Natan Slifkin's Blog, page 9

Standing Silent for the Siren

Last week in Israel there was a siren for Yom HaShoah. Tonight and tomorrow are the sirens for Yom HaZikaron.

Beit Shemesh Chadashot is a news agency that sends out reports via WhatsApp. It’s charedi, but modern charedi. Whereas the regular charedi approach is to entirely ignore the siren, modern charedim have a different approach. Before the siren, they sent out a message reminding people about it, and urging them to respect sensitivites by stopping what they are doing and reciting Tehillim or s...

Ben Gvir in Woodmere

I really did not want to write about this. I have friends, colleagues, neighbors and relatives on both sides of this. Whatever I write, people that I care about will get upset with me. Still, I hope that they appreciate that I write on these topics not to virtue-signal or jump on a banwagon, but because I care about issues and feel that I have something unique to contribute. And living in Israel, with a son in the IDF, I have skin in the game.

There is a huge controversy over Itamar Ben-Gvir’s vi...

Sharks and Jews

Amidst the tragedies of soldiers falling in battle, a different type of unfortunate tragedy occurred in Israel last week when a man was killed by sharks. The incident was of innate interest and concern to me, since I myself had gone to swim with this particular group of sharks a few years ago. But I was also concerned by the reactions to this tragedy.

The background is that Israel's largest power station is situated in the coastal town of Hadera, and a byproduct of the facility is that very hot ...

Is it a Mitzvah to Eat Kosher?

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We normally think of it being a mitzvah to eat kosher food. But for those who are interested in the technicalities of Torah law, it’s surprisingly difficult to define this mitzvah. Does one fulfill a positive mitzvah by eating animals that are kosher? Or is it instead that you commit a sin by eating animals that are not kosher? Do you get a mitzvah every time you take a bite of peacock or piranha, or is it that you get a sin if you ...

Beinish Day

Following my oldest son’s enlistment party, yesterday he was drafted to the IDF. This was not my first child to enlist - my oldest daughter had already done so three years ago. But the Draft Day experience could not have been more different, and it’s not just because he is going into a combat role. It was primarily because yesterday’s draft was for the beinishim.

Beinish is an acronym for bnei yeshivot, those who enlist as part of the five-year hesder program (in which army service is sandwiched ...

Bye Bye Bye

Recently I was chatting with a dati (national-religious) neighbor who, like many Anglos in Ramat Beit Shemesh, has friends spanning both the charedi and dati community here. She told me that she feels as though she’s done with having a mixed social life. Not that she is judging her charedi friends or has anything against them personally; she knows that they moved to Israel with a spirit of idealism, and understands that they joined the charedi community because they simply didn’t realize what it...

The Shidduch Crisis and Hypocrisy

A reader forwarded me an extraordinary special insert from the Pesach edition of Ami magazine, which was published at the behest of many leading rabbis in the charedi world and quotes them. It was about a huge problem in American charedi circles of older girls who are single. Rav Moshe Hillel Hirsch, described in the article to be the Gadol HaDor, presented a diagnosis of this shidduch crisis and a solution. According to R. Hirsch, the reason for the problem is that girls start dating much earli...

The Gedolim Among Us

Last night my family had a particularly memorable meal at a restaurant. In part this was because half of us came down with food poisoning today. But it was also because of who else was there.

At first, we noticed Shai Graucher, the charedi powerhouse who raised millions of dollars to help with the war in all kind of ways. He arranged for endless supplies to be shipped in for soldiers from around the world. He arranged for laundry trucks to do twelve thousand loads of laundry for them. His organiz...

The Seder of Solidarity

I came across the following extraordinary account by Golda Meir of Pesach in 1946; it exists in slightly different versions in various places:

On April 8, 1946 I received a telegram from Italy in which it was written:

“We are 1100 Jewish refugees. We boarded the Dov Hoz boat at La Spezia Port in order to depart for Palestine which is our last hope. [British] Police arrested us on board. We are declaring that we shall not leave the boat. We demand permission to continue to Eretz Yisrael. We declare...

[Re-send with corrected download link] Some Exciting Publications

I was very excited to receive the following two books in the mail yesterday:

Her’es the descriptions from the publisher on each of these volumes:

For over seventy-five years, the question of military service has remained one of the most contested issues in Israeli society, raising fundamental tensions between national defense, Torah study, and religious leadership. Milhemet Mitzvah, vol. 1: Halakhic Foundations, Religious Authority, and Military Service in Israel’s War of Independence examines thi...