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Jewish, Muslim chaplains navigate US campus tensions as Israel-Hamas war rages

In charged and polarizing climate, ministries are seeking to console and guide students gripped with anger, pain, confusion or fear stemming from new violence and old grievances

The post Jewish, Muslim chaplains navigate US campus tensions as Israel-Hamas war rages appeared first on The Times of Israel.

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The 21st-Century’s Great Flood

Noah and the Ark. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

JNS.orgBelieve it or not, the hero of this week’s Torah portion, Noah, needed a not-so-gentle push to get him into the Ark that he himself had built!

 “And Noah, his sons, his wife and his sons’ wives went into the ark because of the flood waters,” (Genesis 7:7).

Interpreting this verse, the great commentator Rashi says that Noah only went into the ark because the floodwaters pushed him inside. He himself wasn’t quite sure this flood thing was really going to happen, but eventually, when he was getting rather wet, he decided to seek refuge in the ark.

There’s a very serious and sobering message here for our times. There’s a flood out there, no question about it. A deluge of disinformation and degeneracy, and it’s leading to the ruination of society as we have always known it. I can handle and even admire “disrupters,” but what we are witnessing now is destruction, a sea of moral sickness and chaos amid the collapse of our traditional values. To even use the term “traditional family values” these days is to incur the wrath of every alternative movement on earth. “How dare you!”

All around us, we see a flood of family breakdowns, a deluge of drugs, crime, and the havoc and devastation it wreaks. Never before have we experienced a tidal wave of mass shootings in schools, shopping malls and theaters. I’m not getting into the gun-control issue; this is a mind-control issue. What possesses the minds of these lonely, troubled young men who go out and shoot up the town? And what insanity warps the minds of young Westerners who become influenced by radical terrorist groups to go and join the Jihadi revolutionaries?

This is clearly a societal problem. The Hebrew word for the great flood in Noah’s time is mabul. Indeed, this a mabul of madness!

But if we enter the ark, we discover a new reality. The holy ark inside every synagogue is a symbol of sanctity, refuge and moral clarity. It is a sanctuary that protects us from the ravaging, raging waters outside. Herein lies the sacred treasure of our people, the holy Torah, the eternal wisdom of our Jewish history and heritage. Here, we find a Godly manual for living, one that is far removed from our contemporary craziness. And, yes, it is a repository of traditional values, our faith in God, our commitment to family, to elders and to respect and decency in all our relationships.

We have a choice. Do we pick the torrents of turbulence outside or the haven of tranquility and the anchor of the ark inside?

There have always been religious and non-religious Jews. And we have always argued. And many religious Jews have debated passionately with their non-religious brothers and sisters to embrace a more traditional Jewish way of life. But today, I would humbly suggest that the flood waters of a society out of control should force any objective, reasonable, upstanding person into the arms of the holy ark.

Even if it is not out of religious conviction, and even if it is not from our faithful childhood memories, the wild waters of a world gone berserk should be pushing us to explore the values represented by the holy ark. We should be doing it for our own family’s safety, security and sanity. We need to save our skin, never mind our soul.

Once upon a time, society and people were “normal” and honorable, more or less. Some were religious, others not. But today, with all the insane ideologies out there, we should be lining up to get into the ark. To ignore the calming refuge of the Almighty’s Ark in our current situation is like Noah standing up to his knees in the floodwaters and whistling in the rain while the ark takes off without him.

Our Jewish way of life offers us a lifeboat of survival in these wild floodwaters. Do we want to be swamped by the woke ideologists who seem completely disengaged from reality? If you can be anything you want, well, with that naturally comes an “anything goes” philosophy of life. And what nachas will we have when we discover that our son or daughter at an Ivy League campus has become a flag-waving member of Jews for Palestine?

My dear friends, as a rabbi, I invite you, nay, I appeal to you to take advantage of the great, trusted, traditional Jewish lifeboat. You’ll find it at the synagogue of your choice. Call a rabbi. Send your kids to a good Jewish day school. Enroll in a Jewish adult-education course. Study some Torah online. Volunteer for Israel or help kids with special needs in your community. Visit a senior center. Do a mitzvah. Do something to save yourself and your family from this disastrous deluge.

In the ark of your people, you will find security, serenity, wisdom and knowledge to help you chart your own way in a world that has become a labyrinth masking morality, honor and plain common sense.

The post The 21st-Century’s Great Flood first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Over 900 Civilians Killed in Israel Since War’s Start

Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepts rockets, as seen from Ashkelon, Israel, Oct. 1, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen

JNS.orgA total of 902 civilians have been killed by terrorism in Israel since the start of the war on Oct. 7, 2023, the country’s National Insurance Institute announced Sunday.

The figure includes all war fronts since the Hamas-led cross-border massacre almost 400 days ago, according to the NII, which supports victims and their families.

The NII did not state how many civilians had been wounded since the start of the war, though an Oct. 29 notice said that the agency provided assistance to over 70,000 victims of hostilities.

On Thursday, seven civilians were killed and one was seriously wounded in two separate Hezbollah rocket assaults on Israel’s north, marking one of the deadliest days since the Iranian-backed terror organization joined the war in support of Hamas on Oct. 8, 2023.

Also on Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces announced that a soldier was killed the previous day by a grenade in the northern Gaza Strip, bringing the total number of troops killed in action on all fronts to 780.

The IDF death toll in Gaza since the start of the ground invasion there on Oct. 27, 2023, stands at 368. Additionally, Chief Inspector Arnon Zamora, of the Border Police’s Yamam National Counter-Terrorism Unit, was fatally wounded during a hostage rescue mission, and defense contractor Liron Yitzhak was mortally wounded in the Strip in May.

Some 12,000 wounded IDF soldiers and security personnel have entered physical rehabilitation programs since the start of the war, including 900 wounded over the past month in Lebanon, according to data published last week by the Israeli Defense Ministry’s Rehabilitation Department.

The IDF has been fighting to defeat Hamas and Hezbollah since the former terror group led the invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering 1,200 people, mainly Jewish civilians, wounding thousands more and kidnapping 251 people to Gaza, where 101 remain.

The post Over 900 Civilians Killed in Israel Since War’s Start first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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What Would Matt Baldacci Do? The Collaborator Mentality Returns

French philosopher, writer and director Bernard-Henri Levy. Photo: Reuters / Benoit Tessier.

JNS.orgLike many Jews of my generation, born during a period when antisemitism was largely depicted as a historical phenomenon and any manifestations were seen as an unfortunate aberration, I would occasionally wonder how the non-Jews in my midst would have behaved during the Holocaust. Would they have stood up to the Nazis, acquiesced to them or even supported them? Would they have expressed disgust at Nazi propaganda or dutifully nodded in agreement? Would they have protected me and my family from deportation, or would they have betrayed us?

Those were, I mused, speculative thought experiments that, thankfully, I would never have to test in the real world. But in 2024, one year after the bestial pogrom wreaked by Hamas terrorists in southern Israel, those same questions belong firmly in the real world. And my suspicion is that many, indeed most, non-Jews would fail these tests of moral and physical courage.

Earlier this month, Melanie Notkin, an author and communications consultant, had the foresight to record a conversation she held with Matt Baldacci, the publisher of Shelf Awareness, a trade title for the bookstore and publishing industry that reaches more than 600,000 readers weekly. Notkin had been helping to promote Israel Alone, the latest book by the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, which I recently reviewed for this column, and duly purchased an ad in Baldacci’s newsletter for $2,300. But then Baldacci sent her an email informing her that he was canceling the ad, so Notkin scheduled a phone call with him to find out more.

Their conversation was endlessly fascinating and incredibly disturbing. As he told Notkin that the ad had been pulled because the book contains the word “Israel” in the title—potentially triggering bookstore staff or customers with what he would call “pro-Palestinian” but what we properly call pro-Hamas sympathies—Baldacci traversed the spectrum of vocal tones with aplomb, sounding by turns friendly, then unctuous, then impatient, then irritated. At one point, he even indulged in a bit of “mansplaining,” telling Notkin “that’s not actually true or relevant” when she noted that the CEO of his company is Jewish. “Listen, Melanie, Melanie, I hear you,” he interjected, sounding determined to end the conversation as quickly as possible. “I respect everything you’re saying. And as you say, I think that’s all there is to say.”

I don’t know Notkin, but I admired her dignity in carefully listening to Baldacci and eloquently pushing back against his cloying, disingenuous arguments. I don’t know Baldacci either, at least not personally, but I know his type very well.

It’s probably true that most of those who collaborated with the Nazis in Germany and occupied Europe did not do so primarily for ideological reasons but because resistance would have made their daily lives much tougher. I was always taught not to judge these people for not doing the right thing because they feared imprisonment or death, after all. And in the postwar period, there was a discreet acknowledgement among the occupied populations that this had been the case and that history had been kinder to them than was perhaps warranted; in the Netherlands, for example, people would joke that “most Dutch were in the resistance—they just joined after the war.” But that explanation doesn’t serve for someone like Baldacci, who exhibits the telltale traits of a collaborator without the specter of a totalitarian state operating concentration camps hanging over him.

Baldacci is a coward: Someone who, when faced with injustice or rank hypocrisy, rationalizes it and plays its worst aspects down. Someone who doesn’t like to rock the boat. In other words, he is the perfect fit for a collaborator. And so we are forced to ask: If America was suddenly in the grip of totalitarianism, if we had a government that was rounding up Jews in a bid to stop the Jewish conspiracy, if we had a government that criminalized the word “Israel”—a word that is always in the consciousness of Jews and their aspirations and prayers—what would Baldacci do? I know the answer, and I expect readers do, too.

It is the Matt Baldaccis of this world—women and men who are followers and not leaders, who consent to antisemitic agitation without explicitly endorsing it, who stay silent when they need to speak up—who have enabled the current wave of eliminationist antisemitism gripping our country and much of the Western world. Their simpering silence and pathetic fear of angering the mob are precisely what empowers the thugs who shoot at Jews going to synagogue in Chicago or at a Jewish school in Toronto, who gather outside a London conference where the Arab head of the anti-Zionist Communist Party of Israel is speaking to verbally abuse the peace activist Jews in attendance, who push petitions seeking to banish Jews from the worlds of literature, art and music—fields of endeavor that would be indelibly poorer without our contribution!

It is the Matt Baldaccis who have forced Jews, myself among them, to ask whether we grew up in some kind of an illusion, given the routine normalcy with which we historically interacted with non-Jewish friends and colleagues. Because if such people can’t stand up for a Jewish writer like Lévy in a democracy where free speech is part of our national ethos, how should we expect them to behave if the stakes and the costs are much graver? If their fear of the disapproval of the pro-Hamas media and street chorus is so great now, how much greater would it be if this chorus exercised direct political control of our republic?

I hope we never have to find out.

The post What Would Matt Baldacci Do? The Collaborator Mentality Returns first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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