As Purim quickly approaches, I find myself struggling with many conflicting
emotions. Normally I would be concentrating on a Purim shpiel or
at least a satirical commentary focusing on current events, but the ongoing war
in Israel, coupled with threats to Jews everywhere and the pain and trauma of
so many Israeli families weighs heavily on me. At the same time, I’m trying to
emotionally reconcile advertisements for all kinds of expensive and
over-the-top Purim delicacies and treats as well as exotic Pesach programs,
offering every type of food, fun, and entertainment.
I recall the
fervor of our davening and tehillim in the days and weeks
after October 7, and now I’m noticing how slowly and steadily the fervor is
dissipating. For many in the Diaspora, life has simply moved on. Recently, I
was invited to a dinner meeting in New Jersey at a very expensive (overpriced)
steakhouse. The place was packed; people were laughing, drinking, and
celebrating. I was feeling quite uncomfortable. I felt like standing up and
shouting, “Israel is at war. Jews worldwide are being threatened. Can
we tone it down a bit?!” I recall Rabbi Berel Wein mentioning that when he
was a child growing up in Chicago, during World War II, his father refused to
buy a new sofa to replace the threadbare one in their living room and refused
numerous creature comforts, even desserts, saying, “When Jews are being killed,
how can I sit on a comfortable chair and eat ice cream?”
I’m trying to make
sense of the many bizarre things that are happening throughout the world, none
of which is occurring in isolation. As most of the Western world, including the
United States, watches Israel at war and insists on a ceasefire and an insane
“two-state solution,” those same Western democracies are themselves under
threat because of Islamofascists who have invaded their countries due to years
of terrible immigration policies. These same Islamofascists insist on their
right to demonstrate their disdain for their host countries while taking full
advantage of all that the host countries generously offer those immigrants and
asylum seekers.
Many European
nations are now being held hostage to the Islamofascist mobs who threaten Jihad
and “death to the infidels!” Here in the United States, we are facing a similar
threat. Let’s remember that, for the Islamists, America is the Big Satan and
Israel is only the Little Satan. If those who think that peace with
Islamofascists can be achieved through negotiations understood Arabic,
listening to the unadulterated Al Jazeera news (not the sanitized English
version) or hearing the hate-filled sermons in mosques might be an eye-opening
experience. As Rabbi Meir Kahana accurately said over 45 years ago, “Peace is
only achieved, and maintained, through superior fire power.” While I am
grateful for the support for Israel expressed by President Biden in the
aftermath of October 7th, we are witnessing a steady erosion of his
commitment due to pressure from those around him who openly support Hamas. His
fear of upsetting Iran, by tolerating repeated attacks on our ships in the Red
Sea, is bad for the United States and Israel while emboldening Iran.
The toxic mix of
progressive woke liberalism and Islamofascism has corrupted American education,
the mainstream media, and elected officials. These naive, cognitively
dissident, and woke individuals do not realize that they are next on the Jihad
hit list – right after Israel and the Jews. While citizens of the West are
playing on their iPads and wondering whether to purchase an electric car, the
Jihadis are sharpening their knives.
* * *
The sheer volume
of madness surrounding us is difficult to process. Unfortunately, like the many
Diaspora Jews who have normalized their lives since October 7th, a
vast number of Americans have accepted and normalized the prevailing
progressive woke insanity while ordering their next latte or micro-brew beer.
The progressive woke leftists are an absolute threat to American democracy. Too
many legislators, judges, members of the media, and educators who hold these
repugnant views are now in positions of power and authority. Our rights are
being stripped away, beginning with our freedom of speech.
On February 5th,
the National Review obtained a document circulated by
Secretary of State Antony Blinken to all State Department employees entitled
“Modeling Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion – Gender Identity – Best Practices.”
Stunning! While conflicts are brewing everywhere and Iran’s proxies are firing
on U.S. ships in the Red Sea, this latest DEI farce is mind numbing. The memo
stated that “gender neutral” language must be used throughout the State
Department. Unacceptable words include “mother,” “father,” “manpower,” and
“ladies and gentlemen.” On and on it went, way too inane to be believed –
except for those who concocted this irrational madness.
Apparently, this
DEI memo was part of Blinkin’s teshuva (repentance) for his
“inappropriate” Veterans Day statement, when he referred to the “brave men and
women who served our country.” It should be noted that the U.S. Armed
Forces have also been instructed to observe the woke DEI protocols. Naturally,
many decent people are terrified to speak up, for fear of cancellation,
punishment, or retaliation from the woke DEI regime that is destroying America.
* * *
As we witness
selective political prosecutions of those deemed to be “enemies of the State,”
it would seem that the advice given to Stalin by Lavrentiy Beria, the head of
Russia’s Secret Police, “Show me the man, and I’ll find you the crime,” has
been embraced by the woke progressive left and incorporated into their
playbook. Contrast this with Franklin Roosevelt’s Attorney General, Robert H
Jackson, who addressed the Conference of Attorneys General of the United States
on April 1, 1940. Included in his remarks was this statement of warning to
prosecutors:
If the
prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his
defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will
pick people whom he thinks he should get, rather than picking cases which need
to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes,
a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of
some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of
discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who
committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law
books, or putting investigators to work, to pin an offense on him. It is in
this realm – in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or
desires to embarrass or selects some unpopular group and then looks for an
offense. Therein lies the greatest danger of abuse of prosecutorial power. It
is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes being
that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached
to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of
the prosecutor himself.
Any reasonable
person can plainly see that Fani Willis, as well as Jack Smith, Letitia James,
and Alvin Bragg (who never met a violent criminal he didn’t love), aided and
abetted by Judge Arthur Engoron, have subverted justice with regard to the
endless Trump prosecutions – this while the Biden family’s criminal activities
are exempt from prosecution and media criticism.
Although, I
dislike Trump’s narcissistic personality and often find his behaviors
offensive, I’m concerned that those who claim to be serving the cause of
justice are actually following the twisted advice of the despicable Soviet
criminal Laverntiy Beria and completely ignoring the profound advice of Robert
H Jackson, a truly distinguished jurist, who became a Supreme Court Justice and
was the Chief United States Prosecutor at Nuremberg.
* * *
Professor Arthur
Herman is a brilliant writer, thinker, and educator. He has stood firmly
against the woke progressive left that wants to erase American history and
replace it with inane self-serving fantasies, which they are systematically
succeeding in doing. Herman advocates embracing United States history in its
entirety, including the Civil War era. He said, “America is a country where the
process of conflict and reconciliation, combined with the passage of time,
brings out and embeds the qualities that made the United States one people and
one community.” Unfortunately, those qualities are now under serious threat.
On February 21,
the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial, written by Arthur
Herman, entitled, “Biden Rewrites An American Tragedy,” succinctly
expressing the mess that America finds itself in. Here is what he wrote:
Biden pledged
to unify the nation but squandered his opportunity, dividing and weakening the
country. In Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy (1925), one of the
characters tells the hapless protagonist, “Time, which sees all things, has
found you out.”
We
can now say the same of President Biden. He is poised to become the most
discredited American president since Richard Nixon – and with far more reason.
The reason goes beyond a special counsel’s report confirming what many of us
already knew about the president’s diminished mental and physical capacity.
Instead of uniting Americans as he promised in 2020, he has made us weaker and
more divided, in large part because he lacked the strength and integrity to do
his job. Those closest to him knew it and let it happen. In the end, it isn’t
Mr. Biden's tragedy, or even theirs. It’s America’s.
We
can say it’s infuriating that those around Mr. Biden know he is failing
mentally and physically and have worked to cover it up, just as those around
Woodrow Wilson, including his wife, tried to cover up his strokes. It was
infuriating to see Mr. Biden publicly blame Donald Trump for the border mess he
himself had created by reversing Mr. Trump's policy in the first place.
Infuriating,
yes, but also disheartening. Not least because we have seen three years of a
presidency wasted, at a time when America needed to make a fresh start and show
the world we were back, stronger than ever. Instead, we are more divided and
weaker than ever, with a world more dangerous than at any time since World War
II. It’s an outcome as tragic for its wasted opportunities as it is for its
dismal results.
Any
tragedy is tinged with irony. So it is ironic that Mr. Biden was elected in
2020 on the theme of coming together: “I pledge to be a president who seeks not
to divide, but to unify,” he said in his first speech as president-elect. Given
his more than three decades in the Senate and his reputation (earned or not) as
a moderate Democrat, one would have expected President Biden to be a compulsive
deal maker on domestic issues like energy, tax cuts, and the border, with one
policy nod in the direction of the GOP, and another toward the Democrats.
At
the same time, one hoped he would stay on course with what had worked for Mr.
Trump in foreign affairs. That would mean treating China as a strategic threat,
restraining Russia after its unprovoked invasion, and countering Iran by
extending the Abraham Accords between Israel and its Arab neighbors, especially
Saudi Arabia.
Instead,
Mr. Biden turned out to be a compulsive deal maker on foreign affairs, in which
he and his team treated America’s enemies as if they were colleagues across the
aisle. From his first days in office, Mr. Biden handed out concessions to
anyone who seemed to threaten American interests, in hopes they would leave us
in peace. Some called this appeasement; I call it the Art of the Bad Deal.
Among them: deals with the Taliban by abandoning Afghanistan, with Russia by
not blocking the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, with China by allowing it to buy
Russian oil and natural gas after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, with
Iran by not enforcing Trump sanctions.
All
this brought disaster. The U.S. now finds itself drawn into regional conflicts
in Ukraine, Israel, and the Red Sea, with the threat of a fourth in the Taiwan
Strait. Meanwhile, the defense secretary has been in and out of hospital and
the military is unsure it can fulfill its missions.
On
the domestic front, instead of a deal maker, we got a rigid ideologue on issues
like green energy and open borders, while soaring government spending gave us
the worst inflation since the 1970s. Mr. Biden has used the bludgeon of woke
ideology to silence critics, including opponents of Covid vaccine mandates. He
has resorted to lawfare to cancel Mr. Trump, even as many Americans look back
with nostalgia to the presidency of the man Mr. Biden wants to destroy.
Instead
of realizing that his policies are alienating voters, Mr. Biden made things
worse by blasting the 70 million or so people who voted for Mr. Trump as
racists and insurrectionists.
As
a biographer of Joe McCarthy, I could have told Mr. Biden that being a
successful demagogue demands manic energy and drive. It’s not a role for a
president more enfeebled than any since Wilson.
The
shame is that Mr. Biden could have used his age to his advantage. At times he
seemed to play an avuncular, even grandfatherly, role, standing up for
old-fashioned virtues and values, while sternly dressing down those who
threaten the American family. Instead, we got King Lear, railing against fate
and blaming everyone except himself for the train of disasters during his
presidency, starting with Afghanistan and continuing most recently with the
border.
Worse,
a Lear who, it seems, sold his office and honor to enrich his own family and
his unworthy son, while developing a 15-year habit of hiding classified
documents in his garage.
The
shame of the Biden presidency has been a tragedy for the rest of us. A tragedy
of three years wasted, and worse, by someone from whom – whatever his faults –
we had a right to expect more.
* * *
Former Attorney
General William Barr, no fan of Donald Trump, when asked recently about a Trump
Biden rematch, said, “The progressive wing of the Democratic Party is dangerous
for the United States.” When asked whom he would vote for in a rematch between
Biden and Trump, Barr said, “Voting for Trump is playing Russian roulette with
the country [but] voting for Biden is outright suicide.” Barr’s comments
reminded me of a famous line delivered by Woody Allen in his 1979 speech to
university graduates: “Dear graduates, before you are two paths, one leads to
despair and hopelessness and the other to total extinction – choose wisely.”
Allen’s comical satire is now becoming reality. Certainly, Jews, throughout
most of history, have been faced with having to choose the best available bad option.
So, as we
anticipate Purim 5784, I’m remembering Abraham Joshua Heschel’s famous
statement comparing the Jews to “the messenger who forgot the message.”
Throughout history, it has consistently been our enemies who have reminded us
of who we are and the responsibilities that we have. Soon we will read, “When
the L-rd your G-d gives you respite from all the enemies surrounding you, in
the land He is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the
name of Amalek from under the heaven. Do not forget!” (Devarim
25:18-19).
There is no
“two-state solution” with Amalek. His interest is ridding the world of Jews and
Torah. “The L-rd will be at war with Amalek throughout the ages.” (Shemos
18:16). Jews can only possess Eretz Yisrael by living by G-d’s rules. Whenever
we forget those rules, we have to relearn the lesson the hard way. We willingly
returned to Amalek the gifts that G-d bestowed upon us in 1967; we therefore
had to fight even harder to regain them in 1973. Again we forgot the message,
and in 2005, we handed back a beautiful Gush Katif (Gaza). Now, once more, our
enemies have united us – as we were in the process of forgetting G-d’s rules
for living in the land – while inviting upon ourselves sinas chinam,
baseless hatred that pit Jew against Jew.
* * *
The Purim story
encapsulates the repetitive Jewish experience in Galus (exile). We settle in
various countries, establish ourselves, often almost completely assimilating,
and then the wakeup call comes! And every time it happens, we are shocked.
After the Jews celebrated the debauchery at Achashverosh’s lavish party,
featuring looted vessels from the Holy Temple, the Jews of the Persian Empire
came close to annihilation. Fortunately, there was the righteous Mordechai,
who, with Esther’s assistance, encouraged the Jews to repent – after which,
with the king’s permission, they went to battle against their enemies and
prevailed. It is interesting that, two years ago, Iranian member of Parliament
Zohreh Lajevardi said, “The Zionist regime is the sworn enemy of Iran; their
enmity has a long history. The Zionists still celebrate Purim every year
commemorating the brutal massacre of the Iranian people.”
It is ironic and
instructive that, 2,500 years ago, the Jews had to fight for their lives in
Persia and its territories. Today, Persia (Iran) and its proxies led by Ali
Khamenei, the Haman of our time, seeks to carry out Haman’s plan to annihilate
the Jews. But I have every confidence that, just as Haman failed in his quest,
so too will Khamenei’s plans be frustrated. “Behold the Guardian of Israel
nether slumbers nor sleeps” (Psalm 121:4).
Almost 30 years
ago, on Taanis Esther (erev Purim), while I was serving as a rabbi
in Cape Town, our “Palestinian peace partners” decided to stage simultaneous
deadly attacks in Tel Aviv and Yerushalayim. Two members of my community
visiting Israel were tragically killed. I received calls from some congregants
urging me to cancel the kids’ Purim masquerade party as well as the program for
adults. South Africa and Israel are in the same time zone, so I phoned Israel,
and sought counsel from a friend, a distinguished Rav in Yerushalayim. I will
always remember his incredible words. He said, “Arafat and his evil cohorts
have stolen so much from us; I refuse to allow him to steal Purim too!” We went
ahead with our planned activities. In physics only one thing can occupy one
space at one time – not so with emotions. The Jewish people have survived
because we have become experts in balancing joy and sadness.
Notwithstanding
the open antisemitism and hatred of Israel in a world gone mad, it is
imperative to remember the Purim addition to the Shemoneh Esrei: “In the days
of Mordechai and Esther, the evil Haman sought to destroy, slay, and
exterminate, all the Jews, young and old, infants and women… but G-d in His
abundant mercy nullified and frustrated Haman’s intention… and he and his sons
were hanged….”
May Hashem, once
again, “protect and keep” His children. May we become united in our reverence
for Heaven and our respect for each other. May this Purim be the next step in
our long-awaited redemption. Chag Purim Samei’ach!
