The wide expanse of the Golan is waiting for millions of Jews to settle there and infuse the area with Torah life. Yehuda, Shomron, the Negev and Galil, will be settled by tens if not hundreds of millions of Jews returning home.
From where will all these Jews come?
For this we have to think “outside of the box”.
Messrs. Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, and special envoy to the Middle East, David Friedman, US Ambassador to Israel, and Jason Greenblatt, special envoy for the impossible, are all observant Jews. They are criticized for removing the ubiquitous symbol of our faith – the kippah – when in public (unless the President demanded that they do so, in which case I would prefer not to accept the position).
After airing the usual mundane excuses, the real reason which applies to almost all Jews of the galut is not touched upon. It is this behavior which I wish to discuss.
An authentic time-tested Jewish mantra: If you don’t make Kiddush, then HaShem will deal with you via Havdalah (separation).
Compromise is not only an integral part of human relations, it was included by HaShem into the very fabric of Creation. The Midrash states that HaShem had originally planned to relate to His creations in accordance to the quality of strict justice – You trespass a command of the infinite Creator; You die!
The Almighty created for us mortals a two-dimensional world of Time and Space; each independent of the other and each with its own “natural” laws. Time can exist without a spatial entity when a change occurs, and space is not measured by time. HaShem is beyond time because He is at perfect rest and is beyond space because He is infinite.
Shabbat is the absolute, ultimate sanctity of time. It occurs in seven-day cycles independent of all human involvement, contrary to the holy days of the year whose dates are determined by a bet din when declaring the time of the new month (Rosh Chodesh.) The sanctity of Shabbat would be in affect even if there were no Jews to observe it.
The site of the Bet HaMikdash on the Temple Mount in Yerushalayim is the absolute sanctity of space. It was declared so at the moment of creation. As the Gemara (Yoma 54b and many other sources) points out that the planet earth expanded from a primordial point, which was later to become Har HaBayit – the Temple Mount.
The book of Devarim begins with Moshe Rabbeinu’s farewell address to the nation, that began on Rosh Chodesh Shevat and terminated 37 days later with Moshe’s demise on the 7th of Adar.
Moshe stood before the nation 40 years after HaShem had commanded him to lead a ragtag assortment of millions of freed slaves, whose only connection was their common ancestry to those who had descended hundreds of years earlier to Egypt from the land of Canaan.
Now, the descendants of those slaves stood before Moshe as God’s chosen people. Twelve tribes hallowed by HaShem at Sinai and sanctified by the forty years of Torah study and fulfillment of mitzvot under Moshe’s tutelage.
Major General Yaakov Amidror, former head of Israel’s National Security Council, said at a Monday press conference that at some point Israel will have to destroy all Iranian infrastructures in Syria. He stated that Israel’s interests must be taken into account by the Russians and the Americans when considering possible peace agreements in Syria.
In Amidror’s opinion, Israel needs to first of all “take care of its strategic goal” of “keeping Iran and Hezbollah from building launch pads in Syria.” Regardless of how much Israel wants the Syrian civil war to end, “the price can’t be having Iran and Hezbollah on our borders.”
