victims

vIn big cities, schools and social welfare centers provided classes in English and citizenship for immigrants. By the time I took classes in teaching English as a Second Language, citizenship was not part of the curriculum.

vi https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5446670/

vii In traditional capitalism, where the right to start and run a business is mostly unfettered, the customers decide what products to buy and which shops to use. Shoddy merchandise, poor customer service, and unrealistic prices mean fewer customers. The financial incentives to provide quality goods at a reasonable price with a smile are huge. Generally, traditional capitalism means prosperity for business owners. But steady jobs with products that employees can be proud of lead to happy and prosperous employees as well. Today, however, with multinational corporations controlling most of the marketplace, individual happiness with products or service are irrelevant. Businesses are incentivised to overprice, produce shoddy products, and use cheap workers who often have poor attitudes; and customers are powerless to change the situation. But this model of business is not true capitalism; it is based on a model of exploitation and greed.

Another cultural trait, this one linguistic, relates to the huge difference between the English, failure and the Hebrew כשל . Disclaimer: these are my observations, not an authoritative take on this issue.

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One tenet of Judaism is that one can almost always correct a mistake or learn something new and different that will bring about a different outcome. The language reflects this. The meaning of the Hebrew word commonly translated as failure, כשל, is a mistake that cannot be corrected. It is a very strong word that is not used frequently,ⁱⁱ including (or especially) in an educational sense. On the other hand, words such as טעות (ta'ut) and שגיאה (shagiah), as well as several others built on the root שג (shg), refer to mistakes or errors which can be corrected. These are the words used in Hebrew sayings about learning.

Failure in English has no close synonym. The Merriam-Webster On-Line Thesaurus offers these usages of the word: negligence, defeat, disaster, shortage, and bankruptcy.ⁱⁱⁱ The opposite of failure is success. With no alternative, failure is often used in relation to education. One fails an exam even though one might be able to retake it; Patty has failed to learn the times tables. Even 7-year-olds know that "F" stands for failure. To children and adults alike, failing means "Sorry, kid, you don't cut it. Can't do it. Done. Forever an ignoramus, forever a failure, forever a loser."

There are ways around this issue. In English, the end of the sentence has more power than the beginning, so it should stress the point the author wants to make. Example:

Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light bulb, but it took him 1000 failed attempts.

Thomas Edison persevered through 1000 unsuccessful attempts until he invented the incandescent light bulb.

Negative words such as but, never, does not, and cannot tend to stand out in a reader's mind more than whatever comes after. When can be more positive than if; it suggests a probability, whereas if suggests just a possibility.

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Encouraging Expressions

Here are some popular English expressions meant to be encouraging and uplifting. Seven out of the ten are negative:

1. "You can't let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you."--Barack Obama

2. "Failure is a success if we learn from it."--Malcolm Forbes

3. "There is no failure. Only feedback." --Robert Allen

4. "It is fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure."--Bill Gates

5. "You will only fail to learn if you do not learn from failing."--Stella Adler

6. "The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing."--Henry Ford

7. "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."--Albert Einstein

8. "Mistakes are the stairs we climb to reach success."--Tim Fargo

9. "It's okay to make mistakes. Mistakes are our teachers--they help us to learn."--John Bradshaw

10. "Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes."--Oscar Wilde

The popular Hebrew-language sayings about learning do not use the word כשל and words related to it, and they end on a positive note. Here are the most popular ones:

1. Every mistake is a step toward success.

2. From mistakes we learn, grow, and become stronger.

3. There is no path without errors--and from them come many things to learn.

4. Our mistakes teach us the best way.

5. Mistakes--Learning--Success!

6. Don't be afraid of mistakes--learn the lessons they contain and move forward.

7. Here it's okay to make mistakes because that's how we truly learn.

8. We learn by making mistakes.

Emphasis on the Positive

We Jews are taught to emulate God as best we can. One example appears in II Chronicles 6:7-9, where God shows us to be positive when correcting people:

7 And it was in my father David's heart [the desire] to build a House for the name of the Lord, the God of Israel.

8 And the Lord said to David my father; Since it was in your heart to build a House to My name, you did well that it was in your heart.

9 Nevertheless, you shall not build the House, but your son who will come forth out of your loins he shall build the House for My name.

Negative expressions that are meant to be helpful often have the opposite effect. The focus on avoiding failure often leads to students who are paralyzed by anxiety. This can manifest by the student asking to use the restroom whenever a task seems overwhelming, by claiming the work is too boring to do, or by many other (often very creative) means.

Turning the emphasis from the negative to the positive, from failure to mistake and from mistake to future success can overcome perfectionism. Simply finding a positive saying and posting it in a classroom or making it a family saying can make a big difference. Here is the sign from my sewing classroom in the USA:

Whenever a student was paralyzed by anxiety or frustrated by having messed up, I would point to the sign. She would read it a time or two, sigh deeply, let her shoulders drop, try again, and complete her task successfully.

Turning English Around

How can you switch your meant-to-be-positive-but-not comments to ones that are truly positive? Choose positive words and put the desired result at the end. Here are three of the English statements from above, rewritten to express the ideas positively.

"Failure is a success if we learn from it." This quote from Malcolm Forbes can be rewritten as: When we learn from our mistakes, we will succeed.

Robert Allen said, "There is no failure. Only feedback." This could be rewritten: Turn your mistakes into successes by learning from them.

"It is fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure," according to Bill Gates. It could be rewritten, Learning from our mistakes creates opportunities to celebrate our successes.

Conclusion

Focusing on learning from mistakes, rather than on our failures, can make a huge difference to learners and to the way we handle mistakes, often serious, that we make in our adult lives. Coupled with the related ability to hear and accept opposing views, these two factors have a lot to do with Jewish success.

i Very occasionally, an argument ends with a major schism. One example occurred at the time of the destruction of the Second Temple and the beginnings of Christianity: the argument between the Sadducees and Pharisees. Another is the rift between Orthodoxy today and the Jewish Reform movement, the philosophical if not the organizational home of liberal Jews. This is the group that has supported every Progressive issue and that actively criticizes Israel from the USA. But these major philosophical and theological differences, while very destructive, are few in number.

The New Testament has a lot to say about the Sadducee-Pharisee argument; the Jewish viewpoint can be found at https://www.chabad.or/library/article_cdo/aid/953558/jewish/The-Four-Factions.htm and https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid-2832612/jewish/Pharisees-and-Sadducees-Jewish-Factions-During-the-Hasmonean-period.htm .

ii Unfortunately, on-line translation apps such as Google Translate often use כשל where other words would be more appropriate, using it in the softer uses of "failure" in English, weakening its original meaning.

iii https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/failure

From someone who grew up in those days, here's the true scoop:

Housing

1) Yes indeed! Housing was available and cheap. That housing, though, consisted of homes that today's young adults will not consider:

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Some tracts were built at 600 sq. ft, on 1/6 or 1/8 of an acre lots, built on slabs (no basement), no attic, one bathroom, two tiny bedrooms, no garage or driveway.

• Higher class homes were 850-1200 sq ft, 1 1/2 baths, two or three bedrooms, on a slab with no attic. Probably had a driveway, no garage.

• Painting was about the only household upgrade that was universal. My folks redid the kitchen in our 40-year-old house when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade. It was unusual to rip out the countertop and floor to replace them, but my folks did it. I remember red linoleum used for both the countertop and the floor, but I do not remember if that was before or after the reno.

• My mother got slipcovers for the furniture when I was about 10. New furniture? Once in a lifetime; otherwise it was just reupholstered (replacing the old fabric) or, the cheaper option, covered with covers custom-made to fit.

• Our refrigerator had a "freezer" that was just barely large enough for a half-gallon of ice cream and a tray of ice cubes.

• Gas kitchen ranges were lit with matches.

• My aunt in Scarsdale (one of the most upscale communities in Westchester County, just north of New York City) and her husband bought a 3-bedroom home with a den or maid's room, 3 1/2 bathrooms (one what is now called en suite), eat-in kitchen, probably about 1500 sq. ft.; two-car garage, on 1/3 acre. It was considered a deluxe home on a large lot.

Automobiles

Cars, yes! Every family had one.

• 1, not 2 or 3. Translation: one, not two and not three.

• Probably a 2-door sedan

• Probably 6 cylinders

• Parked on the street or, if wealthier, on a single-wide driveway. Possibly parked in a garage.

Stay-at-home moms

These lazy women didn’t have to work. They just:

• Washed, dried, and put away the dishes by hand--no dishwasher

• Hung laundry out to dry because she probably did not have a dryer. If she did, it was very expensive to use and was mostly used in bad weather. My dad built a rack that was suspended from the kitchen ceiling and could be lowered to hang and unhang clothes, then pulled up so the hanging clothes were not too badly in the way.

• Cleaned with a broom, mop, and carpet sweeper because she probably didn't have a vacuum cleaner and almost certainly didn't have household help.

• Ironed most of the clothes because wool wasn't washable, and cotton and linen came out of the washer or off the clothesline badly wrinkled. Before steam irons, everything was sprinkled with water, rolled up and set aside for the water to have time to penetrate. Cotton and linen need water plus heat to break the chemical bonds that create wrinkles. Synthetics like polyester and acrylics had not been invented and nylon was just beginning to be blended with other fibers.

Clothing

As a child I had two school outfits (three if we were lucky), two play outfits, and a "Sunday dress" (only being Jewish it was a "Sabbath" dress).

• We changed into our play clothes as soon as we got home from school so that the school clothes could be worn once or twice more that week.

• Most of my clothes had once belonged to my friend Lynn's cousin Toby. They were mostly brown and yellow, my two worst colors. Tough--they were free. And PS, I had to keep them in good condition so that my sister could wear them.

• Prettiest party dress I ever had came from a consignment shop, where my mother was a regular shopper.

Obesity

A woman I knew well didn't like wearing hand-me-downs. As an adult, she told me that she had quickly figured that if she indulged her love of food and became chubby (as we euphemistically called fat in those days) she could have new clothes. PS, the medical examiner attributed her death at age 45 to morbid obesity.

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Paying for College

The scourge that is student loans and grants did not yet exist. People went to college by paying for it each semester.

• Starting around age 12 many/most kids began working.

  • mowing lawns

  • weeding gardens

  • shoveling snow

  • collecting bottles and returning them for the deposit

  • babysitting

  • selling something. John S. in my neighborhood had an uncle in the poultry business. John bought eggs wholesale from him and sold them door-to-door.

• Lots of kids got regular part-time jobs as soon as they were old enough--in my community, 16; for hardship with permission at 15.

• "College" was community college or state college, with the student living at home and working part-time.

• Many kids went to college at night so they could work during the day. Many worked full-time and took 8 years to finish a four-year degree.

• The dorms I lived in for two years consisted of large rooms shared by two or three students, with toilet rooms and shower rooms down the hall and shared by everyone. There were girls' dorms and boys' dorms and never the twain would meet.

• After I transferred to another college, I shared a 1-bedroom apartment with another woman. I slept in the living room on a pull-out sofa. We shared a bathroom and kitchen, and she used the living room during the day.

Entertainment and Vacations

• Vacations often consisted of two weeks camping at the nearest state park.

  • staying in a canvas tent from the army surplus store. It probably had a strong chemical odor from the waterproofing.

  • eating hard-cooked eggs and canned stew, the cans opened and stood in the campfire. Camp stoves were new and expensive, really only for the elites.

• "Traveling" meant a road trip to Grandpa's, three hours away on a two-lane, twisty road that made at least one in the car car-sick.

• Movie matinees (the noon or 2 pm showing) were often half-price, so that's when we went.

• Bowling was a common activity

• Team sports for little kids didn't exist. Competitions were rare. Mostly we played on the streets or in neighborhood yards, often creating our own rules.

Entertainment meant three black-and-white stations on a TV--if you lived in a modern, metropolitan area. Many areas didn't get television until around 1960. Cable didn't come in until much later.

Shopping

Credit cards did not exist. Store cards existed but were limited to a particular shop and had to be paid off immediately. People bought what they could afford.

Conclusion

Are you still so sure that people's lives were so much better in the old days? Words can have many meanings and interpretations, and many writers are gifted in twisting them to make you think something that is not true, or not by any means the whole truth. Before you get jacked up and angry, remember that you may well have been manipulated. Look for the whole truth, not the flashy, upsetting news provided by someone trying to sell you an idea or a product.

For this week I meant to post something about positivity and negativity in messages about learning, but due to the holiday of Shavuoth did not have time to complete it. Hopefully that will be published in my next issue of TanteHannaWrites.com/adults.

As I see it, there are two major reasons Jews have survived and thrived 3,000 years of attempts to destroy us. The first, simply, is that God made us the eternal people so we cannot be destroyed completely. The second, more in tune with today’s secular world, is because Jewish culture leads to success. Fundamentally this second idea is a subset of the first, since God gave us His laws and set out the ways society should be set up and run for maximum success, which we religious Jews have done to the best of our ability. The information of how to do this is there for any group that wants to follow it, but none has adopted the civil laws as a whole.

One way that Jewish culture encourages success is, I believe, our comfort with contradiction and discord.

Embracing Discord as a Factor in Learning

A common aphorism among us is, "Two Jews, three opinions." A joke: two men go to the rabbi with a dispute. One man gives his side of the problem and how the matter should be resolved. The rabbi thinks for a moment and says, "You're right." Then the other man gives his side. After some thought, the rabbi says, "You're right." The two men say "How can we both be right?" The rabbi replies, "That's also right."

The Talmudⁱ is the compilation of a thousand years of the Jewish oral tradition that was put into written form in the 2nd century CE.ⁱⁱ Much of the Talmud is composed of discussions and even heated arguments between or among Torah scholars as to what something means or how something should be interpreted. An example is the relationship of Shammai and Hillel, whose opinions often differed. A famous case is over Hanukkah candles. Shammai said all should be lit the first night, the number diminishing through the holiday. Hillel said that the number of lights should increase.ⁱⁱⁱ Hillel's opinion was accepted.

The Talmud records the many discussions and says, "The law resides with..." whichever one's argument was chosen by the Sanhedrin, the leaders at that time.

As we Jews see it, there are many ways of understanding and being. Everyone's perspective is different. And excepting those that contradict God’s laws, we can learn from all of them.

The Ten Commandments

The Ten Commandments are basic truths, laws that cannot be abrogated: honor your parents, do not worship idols, do not steal, murder, lie in front of a judge or through gossip, covet what your neighbor has, do not commit adultery. Without these basic laws people live in chaos.

There are other laws, based on the Ten Commandments, that make the most rudimentary society more civil: laws about property rights (tort law) and those about violence against others, for example.

Even within these groups there is difference of opinion. When is killing another person murder? Is it ever justified? If so, when and under what conditions? Did these particular circumstances justify it in this particular case?

The famous statement "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" appears three times in the Five Books of Moses.^iv But, as I have mentioned in previous posts, those famous Five Books are notes that Moses took during the 40 days he was on Mt. Sinai learning Torah directly from God. The full meaning, fleshing out those brief words, is found in the Talmud. And...there is no one, simple, straightforward answer to what those words mean, because (I hate to write these electrified words) context matters.

Additionally, since the First Temple was destroyed and the Ten Tribes of Israel were removed to Babylon and then dispersed,^v there has been no central Jewish authority, religious or secular. Local rabbis form their own individual courts to adjudicate issues of Jewish law that come up in their jurisdictions. Rabbis who answer questions about the application of law also apply local realities.

The use of glass dishes is an example. According to the kosher laws, glass can technically be used for both meat and milk. In the USA, a rich nation where today a 1,000-square-foot home is considered too small for families with three or more children, most Orthodox rabbis say that while having only one set of glass drinking glasses is permitted, two sets--one for use with dairy meals and one with meaty meals--is much better. However, using one set of glass dishes for both meat and milk is not acceptable.

Israel, however, is a far poorer country. When, for example, Moroccan Jews were expelled from that land and came to Israel they were housed in quickly-built settlements where each family had a one- or two-room apartment and a large garden. Some of my friends' youngest years were spent in 200 square foot apartments with seven or ten siblings. Today, even with the booming economy before the current war, I have two married friends, in two-income families, who live in 900-square-foot apartments with four children each. Additionally, our defense expenses, the socialist history of the country, and graft have led to a very high cost of living. Many people still live with kitchens smaller than the pantries in a lot of new American homes. The standard of living is far lower than in the USA and many families struggle to pay their bills. Here, rabbis generally approve of using one set of glass dishes for all meals, as long as they are thoroughly washed in between.

Because we Jews are comfortable with ambiguity, it is easier for us to study alternatives with an open mind. This gives us the edge at solving complex problems over people whose minds are more closed.

Unfortunately, the reluctance to consider alternatives is a western value that many secular Jews today have adopted. A large percentage espouse progressive political views even though those demonize Israel and the Jewish people.

What about Israel's Civil Discord?

Commentators from outside Israel have for years spoken about the civil war that they believe is brewing in Israel. The Left, funded according to the word on the street by George Soros and other progressives from outside, has for many years caused frequent disturbances in this small country. Yet not only is Israel still in one piece, the nation rated 8th happiest in the world--in a time of war. How can this be?

This is because Israelis--Jews particularly, but the feeling rubs off on some non-Jews as well--know that they are a family. Families often disagree, and here in Israel they rarely fall apart. Unlike in the USA, where political discord often decays into the destruction of family relations, Israelis are mostly able to argue furiously while acknowledging that they are still part of a strong family.

Lulav as Metaphor

A lulav is composed of a palm frond, branches of myrtle and willow, and an etrog, known in English as a citron. Without all four species a lulav cannot be used in the Sukkot festival. Among one of the explanations for the composition of the lulav (we thrive on discord, right? So there are many explanations) is that each species represents one type of person. The palm branch has flavor but no odor. Myrtle has a scent but no flavor, Willow has neither, and citron has both. In the same way, different people have different characteristics. The lulav teaches us that all kinds--of vegetation, of humans--are needed to have a complete whole. And so leftists and rightists are both needed to keep the country in balance.

Balance and Discord

Look at what happens when balance is missing: radical Islam is at this time unopposed in the world sphere of influence. As we see from massacres in Kashmir, Bangladesh, Nigeria and other sub-Saharan African nations, and Israel, they have gotten way out of hand. Muslims who might be moderate have no spokesman. The same was true in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, when Hitler and Stalin eliminated their opposition: there was no stopping them.

Until the last ten or fifteen years, most people in the USA espoused free speech, even if they did not completely agree with the principle; and the USA flourished. Increasing polarization has been associated with riots, inflation, an unstable economy, and more. The very foundation of the USA has become shaky, with legislators in some states whispering about seceding from the union.

An appreciation of and habit of argument with the possibility of finding middle ground is necessary for a flourishing society. Judaism, which has survived 3,000 years of attempts to eradicate it, and Israel, which has survived constant violence and many wars in its short existence, are stellar examples of the kinds of societies that are possible when discord is not only permitted, but expected and even sometimes celebrated.

When the world can set its antisemitism aside and start to learn from Israel, it might become much more peaceful.

If only!

i The Talmud is a thousand years of the Jewish oral tradition, compiled in written form in the 2nd century of the common era.

ii C.E. or Common Era is used by Jews instead of A.D., Anno Domini or Year of Our Lord, which refers to Jesus. Likewise, we use BCE, Before the Common Era, instead of BC, Before Christ. Before you get insulted, think about how you'd feel if you had to write after dates AM, meaning after the birth of the founder of Islam.

iiiWeinbach, Mendel, Understanding the dispute between Beit Hillel & Beit Shammai. www.ou.org/holidays/some_talmudic_insights, accessed May 20, 2025.

iv Exodus 21:24; Leviticus 24:20, and Deuteronomy 19:21.

vLost, perhaps, to the western world; but many groups of Jews from central Asia, expelled from those Muslim countries when Israel was established, trace their roots to those tribes. And the Bene Menashe people of northeastern India are descended from the tribe of Menashe and still maintain some customs and laws from First Temple days.

Today there are massive demonstrations of masked and kaffiya-clad participants in major cities and on university campuses. Many conservative Christians, a group that used to be supporters of Israel, have now joined in the vitriol against us. Attacks against Jews are played down or ignored in the mainstream media.

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In schools and colleges across the USA, Canada and Europe, Jews are seen as colonialist invaders of Israel and as the root of evil. As a result, many Jewish children, including the very young, are confused and distressed. At the same time, many parents are still stuck in the past, when the western world still felt guilt about the Holocaust, and antisemitism was not tolerated in polite society.

I believe that as part of their core sense of identity, Jewish children need to know two critical facts: first, that they are Jews, descendants of the people whose moral code formed the basis of the civilization of the western world; and second, that there are lots of bad people in the world, and some of those don't like Jews.

Very young children do not need any bigger explanation that that, but that much is, I believe, critical for their healthy development.

Identity and Differences

When children are presented with information that they are not cognitively able to comprehend, they will probably set it aside. When the day comes that that information is important, or when it is presented again at a time when they can comprehend, they have an Aha! moment that goes something like, "I knew there was more to it. Glad to have that confirmed, glad to have more info on that subject." Because the new information fills a blank that was already in the child's mind, heⁱ is curious about it, but not shocked by it. It answers a question that he did not realize he had, but that had been put in his mind by the "developmentally inappropriateⁱⁱ" information that had been filed away months or years before.

Learning information about one's identity when young is important for any child. Issues faced by racially different children and those with obvious differences, such as physical anomalies or the need for adaptive equipment like braces or wheelchairs, are frequently the subject of discussion in the media. For Jewish children in the USA and other western countries, as well as for adopted children, their uniqueness may be almost invisible. However, it is no less true, and like any difference from the norm it may open them to unique challenges.

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Because information about Jewish identity tends to be politically charged, I also looked at information about adoptees that I believe applies to our children. In the quotes below, please substitute “Jewish” for “adoption.”

"Talking about adoption early on means that when your child asks questions about who they are, you’ll already have the topic...incorporated into the conversation. It will be as natural as your connection with them and an essential part of their understanding of themselves.ⁱⁱⁱ"

"...adoption for adoptees is part of their life story just as much as any other of the many characteristics that make any person the unique individual that he or she is. Being adopted is not and should not be treated as something to hide, something negative, or something that makes an adoptee less than ... By withholding this sort of information, adoptive parents are unintentionally communicating that their child’s adoption is bad in some way, and this is not good for a child at any age. ^iv"

Amanda L. Baden, an adoptee and a Ph.D. researcher, found that adoptees for whom the fact of their adoption was a basic part of their identity fared far better in life than those who learned later. She wrote, "Results indicated that those who learned of their adoptions from age 3 and older reported more distress and lower life satisfaction when controlling for the amount of time adoptees have known of their adoption statuses and their use of coping strategies.^v"

In 1999 P.F. Langman wrote^vi that compared to the past, "...Contemporary U.S. Jews are...less conscious of their heritage and more prone to internalized anti-Semitism." In other words, ignoring Judaism as an important part of a child's identity may lead to Jewish antisemitism.

A friend who adopted twins over 30 years ago told me that her boys, who have known since infanthood that they are Jewish and adopted, are comfortable both with their adoption and their Jewishness, in spite of their non-Jewish appearance. But, she continued, the children of a Jewish friend who did not tell her children they were adopted until they were approaching school age have had many identity problems.

“Protecting” Actually Hurts Kids

Antisemitic incidents have always been common, but they have not been discussed. After the Holocaust it became uncouth to mention Jew-hatred. A fascinating study on Jewish identity states, "Although all participants were aware of discrimination against Jews, only some had experienced it personally, and many seemed reluctant to label it as such.”^vii

Jewish culture is different from mainstream American culture. Even completely assimilated families have customs that vary from the norm, regardless of the economic or social stratum in which they live. In general,

• We are less likely to push our children into competitive sports

• We are more likely to stress reading and academic success

• We are more likely to have advanced degrees

• We are less likely to have large family reunions or to decorate graves on Memorial Day

• Even in assimilated or mixed families that celebrate Christmas and Easter, we are likely to do so with tension and without the focus on family traditions

• We are less likely to go to dance clubs

• “To party” to most Jews does not mean to get drunk

• We have our own holidays

• We may be reluctant to schedule things on Friday night or Saturday, prime times for socializing

• There is also, in virtually every community, gossip where any differences between individuals or families are spread like the 24-hour flu, even to and by children.

In other words, even our young children know that there is a difference between them and others, and the others know it as well.

Non-Jewish children are often hurtful, sometimes totally innocently, sometimes repeating something they heard, and sometimes out of malice. A child whose basic identity is, "I am a Jew, being Jewish is great, and some bad people won't like me because of that," is much less likely to feel shame and guilt when faced with those kinds of experiences.

A child who has not been vaccinated against antisemitism has no coping mechanism for the moments when those incidents occur. They occurred 30 years ago when antisemitism was rarely discussed, and they occur at greater frequency, and possibly greater vitriol, today.

Betrayal

As a Jewish storyteller in the 1980s and 90s, I often gave workshops in telling one's personal stories. Whenever I shared an antisemitic incident from my childhood, children responded with incidents from their own lives. Almost without exception children began by saying, “I never told anyone this before.” They ended with two questions: “Do you think this was antisemitism?” and “Do you think maybe I’m not responsible for this happening, that I didn’t do something to deserve it?”

Telling children that an incident at school was not antisemitic when it might have been is hurtful; repeated assertions in the face of repeated, unprovoked negative experiences can be devastating. Denial of the truth is a lie. When the truth finally comes out, children who have been lied to lose trust in the teller. The adult has betrayed them.

Betrayal has been called "a psychological wound that cuts deep into our sense of security and self worth.^viii" Trust may take many years to rebuild; the child may never recover completely. The lie can forever shatter the parent-child relationship.

Many of our children carry an appalling burden of guilt for having “caused” an anti-Semitic slur or attack by another child. Parents need to be honest and not whitewash difficult incidents. Unfortunately they are often used as occasions to berate children for rudeness, shyness or other failings that parents who want to avoid reality may project on them. The moments should be used as teachable moments about the harsh realities of life instead.

Religious schools, including Sunday Schools, should teach children about antisemitism, even though it might reflect badly on the heritage of one parent in a mixed marriage. In 1992 I often gave a storytelling program about the Inquisition and expulsion from Spain in 1492. At one Sunday School I was berated by the same principal who had hired me specifically to tell a story about the Inquisition. By telling that the Inquisition was a function of the Catholic Church hurt several children from Catholic-Jewish marriages, she told me. But reality is real. What safer place was there for children from those mixed marriages to learn about the Inquisition from a Jewish perspective than Sunday School?

Children need safe places to discuss their experiences. Even in a mixed marriage, a child may experience antisemitic behavior from young relatives on the "other" side. When something happens, the part-Jewish child is likely to be blamed by his parents, who imagine that their union has been fully accepted by the extended family, but who in actuality have their heads in the proverbial sand.

Conclusion

Jewish children in the USA and other western countries may be surrounded by Jew-hatred, overheard on the news if not experienced personally. I strongly recommend that parents include mention of antisemitism in conversation, and even mention casually to very young children, "Some bad people just don't like Jews." I say "casually" --with a shrug--because the less important antisemitic behavior seems to you, the less personally young children will take slurs thrown at them.

Include discussions of antisemitism, with more detail and history, as children are able to handle the information. Avoid graphic details as long as possible. Children take to comments such as "I'll tell you more when you are older" better than denial.

I felt passionately about this subject thirty years ago, when antisemitism was practically a forbidden topic. I feel more strongly about it today, when it is everywhere. Please inoculate your children against feeling ashamed of their Jewishness by ensuring that it, and the understanding that there are bad people who just happen to hate Jews, are parts of their basic sense of identity. This will help them deal with this harsh reality of life with confidence.

i I am using "he" because it is simpler than "he or she" or "s/he," and I am not comfortable using "they" for a singular child. This use of the pronoun "he" conforms with hundreds of years of English language usage. It in no way should be interpreted as excluding or minimizing females.

ii See my essay, "Developmentally appropriate--or not," published April 25, 2025, at https://www.tantehannawrites.com/p/developmentally-appropriate-or-not

iii Caldwell, M., Adoption Conversations: How & When to Tell a Child They're Adopted. Lifetime adoption.com, May 15, 2024, https://lifetimeadoption.com/adoptivefamilies-how-and-when-to-tell-a-child-they-are-adopted/, accessed May 6, 2025. Information in square brackets was added by me.

iv When Should I Tell My Child He's Adopted? Gladney Center for Adoption, Adoption.org, Feb. 27, 2020, https://adoption.org/tell-child-hes-adopted, accessed May 5, 2025. Information in square brackets added by me.

v Baden, AL, Shadel, D, Bates, TA, Delaying Adoption Disclosure: A survey of Late Discovery Adoptees, Journal of Family Issues, Vol. 40:9, May 14, 2019, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0192513X19829503, accessed May 6, 2025.

vi Langman, P. F. (1999). Jewish issues in multiculturalism: A handbook for educators and clinicians. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, quoted in Friedman M, Blustein D.L., and Friedlander, M., Toward an Understanding of Jewish Identity: A Phenomenological Study," Journal of Counseling Psychology, Janurary 2005, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232418315_Toward_an_Understanding_of_Jewish_Identity_A_Phenomenological_Study, accessed May 6, 2025.

vii ibid.

viii Neurolaunch Editorial Team, Betrayal: Exploring the Complex Emotional Experience, October 18, 2024, https://neurolaunch.com/is-betrayal-an-emotion/, accessed May 6, 2025.

Education and Competence

Those of us born or conceived before the end of World War II--before the baby boom--grew up knowing that life was difficult. While intact nuclear families were the norm, we all knew children whose lives had been disrupted by wars and immigration. We grew up with no expectation that life would be easy.

We attended schools where we were taught patriotism without politics. I remember during Eisenhower's presidential campaign against Adlai Stevenson we talked about it a little. We certainly were not encouraged to take a stand for or against a candidate. We memorized poetry, the times tables, the 100 Math Facts, and certain basic mathematical formulae, such as how to figure the area of a square, and we had crafts projects that required us to think and problem-solve in different ways.

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Then, in the 1980's, a brand-new theory was promoted for early childhood education (birth through age 8). The first generation raised under this concept became helicopter parents, hovering over their children to protect them, discouraging competition ("losing is bad for self-esteem") and requiring a trophy for every child. Their children have grown up so psychologically weak that they need safe spaces and trigger warnings in their colleges. Ideas that contradict their own terrify them.

What destructive educational method created this fiasco?

Background of Developmentally Appropriate Practice

Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP) is an academic construct first formulated by Sue Bredekamp, Ph.D., of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). Her book, called Developmentally Appropriate Practice, was first published in 1983. The book is now in its fourth edition.

To differentiate DAP from traditional educational methods, the NAEYC also developed the term “Developmentally Inappropriate Practice (DIP).” This was applied to methods including rote learning and memorization. Ignoring all the applications when memorizing is quick and effective, such as learning the multiplication tables or the names of the continents, and calling everything except DAP "developmentally inappropriate" demonized traditional methods of learning.

In 1983 the NAEYC was the foremost organization for daycare and preschool educators. Helping set policy has always been a cornerstone of their mission. Dr. Bredekamp led its accreditation department, creating the foundation for accreditation standards for early childhood educators and schools. This ensured that Developmentally Appropriate Practice would become entrenched in the educational system.

NAEYC's policies have been used by governments of all levels in developing curriculum and licensure requirements. Today its mission statement focuses on the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion—the DEI that has been discredited as being divisive and contrary to meritocracy.ⁱ However, their basic principles are fundamental to the organization and its practices.

What Is DAP?

Jean Piaget (1896-1980), a brilliant Swiss scientist, identified the developmental stagesⁱⁱ that children go through. Today his work “is still an inspiration in fields like psychology, sociology, education, epistemology, economics and law.”ⁱⁱⁱ Piaget’s work began as he observed his own three children. His principles are based on observation, not theory, and give wide developmental ranges, such as “birth to 2 years” and “ages 2 to 7.”

“Developmentally appropriate education,” on the other hand, is the theory that educators know what is appropriate for children based on “research, content areas, age, social-emotional learning, families, culture, and school communities.”^iv

Although the theory explains that teachers apply these principles, it does not explain how they can learn enough about each child’s family and culture to tailor education to each individual child, or how they would have the time to do so.

The theory was meant to improve educational outcomes of disadvantaged minorities, but like many progressive concepts this desire was poisoned by an underlying belief that minority children were less capable of learning than more advantaged: that their lack of school success must be because of innate differences in capability rather than poverty and a high rate of unwed motherhood.

Realistically, no teacher of a classroom full of students can possibly tailor education to each child’s level of social-emotional learning, family background, and culture. Despite the appealing academic jargon, in practice DAP means that children are introduced to information that NAEYC researchers have determined is suitable for children at each age.

The fact is that no one can identify what, how, or how much any child understands. Besides innate and cultural differences between people, everyone's capacity fluctuates hour to hour. If mental energy never flagged, Starbucks would be out of business.

What’s Wrong with DAP

The concept of "developmental appropriateness" is obviously nonsense because it assumes that professors can determine what is and is not appropriate for all children at all times and at different ages.

But this is not the worst.

DAP’s basic concept is shocking: challenging material hurts children. It's premise is that children flourish when they succeed at a task. While this is true, it is not the whole story. DAP assumes that struggling and “failing” discourages children and thus is destructive. This appears to be related to the failed “give everyone a trophy: philosophy.^v Thus in DAP classrooms, material is presented at such a level and in such a way that children do not fail. This is the very definition of “dumbing down.”

The belief that difficulty is harmful to children's learning is patently ridiculous. If it were true, no child would ever learn to walk. Anyone who has spent time with a young toddler knows that only after great effort and repeated failures are children able to walk securely. They are self-motivated in the struggle to walk. They do it because they want to, not because they are told to.

The same is true with children learning to catch or throw a ball. When playing catch with a parent, most children do not want to quit, no matter how badly they handle the ball. When after repeated failure they catch the ball, their joy is written all over their bodies.

The belief that children should be surrounded by success is the mindset under which red marking pens became taboo.^vi The belief is that papers marked with red may make school children feel badly about themselves. The same is true of giving failing grades to children who haven’t learned.

Developmental appropriateness steals natural curiosity from children because, in the formal educational setting at least, they are not exposed to things that they cannot comprehend intellectually, nor to tasks that children of their age rarely (if ever) can master.

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Never having experienced negative experiences or consequences, many of today's young adults are psychologically weak. They need trigger warnings before hearing something that upsets them and "safe spaces" where negative information will not intrude.

Those who do not learn to make mistakes are not equipped for adult life, which includes making mistakes and failing. This can have tragic consequences. MIT, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and other elite colleges have higher than normal suicide rates. One reason, perhaps the major one, is that young people who were best in their high schools are competing for the first time with other students who were the best. That means some fail. And if it is for the first time, it can be devastating.

In DAP, failure became a monster to be avoided at all costs, instead of something that happens to everyone and can often be overcome by practice and persistence. Perhaps more importantly, the term “failure” is often used when the softer and more realistic term, “mistake,” could have been used. Mistakes are made in the course of completing a task, and they can be corrected. Failing is final.

Children think differently from adults

Anyone with experience with infants knows that babies start learning before birth: a newborn recognizes his mother’s voice.^vii Tiny babies learn how their fingers and toes work and that they can bring them to their mouths. But a child's understanding is not like an adult’s. A young child understand the here-and-now. Because of this, at a very young age children know that there are things they don’t understand. That's the mindset behind the exasperating question, "Why?" Their brains become filled with words that they know older people understand.

DAP and Student Apathy

Children are interested in learning more when they know there is more to learn. An example: parents of an 8-year-old boy with school issues sent him to private sewing lessons with me. He said he was not interested in sewing. Then I showed him some quilts I had made, and together we looked through a magazine of modern quilts. Suddenly he was excited by the possibilities of color, shape, and sewing. He needed to know there was more to learn before he wanted to learn more.

Without the dissonance between knowing something and knowing there is more to know about it, children have little curiosity. Children raised in developmentally appropriate classrooms are shielded from “complicated" and “difficult” information and projects which they cannot complete. In their immature minds, they are left with nothing to strive for.

No wonder they are apathetic in school.

A Different Educational Philosophy

In 1991 I studied a very different style of teaching, Workshop Way^(TM). After I completed an intensive seminar in using Workshop Way for preschool, I sat down with the Workshop Way preschool standards and those of the NAEYC. I wrote a ten-page comparison of the two methods. Unfortunately it was lost in one of my moves. But I remember the huge difference in the systems.

While DAP limits children's access to challenges, Workshop Way gives children a lot of freedom to try. One of its core beliefs is that mistakes are how we learn. Another is that everyone has their own time-clock for learning: we all learn at our own speed.

These maxims are repeated to and by the children until they are firmly established within the children's minds. It creates children who are curious and not discouraged when their first or second attempt at a task is not successful. And slow students feel comfortable learning at their own pace.

When I had a sewing school, I had the "mistakes" maxim printed on a sign that hung in my classroom. When children got frustrated, I pointed to the sign. It freed children to learn.

I recently saw on Facebook a discussion on student apathy. One teacher wrote that one should say to students, Don't get discouraged by failure. But the stand-out words are "don't," "discouraged," and "failure." That statement projects a totally different belief about trial and error than Mistakes are how we learn, where the stand-out concept is "we learn."

Developmentally Appropriate Practice removes failure because it is negative, and the theory is built on the premise that teachers must protect children from the negative. The theory misses the point. Children learn faster and better when the fear of failure is removedwhile their curiosity and creativity are encouraged.

Developmentally Appropriate Practice Today

Today, NAEYC's focus is on diversity, equity and inclusion. The webpage makes this clear simply by the prevalence of nonwhite children and adults. Titles of its resources makes the point unmistakeable. But there are many troubling things about the webpage.

I studied this method back in the late 1980s when I considered returning to graduate school for a second degree in early childhood education (my master's degree is in elementary education). The importance of NAEYC was one reason I decided against it; I knew I could not participate in a field that was based so heavily on what was clearly a faulty philosophy.

When I first went onto the NAEYC web page this year, about six weeks after President Trump declared war on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, I found that NAEYC's website is hiding important information. For example, the page “Topics in Developmentally Appropriate Practice" relies heavily on ellipses (…) showing that text is missing; the paragraphs as written are meaningless. When a nonmember clicks on the topic to get details, they find they cannot access the page.

One would think that NAEYC would want interested people to learn details of what they stand for. But only paid members can access this information without buying a book. One cannot even obtain membership information without first creating an account with more personal information than normally required on websites.

I suspect that NAEYC is deliberately hiding information to keep it from the Department of Government Efficiency. They undoubtedly have obtained federal funds that would be ended if DOGE discovered they still preach DEI.

Because so much information is hidden, I cannot tell whether the standards are as poor as they were 45 years ago, and I cannot be as explicit as I would like. But there is absolutely no evidence on their website that the organization has given up Developmentally Appropriate Practice.

Replace DAP

DAP is a practice that should be loudly repudiated and replaced by concepts developed by people who have watched toddlers learn to walk, extrapolating from that the understanding that almost all children try endlessly to succeed at something that they really want. Exposing them to interesting facts and experiences, even or perhaps especially those they cannot comprehend at an adult level, helps develop their innate curiosity. And children with innate curiosity that is not stifled by fear of failure make excellent learners.

i President Trump has taken a firm stand against DEI and I am sure that the new Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, will make ridding the US's education system of this destructive philosophy one of her main concerns.

ii Cherry, K., Piaget’s 4 Stages of Cognitive Development Explained: Background and Key Concepts of Piaget’s Theory, verywell mind, May 1, 2024, https://www.verywellmind.com/piagets-stages-of-cognitive-development-2795457, accessed March 10, 2025.

iii Jean Piaget Society, About Jean Piaget, https://piaget.org/about-piaget/, accessed March 9, 2025.

iv NAEYC Video Series: Joyful, Equitable Learning in Action: Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Action, a 1\37 minute video at

, accessed March 9, 2025.

v This theory appeared around the same time as the "self-esteem" movement, when every child started getting a trophy, regardless of the quality of their performance. I was unable to find the connection between the two theories, but I am sure there was one.

vi Google the term "red marking pens" and you will see many articles on this. It is no wonder that young adults are afraid of failure: they may have never experienced it before. They have no idea how much they know, either, since they were not graded on merit. I once asked a 9th grade sewing student what she had learned from me. I was shocked at her reply: she said that until I taught her to rip out sewing mistakes and redo the seam correctly, she never knew one could actually correct an error.

vii Does my baby recognize me? Yale Baby School, Yale University, https://babyschool.yale.edu/does-my-baby-recognize-me/, accessed March 10, 2025.

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The other day Facebook put in my feed a post, Jewish Crossroads, Jewish Identity in Times of Crisis. The post contained a video with Rachel Goldberg-Polin, mother of the late Hersh, who was killed while a hostage in Gaza. After listening to the small clip on Facebook, I found the complete interview on YouTube and listened to it.

Mrs. Goldberg-Polin has been outspoken in bringing the plight of the hostages to the world stage. But as difficult as it is to be critical of a grieving mother, her comments demand a rebuttal. In order to understand, you need to understand a bit about who she is.

Although from the short Facebook clip I assumed she was not religious, in the long clip she says her faith is important, that she prays daily, and that she keeps our traditions. The family reportedly belongs to an egalitarian congregation in Jerusalem.ⁱ "Egalitarian" means the synagogue does not share the concern for Torah law found in Orthodoxy.

In the long interview Mrs. Goldberg-Polin expresses overt hostility towards several large groups of traditionally observant Jews, blaming them for the government's failure to save the hostages. She speaks as someone who is oblivious to the hundreds of thousands of us who live near the borders of this tiny country and the dangers that we have faced every day, both before and during the war.

Why The War Has To Be About More than Hostages

I've written about many of these things before, but for those who might not remember and those who are new readers, here are some of what those of us living especially close to a border have gone through:

• In the south near Gaza, rocket attacks have been weekly, if not daily, for several years. An example of how we survive under these conditions: a huge reinforced indoor playground in the city of Sderot is in constant use by parents who cannot safely let their children play outside.

• At the beginning of the war, my community was blacked out briefly (all streetlights shut off) and we were instructed to shut our shutters and turn off all our lights because there was suspicion of terrorists in the area. This happened only once and only lasted about 15 minutes, but it was absolutely terrifying occurring, as it did, only a day or two after the Oct. 7 massacre.

• It was discovered by our troops that Hezbollah had detailed plans of carrying out the same kind of attack in the north that Hamas carried out on October 7. Use your imagination to guess how secure we now feel in our homes.

• Within a week or two of moving here, I was told to keep bottled water, some nonperishable food, and a strong flashlight available in case of trouble.

• Newcomers are also instructed what to do in case of a rocket attack alarm, including finding our nearest shelter if we do not have our own secure room.

• Every year information specialists from the army speak to every elementary school about how to respond to emergencies--fires, earthquakes, rocket attacks, and two other possible disasters.

• During the war we were frequently subject to missile/rocket attacks when we had 5 seconds in which to find shelter and wait ten minutes (for shrapnel from the Iron Dome's destruction of the rocket to fall to the ground). The house next to a friend's home received a direct hit from a missile itself. A vacant lot two doors over the other way remains from where a house was destroyed by a missile during the last Hezbollah-Israel confrontation. (The view from my friend's home is spectacular, but the border with Lebanon runs along the top of this gorgeous ridge.)

The sounds of artillery reverberated through the mountains, sometimes many times a day, during the worst of the Hezbollah war. We still hear occasional booms.

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Those of us near the border understand that heartbreaking as the truth is, the well-being of hundreds of thousands must take priority over the suffering of a few. For millenia, Jewish sages have been very clear that while we should ransom those kidnapped and held for money, we should not do so if it is likely that the ransom price will be too high, or if it will only encourage further kidnapping.

Leftist governments have made sure that most Israelis (those whose heads are not stuck in their politics) understand the wisdom of these ancient decisions. Just one example: about 13 years ago, the late Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of the October 7 massacre, was freed from an Israeli prison where he was serving a life sentence for terrorism. He was part of a massive prisoner release in exchange for one (yes, one) hostage. This winter, nearly 2,000 terrorists were released from prisonⁱⁱ as part of the deal that secured the release of the handful of hostages freed by Hamas.

Some of the freed terrorists had been jailed for their involvement in the bus bombings that occurred throughout Israel in the 1990s, killing and maiming thousands. Shortly after the release of the bombers this winter, several buses were bombed. Only a 12-hour error saved lives: the bombs were accidentally set for 9 pm rather than 9 am. Choosing to protect the many instead of the few is part of Jewish law, as painful as this may be.

While hostile to most traditional Jewish groups, Mrs. Goldberg-Polin is especially outspoken in her dislike of Religious Zionists because of their role in supporting the government's position: that defeating Hamas and Hezbollah is the most important goal of the war. The Religious Zionists, whose young men and women make up a disproportionately high percentage of combat troops, have consequently suffered the largest number of soldier deaths and injuries.

A high proportion of Jews who have chosenⁱⁱⁱ to live near the borders are Religious Zionists. They believe it is important to strengthen the Jewish presence throughout Israel. The northern border region, where I live, is home to many Muslim and Christian Arabs, Circassians, Druze, and others. Here, we live, work, and shop peacefully together.

The Clip That Triggered Me

Here is the short video clip that appeared on Facebook, transcribed by me. Speaking of the hostages Mrs. Goldberg-Polin says:

"...It almost sounds like a broken record when we say, 'They're out of time, and time is running out.' It is true. They are out of time, and time is running out. And we have been saying that for 545 days, and every single day it's true. And I just. The thought I've been feeling, what is it this morning? What is it? What is this sensation? I feel dread, I feel dreadful in the most literal sense of the word. I feel full of all the dread that everyone is excited about Pesach. Everyone's excited about the holiday of Passover that's next week. This holiday that commemorates freedom. Freedom from bondage. And the absolute inappropriateness of commemorating this holiday with 59 beloved human beings, 24 of whom are in active bondage, in shackles, starving, being tortured, while we're thinking that we're going to be sitting around a table, singing songs and drinking wine [said in a sing-song, sarcastic way], just feels absolutely perverse to me."

Are we Jews unfeeling party animals to whom the hostages mean nothing, to whom the holiday commemorating the seminal moment in the creation of the Jewish people is nothing but an excuse to get drunk and sing stupid songs? This is just what we need: another outspoken Jew with a huge platform telling the world what useless, selfish, horrible people we and our religion are.

Passover: What is it?

Many years ago I heard this: "The cornerstone of Christianity is, 'Jesus died for your sins.' The cornerstone of Islam is, 'Convert or die.' And the cornerstone of Judaism is, 'God took us (the Jewish people) out of bondage into freedom.'"

Passover is the commemoration of the night that the Angel of Death passed over the homes of the Jews and killed the first-born of the Egyptians. This was a tragedy of unbelievable proportion that led the Pharaoh to let the Jewish slaves leave, and led the Egyptian people to give to the Jews gold, silver, jewels, and other valuables. These were later donated to build the Mishkan^iv, the traveling tabernacle that was God's dwelling place on earth (see my story, Becoming Family). But it is far more than a mere recital of ancient history.

At the Passover seder, the story of the Exodus is read from a book called the Haggadah. The Ten Plagues are recited. Unlike Palestinian Arabs, who danced in the streets when word of the October 7 massacre reached them, religious Jews do not rejoice at the defeat of their enemies. One example of a place where mourning the deaths of our enemies is institutionalized is in the Haggadah, which directs us to remove a bit of wine from our goblet as each plague is mentioned. While there are many reasons for this, one is that our joy cannot be complete because of the suffering of the Egyptian people from the plagues which culminated in deaths of every first-born.^v

The seder has been celebrated throughout Jewish history, millennia filled with bleak moments when the Jews were anything but free to live happy lives filled with the drunkenness and carefree attitude of which Goldberg-Polin accuses us.

• My last year's Passover story, Passover Suitcase, is fiction but based on a true story of Jewish persecution in the Soviet Union.

• There are countless stories of Holocaust victims whose normal diet in the camps was a crust of bread and a bit of weak soup, yet they refused to eat the bread during Passover since not eating hametz was the only holiday mitzvah they could keep.

• Several of the freed hostages have reported that keeping the memory of the Passover seder alive, although holding a seder was impossible, gave them courage to continue living in spite of starvation, shackles, and torture.

The message of the holiday, that God frees the Jews and brings us from bondage to freedom, is eternal. Time is cyclic. The one sure thing is that everything changes. “What goes around, comes around.” ”FAFO.” The Soviet Union, which prohibited Jewish practice, lasted about 70 miserable years--and ended. Today Jewish communities thrive in many European cities that less than 100 years ago were places of mass Jewish deportation and death. The concentration camps ended; many survivors made their way to the United States, Canada, Australia, and Israel, where their descendants raise strong Jewish families.

Yes there is bondage, says the Seder, and it is followed by freedom. As the Haggadah says:

• "This is what has stood by our fathers and us! For not just one alone has risen against us to destroy us, but in every generation they rise against us to destroy us; and the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hand!"

• And later: "Thus it is our duty to thank, to laud, to praise...the One who did all these miracles for our fathers and for us. He took us from slavery to freedom, from sorrow to joy, and from mourning to festivity, and from deep darkness to great light, and from bondage to redemption. Let us therefore recite before Him Halleluyah, Praise G-d!"

• Near the end: You have redeemed us from Egypt, You have freed us from the house of bondage, You have fed us in famine and nourished us in plenty; You have saved us from the sword and delivered us from pestilence, and raised us from evil and lasting maladies. Until now Your mercies have helped us, and Your kindnesses have not forsaken us; and do not abandon us, L‑rd our G‑d, forever!

Here's the truth

My American Jewish friends (as well as many non-Jews) are praying for the release of the hostages. They cried when Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas were returned to us in coffins. When Biden stopped the shipment of materiel needed by our army, they dug deeply into their pockets to provide what was needed. Some voted Republican for the first time in their lives because they were appalled at the way the Hamas riots were ignored by the US government. Many American Jews know that Netanyahu cannot simply free the hostages, as Goldberg-Polin seems to think.

Here in Israel, in synagogues and at home we pray daily for the freeing of the hostages and the healing of the bodies and souls of every Israeli injured and/or imprisoned in this war. We have given, and continue to give, our time and money as well as our prayers to support our army and our government at this difficult time. Many of us will undoubtedly repeat what we did last year at Passover: put a sign with the hostage symbol of a yellow ribbon on a chair, and put the empty chair at our seder table to indicate those still missing.

And we will recite the Haggadah, as we have for thousands of years, thanking God for bringing us out of slavery in Egypt, out of Spain and Portugal in the Inquisition, for leaving a remnant of European Jews alive in spite of the best efforts of the Nazis to eradicate them; for freeing the Ethiopian Jews and the Bene Menshe who were persecuted for generations in northeastern India. And we will be reminding God that we trust Him to bring us all--hostages of Hamas, our war widows and orphans, and American and other Jews subjected to vicious anti-semitic attacks, out of the present difficulties as well.

As for Mrs. Goldberg-Polin, she is trashing the elected government of Israel and the Jewish people, condemning us for celebrating the sacred holiday of Passover, and portraying us as thoughtless, shallow drunks. In the complete interview she soundly condemns those of us who are more concerned with the safety of the general population of Israel than in rescuing the small number of hostages, as appalling and tragic as their plight is.

I want to end by pointing out a truth I would never have considered had this woman not defamed the Jewish people and our sacred holiday of Passover. In the Hebrew year 5784, on Simchat Torah, the holiday during which we read the last section of the Torah and then begin reading at the beginning, Hersh Goldberg-Polin participated in a music-and-dance festival.^vi In so doing he desecrated the holy day. Had he celebrated the holiday at his family's synagogue in Jerusalem he would not have been in the path of Hamas, and he would be alive today.

Yes, the hostages should be freed. Yes, the conditions under which they are barely surviving are horrendous. Yes, the bodies of those already dead should be returned to their families for proper burial. But those who attended the music festival made a choice, and sometimes choices have terrible consequences. Those of us whose choice is to provide a Jewish presence at the edges of this tiny land, providing a buffer between our enemies and the majority of the population, also deserve the protection of the government.

And the vast majority of those of us who will celebrate Passover with a seder that includes songs and wine will, at some point in the service, mention the hostages. They are too much on everyone's mind, and their plight is too parallel to the story we will recite, for them to be forgotten.

These are some things that Mrs. Goldberg-Polin, for all her exhortation to the rest of us, seems to have forgotten.

i Danan, D., At the Jerusalem Synagogue..., JTA.org, Sept. 1, 2024. https://www.jta.org/2024/09/01/israel/in-the-courtyard-where-hersh-goldberg-polin-danced-on-oct-6-grief-and-anger-reign-after-his-death

ii Fabian, E., Israel to free up to 1,904 Palestinians in 1st stage of hostage deal, including killers. Times of Israel, Jan. 18, 2025. https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-to-free-1904-palestinians-in-1st-stage-of-hostage-deal-including-killers/

iii Many border communities are now the second- and third-generation homes of Jews from the Arab lands. The first settlers did not choose the location. The Jews from North Africa and the Middle East, called "Sephardim" or "Mizrachi," were largely devout. Having been separated by time and distance and surrounded by Arabs, for hundreds and in some cases thousands of years, their culture was very different from that of the Russian- and eastern-Europe-born leaders of Israel, who were secular socialists. When the Mizrachim were expelled from their homelands and came to Israel, a high percentage were trucked to the border areas. People in my community who were children then remember their families being dumped on a barren hill during the night and housed in tiny, rudimentary shacks. They were badly discriminated against for a generation or two and are still held in disdain by a segment of Israeli society. In many communities, mine included, they are the dominant group. Of the non-Mizrachi religious here, the Religious Zionists predominate.

iv Exodus 12:35-36

v Shurpin, Y., Why Do We Spill Wine at the Seder? Chabad.org, https://www.chabad.org/holidays/passover/pesach_cdo/aid/4347492/jewish/Why-Do-We-Spill-wine-at-the-Seder.htm

vi Gan, Nectar, Hersh Goldberg-Polin: The "happy-go-lucky" Israeli-American who became a symbol of Israel's enduring hostage heartbreak. CNN, updated Sept. 1, 2024, https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/01/middleeast/israel-gaza-hostage-polin-goldberg-profile-intl-hnk/index.html .