Yehuda Lave, Spiritual Advisor and Counselor

Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher, and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money,  and spiritual engagement. Now also a Blogger on the Times of Israel. Look for my column

Love Yehuda Lave

I would be lax to mention that tomorrow Shabbat is July 4th, a holy day in America. It is our independence day and with all of the riots and troubles, one has to remember that the United States revolution re-brought the idea from the Torah into the modern world that man has rights and he should not bow so quickly to the government to give thim up. We fought and died for those rights.

The Zadick Taxi Driver

The Zadick Taxi Driver

Friday night brought new experiences for a Shabbat. I had an accident in my home and I was bleeding and my arm swelled up quickly.

This required some fast thinking, I said to myself.

Obviously I need to go to some time of emergency room to get some fast treatment, I realized.

But it was Shabbat. We aren’t supposed to break the Shabbat,  but if it is a question of health, part of the law (halachot) of Shabbat itself is to break the Shabbat to preserve life. And we are very liberal of the definition of what is life-threatening. If any limb or facial feature or any other part of the body might suffer harm or if you are in pain, medical attention is required.

There is no reason to be in pain on Shabbat, more than any other day. If you stubbed your toe during the week, you wouldn’t run to the Doctor, but if you are bleeding and your arm is swelling up, you don’t have to think twice. And while you don’t have to go out of your way to break Shabbat, you don’t have to scrimp or save on time, when it is time to get to a Doctor. So the first breaking of Shabbat for me was taking the elevator down from my fifth-floor apartment to the lobby. One would think that you would want a non-Jewish driver to minimize the breaking of the Shabbat, but the Halacha (law) is actually the opposite. We prefer a Jewish ambulance driver who wants to get you to the hospital safely, whether than someone who might be prejudiced against Jews and take his time to get to the hospital The Jewish driver knows that “breaking” the Shabbat is actually keeping it.

The next problem was I didn’t know where to go. I have lived in Jerusalem for seven years but never had a medical emergency. I have a regular Doctor at the Wolfson Medical Clinic in Sheri Hesed - Rahavia and they give me regular appointments whenever I need them. I have had a couple of semi-several serious medical problems over my seven years here, but I made an appointment (although sometimes you have to wait for several months), and was always taken care of.

Now, what do you do with an emergency? In the states, we have emergency rooms. The couple of hospitals that are here are quite a distance away, and I am not sure if they have walk-in emergency rooms. I knew that there is something called Terem, that was available on the evenings and Shabbat and have heard of people going to it, someplace near the Central Bus Station. So first I thought I would call a Taxi on Gett. Gett vetted its drivers, they give you a credit card bill and you know they go according to the meter on the Taxi. There are many stories of Jews being ripped off by unscrupulous drivers on Shabbat and the evenings. Gett helps avoid these issues. I live in the most normally tourist area of Jerusalem. Usually, the five major hotels within ½ a kilometer of my house have taxis running by day and night, but now because of the virus, most of the hotels are still 90 to 100% empty. 

So I tried the Gett application and though it had worked before for me, I couldn’t get it to work.

So I looked out on King David Street and there was a taxi going by (It was only about 8:30 at night), and I yelled and he stopped. I knew now was not the time to ask for the price, I was grateful to get a taxi. I said I need to go to Terem and he understood Engish. Isn’t by the Central Bus Station I asked? There is one there he replied but there is a new one closer to us down by Hebron Road medical center, about a 15-minute ride away.

He took me there and stayed with me until we were sure that the Terem was open. I asked for the price and he told me thirty (30) shekels which is the regular everyday price, certainly not Friday evening when you have no public transportation option. I thanked for his honesty and paid the 30 shekels and I dedicate this piece to the Zadik taxi driver.

The Terem Promenade Branch office, which is just off of the main Street, Hebron Road, the address is 6 Daniel Yanovski Jerusalem turns out to open from 8:30 to Midnight 7 days a week. If it had been later at night I would have had to go to the main office by the Central Bus Station which is open 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Their office name is Terem Romema-Sarei Yisrael on the corner of Sarei Yisrael and Jaffe Street. I know all this now after the fact. 

Any way the Terem Promenade Branch was also very professional, but you expect that not like the low expectations I had of the taxi drivers. 

The office saw me right away, spoke English, and charged less than 100 shekels. They gave me a Tetanus shot, patched and bandaged me up and I was on my way. Now the only problem was they gave a prescription for antibiotics and an antibiotic cream and there was no close pharmacy.

The two open pharmacies until Midnight were another cab ride away, and I didn’t want to break Shabbat any further. I got the names and addresses of both places and they were not on the way home. I then walked homes, since I was not in pain and it was a beautiful evening, without the need to break Shabbat any further, which is a good goal if you can do it. For a Doctor returning home from an emergency, is considered part of his going out. If it were not so, the Doctor could not leave his family and not return. His return is considered part of his trip and he can drive or take a taxi. For the patient, it is a little more complicated. 

Since it was late, and a 40-minute walk home, I could have taken a taxi under the laws of Shabbat. I could have also taken a taxi to the pharmacy, but I didn’t need the medicine until tomorrow (Saturday), so I walked home and worried about the medicine the next day. I awoke at 4:00 Am after getting home about 11 and thought that I should do a two-hour walk when it was cool to the pharmacy but low and behold there are no 24-hour pharmacies at this time. Maybe because of the Corona, but Google couldn’t find me anything open in the morning. The late-night pharmacy of the previous night didn’t open until 10, but stayed open until 7. The problem was of course that there is the synagogue in the morning and it not nice and cool like it is at 4:00 in the morning, but hot the whole day. 

So, I decided to walk with my friend Moshe, who was planned to come to my house to walk in advance at 5:30. It was a 45 to 50-minute walk but as long as I got there by 7 I would have the medicine today as the Doctor wanted. We walked to the only open pharmacy in Jerusalem by 6:30 and was back home by 7:15. Moshe later told me that there is an Arab pharmacy in the Old City open until 7 pm seven days a week, but that was later leaned knowledge.

The cuts and scabs responded to the medicine and the antibiotics and in a few days, I will be as good as new. A little banged up in the process, but wiser what to do in case of another medical emergency, thanks to Terem and the Zadic Cab driver

Ideas, that help explain how the world works

It can be very scary to feel isolated, rejected, confused, depressed and anxious. One way to soothe yourself when you are feeling these emotions is to tell yourself, "The depth of my pain is equal to the degree to which I need Hashem as well as the depth of my ability to feel His love."

Christian TV channel broadcast in Israel suspended

Cable and Satellite Broadcasting Council says GodTV's Israeli channel aims to convert Jews to Christianity must be removed pending appeal.

Chairman of the Cable and Satellite Broadcasting Council, Asher Biton, announced on Thursday to the "Hot" TV network its decision to suspend the "GodTV - Shelanu” channel from being broadcast in Israel.

Explaining the decision, Biton said that the channel appeals to Jews with Christian content, in contrast to the original request for approval which stated that the channel is intended for the Christian population.

Before deciding to remove the channel, the chairman of the council held a hearing, to which Hot and the channel itself responded. After examining the responses, Biton replied that the responses didn’t contradict what was written in the hearing - that the channel’s broadcasts do not correspond to the approval granted in April. Therefore, he said, there is no avoiding the suspension of the channel and its removal from scheduled broadcasts.

Hot was ordered to take the channel off the air within 7 days. It has the right to submit a new request which is "clear and transparent" for the approval of the channel, including a truthful and detailed characterization of the channel, and that request will be brought before the council for an in-depth discussion on such matters as freedom of expression versus harm to religious feelings, points which the council did not have to address so far.

The anti-missionary group Yad L’Achim responded to the decision, saying, “We are happy that the Communications Minister Mr. Yoaz Hendel and his staff understood the intentions of the operators of the channel and acted to shut it down in accordance with our request.”

“In our letter to the previous Communications Minister Mr. David Amsalem several months ago already, we warned that missionaries had established this channel in order to preach to hundreds of thousands of Israelis and convert them to Christianity, and that the missionaries had been granted approval through subterfuge.

“We want to thank MK Moshe Gafni for his great help vis a vis the communications ministry regarding the matter.”

Rabbi Tovia Singer, director of Outreach Judaism, said: "This ruling that shut down the missionary channel, GOD TV, is a landmark decision by the Israel regulatory authorities. By the admission of the station’s president and CEO, “Shelanu,” was set to convert every Jew in Israel to Christianity."

"This decision sends a loud message to overzealous missionaries dedicated to converting Israeli Jews to Christianity: their aggressive and deceptive targeting of Jews and Israeli children for conversion is unwelcome in the Holy Land."

Groups on Far Left, Far Right Co-Opt Black Lives Matter Movement to Target Israel By Sean Savage

Groups on the far-right and far-left, including pro-Palestinian organizations with links to terrorism, have been engaged in a campaign to co-opt the Black Lives Matter movement to target and delegitimize Israel.

“The cynical use of the Black Lives Matter by groups backed and controlled by foreign terror movements is nothing less than a repeat of the many other times that terror groups have used human shields to push their violence and hate,” Mark Greendorfer, president of the Zachor Legal Group, told JNS.

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A “civil-rights movement (Black Lives Matter) has been hijacked by extremists to push an agenda focused on promoting hate, in the form of anti-Semitism, rather than seeking justice,” he said.

Last week, it was widely reported when several Jewish institutions were targeted during protests in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, which included vandalism to Jewish businesses and synagogues, such as Congregation Beth El, which was vandalized with graffiti stating “Free Palestine” and “F*** Israel.”

While these incidents drew headlines and condemnations, several far-left anti-Israel groups have been engaged in a campaign on social media and in protests blaming Israel for police violence and linking the Black Lives Matter movement to Palestinian Authority uprisings.

In particular, anti-Israel groups have been using the protests over the public murder of 46-year-old George Floyd in Minnesota by a police officer to target the Jewish state over past training programs set up between the United States and Israeli police departments.

“This is where the Minneapolis Police Department learned their police brutality tactics from. Israeli occupation terrorist soldiers (on the left) murder Palestinians on a daily basis. We must stop training our American police officers to be gestapo units. #GeorgeFloyd #Palestine.” tweeted Abbas Hamideh of the group Al-Awda, a pro-Palestinian BDS group.

Similarly, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights and a student leader in Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) also blamed Israel for the police tactics.

US Campaign for Palestinian Rights@USCPR_

The Israeli military trains US police in racist and repressive policing tactics, which systematically targets Black and Brown bodies. The recent murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery are examples of racialized, systematized violence. https://bit.ly/2Amkm2b 

Where Do Many Police Departments Train? In Israel

U.S. law enforcement agencies need partners for effective training to strengthen their identified weak areas. Israel is not such a partner.

amnestyusa.org42112:06 AM - May 29, 2020Twitter Ads info and privacy533 people are talking about this

The anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which in 2017 launched its “Deadly Exchange” campaign, has long blamed Israel for helping to train US police in “extrajudicial executions, shoot-to-kill, police murders, racial profiling, massive spying and surveillance, deportation and detention.”

Over the past week, JVP’s campaign has spread and become a popular conspiracy theory among anti-Israel activists, according to the Canary Mission, an anti-Semitism watchdog group.

“Anti-Israel activists have claimed that Israel and American Jewish organizations are responsible for police brutality resulting in the deaths of black people, such as George Floyd,” said the Canary Mission. “They state that U.S. police forces are trained by Israel to deliberately use brutal methods of policing. They further claim that this training is organized and sponsored by the American Jewish community.”

At the same time, several pro-Palestinian BDS groups have applied violent terms such as intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) to the current eruption of protests in the wake of Floyd’s death.

The term was the name given to the first and second Palestinian Authority bouts of violence in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and then from 2000 to 2005, which witnessed daily terror attacks, including suicide bombings, stabbings and shootings against Israeli civilians, claiming thousands of lives.

In a Facebook post, the group Samidoun, which advocates for Palestinian prisoners and has ties to the US-designated terror group the Popular Front of the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), called the Floyd protests an “intifada.”

“We support the uprising in Minneapolis, the intifada of people subjected to an ongoing, vicious and structural racism, inheriting a lengthy and rich tradition of Black resistance, organizing and struggle,” wrote the group.

In a statement, PFLP also expressed its solidarity with the protests.

“It is not surprising for a country like the United States, which has a strategic alliance with the Zionist entity [Israel], to intersect with it in the discrimination, racism and repression that embodies its treatment of Palestinians,” the terror group wrote on its site.

‘There is no connection between the struggles’
Meanwhile, far-right neo-Nazi individuals and organizations have also been blaming Jews for the violence associated with the protests.

Andrew Anglin, founder of the Neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, wrote in a blog post about the protests, saying “Fear not the blacks who can burn your city, but fear the Jews who can release the blacks to burn your city and lock you in your house in hell.”

Similarly, the far-right is also claiming that the violent protesters are being controlled by Jewish money.

“They [Jews] Are Starting a Race War So People Don’t Rally Against ZOG [Zionist Occupation Government],” wrote neo-Nazi Kyle Hunt, according to the Canary Mission.

Hunt, who is also a supporter of the BDS movement, has previously joined anti-Israel groups IfNotNow (INN) and Al-Awda in protesting against the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in 2017, according to the Canary Mission.

At the same time, pro-Palestinian Authority activists have also sought to link and draw parallels between police violence in America and violence against Palestinian Authority Arabs by Israel.

In what has been termed “intersectionality,” these groups posit that no form of discrimination is distinct from one another.

Following the killing of Floyd, anti-Israel activists immediately began drawing comparisons with what they describe as systematic and deadly Israeli brutality against Palestinian Authority Arabs. Those comparisons were given further impetus in the wake of the May 30 killing of Iyad Halak, an autistic Palestinian from eastern Jerusalem, by Israeli police in Jerusalem’s Old City.

Drawing on this, several social-media posts depicted US and Israeli police as one and the same on social-media imagery.

In a picture shared on Twitter by “Los Otros Judios,” it depicts an Israeli and American police officer embracing while kneeling on the necks of a Palestinian and a black man, respectively.

The Four Horsemen Of America’s Apocalypse By Dennis Prager

It takes a lot to build a civilization, and though it is much easier to destroy a civilization, it takes a lot to do that, too.

But now we have four roots of evil that are guaranteed to do so.

No. 1: Victimhood.

The more people who regard themselves as victims – as individuals or as a group – the more likely they are to commit evil. People who think of themselves as victims feel that, having been victimized, they are no longer bound by normal moral conventions – especially the moral conventions of their alleged or real oppressors.

Everyone knows this is true. But few confront this truth. Every parent, for example, knows that the child who thinks of him or herself as a perpetual victim is the child most likely to cause and get into trouble. And criminologists report that nearly every murderer in prison thinks of himself as a victim.

On a societal scale, the same holds true – and being on such a larger scale, the chances of real evil ensuing are exponentially increased. One of the most obvious examples is Germany after World War I. Most Germans regarded themselves as victims – of the Treaty of Versailles; of a “stab in the back” German government; of the British, Americans, and French; and, of course, of the Jews.

This sense of victimhood was one of the most important factors in the popularity of the Nazis, who promised to restore German dignity.

That millions of black Americans regard themselves as victims – probably more so today than at any time in the past 50 years – can only lead to disaster for America generally and for blacks specifically. While victims generally feel free to lash out at others, they also go through life angry and unhappy.

No. 2: Demonization.

Demonizing a group as inherently evil is being done now with regard to the white people of America. All – again, all – whites are declared racist. The only difference among them is that some admit it and some deny it.

The notion that whites are inherently evil has long been associated with Louis Farrakhan. But it has apparently migrated out from his relatively small following to many blacks, even those who might consider Farrakhan a kook.

Former President Barack Obama, hardly a Farrakhan follower, described America as having racism in its DNA. That is as close to inherently and irredeemably evil as it gets; you cannot change your DNA.

In that sense, not only are whites demonized, but America is, too. Unlike traditional liberals, the left regards America as a moral cesspool – not only racist but, according to The New York Times, founded to be so. The New York Times has created a history of America that declares its founding, not in 1776 but in 1619, when the first black slaves arrived.

The American Revolution was fought, according to this malign narrative, not merely for American independence but in order to preserve slavery, a practice the British would have interfered with. This “history” will now be taught in thousands of American schools.

The combination of victimhood and demonization alone is dangerous enough. But there are still two more horsemen galloping toward the looming apocalypse.

No. 3: A Cause To Believe In.

Most Americans throughout American history found great meaning in being American and in being religious – usually Christian. Since World War II, we have lived in a post-Christian, post-nationalist age. Until very recently, Americans would have found the expression “for G-d and country” deeply meaningful; that term today, on the left, is risible and execrable.

But people need something to believe in. The need for meaning is the greatest human need after the need for food. Leftism, with all its offshoots – feminism, environmentalism, Black Lives Matter, Antifa – has filled that vacuum. In Europe, communism, fascism, and Nazism filled the hole left by the demise of nationalism and Christianity. Here it is leftism and its offshoots.

No. 4: Lies.

The fourth and most important ingredient necessary for evil is lies. Lies are the root of evil. Ironically, slavery itself was made possible only because of the lie that the black was inferior to the white. Nazism was made possible thanks to the lie that Jews were not fully human.

And communism was built on lies. Lenin, the father of Soviet Communism, named the Soviet communist newspaper “Truth” (“Pravda”) because truth was what the Communist Party said it was.

The New York Times, CNN, and the rest of the mainstream “news” media are becoming our version of Pravda.

Objective truth doesn’t exist on the left. The universities have already declared “objective truth” as essentially an expression of “white privilege.” See what happens to a student who says in class, for example, that “men cannot give birth.”

The public self-debasement demanded of anyone who differs with the left – like New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees just did when he said not standing for the national anthem desecrated the flag and those who have died for it – happens almost daily. The only difference between this and what dissidents underwent during Mao’s Cultural Revolution is that the self-debasement here is voluntary – thus far.

Last week, when this Jew saw a store in Santa Monica with a sign reading “black-owned business” so as to avoid being destroyed, it evoked chilling memories.

That’s how bad it is in America today.

See you Sunday bli-neder We need Mosiach now

Hopefully you will have a more peaceful Shabbat than I did last Friday night (see the Zadic Cab driver above). I will also be alone at night as my wife is going to the Czech Republic to see her parents. Friends are inviiting me for dinner and lunch but it will be different to be alone at night

Love Yehuda Lave