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The ‘Higher Plan’ at Work
Ariana Hoblin, a Jewish public-school student from Florida, tells US President Donald Trump about being bullied in middle school for her religion. It took place during a ceremony in the Oval Office when Trump signed an executive order to better protect prayer in public schools and federal funds for religious organizations on Jan. 16, 2020. Photo: Screenshot.
JNS.org – Tell me the truth. Two days ago, would you have predicted a victory by former President Donald Trump in the race for the White House? Every political pundit and pollster said it was neck-and-neck and too close to call. And yet, here we have Trump elected as the 47th president of the United States.
So, once again, we see clearly that we don’t call the shots. There are always higher forces at play.
My congregants know that I often say how it never fails to impress me that the weekly Torah reading somehow always has a line or a phrase that alludes to current events happening that same week.
This week is no different.
In Lech Lecha, we read of the famous covenant where the Promised Land first became the land promised by God to our forefather Abraham and to his children for posterity.
“And He (God) said to Abram, ‘Know with certainty that your offspring shall be strangers in a land not their own … and they will be oppressed … and afterward they shall leave with great wealth.’
“On that day, God made a covenant with Abram, saying, ‘To your descendants have I given this land.’” (Genesis 15:13-18).
Later, God elaborates that He will make Ishmael a great nation, but the covenant with Abraham to the Promised Land will be maintained through Isaac and not Ishmael.
Now, cast your eye back to the first verse I quoted above. “Know with certainty that your offspring shall be strangers in a land not their own,” this is a reference to the long Egyptian bondage. The phrase “not their own” is considered by some commentaries to be redundant and is therefore interpreted somewhat mystically.
Why did the Jews have to go down to Egypt and be enslaved for hundreds of years? The reason was “not their own,” meaning that it was for a higher purpose: to refine the spiritual sparks found in Egypt and elevate them. The Egyptian experience was a spiritual odyssey. The Israelites may have thought that their Patriarch Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, went down to Egypt because of a famine in Canaan at the time, and then his descendants got stuck there and went into bondage. But the real reason was “not their own” making. It was part of an infinite Divine plan that was developing. It was to extract the dormant layers of Godly energy in Egypt and to build up the resilience of the Israelites.
So it has been throughout our history. We were wandering Jews. But whether it was to escape poverty or a pogrom in Poland, or the czar’s army in Russia or to find a better life for our children, there was always a higher plan for all our travels and travails. A deeper reason or a greater cause—one that was “not their own” making.
Starting nearly two centuries ago, Jews left Eastern Europe by the millions for a better future in the United States, South America, South Africa and Australia. This was God’s plan unfolding. Today, in all these regions, there are strong and thriving Jewish communities to one degree or another. The new Jewish foreign minister of Argentina, Gerardo Werthein, was just sworn in, holding the Jewish Bible, a Torah. And the non-Jewish president, Javier Milei, who appointed him, gave a little parshah shiur, Torah thought, at his induction!
Behind the mass migration of Jews across the world, we can assume that God wanted them in the specific areas that they thought they were choosing for their own reasons. But as always, there were reasons beyond what those Jews thought. Their personal circumstances and decisions were superficial, as there were deeper reasons that were “not their own.”
So it appears that God wanted Johannesburg, the “City of Gold,” to be transformed into the “City of God.” We are privileged here to be living in a community with, admittedly, smaller numbers than in the past but with a vibrant, pulsating Yiddishkeit with shuls, schools, yeshivahs, beautiful mikvahs, kosher supermarkets, restaurants and much more.
For reasons known only to Him, the Almighty decided that at the bottom of Africa, the Torah should be studied, and Jewish life should be so elevated and uplifted that it even inspired the whole world to keep Shabbat. You must know that next week’s internationally acclaimed “Shabbat Project,” which encourages Jews worldwide to celebrate Shabbat, came from our own small community in South Africa.
“The steps of man are established by God,” goes the verse in Psalm 37. We think we know where we are going, but there is always a higher plan taking us to where we need to be. I was born in New York, and for the first 26 years of my life, I never dreamed that I would make my home in South Africa. But it was meant to be, and I’ve never looked back.
How often have we all found ourselves somewhere, and it turned out that we experienced a fortuitous meeting that had important outcomes that we could never have anticipated?
Many years ago, I had a bout of double vision. I had to wear a black patch over one eye, just like former Israeli leader Moshe Dayan. I went into the hospital for tests, and my roommate was a Jewish doctor who had contracted meningitis and was also left with double vision. He, too, had a patch over one eye. I remember that when the respected Jewish medical professor came in to see us with his entourage of students, he quipped, “What is this, a Jewish status symbol?”
Thank God, my problem was a small one, and it quickly passed. But whereas I had thought that I had gone to the hospital for my medical issue, it turned out that I had a higher mission. When I prayed in the morning with my tallit and tefillin, I shared them with my roommate. It awakened within him memories of his beloved zayde, who did the same thing. I helped him, and slowly but surely, he became a fully observant Jew who went on to serve in important communal positions.
Jews are always going places for reasons “not their own.” We don’t have to become the president, but our job is to remember that there is always a higher purpose, and we have to find it and become ambassadors of our faith and our people.
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Oscar-Winning Jewish Director-Actor Jesse Eisenberg Gets Polish Citizenship After Filming ‘A Real Pain’ in Poland
Jesse Eisenberg holding his Polish citizenship certificate presented to him by President Andrzej Duda during a ceremony at the Polish Mission to the United Nations in New York on March 4, 2025. Photo: Marek Borawski/KPRP/Cover Images via Reuters Connect
Actor and director Jesse Eisenberg recently received Polish citizenship after filming in the Eastern European country the Oscar-winning drama “A Real Pain,” which is about two cousins who go on a Jewish heritage tour through Poland to learn about their family history.
Polish President Andrzej Duda presented Eisenberg with the citizenship certificate during a ceremony at the Polish Mission to the United Nations in New York on March 4. “I want to express my happiness, and the happiness of my compatriots, that we have a new citizen,” said Duda. “I am pleased that people from around the world remember their origins, that their ancestors came from Poland, and want to connect with our country.” Eisenberg, whose has family ties to Poland and the Holocaust, said receiving Polish citizenship is “an honor of a lifetime” and something he had been interested in pursuing for two decades.
“While we were filming ‘A Real Pain’ in Poland, and I was walking the streets and starting to get a little more comfortable in the country, it occurred to me that my family lived in this place for far longer than we lived in New York,” he said at the ceremony. “And of course of the history ended so tragically, but in addition to that, is the tragedy that my family didn’t feel any connection anymore to Poland. And that saddened me and confirmed to me that I really wanted to try to reconnect as much as possible. I really hope this amazing honor is the first step in me on behalf of my family reconnecting to this beautiful country.”
Eisenberg revealed last year that he had applied for Polish citizenship. The Oscar winner told the Polish broadcaster TVN at the time that he feels a deep connection to Poland and wants to help improve Polish-Jewish relations. His wife and the mother of his son, Anna Strout, also has family roots in Poland. The “Social Network” star first visited Poland in 2007. He said last year that much of “A Real Pain” is based on his family’s personal history. His ancestors hailed from the town of Krasnystaw in southeast Poland and many of his family members died in the Holocaust. Last year, the town council of Krasnystaw awarded him honorary local citizenship. His great-aunt Doris fled Poland for the United States in 1938. She died in 2019 at the age of 106.
“I became obsessed with my family’s history during the war when I was 19 years old,” Eisenberg said in 2020. “I would see my aunt every week — she died last year at 106 … She was born in Poland and then when she was about nine she came to America … I became really fascinated and it was interesting for me as an American teenager to have some connection to something that was so much more historically relevant than my own life.”
“A Real Pain” tells the fictional story of two American-Jewish cousins – played by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin – who reconnect to participate in a Jewish heritage tour in Poland to learn more about their Jewish roots and the Holocaust following the death of their grandmother, who was a Holocaust survivor. The movie was filmed in Poland and included scenes at the former Nazi concentration camp of Majdanek, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial. “A Real Pain” features a scene that was even filmed in the small apartment that Eisenberg’s family fled from during World War II.
Eisenberg wrote, directed, produced and starred in “A Real Pain.” He has won a number of awards for the film, including a BAFTA and Independent Spirit Award, both for best original screenplay, and the Culkin has taken home several honors this season for best supporting actor, including an Academy Award, Golden Globe, Critics Choice Award, BAFTA and Screen Actors Guild Award.
Eisenberg has starred in and wrote other projects that have ties to Poland or the Holocaust, including the 2020 war drama “Resistance” and his 2013 play “The Revisionist.”
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Israel Slams UN Report Charging IDF with Sexual Violence in Gaza
Delegates react to the results during the United Nations General Assembly vote on a draft resolution that would recognize the Palestinians as qualified to become a full UN member, in New York City, US, May 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
Israel has been accused of committing “genocidal acts” and employing sexual violence as a weapon of war in a new report published Thursday by a United Nations commission. The report drew sharp criticism from Israel, which dismissed it as an antisemitic blood libel, while Hamas welcomed its findings.
“Israeli authorities have destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group, including by imposing measures intended to prevent births, one of the categories of genocidal acts in the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention,” the report by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry stated.
It also accused Israeli security forces of using forced public stripping and sexual assault as a punitive measure in Gaza.
The report, citing testimonies from Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, alleges that civilians were stripped of their clothing in public, sometimes without gender separation. Israel’s permanent mission to the UN in Geneva has rejected the allegations, calling them unfounded and based on uncorroborated sources.
“In a shameless attempt to incriminate the IDF and manufacture the illusion of ‘systematic’ use of [sexual and gender-based violence], the [Commission of Inquiry] deliberately adopts a lower level of corroboration in its report, which allowed it to include information from second-hand single uncorroborated sources,” the mission said in a statement.
Israeli officials say the Commission of Inquiry has applied different standards in evaluating evidence against Israel compared to its assessment of Hamas’ actions on October 7, when it only included corroborated information.
The COI last year released another report last year saying it had “not been able to independently verify” allegations of rape citing “a lack of access to victims, witnesses and crime sites and the obstruction of its investigations by the Israeli authorities.”
It’s three members are Navi Pillay, who orchestrated both the discredited Goldstone Report and the Durban II Zionism is Racism conference and who routinely denounces “apartheid” Israel; UN Special Rapporteur Miloon Kothari who questioned the influence of the “Jewish lobby” and Israel’s right to be a UN member state; and Chris Sidoti, who said accusations of antisemitism are “thrown around like rice at a wedding”.
“All of the people on that commission have expressed hostile views and prejudicial views to Israel, even prior to serving on the commission,”Anne Herzberg, Legal Advisor and UN Representative for NGO Monitor, told The Algemeiner.
“The staffing is completely secret. There’s no way to even know who is writing the reports, how they’re gathering the evidence. So this COI has no credibility.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu slammed the report and the UN Human Rights Council, calling it “an antisemitic, rotten, terrorist-supporting, and irrelevant body.”
“Instead of focusing on the crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by the Hamas terrorist organization in the worst massacre committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, the UN is once again choosing to attack Israel with false accusations, including unfounded accusations of sexual violence,” Netanyahu said.
Cochav Elkayam-Levy, who heads the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children, said the report followed many other instances drawing “a false comparison between Israel and Hamas, especially in the context of sexual violence.”
“Sadly, this pattern has repeated itself across various UN bodies since October 7th. This moral comparison is painful and wrong because its purpose is to establish false historical narratives and inflicts irreparable harm both on the victims and on justice,” she said.
Herzberg said the COI was “a main vector of atrocity denial and inversion.”
“Since October 7, the COI has outrageously accused Israel of committing crimes against humanity in Gaza while refusing to say the same about Hamas. It also downplayed the mass sexual violence committed on October 7 against Israeli women and girls, while now issuing an entire report dedicated to defaming the IDF with the false claim of perpetrating systematic gender-based violence against Palestinians,” Herzberg said.
The report will likely be exploited by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, and provide fuel for campaigns by the BDS movement against Israel, Herzberg said. She expressed her hope that the Trump administration would defund the UNHRC in the near future. “It should never have been established in the first place,” she said.
The Hamas terror group welcomed the report, saying it confirmed Israel’s “genocidal” campaign against Palestinians. Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem told AFP, “The UN’s investigation report on Israel’s genocidal acts against the Palestinian people confirms what has happened on the ground: genocide and violations of all humanitarian and legal standards.
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Cornell University Pursuing Disciplinary Charges Against Anti-Zionist Hecklers of Pro-Peace Event
Cornell University anti-Israel protesters set up encampment on the University’s Arts Quad, May 3, 2024. Photo: USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters Connect
Cornell University has initiated disciplinary proceedings against over a dozen anti-Zionist students, staff, and non-Cornell-affiliated individuals who disrupted a “Pathways to Peace” campus event that was held to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians on March 10.
According to a statement by interim president Michael Kotlikoff, 17 protesters organized by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) heckled and jeered a panel comprising “Middle East leaders and US ambassadors,” violating the “educational process” and the university’s community standards. No sooner had they started than they “were swiftly removed,” Kotlikoff said.
Cornell University Police identified 17 people responsible for what Kotlikoff called an “unacceptable disruption.”
Nine students will be referred to the Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards for “appropriate action,” he added, which includes the possibility of suspension. Staff members involved in the disruption would be referred “for disciplinary actions through Human Resources,” while outside disrupters were to be issued “issued persona non grata status, barring them from Cornell’s campus.”
As an additional measure, Kotlikoff has also imposed an interim suspension on SJP for its orchestrating the unauthorized protest. The move could, on paper, deactivate the group for the remainder of the semester.
“Events like Pathways to Peace represent our ambition to embrace diverse viewpoints and engage in difficult conversations,” he said. “Cornell must be a place where all voices can be heard and none are silenced.”
Cornell University and Students for Justice in Palestine have sparred all academic year, with SJP pushing the limits of what constitutes appropriate conduct. In Sept., school officials suspended over a dozen students who disrupted a career fair, an action which saw them “physically” breach the area by “[pushing] police out of the way.” In Feb., the university amnestied some of the protesters, granting them “alternate resolutions” which terminated their suspensions, according to The Cornell Daily Sun.
In January, anti-Zionist agitators at Cornell kicked off the spring semester with an act of vandalism which defamed Israel as an “occupier” and practitioner of “apartheid.” The students drew a blistering response from Kotlikoff, who said that “acts of violence, extended occupations of buildings, or destruction of property (including graffiti), will not be tolerated and will be subject to immediate public safety response,” but the university has declined to say how it will deal with the matter since identifying at least one of the culprits in Feb.
Anti-Zionists convulsed Cornell University’s campus during the 2023-2024 academic year, engaging in activities that are without precedent in the school’s 159-year history. Three weeks after Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel, now-former student Patrick Dai threatened to perpetrate heinous crimes against members of the school’s Jewish community, including mass murder and rape. Cornell students also occupied an administrative building and held a “mock trial” in which they convicted school president Martha Pollack of complicity in “apartheid” and “genocide against Palestinian civilians.” Meanwhile, history professor Russell Rickford called Hamas’s barbarity on Oct. 7 “exhilarating” and “energizing” at a pro-Palestinian rally held on campus.
By the end of the year, Pollack announced her resignation as president of the university, a decision which followed the installment of an illegal “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on the campus in which pro-Hamas students had lived and protested the university’s investments in companies linked to Israel.
Despite some inconsistencies, the Kotlikoff administration has pursued campus lawbreakers. In Feb., it ordered the arrest of a fourth individual, Sumitra P. Pandit, involved in the Sept. career fair protest, pressing charges for obstruction and unlawful assembly.
“Pandita was identified as one of several people refusing to compl with lawful orders of the police to remain outside…and physically forcing their way past officers who were preventing the group’s entrance to the building,” Cornell University Police Department (CUPD) said on Feb. 7. “The investigation into the incident is continuing. All defendants charged with a crime are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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