Tamar

[Tamar @tdbho]

Slinging criticism without responsibility and spewing all complaints all the time, is barn-burning, not bridge-building. https://t.co/gH0qlNc2Dn

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

Shavuot is a holiday of wonder, the time on our calendar of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, the Sages of the Talmud tell us.

No less.

The great gathering at Sinai, the great submission, the granting of law and universalist morality and particularist purpose and all the great ideas that make our inheritance what it is. (Including, of course -- because humans are what they are -- the great ethical collapses and religious rebellions that accompany the revelation story at every turn).

And precisely because it is so grand, the Sages, and the Hasidic masters in their wake, are keen on anchoring it firmly in the most profoundly sacred realm of existence: Our daily lives.

The great and enigmatic Kotzker Rebbe asks why the liturgy repeatedly calls Shavuot "The Time of the Giving of Our Torah." God did the giving, the people did the receiving. Two different acts by two different actors. Why focus on God's act rather than the experience of the humans?

His answer is anti-romantic, anti-grand, and utterly, well, Kotzkerish.

The giving only took a day. It happened in a particular place and time. And it was important that the revelation happened the way it did: Given to humble, escaped slaves; to all of them at once, not to a holy few; and at a humble mount, not a great sky-reaching monument to divine power. Yes, there is meaning and power in that moment and that place.

But the *receiving*, well, the receiving never stopped. We receive it still. And ponder it, and test it against the great wisdom we have since gained of the universe, and thus of the metaphorical mind of the divine.

Receiving, the Kotzker taught, must happen each day, and depends, unlike the giving, entirely on our own effort and capacity and willingness to seek out and learn the truth and meaning of things.

And so Shavuot can only commemorate the giving. Because the receiving is still underway. It is ours to fulfill, each in his own way.

And another Kotzker teaching in the same vein.

Right after the revelation, with all its grandeur, thunder, lightning and God's own voice (whatever that is), the very next verse instructs the people to make "an altar of earth...for me." (Exodus 20:21)

Why? Why transition so abruptly from the history-bending revelation, the spectacle of the divine and numinous, to building an altar out of dirt?

You're already there. You see it, right?

Because the great and infinite and divine can only matter to humans in ways reachable in human terms. And that can only happen if they are grounded in the very dirt on which we tread and from which we were made.

No mountaintops and no angel-songs can claim to be the sole vessels of truth. It is not in the heavens, nor beyond the distant seas. It is either here and now, alongside us in the dirt, or it is nowhere.

The immediate urgent command drawn from the revelation at Sinai is to turn back from the numinous to our place and time and build from the literal dirt of the earth. Your mundane reality is the vessel, the sacred space.

Chag sameach.

[Karl Musk @mrkarlmusk]

Not long ago, I wrote about one of the great narrative advantages antizionists have secured for themselves: they position Zionism as the disruptive event, the thing that enters history and must justify itself to the world.

Once that move is accepted, everything else becomes easier. Arab and Palestinian politics can slip out the back door. Jewish self-determination is dislodged from the ordinary language of nations, peoples, borders, refugees, war, defeat, compromise, and statecraft. It is marked instead as an alien politics, a permanent intrusion, a problem whose existence must be explained before anything else can even be discussed.

To see how extreme this is, imagine the same narrative machinery being used against Palestinians.

Imagine a world in which Palestinian celebrities, writers, professors, business owners, and artists were routinely targeted across countries. The crudest people would call them “baby killers.” The more respectable class would ask whether Palestinians had finally produced a realistic solution to the conflict their nationalism helped create.

People assumed to be Arab would be stopped in public and asked whether they supported a State of Palestine that depends on violence, ethnic exclusion, and the permanent denial of Jewish self-determination. In the entertainment industry, actors and musicians would be pressured to denounce Palestine before being allowed to keep their reputations. Lists would circulate of pro-Palestine donors, professionals, students, and public figures.

People with barely a passing interest in the conflict would somehow know the names of the most brutal or embarrassing figures associated with Palestinian history, and only those figures. They would know the massacres, the rejectionism, the authoritarian leaders, the corruption, the ideological maximalists, the factions that murdered civilians, the schools and media systems that glorified “martyrs,” the diplomats who rejected partition, the movements that turned refugeehood into a permanent political weapon.

And then, after years of this, when most ordinary people had grown exhausted by it, the people still doing it would insist that they were merely asking questions. They would call it critique. They would call it anti-nationalism. They would call it concern for human rights. They would deny that any of this had anything to do with Arabs or Palestinians as people, even while Arabs and Palestinians bore the social consequences of the obsession.

Meanwhile, political candidates across the democratic world would begin making “criticism of Palestine” and “criticism of Palestinian ideology” central to their campaigns. Campus movements would demand that universities cut ties with Palestinian institutions. Public figures would be asked, again and again, whether they condemn Palestinian self-determination. The entire subject would be organized around the presumption that Palestine is the thing that must answer for itself.

This hypothetical is almost impossible to imagine because it is so distant from political reality. Sometimes Zionist propaganda can come close in quality, but microscopic in quantity. That is the achievement of antizionist narrative politics. It constructs Jewish national self-determination as the exceptional case, the suspect case, the one nationalism that must stand before the world and prove that it has a right to exist at all. And once that burden is assigned, everything else follows.

To note here at the end, the response to this shouldn’t be imitation. It should be exposure. This kind of politics is disguising and should be rooted out of society. Today it is used against Zionists and Jews generally, but it didn’t begin there and it won’t stop there. It will need to be stopped by people who can see it for what it is and make what it is clear to those who still can’t see it well.

[Mark Dubowitz @mdubowitz]

Next time, let’s wait until Iran has nuclear-armed ICBMs, 10,000 ballistic missiles, a Chinese- and Russian-built military, a million attack drones, a fully operational terror network, and hundreds of billions to harden its economy. Then we’ll fight to reopen Hormuz.

[Amit Segal @AmitSegal]

The New York Times:

In recent days, Saudi Crown Prince bin Salman has urged Trump to continue the war against Iran, calling it a “historic opportunity” to reshape the Middle East.

In a series of conversations over the past week, bin Salman called on Trump to act to topple the regime — saying that only in this way could a “long-term threat” to the Gulf be eliminated.

[הלל ביטון רוזן | Hallel Bitton Rosen @BittonRosen]

בבסיס סודי אי שם בארצנו, התקבצו לפני זמן קצר עשרות קציני אגף המודיעין וחיל האוויר לאחר מספר ימים שלא ראו את אור השמש, לקריאת מגילה משותפת.
הקורא הוא רב סרן באמ״ן, שהוא כמו כלל הנוכחים, עוסקים מהיום הראשון שלהם על מדים הלכה למעשה במחיית זרע עמלק.
לפי המשתתפים בקריאה, היא הייתה המרגשת ביותר עבורם מאז ומעולם.
עם ישראל חי 🇮🇱

[Israel Foreign Ministry @IsraelMFA]

This is who Iran targets.

An Iranian missile deliberately targeted a civilian residential neighborhood in Beit Shemesh, murdering 9 civilians.
All nine victims have now been identified.

Four were children - including three siblings.

May their memory be a blessing 🕯️

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

Adolf Hitler, hard-line nationalist who rebuilt Germany into a European power, dies at 56

[John Spencer @SpencerGuard]

It may be shocking @TCNetwork @TuckerCarlson because it is true, facts from @GovMikeHuckabee Israel has implemented more civilian harm mitigation measures than any military in history and yes has a lower civilian death ratio than the urban centric war/battles like Iraq War, Korean War, or any comparable major protracted urban battles Manila, Seoul, Mosul, etc.

[Brianna Wu @BriannaWu]

It gives away the game that #FreePalestine is silent on the people of Iran trying to overthrow the #irgc.

This isn’t about freedom. It’s about slaughtering Jews.

[Tamar @tdbho]

Hey @linjiang0803 Any coupon codes running right now? ✅ #coupon #savings #linjiang0803 https://t.co/NEixjvMVVX via @tenere_team

[The Jerusalem Post @Jerusalem_Post]

The Vatican must speak out now against anti-Jewish voices such as Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes. After all, for 1,900 years, the Catholic Church was one of the principal architects of antisemitism in the Western world. | Opinion

https://t.co/D9qbmDUYBI

[HonestReporting @HonestReporting]

The viral “Palestinian land loss” maps claim Israel has been shrinking Palestine since 1948. But there was never a sovereign Palestinian state. The 1947 map was a UN plan Arab leaders rejected before going to war. These maps don’t tell history, they erase it.

[Nicole Lampert @nicolelampert]

‘Implying a country has committed war crimes when there is serious evidence to the contrary has serious ramifications.’

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib @afalkhatib]

After 15 months in Washington, DC, it has been disturbing to register just how many think tank staff, government workers, and supposed community organizations are actually truly pro-Hamas and opposed to calling out the terror group’s deeply entrenched narrative, because they fashion themselves as “pro-Palestine” voices and activists.

Indeed, entities across many political spectrums have leaders who see the big picture and register the horrors of Hamas, the group’s horrendous behavior, consequences of October 7, terrible challenges facing the Palestinian national project, and the dogmatic trends of the past two years, while their leftist junior staff who are younger and more “passionate” about “woke” issues and supposedly “human rights” tend to see Hamas as merely a “symptom” rather than a problem.

Despite the best of my efforts to engage a wide-ranging audience of young and aspiring foreign policy professionals in Washington, I’ve come to the realization that many have been profoundly and irreversibly damaged by the indoctrination of Ivy League institutions and expensive schools that adopt social programming and predictably one-sided framing of all of the world’s complex issues and conflicts. These individuals have been especially disappointing and often, quite gross and repulsive, when it comes to demonstrating capacity for nuanced thinking that breaks the binary views and narratives associated with many issues, including the Israel and Palestine conflict, particularly the war in Gaza after the October 7 massacre.

Anti-Israel sentiments have become the primary lens through which analyses and opinions are constructed and shared. While individuals have a right to hold whatever beliefs they choose, the goals and aspirations of free thinkers and analysts should be the maximal pursuit of information, evidence, hypotheses, theories, diverse perspectives, and de-personalized discourse.

Instead, many end up grossly rushing to tell me how I don’t “conform” to other Palestinian views, and how many “pro-Palestine” voices have problems with me. Instead of Washington DC being a vibrant place for policymaking and the exchange of truly original and free ideas, hordes of non-Palestinian “experts”, “analysts”, junior staff, Ivy League ideologues, brainwashed young people, and detached individuals feel the need to police what I have to say relative to their intransigent rubric for how they assess Hamas, Gaza, the war, and associated issues.

I share this in the spirit of highlighting yet another dimension of Washington’s problematic ethos and the issues of young staffers running this city. The detachment between policymakers, young professionals, partisan think tankers, social justice warriors, and Ivy League wokesters is part of the long list of issues that sustain the dysfunction and parallel universes one finds in such an important yet impotent town.

The so-called “professional and intellectual” class in Washington, particularly the young staffers in think tanks, government, Congress, and nonprofits, is part of a deeply entrenched industrial complex that inhibits truly transformative policymaking, opting instead for cliquey groupthink that creates a useless, self-affirming feedback loop.

[Brianna Wu @BriannaWu]

He’s obviously an antisemite. This is Jewish Space Laser level delusion.

Having spent time on IDF bases and met so many IDF soldiers, it gets me so angry to see people that serve slandered like this. They are literally just Israel’s kids serving their country.

[Katie the Lunch Lady @KatieLunchLady]

@khalidi79397

[Ahmed Al-Khalidi @khalidi79397]

We Had a Chance to End the Conflict and We Chose to Burn It.

In 2005, something historic happened.
Israel withdrew completely from Gaza - not just its soldiers, but also all of its civilians, farms, and settlements. Thousands of Israeli families were uprooted from their homes by their own government. Synagogues were dismantled, greenhouses and infrastructure worth hundreds of millions of dollars were left behind - not destroyed, but handed over to give us a chance to start fresh.

For the first time in our history, we had full control over a piece of land - our own borders, our own cities, our own people, and access to the sea. The world was ready to help. Billions in aid and investment were promised.
It could have been the beginning of a Palestinian Singapore.

But instead of building schools, hospitals, and industries, we built tunnels, rockets, and militias.
Instead of creating hope, we chose hatred.
Instead of turning Gaza into proof that Palestinians can govern themselves, we turned it into proof that we cannot.

When Israel left, the world expected calm, peace, and progress.
What did we give them?

Civil war between Fatah and Hamas.

Executions in the streets.

A terror group seizing power and turning Gaza into a launching pad for endless wars.

And the world still asks: Why doesn’t Israel “just give up the West Bank” too?
Because they already saw what happened the last time they gave land for nothing in return.

The truth is painful, but it must be said:
We were given a chance to build a future and we used it to destroy our own.
We could have shown that we were ready for peace.
Instead, we showed that we were ruled by those who fear peace more than they fear death.

Every rocket fired from Gaza wasn’t just aimed at Israel - it was aimed at our own future.

And now, after all the destruction, poverty, and death, I keep asking myself:
What if, just once, we had chosen life instead of revenge?
We had the opportunity to end the conflict.
But our leaders and too many of us chose to keep it alive.

[Rafael A. Mangual @Rafa_Mangual]

It seems that @ZohranKMamdani may finally be growing tired of keeping up the pro-policing charade. Let me be very clear: Abolishing the city's gang database is an insanely bad idea and should be disqualifying. 🧵

[Tamar @tdbho]

@reenchuk @mdubowitz I'm a little confused. Jews and Americans of all faiths can visit Israel right now (or any other time) -- and would be very welcome. I agree that tickets on El Al are too expensive and other carriers have been less dependable...