Our 4th Anniversary

Last week on the 24th of Tammuz we marked the fourth anniversary of our Aliyah to this small country on the sunny shores of the Eastern Mediterranean.

We are currently in the 9-day period leading to Tisha B’Av, a day of national mourning, the day on which Hashem’s house was destroyed and our nation was exiled, not once but twice. Every calamity that has occurred to us since then is a direct consequence of those events.

When it happened to Hashem’s first house, the exile lasted only 70 years. A group of exiles then returned and rebuilt his house a second time, but the degree of holiness within it was diminished greatly compared to the first.

When Hashem’s second house was destroyed, the great sages who witnessed it wrote it all down in a book, and that book (the Gemara) is widely available today for all of us to read in plain, simple English.

Those eyewitnesses tell us that in the case of his second house, Hashem was far more disappointed with his children. They had done deeds to one another even more evil than the generation of the first destruction; therefore the sages probably guessed that the second exile would be longer than the first.

Seeing these events through the eyes of these eye-witnesses. I don't think they ever expected that this exile would last so long. Heck, the first one was only 70 years, so they probably figured the second one would be like 200 years, not 2000 !!!

Consider this: G-d sent Jeremiah to the people to tell them that he was not happy with their behavior and he would give them plenty of time to mend their ways. After a long time, seeing that not many were flocking to take him up on the offer, G-d warned that trouble would come from the North in the form of the armies of Babylon. So what did the people do? Did they take the warning to heart and repent? Nope, instead, they ran to their arch-enemies the Assyrians and the Egyptians to sign mutual defense pacts in the hope of being able to defeat a Babylonian invasion. What were these people thinking? Did they really think that that would help?

When you read about these events in history books, it’s frequently something like “The First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, and the Second was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE.” They make it sound like, well, just history.

You visualize the evil, nasty Babylonians on the march, on their way to conquer the holy city and to declare war against G-d. Ditto for the Romans. Those naughty, naughty generals, Nebuchadnezzar and Titus, naughty boys they were. For them it was all about wealth, power and glory.

Actually, it turns out that Nebuchadnezzar and Titus didn’t really have much of a choice in the matter. G-d was really, really disappointed with his children. He gave them so much, and they rebelled against him. They worshipped idols, they behaved badly towards one another, and they broke almost every rule in the book. Time and time again he was willing to give second chances, over and over and over. But finally, his children fell so, so low that he needed to send them out of the palace for a while so they would, hopefully, take stock of their deeds and would finally come to understand the purpose for which they were created.

So, G-d looked around at all the nations on Earth to find leaders with the biggest egos, guys like Nebuchadnezzar and Titus, and all he had to do was whisper a suggestion ever so gently into their ears. Although these guys thought they were really great stuff, they were nothing more than G-d’s agents, carrying out his will, and nothing more. Shortly thereafter, they and their empires crumbled and faded away. There is a lesson in that, and it should give us hope.

Berachot 3a: (written around 1800 years ago):

It was taught in a Baraisa: Rabbi Yosi said: I was once traveling on the road and I entered one of the ruins of Jerusalem to pray. Elijah (the prophet) who is remembered for good, came for me at the entrance (to the ruin) until I finished my prayer. After I finished my prayer, Elijah said to me: “Peace unto you my teacher”, and I responded to him: “Peace unto you, my teacher and master.” And he said to me: My son, for what reason did you enter this ruin (and place yourself in a state of danger)? I said to him: To pray. And he said to me: You should have prayed on the road (and not have entered the ruin). And I said to him: (I did not pray on the road for) I was afraid that passerby might interrupt me. And he said to me: (In that case) you should have prayed the short prayer. At that time I learned from Elijah (the following) three things: I learned that one should not enter a ruin, and I learned that one may pray on the road, and I learned that one who prays while on the road should pray the short prayer.

The Artscroll Gemara provides the following comment in the name of R’ Yaakov ibn Chaviv, the original compiler of the Ein Yaakov:

Rabbi Yosi entered the ruin to pray for the rebuilding of the Beit Hamikdash, and prayed so intensely that it caused Elijah the prophet to appear and ask him: My son, for what reason did you enter this ruin? What he was asking is: Why have you delved into this matter with such intensity? Are you perhaps questioning the justice of G-d’s ways? Rabbi Yosi answered: No, I entered only to pray for the quick restoration of the temple. Elijah answered him: You should have prayed on the road, meaning the time has not yet come for the restoration and the return of the exiles. You should therefore have devoted the main part of your prayer to the safe passage of Israel on the long and bitter road of its exile. Rabbi Yosi responded: I was afraid that passerby might interrupt me, meaning I was afraid that the nations of the world, who constantly persecute the people of G-d, would make it impossible for Israel to complete its journey through the exile as faithful servants to him. Elijah responded that even so: You should have prayed the short prayer, meaning our prayers on the matter should be full of intensity, yet short, for if we were to cry in full over all the tragedies of the exile, our lives would be completely consumed to this task and no time and energy would be left to build, support and make Israel flourish despite her many woes.

Returning to the Gemara:

And Elijah said to me: What sound did you hear (when you were) in this ruin? And I said to him: I heard a heavenly voice that was cooing like a dove and saying: Woe to the sons because of whose sins I destroyed my house and burned my temple and exiled them among the nations (of the world). And Elijah said to me: By your life and the life of your head! It is not only at this moment that (the heavenly voice) says this, but on each and every day it says this three times, and not only this, but at the time that (the people of) Israel enter the synagogues and houses of study and respond (in the Kaddish): “May His (G-d’s) great name be blessed", the Holy One, blessed is he, shakes his head and says: Fortunate is the king who is praised this way in his house. What is there for the father who has exiled his sons? And woe to the sons who have been exiled from their father’s table.

So tell me, do you know what exile is?

Am I Xenophobic or What?

We are fast coming up on the first anniversary of Lebanon II, next week I plan to post some of what I wrote in my journal way back when, so stay tuned for a painful stroll down memory lane.

Today, I sense the storm clouds of our next disaster in the making: Sudanese refugees have been crossing into Egypt, crossing the Sinai Desert and trickling over the border into our small country on the sunny shores of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Just go to Google and enter "Israel Sudan Refugees" and you'll see what I mean.

When it began earlier this year, it was just a handful of hearty souls that survived the trek across the hundreds of kilometers of Sinai desert. When they arrived in Israel, they were picked up by the army, detained for a while, had their pictures on the front page of the papers and were eventually granted asylum. Today, they are happily working in Eilat in the hotel industry while Sudanese refugee children are happily learning in the Israeli school system.

So what's the problem? Now that word has gotten back to the folks in the old country that this is a great place to be, the trickle of illegal border-crossers is becoming a steady stream. All of a sudden, we've gone from having 200 Sudanese refugees to over 2000 !

Unless we take decisive action now, within months we will be caring for 10's of thousands of these people. These are non-Islamic peoples being chased out of their country by marauding militias of Muslim countrymen and Arab instigators. Those fleeing find no sympathy in Egypt, who in turn point them to our border and tell them to try their luck with the Jews.

Once again, the Arab world creates a problem, and then lays it at the feet of the Jews, who are expected to solve it single-handedly. I say that Egypt as Sudans's nearest neighbor has two choices: Either send their army into Sudan to make it safe for the refugees to return, or set up refugee camps for them in some corner of Sinai. Heck, they've got plenty of room for it: At 61,000 km sq, the Sinai is almost triple the size of our small country on the sunny shores of the Eastern Mediterranean.

So what do you think. Am I behaving like a flaming Xenophobic? Leave a comment and let me know!

The Fourth of July

Son: Mom, do we have a Fourth of July in our small country on the sunny shores of the Eastern Mediterranean?

Mom: Of course we do! It's the day between the Third and the Fifth.

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To all of our friends in the land of the free and the home of the brave: Happy 4th!

Today also marks the 31st anniversary of the daring raid on Entebbe. Want to relive it? Click on this link to the BBC, and you can see the actual video of the news from that day:

Link to the BBC - Click Here

So here's the thing: The world began to learn of the rescue by 8:00 PM New York time on Saturday July 3rd, 1976. I imagine that it was on the front page of the New York Daily News on Sunday morning. I recall following the drama as it unfolded during the previous week, just as I had followed the Massacre at the Munich Olympics in '72, but in the case of Entebbe, my visual database is missing an entry. If anyone out there happens to have a copy of the Daily News from that day, I would love to see it.

I do remember getting up early on that Sunday July 4th morning and taking a ride on my bicycle along a good length of the Belt Parkway. The highway was closed in the vicinity of the Verrazano Bridge so that spectators could stand and view the tall ships sailing in New York Harbor for the Bicentennial "Operation Sail".

Later that day, we had a family outing to lower Manhattan, where we took an early evening stroll past Federal Hall and made our way down to the tip of Battery Park to see the spectacular fireworks.

I had just turned 16 and would be entering my senior year of high school that fall. Up until that day, some of the major events that probably shaped my young, mostly empty mind were:

• Summer 1973 - My Bar-Mitzvah (aka Emancipation from Hebrew school)
• Fall 1973 - Yom Kippur War (where the heck is the Suez Canal anyway?)
• Spring 1974 - Arab Oil Embargo (Dad and I wait in line to buy gas)
• Summer 1974 - Nixon resigns (watched the hearings all day long, didn't understand a thing)
• Spring 1975 - Saigon falls, end of war in Vietnam (didn't want to be in the army anyway)
• Summer 1975 - The movie Jaws kept me off the beach
• Winter 1975 - Spanish dictator Francisco Franco dies (as reported weekly on Saturday Night Live)
• Summer 1976 - American Bicentennial
• Fall 1976 - Jimmy Carter elected President

I know that my Dad remembers his 16th birthday well. The US had dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, thus officially ending World War II. He was making his way from Brighton 6th Street to Abraham Lincoln High School every day, just like I would be doing 30 years later.

I do remember feeling particularly patriotic that summer. I remember a family summer vacation to Washington D.C. around that time (was it also '76? I don't remember).

Well that was some mighty fine reminiscing, eh? Have a good one!

World War III - Jews, Arabs and Oil

I got mail from my Dad! He saw Fouad Ajami's Op-Ed in the NY Times titled "Brothers to the Bitter End" on June 19th, and wanted to know what I thought. It's an opinion piece, written by an Arab, critical of Arabs. I'm sure the Arabs are seething and will disregard it as the work of a deranged self-hating Arab.

Who is Fouad Ajami? According to Wikipedia, he was born in Lebanon, the son of Shiites who migrated from Iran in the 1850's. In 1973 Ajami joined the political science department of Princeton University, making a name for himself there as a vocal supporter of Palestinian self-determination. He is today the Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University.

Here's a link to his piece at the International Herald Tribune (the NY Times has already archived it in the "Pay Per View" section):

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/19/opinion/edajami.php

I read it, and this is the reply that I sent to my Dad:

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June 20, 2007


Hi Dad -

He gives a rarely seen glimpse of the truth, I'm surprised the Times agreed to publish it. You should already know that in the past, the Times has very rarely blamed the Palis for their own ills, and they rarely blame the Arab world for perpetuating the misery in the first place. Consider a person, if one existed, who has received their news exclusively from the Times for the last 20 years and from no other source. That person would have no choice but to believe that all Palestinian violence is a natural reaction to unprovoked Israeli aggression and the tyranny of Israeli occupation. The blame has been laid solely at the feet of the Jews, who are not only accused of creating the problem single-handedly, but are expected to fix it by giving and giving until there is nothing left to give.

The position of the European Union, and all the leftist movements, and by intellectual unions all over the world (e.g. boycotts of Israel in the last few weeks by major UK academic and labor unions) is to prevent the creation of a two-state solution. Rather, they want to see a single bi-national state in which the Jews would live as a minority under Islamic rule.

Where they are concerned, this wish is motivated largely by pure anti-semitism. However, they are in fact naive accomplices in an even larger geo-political struggle: Over the next 20 years, the greatest global conflict in the history of human civilisation will not be about water or global warming. Instead, it will be a struggle between the US, Europe, Russia and China to control the world's oil supply. The most natural opening move in this game will be to gain the favor of the Arabs. At first, none of the powers will want to be seen as the bully, therefore they will work to appease the Arabs together. In order to satisfy China's insatiable oil thirst while leaving some for the rest of the world, the Arabs must be persuaded to increase production. The pressure to deliver a prize will become unbearable, and the world will have no choice but to offer the Jews as a sacrifice.

As we know from history, the effectiveness of appeasement is short-lived. Other economic and power factors will influence the actors, and there will be a need to wrest control of Arab oil from the Arabs. However, this will not be an altruistic one-for-all all-for-one undertaking. The struggle for economic and political dominance must produce one winner. That is simply human nature.

Armies will invade, nuclear missiles will fly. It will not be a pretty scene.

Then, as now, few in the US will look back and see that the last 30 years were completely squandered. In all that time, virtually no progress was made to find an alternative to oil. The masses remained addicted to the opiate of cheap oil, the auto industry churned out enormous gas-guzzlers without improving fuel economy in any significant way, nuclear energy was villanized, the population expanded over 20%, average home sizes doubled, bringing in turn a doubling of heating and cooling costs. The US economy, critically dependent on consumption to sustain itself, needs tremendous amounts of energy. Does anyone in the US ever think about where it all comes from?

Back to the OP-ED, I could add dozens of points that he left out, but it would be futile. It is pointless to look at the Israeli-Arab conflict under a microscope. It won't matter. Watch the news over the next month, three months, six months, one year, two years, five years and you will clearly see appeasement from every corner.

Of course, I have my own cunning plan to save the world from itself, but that's a topic for another email!

Regards and Love to all,

Sunhouse