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Monthly Archives: February 2019

Our Reform Movement Condemns Bibi’s Decision to Bring Kahanists into his Coalition

28 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by rabbijohnrosove in Ethics, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish Identity, Social Justice, Uncategorized

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“The Reform Movement strongly condemns the recent initiative of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to bring loyalists of racist Rabbi Meir Kahane into the Knesset. Those who espouse an ideology of hate, intolerance, and incite violence have no place in the Jewish State let alone in her government.” — The Reform Movement released a new statement this morning on Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Initiative to Bring the Racist Otzma Yehudit Party into the Government.

For full statement, go to – https://bit.ly/2Xxa1Yi

Bezalel – Judaism’s First Artist

28 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by rabbijohnrosove in American Jewish Life, Art, Divrei Torah, Inuyim - Prayer reflections and ruminations, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Uncategorized

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On the face of it, the verses from this week’s Torah portion Vayakehl describe the matter-of-fact building of a movable edifice. But this isn’t merely an architectural plan. It’s a description of the highest aesthetic vision of the ancient Israelites, a standard that would impress itself upon the hearts, minds, and souls of generations of Jews to come…

Not just any craftsman could design and build this sacred structure. Only someone with the right qualities of heart, mind, soul, skill, and communal attitude could do the job, qualities spelled out in the text.

To read the entire d’var Torah, go to https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/bezalel-judaisms-first-artist/

Why a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is anti-Jewish

21 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by rabbijohnrosove in American Jewish Life, American Politics and Life, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism

≈ 1 Comment

If people hold the State of Israel to an unfair standard of behavior that they don’t hold for any other nation, and if they believe that Israel does not have the right to exist, that is anti-Jewish. If, however, someone is critical of policies of the State of Israel while supporting its legitimacy and right to exist as a Jewish state, that is not anti-Jewish.

To read more go to my blog at the Times of Israel – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/why-a-one-state-solution-is-anti-jewish/

My blessing for Pearl Berg at her 109th Birthday – updated in 2022

17 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by rabbijohnrosove in American Jewish Life, Health and Well-Being, Life Cycle, Uncategorized

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Pearl Berg's 109th birthday
At the end of an amazing Shabbat morning service at Temple Israel of Hollywood that celebrated my 30th and final year as Senior Rabbi, I had the honor of invoking a blessing upon Pearl Berg who celebrated on February 14 her 109th birthday! [Pearl’s actual birthday was 3 months earlier – on October 1, 1909 – a story in and of itself]
She still knows what’s going on and knew me immediately.
Her son, Robert, told me that on her 107th birthday the family invited KTLA television to interview her. The anchor asked: “Mrs. Berg – how were you able to reach 107 years?”
She answered: “First, you have to reach 106 years!”
I told her that she should live to 120! She said “Please no!” The room cracked up!
She’s still got “IT!”
Notes: As of October 13, 2022, Pearl is still alive and well making her now 113 years old.
Pearl is listed as the 12th oldest American as of this date and the 2nd oldest Californian. She is likely the oldest Jewish person in California and, possibly, the oldest Jew in America – https://gerontology.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_oldest_living_people_in_the_United_States
See article in the Jewish Journal – October 2022 – for the full story of Pearl’s life – https://jewishjournal.com/cover_story/352205/cover-story-113-year-old-pearl-berg-may-be-the-oldest-jew-in-the-world/

Israeli Elections and the Big, Fat Palestinian Elephant in the Room – Haaretz by Chemi Shalev – February 17, 2019

17 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by rabbijohnrosove in Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity

≈ 1 Comment

Note: For those who subscribe to Haaretz, go to https://bit.ly/2BDFxLe – for those who don’t, the following is an important article. However, I urge you to subscribe to Haaretz.

Hardened by terror and frustrated by failed peace efforts, Israelis don’t want to hear about the evils of occupation or ways of ending it

As of 2019, there are 6.7 million Jews in Israel, the occupied territories and Gaza, and 6.7 million Arabs, according to the latest official estimates.

Of the Arabs – or Palestinians, if you will – nearly 1.9 million are Israeli citizens, another 1.9 million live under a ruthless Hamas regime fixated on fighting Israel and 2.9 million live in the hybrid West Bank, under military occupation or the semi-autonomous rule of the Palestinian Authority.

An objective observer might surmise that Israel is caught between a rock and hard place, with a sword hanging over its head to boot. It won’t recapture Gaza but won’t release it from its stranglehold either. It won’t surrender the West Bank, for both religious and security reasons and because Israelis are convinced that it would soon turn into another Gaza as well. Israel won’t annex the West Bank either, less because of concerns over the international backlash and more because such a move entails enfranchisement of the Palestinians, which would upset the demographic balance, upend Israel’s democracy and jeopardize the country’s continued existence as a Jewish state.

History shows that prolonged periods of relative – very relative – peace and quiet, however, are always a prelude to flare-ups of violence and significant loss of Israeli lives. Our dispassionate outsider might surmise, therefore, that Israelis are clamoring for a solution and pressing their leaders to come up with new ideas, especially during an election campaign. He (or she) wouldn’t be more wrong.

The Palestinian problem, in fact, is hardly being mentioned, other than as a club with which the right browbeats leftist politicians and portrays them as defeatist and even treacherous. Politicians run away from discussing potential solutions – never mind actual peace – as if it was the plague. And it’s not because they’re all out of fresh ideas, though they are: They know that the Israeli public is in collective denial and that voters won’t reward those who dare snap them out of their reverie. Those who are might be tempted to cry out “The Emperor has no clothes” will first be shushed and then sent home, consigned to political oblivion.

Exceptions to the rule can be found on the fringes alone, from the hard right that advocates annexation come what may, to the hard left, both Zionist and Arab-Israeli, which is gradually gravitating towards a one-state solution, with all of its inherent risks. But in most of the Jewish political arena, from right to left, the Palestinian issue is like a dead man zone, which no man dare enter. If pressed to the wall, supporters of Benjamin Netanyahu will praise the current status quo as the best of all possible worlds, but given their opponents’ fear of upsetting voters and being branded traitors, they don’t get pressed very often.

Israelis are not blind to the fact that there is a big, fat Palestinian elephant in their living room. After decades of devoting election campaigns to discussing what to do with it, they now prefer to go about their lives and ignore it. At best, it will disappear on its own and at worst it will need to be subdued – but the odds are that it will remain inert and paralyzed, with occasional spasms meant to remind the world of its existence. As Scarlett O’Hara famously said in Gone With The Wind, Israel will think about it tomorrow.

It’s not that Israelis don’t want peace either. Most polls show that a solid majority of Israelis, and a distinct plurality of Israelis Jews, support a two-state solution while only a small minority backs outright annexation. With all due deference to Donald Trump’s impending and “ultimate” deal, peace is regarded today as a pie in the sky aspiration for the far future. In practice, most Israelis believe that achieving it is a mission impossible, and therefore unworthy of their attentions or energy.

They have arrived at this conclusion based on what they perceive as Israel’s countless and futile efforts to negotiate peace with the Palestinians, from Camp David I to Oslo, from Camp David II to Annapolis, from Jimmy Carter to John Kerry et al. Many on the right are convinced that the Palestinians regard “peace” as a gateway to Israel’s destruction, but even those that reject such views now regard the most minimal Palestinian demands as exceeding Israel’s maximal concessions.

Israelis still carry the scars and trauma of the second intifada, which ravaged Israel at the start of the last decade, when suicide bombings terrified them, turned their cities to hell, their buses to death traps and their Palestinian neighbors to inhuman adversaries, unworthy of concessions and incapable of compromise.

And while the world might regard the occupation and Palestinian violence as chicken and egg, Israelis have managed to convince themselves that it’s the other way round: It’s not the occupation that sows the seeds of terror and violence but rather the Palestinian propensity for terror and violence that justifies and mandates continued occupation.

The savagery of the suicide bombings, coupled with the despondence over past failures to achieve peace, have effectively erased whatever remained of the Israeli left’s compassion for Palestinians and sympathy for their plight. The injustice of the occupation played a prominent role in driving left-wing support for Palestinian independence and/or territorial compromise in the first few years after the territories were occupied during the 1967 war but perceived Palestinian intransigence coupled with the traumas of terror, have gradually hardened the most leftist of hearts. Until they learn to behave, Israelis tell themselves, the Palestinians have got it coming.

The flip side of this post-1967 perspective was the dire assessment of many leading figures on the left, from Yeshayahu Leibowitz to Amos Oz, from David Ben Gurion to Yitzhak Rabin, of the inevitable corrosive influence of the occupation on Israeli society and democracy. The impact of lording over another people and sending Israel’s soldiers to police them, they warned, could not remain quarantined in the streets of Nablus and Ramallah; it would permeate throughout pre-1967 Israel, distorting its democracy, brutalizing its politics and propelling it to embrace Jewish nationalism and ethnocentrism.

But by the time this pervasive leftist pessimism was fully borne out and vindicated – as Benjamin Netanyahu’s last term in office amply shows – moderate Israelis have themselves forgotten the direct link their predecessors made between cause and effect. Even the most moderate of Israeli politicians no longer contends that occupation is the original virus responsible for many of the ailments plaguing Israeli democracy today. They prefer to blame Netanyahu and in doing so, to convince themselves that his removal would produce a catchall cure.

In this regard, there is some truth in describing the Israeli left as well as its political leaders as “defeatist”, but not vis a vis the Palestinians but towards their political rivals on the right. The numbers are indeed daunting: For most of the past forty years, Labor and its allies have either been in the opposition or have shared power as a junior or equal partner in coalitions with the Likud. Since the first Likud victory 42 years ago, the “left” has held power for only six years, and even those were due to the decidedly hawkish, militaristic and decidedly non-leftist appeal of Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak, two former army chiefs of staff.

In the April 9 ballot, the role of former army commander challenging right wing hegemony is being filled by Benny Gantz, who has shunned politicians such as Tzipi Livni for being too “leftist” but has embraced the ultra-right former Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, who believes the very concept of peace is a dangerous illusion. Gantz is following in the footsteps of Avi Gabbay, who initially lurched to the right after his election but has since re-centered himself after alienating large parts of his own base. The upshot, however, is that when the left tries to emulate the right, voters tend to prefer the original to the impersonation.

Even the distinctly ideological left-wing Meretz, while formally remaining committed to a two-state solution, is wary of the potential fallout of advocating forcefully in its favor. Like Labor, it has selected a Knesset list heavy on social advocacy and general support for democratic principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence – as opposed to the controversial Nation-State law – while steering clear of the injustice of occupation and the evils it has wrought on Israeli society and democracy.

Instead, Netanyahu’s rivals have fallen into his trap of making the elections all about him, rather than the issues themselves. The current election campaign has so far been marked by Netanyahu’s efforts to harness his position in order to tout his achievements – a risky endeavor, as proven by his recent scandal-plagued and mishap-rich participation in the U.S.-brokered anti-Iranian summit in Warsaw. And it has been dominated by anticipation for, and speculation over, the attorney general’s impending decision whether to indict the prime minister for bribery.

Once the decision is made public, apparently within the next two weeks, the preoccupation with Netanyahu’s legal predicament is bound to reach fever pitch. The few and isolated efforts to place the Palestinian problem on center stage will be swept away by the expected tsunami of saturation media coverage of Netanyahu’s affairs and the politicians’ tendency to go where the news takes them. The Palestinian elephant will continue to be ignored, consigned to a collective Israeli attitude reminiscent of the Ottoman fleet that was sent by Emperor Suleiman the Magnificent in the mid-16th Century to reconnoiter the island of Malta and to ascertain the reason for its steadfast resistance to his superior forces. The famous response of the commander sent on the mission was to tell his Sultan “Malta Yok”  – Malta does not exist.

It will take a leader made of sterner stuff than the current offerings in order to jolt Israelis out of their collective denial – unless the Palestinians do so earlier, at deadly cost. Until then, Israelis will continue to adhere to their “groupthink” a phenomenon of mass psychology first detailed by the late Professor Irving Janus of Yale and Berkeley, who wrote that it occurs “when concurrence-seeking becomes so dominant in a cohesive in-group that it tends to override realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action.”

In societies overtaken by groupthink, a term derived from George Orwell’s 1984, Janus wrote “independent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink, which is likely to result in irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against out-groups”. More than the powerful lobby of Jewish settlers, the rabble-rousing nationalism espoused by the right and the general frustration with efforts to achieve peace, it is the willful ignorance of the Israeli public that is the chief enabler of the occupation and the ongoing disenfranchisement of the Palestinian “out-group”. Netanyahu and his allies have come to learn and exploit the Israeli groupthink to their heart’s content, and for the perpetuation of their rule.

 

The Jewish American Paradox: Embracing Choice in a Changing World – By Robert Mnookin

15 Friday Feb 2019

Posted by rabbijohnrosove in American Jewish Life, American Politics and Life, Ethics, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity

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Reviewed by Philip K. Jason – December 26, 2018

This is an excellent review by Philip K Jason of a thoughtful, nuanced, open-hearted, and challenging book that every American Jew and Israeli ought to read.

Dr. Mnookin, a Harvard Law Professor and expert in conflict resolution, describes accurately and expansively the stresses and strains on  American Jews today and discusses the opportunities to confront these challenges creatively and with a fresh approach. He challenges historical models of Jewish identity in light of diminishing observance and knowledge of Judaism, widening polarities in the American Jewish community and State of Israel, a rising rate of intermarriage, and raising children to be positively identified Jews.

For those living in Los Angeles, I will be in dialogue with Dr. Mnookin on Monday evening, March 4 at 7:00 PM at Chevalier’s Book Store, 126 N Larchmont Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90004.

Read –  https://bit.ly/2TQ0HfX

Shtisel – A Netflix series worth watching

08 Friday Feb 2019

Posted by rabbijohnrosove in Film Reviews, Jewish Identity

≈ 1 Comment

Netflix’s Shtisel (created by Ori Elon and Yehonatan Indursky) is a two-season series telling the story of an extended Haredi family living in present-day ultra-Orthodox Geula, a neighborhood in the center of Jerusalem. In Hebrew and Yiddish with English subtitles (the Hebrew is not always accurate as it glosses over religious expressions in a truncated English translation), we watch as life unfolds for the 63 year-old widower and patriarch of his family Shulem Shtisel, his 89 year-old mother who lives in assisted living and is “corrupted” (per Haredi values) by and addicted to her television set, Shulem’s older brother Nukhem who has financial woes and his 23 year-old unmarried daughter Libi who live in Belgium but come to Jerusalem to get a loan from Shulem and find a kosher husband for Libi, Shulem’s 5 children and their spouses with a wide variety of strengths and problems, and his twelve grandchildren the oldest of whom (15 year-old Nuchama) takes care of her younger siblings when her mother Giti struggles to make a living after her husband Lipa abandons her and their children on a business trip to Argentina. Lipa returns and begs forgiveness and they reconcile over the course of the two seasons.

For my complete review, see my Blog at the Times of Israel – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/shtisel-a-netflix-series-worth-watching/

“Make for me a Sanctuary that I may dwell within them” – Parashat T’rumah

07 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by rabbijohnrosove in Art, Divrei Torah, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life

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The Mishkan (i.e. Tabernacle) was a physical manifestation of God’s presence on earth as designed and built by human hands, just as the created world (through the twenty-two letters of the aleph-bet) is an emanation of Divine thought into the creation of the universe. In each case, the same verb asah (make) appears in the Biblical text. There being nothing of coincidence in the Hebrew Bible, the rabbis concluded that there was a direct correlation between the creation of the world by God and the creation of the Mishkan by the ancient Israelites.

For my full d’var Torah, please see my Blog at the Times of Israel at  https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/make-for-me-a-sanctuary-that-i-may-dwell-within-them-parashat-terumah/ .

The Super Bowl – a reflection of a violent America

04 Monday Feb 2019

Posted by rabbijohnrosove in American Jewish Life, American Politics and Life, Ethics, Jewish Identity

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Watching the Super Bowl, likely the last time I do so, I felt alienated from my own country for the Super Bowl and football generally present a world that is contrary to my Jewish values.

To understand why, go to my Blog at the Times of Israel –  https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-super-bowl-a-reflection-of-a-violent-america/

 

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