We are World Champions in dying together, but in figuring out how to live together we have not yet even finished basic training level.

I just discovered this project called "Bet Sfer lAchdut".. here are a couple of the recent videos they produced.. Rami Levi and Rabbi Lau

Rabbi Lau is always worth giving 8 minutes to..

I like Rabbi Lau. Who doesn't? The son also, the current Chief Rabbi, but I am referring to the father, the current Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv.

Rav Yisrael Meir Lau is about to turn 80, and thank God has good health and strength and is doing a fine job in Tel Aviv. Unfortunately, the law is forcing him to retire when he hits 80. It would be a big loss to have him forced out when he is still functioning just fine, though I understand the purpose of the law is to deal with situations in which the Chief Rabbi of a given city might not be functioning so well and continues to hold the position, leaving his residents without a functioning rabbi. The law itself isn't bad, but perhaps need to be adjusted to take into account the rabbi's health.

Anyways, Rabbi Lau the son has requested from the Legal Counsel of the Rabbanut to find a way to extend Rabbi Lau the father's term for another 5 years (dependent on a health report).

It seems that the most effective way to allow this to happen would be to change the status of the Chief Rabbi of a city from being an appointment to being a publicly elected position.
source: Behadrei

I think that this could be great. I don't know how such elections would be designed. I suspect that they would design them in a way that does not actually give people the vote, but keeps it within the political level of voting and just change the official status.

That would be a shame.

Let the people have the power, rather than the cronyism of politics. The people should have more say in who their Chief Rabbi is. Rabbi Lau very well might win his election, as he has always been very popular, but other rabbis might be replaced, whether at 80 or at a earlier age.

I would have preferred listening to Rabbi Lau directly rather than through a translator, but maybe some of you will prefer it this way...

Rsbbi Lau is always worth listening to..

Another lesson is to know to value the fact that we have our home, with all the difficulties, and with all the indecision, and with all the internal fighting, this is our home and and we must hold on to it because we have no other. 
Third, there in Buchenwald, there were Jews as I described from Poland and Hungary, from Russia and from Lithuania, from Germany and from Saloniki and form Bulgaria. We always knew how to die together. The time has come for us to figure out how to live together..

  -- Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv Yisrael Meir Lau

nothing new here, but appropriate for Yom Ha'Shoah

An elderly woman was reading Rav Lau's book on his growing up and experience surviving the Holocaust, when her daughter saw (Miriam herself is blind) a picture of her. She remembered him because in Buchenwald there were no children, except for little Lulik Lau. She wrote him a letter, and a meeting was set up in her home in Haifa. 68 years earlier she had helped this young child survive.. she never knew what had happened to him and did not even realize it when he had been the Chief Rabbi.


הרב לאו from bhol on Vimeo.

Obviously you will have noticed, as an aside, that he had said when he came in that he cannot give her his hands, but he gives her his heart, but then when she tries to stand and reaches out, Rav Lau takes her hand and helps her...

Quote Of The Day

It is an amazing thing that the German-Speakers display such sensitivity to the cries of a baby and to the drop of blood, I did not see this in my youth. The blood of the Jewish child then was hefker and his life was given to be trampeled by the Gestapo boots, and tens of millions of the German people either collaborated or stood by the side. We don't need a license from them to live as Jews. If this is how things are, and if the German parliament will approve this law, something I don't believe will happen, we have nothing to be there for. Perhaps from the harsh will come something sweet and the Jews there will understand that that is not their place...

  -- Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv Yisrael Meir Lau

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Rabbinically mandated gender-segregation? That is so 2011. Today's issue is rabbinically mandated waste-segregation...



Rabbis from Tel Aviv, including the Tel Aviv Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau are encouraging people to be concerned for the environment and protect it for future generations. The city has created an initiative for people to separate their garbage, and the group of rabbis signing on the letter of rabbinic approval even say that because some of the garbage has value and can be recycled, disposing of it without separating the items would even be considered bal tashchis.

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This past week has seen the tragic, horrific, deaths of 8 children - 3 murdered in France and 5 on Tuesday night in a horrible fire in Rehovot.

2 interesting responses I have seen regarding the tragedies:

1. Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau said that the mothers should realize that the tragic deaths of their children was, perhaps, to atone for harsh decrees that were possibly meant to be brought down upon the nation of Israel. (source: Ynet). Maybe yes, maybe no, at least he offered comforting words suggesting there might have been a greater purpose.
   
2. Rav Shlomo Aviner, while acknowledging the aspect of the personal tragedy of mothers losing their children and husbands, said this should not be played up to a national tragedy. Rav Aviner said that before modern medicine 2/3 of children would die from disease, and now it is rare for a child to die of disease, and that is only due to modern medicine. The death of each and every child is a tragedy and the general picture of statistics does not solve the suffering of those families. If even statistically only one out of a million children die from a certain disease, for the mother of that one child it is 100% - to her it matters not what happens to the rest.
   
   We, with a broader perspective, are living in paradise, but we must remember that people die all the time... every year more than 350 people, including children, die in car accidents, more than 10,000 from smoking while up to 1/6th of them dont even smoke - why does nobody get emotional about all of them? That does not even take into account all the people who die of heart diseases from poor eating habits. Because those are large numbers.
   
   It is not right to turn to Hashem and ask why He did this to us, when just about everything we have is very good. There are countries in which the people have almost nothing to eat. Every day 30,000 children die of hunger. Have you seen anybody get emotional over that?
   
   Every death is a tragedy. But the personal tragedy of a person should not distort everybody's thinking. For that family it was truly a tragedy, but there are many other families with tragedies. A family that was killed in a car accident is less upsetting than that killed in a terrorist attack or in a fire? (source and more: Srugim)

While Rav Aviner is putting this into perspective, I am not sure what he is trying to do. While it would make sense if he would be saying to be more emotional and recognize the tragedy in even less dramatic tragedies, it seems more like he is trying to get people to be less emotional about these tragedies. 

The haredi news site, Ladaat.net, is reporting that Rav Lau's bestseller book of how he survived Buchenwald and made it home, originally printed in Hebrew under the name "Al Tishlach Yadcha El Hanaar" and recently translated to many languages, including English under the title "Out of the Depths", has also been printed in Chinese and is a bestseller there as well.

Ladaat also adds that China, being a Communist country, tends to intervene and alter content that is made accessible to its citizens. Rabbi Lau's book has been censored just like most content in China is censored. It seems that all the pictures of rabbis were removed from the book. Only two pictures were left in, according to the report.

What is interesting, to me, is how the report explains the censorship as being obvious due to their Communist framework. Why is this interesting? Because the frum press in Judaism, Israel and the USA and maybe other places as well, also applies heavy censorship in what is allowed to be printed, and also removes or alters pictures in books in order to convey only approved appearances and images.

A prominent censorship of this kind was when a book on Rav Kotler removed Rav Soloveitchik from a picture showing them together. Recently Hillary Clinton was removed form pictures in haredi papers. Women in general are removed regularly from images.

Interesting that the haredi news has a problem with Communists removing pictures, when that is done similarly, albeit using different criteria, in the haredi press and media.

Picture Of The Day

PM Netanyahu pays a shiva call to Chief Rabbi Lau after death of his brother

Turkey's Adnan Oktar's live conversation with the Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau

Quote Of The Day

When we arrived here, there was already a people that was living here for many years.. it is clear that what is desired is Eretz Yisrael according to the Torah, but if a government would arise that would say we must concentrate the settlement to large blocs and forgo isolated settlements - I could understand that. It is precisely like when Menachem Begin returned half the Sinai and destroyed Yamit, but nobody claimed he was  a hater of Israel. 
Jerusalem must remain for the final step of negotiations. I hope that she will not be harmed. We can continue to live there for many years, just like today. Also after the Six Day War Ben Gurion gave orders to Teddy Kollek to take down the wall and unify East and West Jerusalem to one authority. What? DO Tel Aviv and Yaffo not live in peace? In Haifa do Arabs and Jews not live together peacefully?

  -- Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv (and formerly of Israel) Yisrael Meir Lau