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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.

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Election day today in America today-Jew do the right thing!

A shout out to my sister tomorrow on her Birthday-enjoy

The Three Musketeers at the Kotel

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'Mortality dropped 8-fold with use of those two drugs'

T. Belman. I undertook on behalf of Dr Risch to get this information to the Health Ministry. You might say I hit a brick wall. Hopefully this interview will do the trick. By the way Trump was treated quickly and was given zinc but a different carrier than Hydroxychloroquine.

Yale Professor Harvey Risch and Dr. Vladimir Zelenko challenge assumptions of health officials with science, facts, and evidence.

WATCH

Israel Institute for Strategic Studies’ Barry Shaw’s View from Israel program interviewed Dr. Zev Vladimir Zelenko, discoverer of the “Zelenko Protocol” to treat COVID-19, and Yale School of Medicine Epidemiology Professor Harvey Risch.

In this explosive interview, Dr. Zelenko reveals that his Protocol was what cured then Health Minister Yaakov Litzman, but that ever since his successor, Yuli Edelstein took over, the Ministry has been stonewalling him.

Professor Risch discusses the “big lie” surrounding hydroxychloroquine efficacy, and evidence that “mortality dropped 8-fold with use of those two drugs.”

Read more...

The UN Human Rights Council is a sick joke.

So what’s new? High time to acknowledge the deeper problem beneath this farce

By Melanie Phillips

Some of the world’s worst human rights violators have now been placed in charge of protecting the world’s human rights.

China, Russia, Cuba, and Pakistan are among the 15 countries that have won seats on the UN Human Rights Council in a secret-ballot of the 193-member UN General Assembly.

China jails opponents of the regime and has sent hundreds of thousands of Uighurs into state re-education camps. Russia poisons its dissidents. Pakistan represses Christians, Hindus, and Ahmadis. Cuba is a police state.

Farcical as this is, it’s nothing new. The council has often included human rights abusers such as Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Angola, Qatar, and Venezuela.

Its activities also make a mockery of its remit. “If a state thinks they can conceal the human rights violations they may have committed, or escape criticism by sitting on the Human Rights Council, they are greatly mistaken,” said the council’s spokesman Rolando Gomez. But that is exactly what does happen.

The council routinely ignores violations by tyrannical regimes while perversely and egregiously targeting its condemnations instead at Israel, the sole democracy in the Middle East. Since 2006, the council has adopted 90 resolutions condemning Israel — more than all the resolutions against Syria, North Korea, and Iran combined.

The US has expressed its disgust over this monstrous travesty of human rights, with the Trump administration pulling out of the council altogether in 2018. To their shame, Britain and the EU remain silent about its intrinsic moral bankruptcy and continue to lend it authority and implicit approval by remaining members. The UK and France are now to take their places on the council once again, with Britain’s Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab having refused to say whether the UK would support China in the vote.

The reason for the council’s systemic perversity, however, lies deeper — in an existential problem with the UN itself.

Gomez boasted that when the newly elected members take their seats in January, 119 of the 193 UN’s member states will have served on the council, reflecting its diversity and giving the council “legitimacy when speaking out on human rights violations in all countries.”

But this is in fact the essence of the problem. The UN does indeed represent the world — and most countries in the world are tyrannies, authoritarian despotisms, or failed states.

The UN’s original membership of 51 states has swelled over the years to 193. This growth transformed it from the defender of freedom into a vector of injustice, corruption, and moral indifference. By 1993, only 75 out of 184 member states were free democracies.

Everything changed with the arrival of the non-aligned nations. This bloc of countries, mainly from Asia and Africa, believed the west had dominated the UN for too long. Their numbers enabled them to dominate it instead and suffuse it with a poisonous ideology aimed at taking revenge on the west for their perceived oppression under colonialism, imperialism, and neo-colonialism.

Their arrival turned the UN into an intrinsically anti-western body. Having been sidelined by the Cold War, which exposed its irrelevance, the UN became in effect the captive of the Soviet bloc and its allies.

In 1985, the Soviet bloc and its associates introduced a resolution, passed the following year in watered-down form, which was designed to preserve their power to abuse their citizens’ human rights. The UN turned into a platform for anti-western, anti-American, and anti-Israel hostility while sanitizing or ignoring real human rights abuses.

Yet as if it has turned itself into the chorus to John Lennon’s Imagine, the pathologically guilt-ridden and deluded liberal west (the current Trump administration apart) persists in regarding the UN as a dispassionate and moral arbiter of global peace and security whose sanctified decisions have the authority of holy writ.

By every possible standard, however, the UN has conspicuously failed to live up to its own objectives of maintaining global peace and security.

It has failed to keep peace in the world, failed to stop global conflicts, failed to halt the carnage in Syria. It has done nothing to prevent Islamic jihadi aggression, nothing to halt the horrific mass murder of Christians in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world, nothing to stop the murder of opposition politicians and extinction of human rights in country after country.

Instead, the overtly anti-American, anti-western and anti-Israel UN provides a rhetorical shield and effective justification and incitement for tyranny and oppression. It has turned the free societies among its members into effective accomplices to terrorism, genocide, and other abuses of human rights.

It’s high time to acknowledge the failure of the original ideal and why it has failed. What’s needed instead is a United Democratic Nations. Such an organization would command more respect than a trans-national institution founded on the mistaken belief that tyrannies and free societies can be bound together for mutual advantage.

The UN was created as a result of the shattering impact of the Second World War. It was founded on a starry-eyed belief in the brotherhood of man. But if a lion lies down with a lamb, the lion doesn’t turn vegan. The lamb gets eaten.

Don't Let Fear Dominate You by Rabbi Mannis Friedman

About Rabbi Manis Friedman:
Rabbi Manis Friedman is a world-renowned author, counselor, lecturer and philosopher who uses ancient wisdom and modern wit to captivate audiences around the world

Ten Questions On Evolution And Judaism

Posted: 13 Oct 2020 09:32 PM PDT

(It's that time of year, so here's a re-post of an article that I originally published in The Jewish Press)

Evolution

is feared by many as being heretical. But is this really the case? Here

are ten questions about evolution and Judaism, along with brief

answers. This does not substitute for the detailed discussion that this

topic requires; it is merely intended as an introduction.

1)

Evolution is alleged to have taken place over millions of years. But

doesn't the Torah teach that the universe was created just a few

thousand years ago?

There is a strong (albeit not universal)

tradition in Judaism that "the account of creation is not all to be

taken literally," to quote Maimonides. Rav Dovid Tzvi Hoffman

(1843-1921), a member of Agudath Israel’s Council of Torah Sages,

suggested that the Six Days of Creation were lengthy eras rather than

24-hour periods. Maimonides himself, as the commentaries on the Guide to the Perplexed reveal, was of the view that the Six Days represent a conceptual rather than historical account of creation.

2) Why should anyone accommodate evolution? Isn't evolution just a theory, not a fact?

"Evolution" is a confusing term, because it covers two very different concepts. One is common ancestry,

the concept that all animal life arose from a common ancestor - simple

organisms gave rise to fish, fish to amphibians, amphibians to reptiles,

reptiles to birds and mammals (without getting into how that

could have happened). This is supported by a wealth of converging

evidence along with testable predictions. Common ancestry is considered

by all scientists (except certain deeply religious ones) to be as

well-established as many other historical facts, and is thus often

referred to as "the fact of evolution." It is of immense benefit in

understanding the natural world - for example, it tells us why whales

and bats share anatomical similarities with mammals, despite their

superficial resemblance to fish and birds.

The second and very different aspect of evolution is the mechanism via

which one species changes into another. This is called the "theory" of

evolution. It is, however, important to bear in mind that the word

"theory" has a very different meaning in science than in everyday

conversational English. It does not refer to wild speculation, but

rather to an explanatory mechanism. Most, though not all, biologists

believe that random mutations, coupled with natural selection, broadly

suffice to explain this mechanism. The issue is, however, of zero

religious significance, as we shall explain in the answer to the next

question.

3) How can we accept scientific explanations for how animal life came about? It was God who made everything!

We

have a science of meteorology, but that does not stop us from saying

that God "makes the wind blow and the rain fall." We have a science of

medicine, but this does not stop us from saying that God "heals the

sick." We have documented history of the process involved in winning the

'67 war, but this does not stop us from talking about God's miraculous

hand. God can work through meteorology, through medicine, through history, and through developmental

biology. This is why it makes no difference if the neo-Darwinian

explanation of the mechanism for evolution is true or not.

4) Doesn't the Torah say that animals and man were created from the ground, not from earlier creatures?

Indeed it does. But what does that mean?

The blessing recited over bread is “Blessed are You... Who brings bread

out of the ground.” But what actually happens is that God created

wheat, which man sows, nature grows, and man transforms into bread. Yet

the blessing simplifies this in describing God as bringing bread out of

the ground. By the same token, the description of God bringing animal

life out of the ground can refer to His creating the raw material of

nature and the natural processes that lead to the formation of animal

life.

In any case, it is widely accepted today that we do not

learn science from the literal meaning of Scripture - after all,

Scripture describes the sky as a dome, the hare as bringing up its cud, and the kidneys and heart

as housing one's mind. All these descriptions were interpreted

literally by the Sages of old, and yet almost all recent Torah scholars

interpret them non-literally.

5) Doesn't the notion of randomness in evolution contradict with the idea of a purposeful creation directed by God?

Judaism has always acknowledged that there are events which, in the physical world, appear to

be random and happenstance. But it maintains that this does not rule

out God's role behind the scenes. Indeed, this is the entire message of

the Purim story! As it states in Scripture, "When the lot is cast in the

lap, its entire verdict has been decided by God" (Proverbs 16:33).

6) Doesn't the Biblical concept of man being created in the image of God contradict the notion that man comes from animals?

Absolutely not! Classical Judaism has long maintained that man is not qualitatively different from animals in his physical aspects. Man's

unique identity is in his spiritual soul, not in his physical body and

most certainly not in his physical origins. The great medieval Torah

scholars stated that man was created physically as an animal, but was

given the spiritual potential to rise beyond that level. The Mishnah

notes that on an individual level, we all come from a "putrid drop (of

semen)," which is even less than an animal; yet we are defined not by

what we come from, but rather by what we become.

7) Don't most rabbis state that evolution is heresy?

Very

few leading rabbis have studied the science and have ever given the

matter serious thought (and rabbis in the charedi world are not

operating from the rationalist perspective that is the legacy of

Maimonides and the great Torah scholars of Spain). The few

rationalist-oriented rabbis who did study the topic, such as Rav Kook, Rav Yosef Ber Soloveitchik, Rav Gedalyah Nadel

(a leading disciple of Chazon Ish) and Rav Aryeh Carmell, concluded

that evolution is compatible with Judaism. Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch was

personally skeptical of evolution but saw no theological problem with

it: "...If this notion were ever to gain complete acceptance by the

scientific world... Judaism in that case would call upon its adherents

to give even greater reverence than ever before to the one, sole God

Who, in His boundless creative wisdom and eternal omnipotence, needed

to bring into existence no more than one single, amorphous nucleus, and

one single law of “adaptation and heredity” in order to bring forth,

from what seemed chaos but was in fact a very definite order, the

infinite variety of species we know today, each with its unique

characteristics that sets it apart from all other creatures." ("The

Educational Value of Judaism," in Collected Writings, vol. VII, p. 264)

8) Doesn't evolution go against tradition?

No more so than the notion of the earth orbiting the sun. That was also rejected

by many leading rabbis from the era of Copernicus through today. Yet

most religious Jews have managed to come to terms with it. The same is

true of evolution, which has become widely accepted by religious Jews

with a strong background in science and/or rationalist Jewish theology.

9) But aren't there many secular evolutionists who use evolution to try to attack religious principles?

Yes, unfortunately there are. But this is an abuse of science; it doesn't reflect on the science of evolution itself. This, however, is why it is important for anyone teaching evolution to understand it properly.

10) You didn't answer all my questions and objections!

Of course not! Evolution is an immensely complicated topic, to which it is impossible to do justice in a brief article. Please see my book The Challenge Of Creation (available in Jewish bookstores and at www.BiblicalNaturalHistory.org) for a very detailed discussion

It is all over now but the counting--Go out and vote in America today

See you tomorrow bli neder

Love Yehuda Lave

Yehuda Lave, Spirtiual Advisor and Counselor

Jerusalem, Jerusalem
 Israel

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