Herzog forgot he lost the elections

Israel's 34th government had a very difficult birth. And when it was finally born, it was greeted mainly with criticism. It was lambasted by the opposition and by the media. Criticism from the camp that lost the election. But that is how it goes when memories are short and it is forgotten that in a democracy, even one voice can mean a majority.  Hello?  Does anyone in the opposition, Mr. Herzog and Mrs. Livni, recall the election we had here in March, and that the people also had their say?  The elections are perhaps of secondary importance because Livni, as evidenced by her words on Thursday, is concerned over the fate of democracy in Israel. Maybe to alleviate her concerns the losing party should be allowed to form the next coalition. Democracy, the Tzipi Livni version. Her partner, Isaac Herzog, does not want to be foreign minister. He wants to be prime minister. And to be prime minister he first and foremost needs to continue leading the Zionist Union. And to continue leading his party he must show some mettle against those who seek to depose him in his own home. Because between us, he didn't quite deliver the goods after promising he would form the next government. And this is precisely what Herzog did on Thursday in his forceful, aggressive speech. He wanted to show the opposition that he is the leader.  During his speech, however, which was exceptionally unbecoming of the occasion, he forgot to mention just one small thing -- it was he who basically lost the elections.  Apparently this is a minor, insignificant detail, something the entire opposition was quick to forget during the coalition talks, which, we must admit, were conducted in a considerably inelegant fashion. And now let us address the coalition talks. Those 42 days -- during which we were yet again exposed to the distortions that have existed for years in the Israeli political system -- were difficult to watch. In Israel, once the elections end the extortions assuredly begin. The extremely unflattering role of the extorted side, contrary to what one might think, is reserved for the winner. Such is the fate of he who wins elections in Israel. In these elections the people actually spoke loudly and clearly. The right-wing bloc was supposed to arrive at the coalition negotiations with 70 mandates, more or less. But three mandates for Eli Yishai were lost when his party failed to meet the minimum threshold, and the six mandates won by Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beytenu party belong to the Right. Lieberman, however, made his choice and is not in the coalition. At the end of the day, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finds himself with 61 supporters. This is not a lot. But this is the reality. We can hope the government will expand. And even if it doesn't -- we can hope for all our sakes that it will be successful. Herzog's speech on Thursday was a clear message to Netanyahu. The Foreign Ministry portfolio is available. Gilad Erdan, we can assume, will not object to receiving it. Silvan Shalom would be deputy prime minister. This could have been thought of earlier. Thursday's events did nothing to bolster the reputation of our political system, and not because this government now has the slimmest of majorities. We have seen similar scenarios in the past, lest we forget that the archaic Oslo Accords were passed by a single majority vote (which didn't bother the Left at the time). It goes without saying that things could be different, but for this to happen the system needs to be changed. And do we need reminding that when the Likud began its election campaign with the slogan "Change the System," it didn't exactly enthrall voters?  Perhaps the time really has come to find a formula that can spare us the delusions we witnessed on Thursday, where the winner must act like the loser and the loser acts like the winner.

Rabbi Moshe Levinger Z'L passes away,founder of Gush Emunim

Leading religious-Zionist figure Rabbi Moshe Levinger - one of the founders of the Gush Emunim settlement movement and founder of the modern-day Jewish community in Hevron, passed away Saturday, aged 80.

Rabbi Levinger was a leading halakhic and ideological figure in the religious-Zionist world, and had been a close disciple of Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook and Rabbi Avraham Shapira.

Rabbi Levinger's rabbinical career began when he was appointed rabbi of the religious-Zionist Kibbutz Lavi, and later became rabbi of Moshav Nechalim.

But he is better known for his leadership and activism as part of the Gush Emunim movement, which among other things reestablished the Gush Etzion bloc, south of Jerusalem, following the 1967 Six Dat War. 

Gush Etzion's previous Jewish residents had been massacred by Arab forces in 1948, and remained devoid of any Jewish presence under Jordanian occupation.

Rabbi Levinger is perhaps best known for leading the movement to reestablish the ancient Jewish community of Hevron, which had been ethnically-cleansed by bloody Arab riots in 1929.

On Pesach (Passover) 1968, just a year after the city's liberation by the IDF in the Six Day War, Rabbi Levinger was among a group of Jews who celebrated the Seder Night festive meal at the Park Hotel in Hevron.

At the end of the festival, the group - led by Rabbi Levinger - refused to leave the city, and spent three years living in the military authority compound.

They were eventually relocated just outside the city, where they founded the town of Kiryat Arba - named after one of the other names given to Hevron in the Torah.

Following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Rabbi Levinger represented the Jews of Sebastia, in Samaria, in their struggle with the Labor-led government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

In 1987 he was voted joint-top in a poll by the now-defunct Hadashot newspaper, which asked 22 leading Israelis from across the political spectrum to  to name "person of the generation, the man or woman who has had the greatest effect on Israeli society in the last twenty years." Rabbi Levinger shared the top spot with Menachem Begin.

In 1992, Rabbi Levinger founded the "Torah ve'Eretz Yisrael" party, but failed to pass the threshold into the Knesset.

He was awarded the Moskowitz Prize for Zionism in 2013.

Rabbi Levinger is survived by his wife Miriam and their 11 children - many of whom have also gone on to play significant roles in the religious-Zionist community.

His son Malachi was elected to head the Kiryat Arba-Hevron Regional Council in 2008, and his daughter Atiah Zar is a children's author and a journalist for Arutz Sheva's sister paper, Besheva.

The funeral procession will begin tomorrow (Sunday) morning at 11 a.m. at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hevron, and will finished at the city's ancient Jewish cemetery, where he will be laid to rest.

Meshiginar POPE Calls Palestinian Leader Abbas an "Angel Of Peace" During Visit

Muslims are killing and raping Christians all over the world, and this nut is calling the leader of a bunch of murderers, "Angel of Peace?" This Abbas wrote a thesis denying the holocaust and got his doctorate based on his dissertation!
This is the Pope's Angel!

May this "Angel" take over the Vatican!

Pope Francis praised Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as an “angel of peace” during a meeting Saturday at the Vatican that underscored the Holy See’s warm relations with the Palestinians.

Francis made the compliment during the traditional exchange of gifts at the end of an official audience in the Apostolic Palace. He presented Abbas with a medallion and explained that it represented the “angel of peace destroying the bad spirit of war.”

Francis said he thought the gift was appropriate since “you are an angel of peace.” During his 2014 visit to Israel and the West Bank, Francis called both Abbas and Israeli President Shimon Peres men of peace.

Abbas is in Rome for the canonization Sunday of two 19th-century nuns from what was then Ottoman-ruled Palestine. The new saints, Mariam Bawardy and Marie Alphonsine Ghattas, are the first from the region to be canonized since the early days of Christianity.

Abbas on Saturday offered Francis relics of the two new saints.

Church officials are holding up the new saints as a sign of hope and encouragement for Christians in the Middle East at a time when violent persecution from Islamic extremists has driven many Christians from the region of Christ’s birth.

Abbas’ visit also comes days after the Vatican finalized a bilateral treaty with the “state of Palestine” that made explicit its recognition of Palestinian statehood.

The Vatican said it had expressed “great satisfaction” over the new treaty during the talks with the Palestinian delegation. It said the pope, and later the Vatican secretary of state, also expressed hopes that direct peace talks with Israel would resume.

“To this end, the wish was reiterated that with the support of the international community, Israelis and Palestinians may take with determination courageous decisions to promote peace,” a Vatican statement said.

It added that interreligious dialogue was needed to combat terrorism.

Satmar Cult School teach their little squirts to hate the country that G-D gave them

This group call themselves "Bnei-Yoel" they have no Rebbe, but have their allegiance to their dead Rebbe, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum z"l, the first Satmar Rebbe....
They don't follow the two present Satmar Rabbis... 

The Satmar dynasty planted seeds that are now mushrooming very rapidly into bastions of hate. In the video below one can see the brainwashed children spewing Satmar propaganda! 

Children at an Orthodox Jewish school in Brooklyn gathered during the week of Israeli Independence Day to express their concern over the future of American Jewry, in the face of the dangerous climate created by the State of Israel and especially its prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu. One boy gave a short speech explaining traditional Torah opposition to Zionism, and addressing current events, such as the recent anti-Semitic killings in France and Denmark and Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, and the NYC M.T.A hate Ads. 

The POPE just like Satmar recognizes "State of Palestine"

The Pope must be reading Der Yid, Der Blatt, and Ami Magazine since he seems to have been influenced by their anti-Israel rhetoric and propaganda. 
He sounds just like their editorials and  he already wears a big yarmulka. The only difference that I see is that he wears the cross outside his talis katan, and Satmar has the cross in their hearts! If Satmar would have just a small yiddishe neshama, they couldn't possibly  write all that hate, especially now that the anniversary of the 6 day war is coming up..
They both believe that the miracles of the 6 day war weren't any miracles and were performed by Satan!

The Pope with Abbas ym"s

The Vatican officially recognized Palestinian statehood on Wednesday in a statement about a new treaty.

The treaty, which was finalized but not yet signed, signals the Vatican’s diplomatic switch from recognizing the Palestinian Liberation Organization to the “State of Palestine.” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is scheduled to visit the Vatican on Saturday.

On Wednesday, the Vatican’s statement cited “the Bilateral Commission of the Holy See and the State of Palestine.” In 2012, the Vatican had officially supported the United Nations move to upgrade the Palestinians’ status at the world body to “non-member observer state.” Israel has long maintained that pre-emptive and unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood would damage hope to forge a negotiated solution with the Palestinians.

The Vatican’s move follows a growing push among Western European countries to recognize Palestinian statehood. A number of European parliaments-including those of the European Union, the U.K., Spain, and France-have recently passed symbolic resolutions calling for Palestinian statehood recognition. The Swedish government, meanwhile, has gone further by formally recognizing a Palestinian state.

“Formal Vatican recognition of Palestine, a state that, in reality, does not yet exist, is a regrettable move, counterproductive to all who seek true peace between Israel and the Palestinians,” said David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee.

Harris added, “We are fully cognizant of the pope’s good will and desire to be a voice for peaceful coexistence, which is best served, we believe, by encouraging a resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, rather than unilateral gestures outside the framework of the negotiating table.”

In May 2014, Pope Francis made his first official trip to Israel as pontiff, in addition to visiting Jordan and the disputed Palestinian territories. In one enduring image from the trip, the pope received some criticism from the pro-Israel community for an unscheduled stop at the Israeli security fence in Bethlehem, which led to a controversial photo-op in which he touched the fence next to anti-Israel graffiti.

Last June, Pope Francis followed up his Middle East trip by hosting then-Israeli president Shimon Peres and Abbas in Rome to “pray for peace.”

JNS.ORG

Israel's Leftist whiners & hypocrites

Finally a guy who says it like it is...way to go Magal!

Yinon Magal

MK (Bayit Yehudi) Yinon Magal is a rookie in Knesset, but his is far from a political novice. 

Prior to entering Knesset Magal was an editor of Walla News, an anchorman on Channel 1 News, a correspondent for Channel 10 News, a correspondent for Yehuda and Shomron for Galei Tzahal (Army Radio) and one of the voices behind Voice of Israel Radio.

Magal used his first Knesset address to inform many of his opponents that he is not naive and he knows exactly whom he is dealing with.

Statements from Magal’s address:

"Generally a new government is given 100 days of grace but in this case not event two hours.

Naftali Bennett is obviously not qualified to be Minister of Education, perhaps because he wears a kippa or perhaps because he opposed the expulsion of Jews from Gush Katif.

Ayelet Shaked is not suited to become Minister of Culture for certain and not even Minister of Justice because she has a different agenda. There are those who believe their names are written down for these jobs and they cannot tolerate others infringing on their private business.

It is interesting the chareidim are under fire. Mr. Yitzchak Herzog would give them exactly what we did. If there is anything we gave that Herzog would not give please tell me.

I hear MK Bahloul (Labor Party) is shouting about the increase in Torani garinim (young dati leumi families settling the Negev and the Galil). 
Ribono Shel Olam, should we apologize about this? What are we here for if not this? 
Forget about Yehuda and Shomron, they are settling the Galil and the Negev. This too is problematic? What happened to the Labor party settlement spirit? It is gone. 
Today the settlement is only these folks and we are not about to apologize for it. Baruch Hashem there is an increase in these activities.

You reflect back to the tenure of Rabin when you say there was democracy. 
There was no Mitsubishi for Goldfarb (referring to a deal Rabin made to make a MK a minister to secure backing for his government) and to pass Oslo which led to over 1,000 dead. What a democracy! You passed the murderous agreement.

My dear MK Eitan Cabel. You posted a status on Facebook against appointing ministers without portfolio. You yourself were a minister without portfolio in 2007.

Dear Mr. Herzog, you are complaining about enlarging the cabinet to 20. You were one of 31 ministers and cabinet ministers in 2009.

Tzipi Livni, you speak about political ethics in government. You were part of the disgusting deal in 2005 in which Ariel Sharon appointed eight deputy ministers to gain sufficient support to carry out the expulsion of Gush Katif.

Mr. Lapid, who speaks about the inflated size of the cabinet. The cabinet being sworn in will have the fewest number of ministers in the past 19 years."

Rachel Jacobs Mother of 2 year old Missing: UPDATED

Rachel Jacobs, daughter of former Michigan state senator, among 7 dead in Amtrak train derailment

Rachel Jacobs was a go-getter with a weakness for Motown who commuted by Amtrak from Manhattan to her job in Philadelphia.

On Wednesday, her loved ones found out she was never coming home.

“We are just frantic waiting to hear news from my daughter,” Gilda Jacobs told The Daily News just before took off for the East Coast to find her daughter.

FACEBOOK

Jacobs, who lived in Stuyvesant Town, left behind her husband, Todd Waldman, their son, Jacob, and Detroit Nation — an organization of former Motown residents devoted to helping their struggling hometown gets back on its feet.

Several hours later, the former Michigan state senator was on a plane to New York City when the news broke that her 39-year-old daughter was among theseven people who perished when the train ran off the rails in Philadelphia.

Jacobs, who lived in Stuyvesant Town, left behind her husband, Todd Waldman, their son, Jacob, and Detroit Nation — an organization of former Motown residents devoted to helping their struggling hometown gets back on its feet..

“She loved Detroit,” a heartbroken friend who asked not to be identified said. “She wanted to help out her hometown and found a way to get all the expat Detroiters involved in helping the city out.”

Jacobs, CEO of a technology education company called ApprenNet, also loved the music Detroit made famous.

LUCAS JACKSON/REUTERS

Jacobs commuted by Amtrak from Manhattan to her job in Philadelphia.

“I grew up on the Temptations and the Four Tops,” Jacobs said on a website, where she described her joyous Jewish wedding.

Daylight on Wednesday revealed the devastation caused by an Amtrak train derailment in Philadelphia that left at least six people dead and dozens injured, several critically, in a terrifying wreck that plunged passengers into darkness and chaos. 

 One of the victims is a 21-year-old Jewish man from Far Rockaway. His name is Justin (Avraham Yitzchak) Zemser Z”L. Authorities are releasing the body to the family without any autopsy.

Additionally, friends of a woman named Rachel Jacobs were showing her photo at the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. She is the CEO of ApprenNet, a Philadelphia technology firm. She texted her husband that she was on the train and has not been seen since.

Some passengers had to scramble through the windows of toppled cars to escape. One of the seven cars was severely mangled.

Train 188, a Northeast Regional, was en route from Washington to New York with 238 passengers and five crew members when it jumped the tracks as it was rounding a sharp curve in the city’s working-class Port Richmond section shortly after 9 p.m. Tuesday, authorities said.

The accident closed the nation’s busiest rail corridor between New York and Washington as federal investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board arrived to begin examining the twisted wreckage and determine what went wrong.

“It is an absolute disastrous mess,” Mayor Michael Nutter said. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”

Nutter confirmed five deaths and said not all the people on the train had been accounted for. Temple University Hospital said Wednesday a person died there overnight from a chest injury.

More than 140 people went to hospitals to be evaluated or treated for injuries that included burns and broken bones.

Amtrak said the cause of the derailment was not known.

Passenger Jillian Jorgensen, 27, was seated in the quiet car — the second passenger car — and said the train was going “fast enough for me to be worried” when it began to lurch to the right.

The train derailed, the lights went out and Jorgensen was thrown from her seat. She said she “flew across the train” and landed under some seats that had apparently broken loose from the floor.

Jorgensen, a reporter for The New York Observer who lives in Jersey City, New Jersey, said she wriggled free as fellow passengers screamed. She saw one man lying still, his face covered in blood, and a woman with a broken leg.

She climbed out an emergency exit window, and a firefighter helped her down a ladder to safety.

“It was terrifying and awful, and as it was happening it just did not feel like the kind of thing you could walk away from, so I feel very lucky,” Jorgensen said in an email to The Associated Press. “The scene in the car I was in was total disarray, and people were clearly in a great deal of pain.”

Early Wednesday, authorities on the scene seemed to be girding for a long haul. Several portable toilets were delivered for investigators and recovery workers. Heavy equipment was brought in, and Amtrak workers in hard hats walked around the wreck.

All seven train cars, including the engine, were in “various stages of disarray,” Nutter said. He said there were cars that were “completely overturned, on their side, ripped apart.”

An AP Press manager, Paul Cheung, was on the train and said he was watching a video on his laptop when “the train started to decelerate, like someone had slammed the brake.”

“Then suddenly you could see everything starting to shake,” he said. “You could see people’s stuff flying over me.”

Cheung said another passenger urged him to escape from the back of his car, which he did. He said he saw passengers trying to get out through the windows of cars tipped on their sides.

“The front of the train is really mangled,” he said. “It’s a complete wreck. The whole thing is like a pile of metal.”

Gaby Rudy, an 18-year-old from Livingston, New Jersey, was headed home from George Washington University. She said she was nearly asleep when she suddenly felt the train “fall off the track.”

The next few minutes were filled with broken glass and smoke, said Rudy, who suffered minor injuries. “They told us we had to run away from the train in case another train came,” she said.

Another passenger, Daniel Wetrin, was among more than a dozen people taken to a nearby elementary school.

“I think the fact that I walked off kind of made it even more surreal because a lot of people didn’t walk off,” he said. “I walked off as if, like, I was in a movie. There were people standing around, people with bloody faces. There were people, chairs, tables mangled about in the compartment … power cables all buckled down as you stepped off the train.”

Several people, including one man complaining of neck pain, were rolled away on stretchers. Others wobbled as they walked away or were put on buses. An elderly woman was given oxygen.

The Port Richmond neighborhood is a mix of warehouses, industrial buildings and homes.

The area where the wreck happened is known as Frankford Junction. It is not far from the site of one of the nation’s deadliest train accidents: the 1943 derailment of the Congressional Limited, from Washington to New York, which killed 79 people.

Amtrak’s busy Northeast Corridor serves more than 11 million passengers a year.

The mayor, citing the mangled train tracks and downed wires, said: “There’s no circumstance under which there would be any Amtrak service this week through Philadelphia.”

North Korea Executes Defense Chief With An Anti-Aircraft Gun because he took a nap during Kim Jong Un's Speech

Senior North Korean military officer Hyon Yong Chol (R, front) attends the 4th Moscow Conference on International Security (MCIS) in Moscow in this April 16, 2015 file photo. 

North Korea executed its defense chief by putting him in front of an anti-aircraft gun at a firing range, Seoul’s National Intelligence Service told lawmakers, which would be the latest in a series of high-level purges since Kim Jong Un took charge. 

Hyon Yong Chol, who headed the isolated nuclear-capable country’s military, was charged with treason, including disobeying Kim and falling asleep during an event at which North Korea’s young leader was present, according to South Korean lawmakers briefed in a closed-door meeting with the spy agency on Wednesday. 

His execution was watched by hundreds of people, according to NIS intelligence shared with lawmakers. It was not clear how the NIS obtained the information and it is not possible to independently verify such reports from within secretive North Korea. “The NIS official said it had been confirmed by multiple sources. It is still just intelligence, but he said they were confident,” Shin Kyoung-min, a lawmaker and member of the opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy, who attended the briefing, told Reuters. 

Experts on North Korea said there was no sign of instability in Pyongyang, but there could be if purges continued. 

Kim had previously ordered the execution of 15 senior officials this year as punishment for challenging his authority, according to the NIS. In all, some 70 officials have been executed since Kim took over after his father’s death in 2011, Yonhap news agency cited the NIS as saying. “There is no clear or present danger to Kim Jong Un’s leadership or regime stability, but if this continues to happen into next year, then we should seriously start to think about revising our scenarios on North Korea,” said Michael Madden, an expert on the country’s leadership who contributes to the 38 North think tank in Washington. 

Koh Yu-hwan, a North Korea specialist at Dongguk University in Seoul, said the regime could “reach its limit” if Kim’s purges continued. “But it’s still too early to tell,” said Koh. 

The lawmakers said Hyon, 66, was executed at a firing range at the Kanggon Military Training Area, 22 km (14 miles) north of Pyongyang, according to the NIS. The U.S.-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea said last month that, according to satellite images, the range was likely used for an execution by ZPU-4 anti-aircraft guns in October. The target was just 30 meters (100 feet) away from the weapons, which have a range of 8,000 meters, it said. 

 Hyon was said to have shown disrespect to Kim by dozing off at a military event, the Seoul lawmakers said, citing the agency briefing. Hyon was also believed to have voiced complaints against Kim and had not followed his orders several times, according to the lawmakers. He was arrested in late April and executed three days later without legal proceedings, the NIS told lawmakers. 

“When the NIS is talking officially, they are relatively reliable. There are good reasons to believe it is true, but we cannot be 100 percent sure yet,” said Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert at Kookmin University in Seoul. Last month, Hyon traveled to Moscow, where he spoke at a security conference. He was reported by North Korean state media to have appeared at an event in late April - shortly before the NIS told lawmakers he was executed - an outward indication that all was normal. 

North Korea is one of the most insular - and unpredictable - countries in the world and its power structure is highly opaque. The current leader is the third generation of the Kim family that has ruled with near-absolute power since the country was formed in 1948. Kim Jong Un’s father, Kim Jong Il, was appointed successor to the North Korean throne two decades before coming to power in 1994, during which time he was able to purge and alienate potential political challengers. 

Kim Jong Un, by contrast, has had few years to consolidate power. In 2013, Kim Jong Un purged and executed his uncle, Jang Song Thaek, once considered the second most powerful man in Pyongyang’s leadership, for factionalism and committing crimes damaging to the economy, along with a group of officials close to him. Lankov said that the purges in Pyongyang did not necessarily point to instability. “The common assumption is that it’s bad for stability, but I’m not so sure,” he said, adding it could be Kim consolidating his power base and removing people who had not sufficiently proved their loyalty. 

Pyongyang’s military leadership has been in a state of perpetual reshuffle since Kim Jong Un took power. He has changed his armed forces chief four times since coming to power, while his father, Kim Jong Il, who ruled the country for almost two decades, replaced his chief just three times. 

The South Korean spy agency told lawmakers that Ma Won Chun, known as North Korea’s chief architect of new infrastructure under Kim, was also purged or punished, the lawmakers said. Ma had also once served as vice director of the secretive Finance and Accounting Department in the ruling Workers’ Party and, until recently, was effectively the regime’s money man.

The Intrinsic Sanctity of the Land of Israel ... Shmittah etc..

Rabbi Yaakov David Willowski (1845-1913) of Safed, known as the 'Ridbaz,' was one of the most vociferous opponents to the hetter mechirah - the temporary sale of land in Israel to a non-Jew in order to avoid the restrictions of working the land during the Sabbatical year. 

More interesting than his Halachic objections to the sale, however, is the philosophical argument that the rabbi of Safed raised.

The stated purpose of the hetter, the Ridbaz wrote, is to uphold the mitzvah of Yishuv Ha'aretz, settling the Land, by allowing the fledgling agricultural settlements in the Land of Israel to grow and prosper. But if the legal sale is indeed effective, then the Land would lose its sanctity and the special agricultural mitzvot - tithes, the Sabbatical year, and so on - would no longer apply. And if the Land is not holy, there is no longer a mitzvah to settle the Land. Thus the hetter in effect undermines the very goal it was designed to support!

To paraphrase the Ridbaz: the whole purpose of our return to Eretz Yisrael is to fulfill its special mitzvot and experience its unique sanctity. If we use loopholes and legal fictions to avoid these mitzvot, we may as well be living in Warsaw or New York!

Rav Kook and the Hetter

Despite common belief, Rav Kook was not in fact the author of the hetter mechirah. 

This legal mechanism was first designed for the Sabbatical year of 1889. 

At that time, Jewish farmers in Eretz Yisrael, whose livelihood depended upon the export of wine and citrus fruits, turned to the leading Halachic authorities in Europe to find a way to avoid the ruin of the fragile industry they were struggling to develop. Were they to let the land lie fallow, the young orchards would suffer greatly, and the export business they had built up would be lost. They also feared that land left fallow could be lost to squatters and thieves. This was particularly problematic due to Ottoman Empire land laws, which allowed ownership of uncultivated land to be challenged by squatters

In response to this difficult situation, three prominent rabbis met in Vilna and devised the hetter mechirah, based on similar legal sales to avoid the prohibitions involved with bechorot (firstborn animals) and chametz on Passover. The hetter was approved by famed Halachic authority Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan Spector. However, many prominent rabbis opposed it, including some of the greatest authorities of the time - and the controversy over the hetter mechirah was born.

As rabbi of the town of Jaffa and its surrounding communities, Rav Kook needed to take a position regarding the hetter. While still in Europe, he had discussed the issue with his father-in-law, and they both decided against supporting it.

But after coming to Eretz Yisrael and seeing first-hand the great need for the hetter, Rav Kook changed his mind and became a staunch supporter of the leniency. Prior to the Sabbatical year of 1910, he penned a Halachic treatise in defense of the hetter mechirah, entitled Shabbat Ha'aretz.

The Sanctity of the Land

In his remarks defending the hetter, Rav Kook responded to the Ridbaz's objection that the hetter undermines its own stated goal - supporting the settlement of the Land of Israel - because selling the Land to non-Jews annuls its sanctity and circumvents its special mitzvot.

This argument, Rav Kook explained, is based on the false premise that the special holiness of Eretz Yisrael is limited to mitzvot ha-teluyot ba'aretz, those mitzvot that only apply in the Land. According to this view, once these special mitzvot are no longer binding, there is no longer any holiness to the Land and no mitzvah to settle it.

But this is not the true outlook of the Torah. Instead, we should compare the mitzvah of settling the Land of Israel to the mitzvah of studying Torah. While it is true that Torah study enables one to learn how to properly discharge all mitzvot, one cannot say that the value of Torah study is only as a preparation to fulfilling mitzvot. In fact, there is an intrinsic holiness in the act of studying Torah. Even when studying subjects which have no current practical application, this study is nonetheless invaluable. As the Sages taught: One who studies the laws of the Chatat offering is considered as if he offered a Chatat(Menachot 110a).

The holiness of the Land of Israel is independent of those mitzvot that may be fulfilled while living there. Just the opposite: the primary holiness of the Land is reflected in the mitzvah to settle it, and the obligation of mitzvot ha-teluyot ba'aretz is an expression of this special holiness. As the Sages taught, merely living in Eretz Yisrael is equal to all the mitzvot in the Torah - and this 'equation' includes those mitzvot that only apply in the Land.

Equal to all the Mitzvot

This statement about the overriding value of living in the Land appears in the Sifri (sec. 80) in the context of the following story:

"Rabbi Elazar ben Shamua and Rabbi Yochanan HaSandlar set out to travel to Nitzivim [in Babylonia] in order to study Torah from Rabbi Yehudah ben Beteira. But when they arrived in Sidon, they remembered the Land of Israel. They lifted their eyes, and their tears flowed. They rent their garments and quoted the verse: "You will expel them and dwell in their land" (Deut. 12:29). Then they returned home and declared: Dwelling in the Land of Israel is equivalent to all of the mitzvot of the Torah."

These scholars had pure motives for leaving Eretz Yisrael. They sought to learn Torah from one of the leading sages of the generation. Yet in the end, they decided that the mitzvah of dwelling in the Land takes precedence. They placed greater value on living in Eretz Yisrael, even at a time when the country suffered from foreign rule and economic hardship. The mitzvah of living in the Land was still in force, even though the Sages of that time found legal loopholes - similar to the hetter mechirah - to lighten the financial burden of certain mitzvot (such as Hillel's pruzbul, and avoiding tithes by bringing produce into the house by way of the courtyard or the roof (see Berachot 35b)).

Why did these scholars quote this particular verse, "You will expel them and dwell in their land"? Apparently, they noted that the word "their" is extraneous; it could have just read "and dwell in the land." They deduced from here that even when the Land of Israel has not been fully released from the control of foreign nations - even when it was still considered "their land," the land of the Canaanite nations, and many of the land-dependent mitzvot were not yet incumbent - we are nonetheless obligated to dwell in the Land.

This lesson was also valid during the time of Rabbi Elazar ben Shamua and Rabbi Yochanan HaSandlar. Even after the destruction of the Temple, even in a time of foreign rule, the mitzvah of dwelling in the Land is still equal to all the mitzvot.

The author of Kaftor VaFerach (Rabbi Ishtori HaParchi, 1280-1355) similarly wrote that the sanctity of the Land of Israel is independent of the mitzvot ha-teluyot ba'aretz. 

His proof: 

why did Jacob, Joseph, and Moses all seek to be buried in the Land when it had not yet been conquered and sanctified?

In summary, Rav Kook concluded, it is not only possible to be lenient in our days, it is proper to do so, in order to encourage settlement of the Land. Furthermore, the hetter does not cancel all aspects of the Sabbatical year. It only permits those types of agricultural labor that are rabbinically prohibited. Thus the Sabbatical year is not completely uprooted. This hetter, Rav Kook explained, is similar to the permission - and obligation - to desecrate the Sabbath in life-threatening situations. As the Sages wrote: The Torah teaches that we should desecrate a single Sabbath for one whose life is in danger, so that he will be able to keep many future Sabbaths(Yoma 85b). Similarly, by permitting certain agricultural work now, we will enable the full observance of the Sabbatical year in the future.

Novominsker Rebbe Issues Direct Plea to President Obama regarding Iran

I got to give credit where credit is due! I have been hammering Agudah for not addressing issues that concern Israel's security, so now the Noveminsker addressed it..Kudos!

“Our tefillos, of course, are directed to Avinu shebashamayim, but I also feel compelled to address the leader of this great country.”

A deafening silence overtook the cavernous grand ballroom of the Hilton New York, as Rabbi Yaakov Perlow, the Novominsker Rebbe shlit”a, Rosh Agudas Yisroel of America, spoke these words during the organization’s 93rd annual dinner on Sunday evening.

The subject that prompted the Rebbe to address his words directly to President Obama was the impending “deal” with Iran regarding the rogue nation’s nuclear development. The Rebbe expressed deep concern about the threat an invigorated Iran poses toward Israel.

The Rebbe passionately invoked the 70th anniversary of the culmination of the Holocaust when discussing Iran’s “open declaration of genocide.” He bluntly stated that the diplomatic agreements currently being contemplated between the United States and Iran could well enable the radical regime to attain nuclear weapons “one way or another.”

“Mr. President, rise to the challenge of history,” the Rebbe implored, “and preserve life and freedom for a people who have been the whipping boys of history.”