I watched and listened to most of the globe-circling tribute to Sderot in which millions, celebrities and real folks told the Jews of that rocket-battered town that there are millions of their fellows in the world who know and care deeply about their plight: at least the simple and forbearing people do…

Since we are living during the last days of the dominion of Edom and its parent culture, Yavan, there was plenty of politics, some overt and some less obvious. Politics is a Greek word, and all our social forms, habits of thought, vocabularies, sense of what is or is not possible is permeated with the culture of ancient Greece that intertwined democracy, oligarchy, slavery, Tyranny, militarism and cultural imperialism. The derekh Yehudi, commonly and somewhat vacuously called “Judaism” is in the book that many quoted or cited– the scroll of Esther. Do they intend to follow its model for redeeming Sderot and all of Israel or will they, do they now, sit supping at Achashverosh’s feast?

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The essence of a state of good is when a Force has the capacity to be illuminated by the Light of God’s Blessed Presence. The opposite is that state which lacks this capacity… The cause of all evil is the absence of this Light. [1]

In the dark aftermath of the murder of eight students at the Yeshiva of Rav Kook in Jerusalem, March 06, 2008, my thoughts stray to Hanukkah, its lights and its grace. As the lights of Hanukkah swell to their fullness, autumn fades into winter. The memory of their lights of renewal and dedication sees one into winter and the days of strength and revival, Purim, at its end, when plans and events, light and darkness, evil and good were turned about; with the joy of wine “that gladdens man’s heart, to make the face glow with oil” creation itself calls out the link of these two festivals of redempton (psalm 104:15). Spring nears and with it the holy days of the first redemption, Pesach, the threshold event that brought Israel into awareness of its national mission of modeling ordered freedom and the Holy One’s providence. “Sinners will cease from the earth, and the wicked will be no more, bless Hashem!” (104:35).  That joy is what the haters and darkness seek to destroy. (more…)

Eight students of the wisdom of the Holy One, the Highest Wisdom, were gunned down the evening of Thursday March 06, 2008, two weeks before the Fast of Esther and the holiday of Purim when the Jews of Persia rose up “and did to their enemies what they had thought to do to the Jews.” But the spirit that animated the fighters of Purim, three and half centuries later, the Maccabees in the Land of Israel and so many other Jewish warriors for millennia seems lost to the Rabbis of the modern state, and in the galut, too. Crying and proclaiming one’s heartache at funerals seems to have replaced the spirit of Moshe, Joshua, David, and millions of others, famous or unknown. Dissolving in tears, like a woman, lets one avoid confronting an idolatrous, treacherous and remorseless anti-Jewish police state, the client of gentile kingdoms and their lynchpin, Rome. To love Hashem is not to perpetuate funeral dirges. (more…)

This essay focuses on Derekh HaShem “the Way of the Eternal One” by Moshe Chaim Luzzato, the Ramchal being his familiar acronym and title and related halachic discourse by Rambam [1]. What can one do as the world collapses, as a client regime run from abroad, “the government of atheists” foretold for the end of days [2] represses Jews in the Promised Land and Yeshiva students are shot to death en masse in Jerusalem; as one’s own life collapses amid the planned and general take down of cultural institutions, the swelling tyranny and conditioned mindlessness that negates the way of Judaism? (more…)

Let us say the last and essential battle, — the ongoing battle until that day when the merits of the Children of Israel enable them to recognize the scion of David who is present, ready and eager every day, in every generation to accept his role as king, Bar Nofli, a man born like any other man from a man and woman, husband and wife to lead in restoring the Kingdom of a fully sovereign Israel [1]. This day is near, here amid the deep sleep, the dread and great darkness of these terrible days whose full horror Abraham felt (Genesis 15:12). 

We are the walkers of the long road of sanctification, the derekh Yehudi that the nations are rushing to bury, in their chaotic minds, once and for all, to slay and bury the witnesses to and victims of their primal identity theft. Jews have endured so much of their mad power games to attain this far goal of time to survive, triumph, bless and, — it is necessary, all of history has shown this – to take “revenge against those fools who undermine civilization” [2]. (more…)