ROSH-HA-SHANA: THE JEWISH NEW YEAR EXPLAINED BY YORAM ETTINGER

No one tells it better than Ambassador (Retired) Yoram Ettinger…..rsk

The evening of September 6, 2021 will launch the 5782th Jewish New Year.

1.  Annual reminder.  The Hebrew word Rosh (ראש) means first/head/beginning and Hashanah (השנה) means the year. The root of the Hebrew word Shanah is both “repeat” and “change.” Rosh Hashanah constitutes an annual reminder of the need to enhance one’s behavior through a systematic study of moral values, learning from experience and avoiding past errors.  Rosh Hashanah ushers-in the Ten Days of Repentance, which are concluded on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).

The New Jewish (lunar) Year is the only Jewish holiday, which is celebrated upon the (monthly) appearance of a new moon, proceeding from relative-darkness to a fully-illuminated moon in the middle of the month.

2.  Humility.  Rosh Hashanah is celebrated on the 6th day of Creation, when the first human-being, Adam, was created.  Adam is the Hebrew word for a human-being (אדמ), which is the root of the Hebrew word for “soil” (אדמה). Moreover, the Hebrew letter  הis an abbreviation of God, the Creator.  Thus, the date of the Jewish New Year highlights the centrality of the soil – a metaphor for humility – in human life.

3.  Genesis.  The Hebrew letters of Rosh (ראש) constitute the root of the Hebrew word for Genesis (בראשית), which is the first word in the Book of Genesis. Rosh Hashanah is celebrated on the first day of the Jewish month of Tishrei – “the month of the Strong Ones” (Book of Kings A, 8:2) – when the three Jewish Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) and the Prophet Samuel were born. Tishrei means beginning/Genesis in ancient Acadian. The Hebrew letters of Tishrei (תשרי) are included in the spelling of Genesis (בראשית). Furthermore, the Hebrew spelling of Genesis (בראשית) includes the first two letters in the Hebrew alphabet (אב), a middle letter (י) and the last three letters (רשת) – representing the totality of the Creation.

4.  The Shofar (a ritual ram’s horn).  Rosh Hashanah is announced and celebrated in a humble and determined manner, by the blowing of the (bent-humble) Shofar. The sound of the Shofar used to alert people to physical challenges (e.g., military assaults). On Rosh Hashanah, it alarms people to spiritual challenges, while paving the potential road to salvation. It serves as a wakeup call to the necessity of cleansing one’s behavior.

The Competence Question The national government of the United States is incompetent. It’s time to consider what can lawfully replace it. By Jay Whig

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/02/the-competence-question/

The lesson we can learn from Afghanistan is not that Joe Biden lost what Donald Trump could have won. Nor is it that Trump, and his deplorable supporters, are to blame. After all, withdrawal was their plan. Nor is it—God forbid—that the United States should stay in Afghanistan forever. 

The lesson is a hard one. The national government of the United States is incompetent. 

The United States has been defeated in Afghanistan. The United States set incompetent, unachievable war aims, spent as much as $2 trillion over 20 years in the attempt, and achieved none of them. None. The Taliban are stronger, better financed, better equipped, more likely to remain in power, more able to harbor terrorists, more sophisticated, and more popular than they were in 2001. Women in Afghanistan will return to their former abject condition. China will be the Taliban’s partner for the extraction of Afghanistan’s natural resources, and for the promotion of the heroin trade.

The United States famously employs 16 intelligence agencies, a massive State Department, and a fabulously equipped Department of Defense. None of these institutions had the foresight to predict their failure. To say they were blind is unfair to the blind. They either willfully did not look or were consciously deceiving their country. Yet, the heads of these institutions have suffered no loss of prestige. There have been no dismissals, no reckonings, no resignations. The brass, the top bananas at the State Department and the intelligence agencies are, in fact, proud of the role they played. They are incompetent even to address their incompetence.

The incompetence in Afghanistan is not a specific, one-off, incompetence. The incompetence of the national government of the United States is general.

The national government of the United States is a gerontocracy. The president is nearly 79, the speaker of the House is 81, the Senate minority leader is 79, and Senate president pro tempore is 81. The Senate majority leader is the youngest of the senior elected officeholders at 70. The chain of succession for the presidency under the Constitution is president, vice president (who is incompetent, despite her youth), speaker, president pro tempore. Interrupted only by a cackle, it is liver spots all the way down. A gerontocracy requires the cooperation of the middle-aged and young, who cannot conceive of themselves wielding power and so defer to the old. Many place their hopes in Donald Trump, who will be 78 in 2024. This is a deep, broad incompetence.

Biden completely makes up a visit to Pittsburgh synagogue victimized by mass shooting in speech to Jewish leaders By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/biden_completely_makes_up_a_visit_to_pittsburgh_synagogue_victimized_by_mass_shooting_in_speech_to_jewish_leaders.html

The President of the United States has completely lost touch with reality. This is Twenty-fifth Amendment territory, my friends. “No joke,” as the addled executive would say. Like some Walter Mitty of compassion, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. substituted himself for President Donald J Trump, as the person who visited the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh after a deranged gunman attacked the house of worship in 2018. This is not acient history, but a mere three years ago. Here is the fantasy claim:

Steve Nelson of The New York Post fact-checked the claim:

Barb Feige, executive director of the Tree of Life, said that Biden did not visit the synagogue in the nearly three years since the anti-Semitic attack.

In a phone interview, Feige, executive director since July 2019, said firmly that “no” Biden didn’t visit, even before taking office when he had a lower public profile as a former vice president and then-Democratic presidential candidate.

Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/09/emwoke_inc_inside_corporate_americas_social_justice_scamem.html

In 2020, at the World Economic Forum, David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, proclaimed that the investment firm wouldn’t take corporations public unless they had at least one “diverse” member on their board. The ostensible logic: a diverse leadership performs better by avoiding groupthink. But the proclamation came too late. Six months before, the last S&P 500 company with an all-male board had inducted a woman. Goldman was actually virtue-signaling to divert attention from its role in the 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal, described in 2016 as the “largest kleptocracy case to date.” Goldman had paid $1 billion in bribes to win work raising money for 1MBD, a slush fund linked to then Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak and corrupt officials. Fined $5 billion for its machinations, Goldman was embracing “woke” to burnish its credentials.

It’s not just Goldman. Corporate America has learnt to invoke buzzwords like ‘stakeholder capitalism’ and ‘social justice’ to boost their profile, cache and profits. In Woke, Inc.:  Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy lays bare this duplicitous con. He writes in the introduction, “Here’s how it works: pretend like you care about something other than profit and power, precisely to gain more of each.” Worryingly, this deception is subverting democracy.

Like most American capitalists, Ramaswamy believes that the job of business is to provide products, maximize profit, and deliver value to shareholders. It’s not the realm of business to impose one particular vision of “social responsibility” on society. Corporate law limits boards’ focus to the financial interests of shareholders. This protects democracy from corporate overreach, for with financial power, businesses can easily crowd out dissent, whether from employees or from ordinary Americans.

Is the U.S. Intelligence Community Putting the World at Risk? by Pete Hoekstra

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17710/intelligence-report-china-covid

The Intelligence Community’s COVID Summary is dangerous; infinitely more dangerous than it appears.

How can the IC seriously believe that China’s active stonewalling of the international community’s attempts to get to the bottom of what happened and thus learn better how to combat the virus can be reduced to its “uncertainty about where an investigation might lead” or its “frustration” about outside political pressure? If… this wishful thinking really reflects what our IC believes, the world is in deep trouble.

In sum, we can assess with a high degree of confidence that while the origins and initial awareness of the virus by the Chinese government cannot be clearly ascertained, the Chinese government has been intimately involved in most everything since then. It has used the pandemic to further its global economic and political agenda. Its behavior has been ruthless and malicious.

[T]he U.S. intelligence community’s whitewashing of China’s culpability puts us all at risk…. Every word is weighed and considered. The implication that China is essentially innocent of any ill will is in the report only because some senior official wanted to include it.

God help us if this signals the beginning of a Biden administration appeasement strategy. Judging from everything we have experienced over the last ten to twenty years, the attempt to placate China by writing off its malicious behavior as lightly as this report does… shows weakness. It rewards an aggressive China, and only invites more of the same.

The recent release of an unclassified summary by the Intelligence Community (IC) of its investigation into China’s role in the COVID pandemic leaves one feeling that there is nothing there. Like Sergeant Schultz in the old TV series “Hogan’s Heroes,” the IC seems to be protesting “I know nothing! Nothing!” The report provided no real substantive insights into the origins of the pandemic. Yet the Intelligence Community’s COVID Summary is dangerous; infinitely more dangerous than it appears. Without saying so directly, it encourages us to discount China’s significant culpability in this disaster, downplaying its responsibility for the pandemic unleashed on its territory and its role in the deadly spread of COVID around the world.

The United Church of Christ’s Biased Resolution on ‘Palestine’ and Israel Historical facts are immaterial to the UCC. Joseph Puder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/united-church-christs-biased-resolution-palestine-joseph-puder/

The United Church of Christ (UCC), in what has become typical among the mainline Protestant churches, issued a resolution (July 18, 2021) stating that Israel’s continued oppression of the Palestinian people is a “sin.” The resolution calls on the General Synod to adopt a declaration of requirements for a just peace between Palestine and Israel. The UCC’s most recent resolution was adopted by 83% of its delegates voting on line. The UCC has a membership of 800,000.

The UCC, with its progressive-leftist interpretation of the Bible, its lack of regard for history and Middle East realities, particularly as it applies to Palestinian Islamist terrorism and intimidation, is guilty of the sin of bias. The current UCC resolution, like previous ones, shows a clear anti-Israel bias that is largely influenced by the dhimmified Arab-Palestinian Christians. In order to survive in the increasingly jihadist-Muslim Middle East, including the Islamist Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon (all three funded and supported by Iran), and Fatah in the West Bank, Palestinian Christians must show greater anti-Israel vigilance than their fellow Muslims. The above points are evidenced by the massive exodus of Christians from the Middle East to Europe, and the Americas. The Christians are escaping Arab-Palestinian oppression…not Israeli oppression. In fact, this writer interviewed Bethlehem’s Mayor, Elias Freij, in 1991, and asked him where are the Christians of Bethlehem? He replied, “In Santiago de Chile.” Today Bethlehem’s Christian population is around 7%, in the West Bank as a whole, the Christian population is down to about 2%, and in Hamas ruled Gaza, less than 1%.

Using as supportive “evidence” the following groups; Arab-Palestinian dhimmified Kairos declaration, the World Council of Churches, the anti-Semitic and terrorist dominated United Nations Works and Relief Agency (UNWRA), and the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel alone, or bringing forth discredited Israeli NGO’s who are funded by European government agencies with the purpose of weakening Israel, only serves to reinforce the one-sided, biased sources employed by the UCC resolution.

Matt Palumbo Video: The Mind Behind The Iron Curtain The far-reaching global and domestic influence of George Soros.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/matt-palumbo-video-mind-behind-iron-curtain-bongino-report/

In this new video, author Matt Palumbo talks about his new book: The Man Behind the Iron Curtain. It explores the domestic and international far-reaching influence of leftist financier George Soros, backed by his tens of billions of dollars. Don’t miss it.

The Forever War is Islam’s War on the West Are we sure we shouldn’t have maintained a presence in Afghanistan? Don Feder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/forever-war-islams-war-west-don-feder/

Imagine after Pearl Harbor, FDR announcing, “We’re getting into this to bring human rights to Japanese women” or “Our goal in this war is give Germany a democracy.” He would have been laughed out of office.

There was only one legitimate reason to go into Afghanistan after 9/11 and it’s the same reason that should have impelled us to stay – not human rights, democracy or nation-building – but saving our nation.

We went to Afghanistan to root out terrorism, to destroy Al Qaeda’s infrastructure, to disrupt its network – and, quite frankly, to kill as many terrorists as possible.

The goal was to kill them there so they wouldn’t kill us here, as they did on 9/11. Everything else was extraneous. That the mission failed may be seen in just how quickly the Taliban made a comeback, except now, with the most modern weapons in the region – thanks to Quartermaster Joe.

The cut-and-run crowd called it “the forever war.” Rubbish.

You want to hear about a forever war? Afghanistan was the latest chapter in a conflict that’s been going on since the 7th century.

At one time, Islam engulfed much of the known world – from the Arabian Peninsula west to the Pyrenees and east to the Indian subcontinent and beyond.

In his book “The Clash of Civilizations and Remaking of World Order” (1996), Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington spoke of “Islam’s bloody borders,” alluding to the fact that almost all of the religion-based conflicts in the world involve Islam versus someone else.

America’s longest war, they call it. Really? Through April, 2,448 Americans died in the 20 years we’ve been in Afghanistan – fewer than the number of Americans who died in one day in the attack on the World Trade Center (2,996).

The Vietnam War, which started under the French, went on for 21 years (1954-1975). Over 58,000 Americans died when we fought there. Was it worth it? I believe it was. South Vietnam fell. But due to our involvement (and the price we paid in blood), communism is no longer a potent force in Southeast Asia.

Schools in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, adopt critical pedagogy—and face a parental backlash. Michael Torres

https://www.city-journal.org/philly-suburbs-schools-adopt-critical-race-theory

Lower Merion Township’s beauty and wealth belie its proximity to the impoverished neighborhoods of West Philadelphia, which borders the township just east on Route 30. Being the first suburb on the Main Line, Lower Merion is home to many of the region’s wealthy residents. With a median income of nearly $140,000 per year has come an extraordinarily well-funded, high-achieving public school district.

The 83-percent-white township is also unabashedly progressive. The town has about 2.8 times as many registered Democrats as Republicans. The school board is run exclusively by Democrats. Local church lawns are filled with colorful T-shirts emblazoned with the names of black people killed by police. And shoppers at Suburban Square, a high-end local shopping center, are enveloped in the pride flags that decorate shops and sidewalks every few steps in the month of June.

But despite the town’s progressive vibe, a battle over local schools’ embrace of critical pedagogy is burgeoning. To try and understand this cultural conflict in a place where “wokeness” is part of the atmosphere, I spoke with public and private school parents and a person with experience on the school board, and I attended a meeting of local residents and Republican Party officials. All involved requested anonymity.

When local Republicans hosted a meeting in late June at a home not far from Lower Merion High School, about two dozen people stood in the living room, Rolls-Royces and Honda Civics alike parked along the ornate stone curb. Following a brief overview of local budget issues and political polling came the main issue of the evening: the school district’s left turn. Such terms as “race essentialism” and “transgenderism” were tossed around. Still, agreement on the origins and shape of the ideology that these people found themselves contending with remained elusive.

Sorry, The Afghan War Isn’t Over Until We Rescue All Those Left Behind

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/03/sorry-afghan-war-isnt-over-until-those-we-left-behind-can-return/

In what can only be called a shocking lack of self-awareness, President Joe Biden this week bragged about his “extraordinary success” in Afghanistan. Now his handlers and the Democratic Party are urging Americans and, of course, the media to “move on.” But there is no moving on from his botched departure from Kabul, whose ill effects will be felt by Americans for decades.

Far from a success, the “evacuation” was in fact an ill-planned, incompetently executed, chaotic dash to cram as many human beings as possible onto planes and transport them away from Kabul. The new talking point is that “only” 100 or so Americans may have been left behind, despite Biden’s explicit promise that none would be.

The media, which for several days seemed actually to be doing their job, are now falling in line with the new White House-Democratic Party spin. Afghanistan is now a yesterday story.

As National Review noted on Thursday:

“Today is the day that the U.S. media begins its pivot away from Afghanistan. The front page of the New York Times features Hurricane Ida’s rains hitting New York City, and the Supreme Court’s declining to block Texas’ new abortion law. Those are the same two top stories at the Washington Post, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.”

While the administration, in one of the epic political spin jobs ever, lauds itself for its evacuation efforts, the truth is it likely left far more Americans and deserving Afghans in Kabul than estimated. That means victims and/or hostages for the now-jubilant, victorious Taliban, an intolerable situation.

Data from earlier this week estimated 116,700 people were evacuated from Afghanistan. “In fact, while only 5,400 or so Americans were brought to safety, only about 8,500 SIV holders were rescued, with the vast majority left behind,” RedState reports.