Why silence over Israel's wrongs is anti-Zionist (Haaretz Israel News)
- We need to remember this Rashi because it suggests that American Jews should offer angry, vocal, confrontational critique when they feel that Israel is practicing particular policies that they find unworthy. Note the word that Rashi uses: "to fight." Not just to critique, not just to gently remind, not just to seek to influence, but to shout, to confront, to demand to be heard.
If we want American Jews and Israel to be in a truly deep relationship, then we need to enable American Jews to be the ezer k?negdo, the helping spouse who fights. After all, they do enough helping. We can't ask American Jews to support us, visit us, give us their money, and be inspired by us, without allowing them - demanding of them - to tell us what they think. It is taxation without representation. It is an abuse of the relationship between us. It is blasphemy to the very notion of a Jewish state.
This approach will ultimately lead to a much richer marriage between American Jews and Israel. Young American Jews throw their weight behind other causes, causes where demands are made on them, where they are encouraged to fight against injustice, to debate, to create change. We don't give them these opportunities with Israel. Go and change the world, we say; but when it comes to Israel, you must close off your creative energies, your critical thinking, your fiery emotions, and just support politely from the sidelines. No wonder they are not interested.
The lack of American Jewish voices in modern Israel is a tragedy. Israel, for all its wonders, its achievements, and its robustness, is not living up to its potential, and one of the reasons for that gap is the lack of American Jewish voices in its culture, religion, and politics.
Thomas Friedman writes more perceptively about Israeli politics than any Israeli journalist or politician; why are his pieces not regularly and immediately translated into Hebrew? Abraham Joshua Heschel revolutionized our understanding of Jewish spirituality; most religious Israelis have never heard of him. Diaspora Jewish educational thinkers and practitioners have made enormous strides in working out how to get Jews of different religious streams to sit, talk, and learn together; Israel is decades behind. There are countless other examples. Both sides are at fault. Israelis have been too stubborn, too arrogant, or too busy, to listen; but American Jews have not been willing to be the ezer k'negdo, the spouse who fights.
Israel is not living up to its potential, and one reason for that is because American Jews have not insisted that their voices be heard. This is scandalous. It is anti-Zionist. It is suicidal. It must change
Not refusal at all (Haaretz Israel News)
After all, we can understand a soldier whose conscience does not allow him to shoot on Shabbat, can't we? Well, the answer is absolutely not. That is precisely the path to the hardali takeover of the IDF: The rabbis have succeeded in keeping women away from their students, encourage them to turn to a rabbi on any issue related to "conscience" or "ethics," and have created a blatant separation between soldiers who have to obey every order every day of the week, and their favorites, the skullcap wearers.
There can no doubt: The domination of the Israeli reality by the settler norm is a successful enterprise. Every fiery speech by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who bangs on the table with his fist and declares that "we will not agree to refusal from any side," and every demonstration of evasiveness by Defense Minister Ehud Barak who threatens to punish opponents of evacuation but ingratiates himself with the hesder yeshivas and says that we must not harm all of them "because of a handful of refuseniks," are increasing this domination.
Just as the Supreme Court once permitted the two different legal systems in the territories and created a basis for apartheid, the political establishment is allowing the destroyers of democracy, who want to replace sovereignty with the rabbinate, to take it apart from within. That's not refusal at all. That's war.
Israeli ecologists could help stop global warming (Haaretz Israel News)
- I will start by relating that my late colleague, Prof. Hugues Faure of the University of Marseilles in France, who studied Saharan terrain and groundwater resources, calculated that if we used the groundwater beneath that desert for irrigation, and restored the greenery that covered it during the last ice age, the vegetation would absorb all the carbon generated by industry each year. According to his calculations, the water supply could last a few hundred years.
In light of his findings, I convened a group of experts on water in arid areas at UNESCO's offices in Paris in 1998, after which we published a manifesto urging a worldwide campaign to plant trees in desert areas.
Studies conducted since then in the Yatir Forest in the southern Judean Desert, by teams led by Prof. Dan Yakir from the Weizmann Institute of Science and from the Desert Research Institute at Sde Boker, indicate that in addition to the trees functioning as a trap for the huge amounts of carbon in the air, and as a means for transforming it into a substance that can help them grow, the stomata (pores) of the trees' leaves do not have to open to absorb the large amount of carbon dioxide in the air.
Thus the amount of water secreted from the leaves is reduced, and the tree saves water and is able to grow even in relatively dry regions.
And there is more to it: The shade provided by the trees planted in sandy expanses reduces the evaporation of the little rain that falls in the desert.
Slip of the tongue? / His credo snapped (Haaretz Israel News)
- After all, "Torah law" requires us first of all to immediately restore the death penalty. Without it, we will not be able to punish with the full extent of the law, through stoning or burning, for adultery, sodomy and a multitude of other sins. This crown, that Neeman seeks to return, is a crown of thorns and thistles and prohibitions and sufferings and cruelties that are not from the world of justice.
And even if we were to replace "Torah law" with "halakha" - the full complement of Jewish religious law - we could still not relax, breathe a sigh of relief, we would still be choked and lacking air.
Which halakha, exactly? That of Beit Hillel or of Beit Shammai, the less strict or more strict, or, in contrast - that of Ovadia Yosef, according to whom one's mouth should not be muzzled; or that of Eliezer Melamed, the hesder yeshiva head who is calling for soldiers to refuse orders to evacuate settlements; or that of Yitzhak Ginsburg, author of a hagiography of Baruch Goldstein? This crazed land is filled with religious teachers, and every gang has its own rabbi.
There is no animal called halakha; there are many such animals, some of which are predators. We are as if devoured by evil beasts if these are our teachers, if these are our judges, and we shall no longer be able to perceive the coat of many colors of the "Jewish and democratic" state. Instead of judges in Jerusalem we will have a rabbinical court.
Who would want to live here? Who could? We've already given them more than enough authority to run our lives, from birth to marriage to the grave. And what of our conscience, with a rabbi forced upon it?
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