?During the past year I have, on several occasions, reprinted articles written by the award-winning British journalist Melanie Phillips. Because she lives in London and is not an American, Melanie has a unique objectivity when commenting on what’s happening in the United States. As mentioned in one of my previous articles, Melanie introduces herself as a “liberal who was mugged by reality.” Her most popular book is entitled Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within. Unfortunately, the United States and most other naïve Western democracies have also created “terror states within.”

On the day after the U.S. elections, Melanie wrote the following article, which appeared in several major British publications.
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by B. Halevi

In today’s world, almost everyone has heard of ADHD, but, sadly, most people don’t really understand what it is. Even in families where ADHD has been professionally diagnosed and they have read much literature on the topic, parents are often still lacking in their fundamental understanding of what ADHD is all about and what life is like for someone with ADHD. I mean, it’s not their fault. If you don’t experience the world through the ADHD lens, it’s difficult to ever fully grasp the full import of life with this disorder.

I have ADHD, and I’ll never forget the impact two videos I found online made on me. (Disclaimer: freely searching around on unfiltered internet is no longer something I would do or recommend to others.) These videos made me think, “Aha! That’s it! That’s how I feel! That’s the message I want to convey to non-ADHDers about my life!”

I’m no historian, but I remembered learning something about soldiers taking over private homes for their own use. The details, however, were elusive. I guess I should have paid more attention in American history class, but thankfully, Professor Google quickly refreshed me on the particulars.

With apologies to my British daughter-in-law, it seems that 11 years before the American Revolution, the British passed the Quartering Act, which required the colonists to provide housing and provisions to the British soldiers in their towns, at their own expense.

While it’s popularly believed that this allowed soldiers to take over citizens’ homes, the Professor tells me that that’s not actually correct. However, the public did need to come up with the funds to provide for the British troops’ needs. In any case, the Third Amendment to the U.S. Constitution severely curtailed the practice of “quartering” soldiers, requiring the consent of the owners.

Enough of the history lesson. If I didn’t pay sufficient attention the first time, there’s no reason why you should have to suffer through it now.

Miriam was born on my 25^th birthday; she weighed 5 lbs. 6 oz. and was 15 inches long. We were overjoyed that our two boys had a baby sister. Hours after her birth, she was diagnosed with spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia, an orthopedic disorder that would result in dwarfism. We thus entered the unknown world of skeletal dysplasia. These were the pre-Google days. We were sent home 24 hours later with some photocopied pages from a medical journal and instructions to take her to the genetics clinic at Johns Hopkins in the next several weeks. We were told that our baby girl would have extreme short stature, delayed gross motor development, and possibly other health issues. Nevertheless, her prognosis to lead a full, normal life was excellent.

Inspired by their Rosh Hashanah resolutions, many people are in the mode of doing more mitzvos. Not everyone can take on the running of a big organization or do big chasadim that take time and money. Here is a mitzva that everyone can do, young or old, rich or poor, Jewish or not Jewish.

The mitzva is kindness. Kindness is available to everyone and can be done at any time and to anyone, even a stranger or an animal. You just must be aware of what is going on around you. In some ways, it might even be a bigger kindness to do something that seems small than to do something that seems great. Everyone who is capable of it would save a person from drowning, even if they have terrible middos, but only a kind person will give tzedaka to a man who approaches him in the middle of the street. As we know from the Torah, Hashem chose Moshe to be the leader of the Jewish people because he took good care of a little lamb.

As we approach this year’s Yomim Nora’im, we cannot forget the horrors that occurred on October 7, 2023, which, last year, coincided with Shemini Atzeres.

A year ago, Jews in Israel were vociferously divided and rigid in their animosity towards one another. This culminated last Yom Kippur, when secular Jews broke up a group of worshippers in Tel Aviv claiming that they – the worshipers – were destroying the city’s secular ambiance. On Motzei Yom Kippur, when I read about the Tel Aviv tragedy, my heart sank. I knew that when there is such extreme animosity among Jews, we become weakened and vulnerable. I felt that something awful was going to occur. Then, just 13 days later, the slaughter happened. Of course, our enemies do not discriminate between secular and religious Jews. In their reptilian eyes, a Jew is a Jew.

Sadly, many of our Israeli (and Diaspora) brothers and sisters are still divided, but this Rosh Hashanah, our enemies in the North have served as the catalyst for some renewed internal unity among the Jewish people. How tragic it is that, for most of Jewish history, our unity has been inspired by those who desire our destruction.

Are you an unmarried Jew and feel like you have been passed over by the Jewish world? Do you feel that your fellow Jews as well as our Father in Heaven have forsaken you? Or perhaps you have a close friend or relative who finds him or herself in such a situation.

To whom can we turn, and what are we to do to free ourselves from despair when trying to find our zivug or any other seemingly hopeless task in life? Dealing with such situations can be very draining emotionally but can also be a source of great satisfaction upon the realization that no situation need be as hopeless as it initially appears. We have a loving Father in Heaven and great rabbis steeped in Torah who can offer us enormous rays of light to make our way through our darkness.

I would love to share with you a wonderful story of hashgacha – one with a twist! I saw this “gem” (pun intended, as you will soon see) on Page 273 of Achas Sha’alti 2, a sefer of halachic queries posed to Rav Zilberstein, shlit”a. Please look it up!

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Yossi, a young baal teshuva, lived in Manhattan. Anyone who has seen pictures of this “city” inside New York City immediately notices the huge high-rise buildings and the lack of private yards. Yes, Manhattan is a place for those who want to live near work. But for those who might want to build a sukkah – well that is not so simple in this concrete jungle!

Our Yossi thought long and hard about how he was going to manage to fulfill this newfound mitzvah of sukkah. Where could he build a sukkah?

After a long while, it dawned on him that the best place was on the roof, at the top of the high-riser where he lived. Yes, the winds might be strong there, but he would have to build it, reinforced, on the roof. The person whom he needed to ask was the person on the top floor, whose roof he would be using. Hmmmm.

Yossi knocked on the door of this non-Jew, and after a few minutes the penthouse owner realised that he could make a quick buck on this request.

I was alerted to a brief article entitled “Destigmatizing Drug Abuse Is a Dopey Idea.” The author, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (apparently a right-wing think tank), calls attention to recent trends in the substance abuse field to change the language of addiction in ways that minimize stigma. We now almost universally employ what is sometimes referred to as “people-centered language.” For instance, instead of using the term “addict” or “substance abuser,” which defines people solely by their disorder, we prefer to use the phrase “person with substance use disorder,” simply to acknowledge that he or she is still a person!

This article’s author thinks that all of this is nuts and perhaps wants to return to the good old days when we called a drunk a drunk and a junkie a junkie. While her argument is more than a little mean-spirited, it is not without some merit. The author cites, as one example, the trend to call men who hit their wives “intimate partner violence users” instead of “batterers” or “perpetrators.” (At least our field is consistent!) My worry is that modifying the language can unintentionally minimize the severity of the problem. We can’t lose sight of the fact that substance use disorder and domestic violence are extremely serious and often deadly problems.

When I moved to Brookline, Massachusetts, in the late 1960s, Rav Levi Yitzchok Horowitz, better known as the Bostoner Rebbe of Boston,* had a shtiebel-type shul on Beacon Street, right near the border of Brookline (which is a separate municipality) and the Brighton neighborhood of the city of Boston. At that time, the Rebbe himself no longer lived in the shul building but in an adjacent house, but the building still contained the room where the Rebbe held his seudos (today they would be called tishin), had his sukkah, baked matza (using a firewood oven in the basement), and had numerous hachnasas orchim rooms upstairs. The shul part of the building on the main floor still had all the appearances of a somewhat converted house.

The Rebbe himself was the attraction of the shul. There was no community to speak of at that stage. The shul had a few gabbayim to make sure that the daily minyan was somewhat organized. There wasn’t much of what we would call an organization. All of that would happen later.