From the time of Moshe Rabbeinu, until the year 358 CE., there was a
legislative body known as the Sanhedrin. It consisted of seventy of the
greatest scholars in Israel.
The Sanhedrin was viewed and accepted as the ruling body of Jewish Law. It was forbidden to challenge these rulings.
The Torah speaks of the זקן ממרא, who was a judge of a lower
court, who defied the Sanhedrin. He was put to death for such defiance.
Aside from the end to the declaration of the New Moon by way of the
Sanhedrin, their dissolution, represented much more. A set calendar was
established with seven leap years every nineteen years, when they last
met in Tiberius in 358. This may have been seen as a positive outcome,
but it was mostly tragic when we lost this accepted ruling body.
It represented the dispersion of Jews to all parts of the world.
This dispersion also represented the fact that there was no longer one
accepted authority, followed by all Jews.
Over the centuries, the divisions among Jews became more
pronounced. Various communities followed the teachings of “their”
rabbis, and were not connected to other Jews in a uniform manner.
This became even more pronounced in our generation. Everyone has
their rabbi, and their accepted standards of Kashrut. There are
differences among Chassidic and Lithuanian Jewry, and among Ashkenazim
and Sephardim. There are major differences of opinion regarding the
State of Israel and the IDF.
All of this, got me thinking about the current situation we are
in. We constantly hear how special it was when the war broke out. There
was incredible “Achdut,” or Jewish unity. Many, like Yechiel Leiter,
whose eldest son fell in battle, has emphasized that his beloved son,
Moshe, will not have died in vain, as long as the Achdut continues.
If this Achdut is so important,(and it definitely is), why can’t
there be Achdut among the rabbis, who continue to represent views that
are very different from those of other groups?
Why can’t we demand that they all “bury the hatchet,” and learn to
find common ground? Why can’t they agree that there should be only one
definition and label of Kashrut? Why can’t they all agree to salute our
holy soldiers of the IDF? Why can’t they find a way to accept a uniform
of Halacha, as existed in the days of the Sanhedrin?
If the nation as a whole is urged to be united, because our
enemies do not differentiate as to what kind of Jew they want to kill,
how much more should our rabbinic leaders learn to be united?
We need them to guide us as to how to be united. What kind of
example do they set, when there is so much factionalizing? We need to at
least express these ideas. Perhaps someone is listening and will act on
this cry for unity. Hopefully, all of the Jewish people will wake up
and stand together. We are one family with one G-d guiding us. Let’s
hope this can be done now, and it won’t take the Mashiach to get this
done. If we do achieve this unity on all levels, including the rabbis,
that might be the very thing that will hurry the coming of the Mashiach
speedily in our time.
29 Kislev 5784 | כ"ט כסלו ה'תשפ"ד 5th candle of Hanukkah | נר חמישי של חנוכה
NB: Credit for the title of this post is below, near the end.
At the same time the war between Israel and Hamas continues, last week some of the women in my neighborhood got together to make plain tambourines into decorations for the glory of God and to entice Him to bring the Geulah Shlemah now! The tambourine pictured in the video above (you will see it and others through their design development) in the end bears a message from Tehillim/Psalms 42:3: My soulthirsts...for the Living God. The whole thing is 1:20.
***
The two paragraphs below contain an observation and an insight, in that order, that I had last week:
Over an extended period of time, the Muslims
have very well proved themselves to be the children of Hagar, their mother; now, let
them prove themselves to be children of Avraham Avinu, their father and ours. Hospitality is
not enough to get them there; they also have to recognize their cousins,
the children of Yitzhak-and-Ya'acov, in a positive manner.
A hint to the evil of their behavior: Their
epithet "itbakh al-Yahud" not only means "slaughter the Jew" but also
"slaughter gratefulness"! "Yahud" in Arabic is equivalent to the Hebrew "Yehudim", from Yehuda, whom Leah, the mother of most Jews, named
out of her gratefulness to HQB"H (the Holy One, blessed be He) for having more than filled her quota of sons.
In our day, we can learn precisely from this why Jews are counted by who their mother is, and not by their father, because the mother inspires the heart of the children from the time they spend in her womb and throughout childhood.
The tribal assignation comes from the father, and a Jewish woman marries into her husband's tribe. This is a point most of us do not think about much; we are busy enough just trying to keep Jews going in our family tree! But there will come a problem in the not-so-distant future: Jews who have Jewish mothers, but who have no Jewish father, have no tribe! (This is more relevant for the men than for the women, since the latter marry into their husband's tribe, as mentioned above, and it could be relevant only to American Jews.) Where will they be able to live in Eretz haQodesh when the time comes? Who will decide this: Mashiah, the Sanhedrin or the rabbis of that day? This comes straight from the book of Shemoth (Exodus in English)...
The possibility remains that some of the fathers who assumed they weren't Jews will be called and set apart as Jews by the prophet Eliyahu, and will thus gain a tribe they thought they wouldn't be part of.
But, I'm getting ahead of myself a bit. First things first.
We are in a quandary with regard to our goal for this war. We want — no, we need — to win. But because even if we call out our enemy for who he is — Amalek — we will not be allowed to kill all of them as God commanded, due to the government's submission to powers that shouldn't be, of the sort that play both sides of wars all the time and who do things far worse than anything we've ever done in our long history.
Our Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu, may God bless him with wisdom, has been quoted as saying that he both wants (and would adopt the Hebrew calendar as standard. What? We didn't do that already? It's not a religious practice so much as the time keeper we were given...) and doesn't want a Biblical/Talmudic government.
I tend to believe the second one more. It seems to be the desire of those in charge of keeping the status quo of the Israeli government system to keep people afraid of having a governance we haven't had in almost 2,000 years; it's easy to keep the civilians and the army vets alike afraid of the unknown, unless they're growing up with the Tana"ch. Years ago I noticed this in myself, so I've been working on it ever since my days among the nations when it occurred to me that every news story about Israel was specifically designed to keep diaspora Jews afraid even to visit, never mind decide that a long-neglected set of commandments from God should be taken out from between, or under, the mothballs in the place where they have been kept safely hidden away from the very people who should benefit from it.
But more than the state of our government, it's the paradigm we've been living under that bothers me more.
Sitting at the feet of the "democracy" enforcers in Europe and the United States, learning from them, taking their side on everything, and taking orders from them constantly for the more than 75 years since Israel became a "state" have kept us from examining our own God-given indigenous governance. On the other hand, our neighbors and cousins nearby don't believe in democracy, and many actually believe we're not the descendants of the Hebrews/Israelites in the Bible.
Or, at least, that's what they say. Maybe these objections are nothing more than excuses to engage in war and bloodshed, which they have loved for thousands of years and graphically displayed to the world with pride and pleasure on Simchath Torah/October 7th, 2023 with the massacre on the area we call the Gaza Envelope. Maybe they think it will be extremely easy to wipe us off the face of the earth (I picked up a possible clue that soon we'll be seeing similar things about the South of Israel, near the Negev) because our numbers have been small for an extremely long time due to constant attempts at genocide.
There, I've said it. GENOCIDE. It seems that's what the world wants now, for us to disappear from the earth, and they will enforce it violently, or allow others to do so.
(So, what should we in Israel look out for? Maybe of what R' Uri Sofer has to say about the dangers from within HERE: AUDIO ONLY, Hebrew with interspersed English translation, over one (1) hour. Tehillim recitations are followed by the speech and its translation.
Let's shake off the psychological operations that have been done on us, dividing us and taking advantage of a divided people, and plead to HaQadosh Baruch Hu together for salvation!)
This comes from a long history of antisemitism in the US as well as the rest of the world. Here is a SEARCH on how antisemitism became an American crisis, which no one expected (so what else is new? No one expected it in Germany either...). I'm catching the search engines at their peak of Jew defense. Try this search again to see if it remains as positive and sympathetic as it looks at this writing.
***
It's G-d and Torah time for the people of Israel
CREDIT: This video is where I got the title for this post because it's so appropriate. Tzvi here talks about the "social ghettos" Israelis live in, how many of us never meet people outside our ghetto — and how our governance system encourages and enforces this dysfunction within the country, along with other related things. Can you see the connection to all our troubles and our latest war? This is the clearest video I could find with a short message (a tad over 18 minutes).
EVERY LITTLE MITZVAH A JEW DOES IN THESE TIMES HAS GREAT VALUE. ALL THE MORE SO IF WE DO THEM AS A PEOPLE, A NATION.
