Israel has invaded Lebanon! Will it become all-out war? It depends on what the yellow peppers have to say about it!

The Israelis that invaded Lebanon were not people, but yellow peppers originating in Israel and being sold in a Lebanese market.

A shopper noticed a sticker saying "Israel" on the peppers he was selecting from. He informed the local army offices who immediately went to investigate. After finding 13 bags worth of peppers that seem to have originated in Israel, the very serious evidence was brought to the military courts, in order to begin an investigation as to how the Israeli peppers got into Lebanon.
(source: Kikar and Al Arabiya)

From what I understand from some inside sources, they are torturing the peppers to talk. So far the peppers are continuing to remain silent, despite some serious human rights breaches against how the Geneva Conventions allow prisoners to be treated. Word has it that if it gets any worse, the captured peppers might be forced to ingest their hidden cyanide pills, so as to be able to take their secrets to their death...

DAAM party: Half a Million Dollars to to Settler Family Willing To Move

  -- NRG

DAAM, the Worker's Party, calls itself a socialist leftist party. In response to Moshe Feiglin's call to encourage Palestinian families to move abroad and to offer them payments of $500,000 as encouragement to do so, DAAM is suggesting that instead of that, a cheaper option would be to encourage the transfer of settler families, and offer them the same amount of money, $500,00 per family, to do so. The one difference is Feiglin's plan would have the Palestinians move abroad, while DAAM's plan would transfer the Jews to within Israel.

DAAM says this solution would allow for the establishment of a Palestinian state, would allow Israel to retain its democratic nature while integrating into the region through a comprehensive arrangement, lessen the budget for defense and move that money to social welfare, education and health. And, last but not least, it would save Israel a lot of money, as there are only about 300,000 settlers to pay, while there would be 3 million Palestinians to pay.

Not a bad response...

Moshe Feiglin joins, or leads, a group going up to Har HaBayit every 19th of the Hebrew month.

As always, it remains prohibited by the police to pray openly or conduct openly any action that has religious significance. The police enforce this rule in the name of "keeping the peace", despite the Supreme Court upholding the right of Jewish people to pray there, under the principle of freedom of religion and freedom of worship. The catch is that they give the police on-scene leeway to take away such freedom, on a temporary basis, if they deem it necessary due to issues of safety. That temporary withholding of rights to pray has been in effect for many years.

The past couple of months Moshe Feiglin has decided that he is going to pray openly despite the police. I am not really sure what he is trying to do, but I suspect he is trying to force the issue and get the courts to stop the police from their heavy-handed attitude towards Jews rights on the Mount.

Yesterday, again, Moshe Feiglin went up to Har HaBayit, as per his normal schedule, and, again, ignored the  warnings of the police and prayed and prostrated himself openly. Feiglin was immediately removed from the Mount and detained. When he refused to sign the conditions for release, conditions that he would commit to not praying again in the future and the like, he was released scott-free, with no conditions at all.

Today the police announced that they are considering prosecuting Feiglin for disturbing the peace and for breaching the status quo on Har HaBayit.

Surprisingly, the irgunei hamikdash, the group of organizations that fight for Jewish rights on Temple Mount, have decided to support and encourage the police to prosecuting Moshe Feiglin. They are supporting prosecution not because Moshe Feiglin harms their efforts and they want too do away with him, but because they see this as an opportunity to finally get the courts to recognize that the police are discriminating against Jews, and to have the courts put an end to it. The courts have severely criticized the police each time someone was prosecuted, but until now they have not done anything to force a change. Prosecuting someone with such a high profile can put this agenda on the table and perhaps effect a change.
(source: Srugim)

The irony is that the right-wing base wants Feiglin prosecuted, and perhaps some good might come of it.

What concerns me is that this is playing with fire. While the courts have more or less been on the side of the prayers rather than that of the police, I can see another outcome happening in this instance - I can see them using this, perhaps with the quiet encouragement of some politicians, as an opportunity to remove Feiglin from politics. They can prosecute him and find him guilty of incitement to violence, slap the badge of kalon, moral turpitude, on Feiglin, and thereby disqualify him from running for Knesset.

While I like the idea behind the support to prosecute Feiglin, I hope it does not backfire. Perhaps somebody else would be a better guinea pig to try this on...

In the following video from Tzippi Livni's party, she highlights the "fear" created by a Netanyahu government relative to the hope Livni represents. You can hear it strongly even by the ominous tune of Hatikva playing in the background of the Netanyahu images, and the soft and happy jingle of Hatikvah behind the Livni images.

But what really makes this video interesting is that Livni simply stole images of people from the Internet and displays them as her broad support. Many of them are not even Israelis! I guess she had to draw on her international support because she has so little local support. This was exposed by a news report at Channel 2 News.

this is a clip of Shwekey and Shlomi Shabat rehearsing for the big concert in honor of the Israeli soldiers. The concert was last night, but I have not yet seen any clips from it...

(translated from Italian by Google Translate, with slight editing by me) A man disguised as Batman, who travels to the United States with the Batmobile visiting sick children and teens, arrived in the room Danielle Chaya bat Aviva, nineteen years old,  in Coral Springs, Florida just as the Shaliach Chabad Rabbi Avraham Friedman was visiting the girl.
The rabbi immediately asked if Batman was Jew and when the man replied in the affirmative, the rabbi proposed to put Tefillin. Batman that he had never worn in his life, however, did not want to take off his mask and reveal his true identity, so he asked if we could just put Tefillin on the arm. The rabbi explained that in case it is impossible to wear on the head is allowed to wear them only on the arm, and also in this way a mitzva is accomplished.

1. Mom gives son iPhone with 18 point contract

2. the untold crime of Nechemya Weberman

3. our kids need protecting, not our community

4. boycotting AMI magazine

5. a Satmar scribe writes a Temple Torah

6. respect for Penn Jillete plummeted 

7. guns and Israel

According to this article in Yisrael HaYom, Machon Puah is going to be announcing tomorrow at their conference that in certain situations it will be allowed for a person to select the gender of their baby. Unfortunately it does not say which rav, and I assume they would only publicize such a psak if it came from a gadol, authorized it.

Rav Menachem Burshtein, head of Puah Institute, explains that there are three possibilities for selecting the gender of a baby:

1. the more natural way of working around the ovulation schedule and scheduling sexual relations accordingly, in order to have a better chance at whichever gender you prefer.
2. putting the sperm into a machine that separates the female sperm and the male sperm and only using the male sperm to fertilize the egg.
3. IVF - in vitro fertilization

I know it seems like I am picking on SHAS, but it is only because of their campaign incessantly raising the banner of ethnic discrimination.

SHAS, via Aryeh Deri, continues to talk discrimination, to say they are going to fight it, to say only they can deal with it.

Surely discrimination still exists. One would be a fool to say otherwise. The question is how dominant it is in society. While it still exists, like in the news report today in which it was discovered that a haredi girls school in Ramot set in its school takanon, regulations, a clause, one that is illegal, that girls must only daven with ashkenazi pronunciation. As well, percentages in academia aren't equal, with less Sephardim represented than ashkenazim, and in plenty of other areas as well.

But why is SHAS the answer to that? For the past 30 years or so, since its inception, SHAS has only been a part of the problem. SHAS has been in every government (I think except for one, if my memory serves me correctly) since its inception. If they have not been able to solve the problem until now, why is this now their issue to solve?

The other day Arial Attias, the Minister of Housing, was on the radio talking about the housing crisis and how the government is responsible and hasnt done enough to solve the problem, to bring prices down. He was talking as if he has been in the opposition the past four years, fighting against the government, and is now looking to take over and solve the problem. he ignored the fact, and perhaps he hopes many listeners will as well, that he himself has been responsible for both the Housing Ministry and the Lands Authority for the past 4 years, giving himself unprecedented power to make changes in the housing and construction system. Sure, he has done a lot, he has released many new projects and moved things along that have been stagnant for a long time. But what's the deal with accusing the government, one that he was part of, of blaming them for all the ills of the issue?

That is exactly what SHAS is doing now with the discrimination against sephardim issue as well. They are talking about Netanyahu and Lieberman and discrimination in society as if they have not been a part of making all the government decisions for the past 30 years. SHAS is equally responsible as anybody else for any lack of dealing with the issue, and possibly even for making it worse.

Every election season they raise the banner of discrimination, but then they do nothing to solve it. They send their own kids to elite ashkenazi schools, that they can use their own political influence and protexia to get accepted in to, but they abandon the sephardi masses to wallow nsatisfactorily in their own sephardi schools Instead of working to change the system to one where anybody can go to any school they want, or divided up by areas with sephardi-ashkenazi background not being even an issue taken into consideration, or where there isnt even a difference between schools that one would be called sephardi and one would be called ashkenazi, instead of working to improve the image of the sephardi schools so they would be attractive to the sephardim, and maybe even to ashkenazim, the SHAS leadership continues to send their kids to the elite schools and abandon the masses to the discrimination that they allow to continue.

I hope people tell SHAS that they are tired of that issue and that they do not give their confidence to SHAS to be responsible for it.

Recently Rav Shlomo Aviner has publicized a few piskei halacha that put him at odds with many in the Dati Leumi community, of which he is one of the venerable leaders.

The latest is a psak he publicized this past week regarding the issue of tzniyut and what the appropriate style of tzniyut dress is for a girl.

Rav Aviner has always been fairly extreme, relative to the general Dati Leumi community, on issues of tzniyut and inter-gender interaction (for example, Rav Aviner insisted on separate-gender youth groups when most were ok with mixed groups). He is pretty similar to haredi poskim on these issues.

In his latest psak, he talks about the importance of tzniyut and then gives guidelines for clothing. He says, in part::

• clothing must: 

1. cover the entire body
2. cannot be transparent, with transparency being determined outside, in the light or sun, and not inside the house
3. not be tight 
4. be quiet and reserved

Since publicizing this psak, I have noticed that many people, specifically from the Dati Leumi community, have been heaping scorn and rejection on Rav Aviner in various articles and Facebook and Twitter discussion. It is not just people saying he is disconnected from the community, or that he has gotten too extreme, or "I follow a different psak so this does not apply to me". Rather, it has been met with real scorn. People are scoffing at his psak.

I am no fan of Rav Aviner, and I do not follow his piskei halacha. Usually I just ignore them and don't even read them, unless I am directed to something specific. But I find it interesting that instead of just ignoring a psak that one sees as being irrelevant, people are rejecting it in what I think is a very rude and disrespectful way.

In my opinion, it is the job of the rav, especially of a leading rav, to issue his piskei halacha. Perhaps even to try to model the community to the behavior, in this case the details of tzniyut, as he sees to be appropriate.

The people, on the other hand, and this is true in any community be it haredi or Dati Leumi or other, will listen or not as they see fit. practically, people listen to what they want to listen to and do other things when they don't agree. And that is fine by me.

I am not saying people need to follow his psak, but it bothers me that they reject it with scorn. Since when is a rabbi not allowed to state his halachic decision on rules of any matter (including tzniyut) to his community? why is there such scorn for his psak? Even if one were to disagree with it and rely on other piskei halacha or halachic conclusions of their own, why the scorn? Does he not have a right to have, and state, his halachic opinion?


If the issue was raised by askanim, if askanim are trying to force people to do something specific, throw all the scorn you want at them, but this is part of the rav's job and responsibility.

Yair Shamir, the son of the late PM Yitzchak Shamir, came to Bet Shemesh the other night to speak about the upcoming elections. I went to the "parlor meeting", mostly out of curiosity - I did not need him to tell me about the Likud and Yisrael Beyteynu, but I was intrigued to hear the son of a founder of the State of Israel. Also I was curious about him, as he has stayed out of politics until now and I knew almost nothing about him.

I must say that he is a soft-spoken person with strong ideas, he sounds like someone who is a do-er, with interesting ideas of how the country needs to be run. He is definitely someone I want in our government.

my friend Moshe made this "music video"...

start the day with some relaxing music from the amazing pianist Yaron Gershovsky