Tu BiShvat for Hebrew Year 5784 begins at sundown on Wednesday, 24 January 2024, and ends at nightfall on Thursday, 25 January 2024.
Are there any trees for shade in Gaza? We remember what lies under the ground there . . . we will not forget.
The Jewish tradition regards trees as a symbol of life: Atz Chayim — it is a Tree of Life: symbolic of the Torah, the foundation text of the Jewish people. Trees, like people are to be protected, nurtured, and never to be abused or Gd forbid, forgotten.
(Leviticus 19:23-25) When you come to the land and you plant any tree, you shall treat its fruit as forbidden; for three years it will be forbidden and not eaten. In the fourth year, all of its fruit shall be sanctified to praise the LORD. In the fifth year, you may eat its fruit.
(Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 1:1) There are four new years… the first of Shevat is the new year for trees according to the ruling of Beit Shammai; Beit Hillel, however, places it on the fifteenth of that month. There are few customs or observances related to this holiday.
One custom is to eat a new fruit on this day or to eat from the Seven Species (shivat haminim) described in the Bible as being abundant in the land of Israel. The Shivat Haminim are wheat, barley, grapes (vines), figs, pomegranates, olives, and dates (date honey) (for these, please see Deut. 8:8).
Some people plant trees on this day. (authorial note >): In my childhood, Jewish children commonly went around collecting money to plant trees in Israel at this time of year.
Historic note: In the 16th century, the Kabbalists in Safed, Israel, developed a seder ritual similar to the Passover seder, discussing the spiritual significance of fruits and ‘the seven species’ or ‘the shivat haminim.’
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Does a ceasefire mean something other than a ceasefire . . . .
There are many calling for a ceasefire in Gaza who might want to remember why Israel and its people pursue a drive to destroy the butchers of hamas.
For those who have forgotten, please take a moment to reacquaint yourself with the so-called palestinian hamas, ‘the new old butchers of humanity:’
(all of which is supported and abetted by their cooperators and enablers of the UN, the International Red Cross, students, administrations and faculties of American universities and colleges, Western and American media, members of our government, along with governments worldwide, and yes, not surprisingly, Putin).
Israel’s ‘Black Sabbath’: Murder, Sexual Violence and Torture on Oct. 7
Investigators build legal case documenting ‘systematic and unprecedented cruelty’ with echoes of Adolf Eichmann trial
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Behind the back and forth of American academia, along with its DEI promotions, here from the WSJ (<– without a firewall):
Has Harvard’s antisemite antijew issue now been resolved . . . . or is it all being swept aside in an ill attempt to hide a campaign intended to promote and protect the persecuted great-great-great-grandchildren of former black slaves in America?
Have these programs, intended as a remedy for racism, now become a vessel for a new racism: the degradation of the Jew on campus, the Jew in American society, and the Jewish people around the world . . .
Harvard and its former president Gay: here is a peek behind the calls to remove her and ‘the DEI agenda’ — an agenda which brought her magically on a red carpet to the highest level of American academia. Contained within (here, within the excerpted article below) is a look behind the curtain of the ‘new’ antisemitism – i.e. one which claims that ‘context’ must be understood in calls for a Jewish Genocide.
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And now, a peak behind ‘the curtain’ of the DEI agenda
(also known as a certain ‘wokism’ — one which the American Taxpayer pays for).
I.
Ackman says he has a “visceral connectivity” to the issue, being Jewish himself and being married to an Israeli, the celebrity architect Neri Oxman. He has an undergraduate degree and an M.B.A. from Harvard and one of his four daughters graduated from there. His undergraduate thesis was titled “Scaling the Ivy Wall: The Jewish and Asian American Experience in Harvard Admissions.”
His first open letter to Gay, which he said he sent in early November after she didn’t respond to a bid to meet with him, was relatively tame, he said. He wrote that her failure to condemn Hamas’s acts in her initial statement following the rampage “opened the door for a wave of anti-Israel attacks on campus,” and he called on her to discipline pro-Palestinian protesters who he believed had encouraged violence against Jews.
Ackman said he would have liked to see Harvard handle the issue more like Dartmouth, which has held forums where faculty members on either side of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict exchanged ideas. “Universities are supposed to be a place about free speech and sharing ideas and discourse and getting to the truth,” Ackman said. “Instead, Harvard became a stomping ground for antisemitism.”
He sent the letter after spending several hours meeting with students and faculty on campus, in which he wrote he was surprised to learn that the university’s DEI initiatives didn’t seem to extend to Jewish students. He says he never heard back from Gay, but received a flood of messages from other prominent donors and families of current students cheering him on.
II.
After the Congressional hearing concluded:
After ^ none of the presidents provided an unequivocal “yes” when asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) if calls for the genocide of Jewish people would constitute harassment, Ackman called for the trio to “resign in disgrace.”
In recent days, (after the ‘hearings’) as dueling petitions to both oust and retain Gay circulated, Ackman’s attacks on her became increasingly personal. He questioned her scholarship and alleged in his letter Sunday that Gay, a Black woman, was hired in a process that excluded nondiverse candidates.
Later that day, David Thomas, the president of Morehouse College and a professor of Ackman’s at Harvard, took to LinkedIn. While he said he applauded Ackman for calling attention to antisemitism at Harvard, he criticized his former student for questioning the legitimacy of Gay’s selection, calling his comments a dog whistle. “We must call it out,” he wrote.
On Monday evening, Ackman tweeted that he had heard Harvard’s governing boards had decided not to fire Gay. He shared with his followers that two unnamed reporters told him part of the reasoning was that trustees wanted to avoid looking like they had been influenced by his tweets. (<-note: they were hoping not to appear as bowing to a widely held view of the Jewish control of the world, i.e. as outlined in “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and widely held across the landscape of cultural and political institutions worldwide.
Here please recall Rep. Ilhan Omar’s infamous tweet: “it’s all about the Benjamins”.
I do understand she later apologized for it. Nice.
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Amalek visits us in this Parsha — perhaps as a test, in our own time: ‘never forget what Amalek has done to us . . .’
וַיָּבֹ֖א עֲמָלֵ֑ק וַיִּלָּ֥חֶם עִם־יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל בִּרְפִידִֽם׃
Amalek came and fought with Israel at Rephidim.
וַיֹּ֨אמֶר מֹשֶׁ֤ה אֶל־יְהוֹשֻׁ֙עַ֙ בְּחַר־לָ֣נוּ אֲנָשִׁ֔ים וְצֵ֖א הִלָּחֵ֣ם בַּעֲמָלֵ֑ק מָחָ֗ר אָנֹכִ֤י נִצָּב֙ עַל־רֹ֣אשׁ הַגִּבְעָ֔ה וּמַטֵּ֥ה הָאֱלֹהִ֖ים בְּיָדִֽי׃
Moses said to Joshua, “Pick some troops for us, and go out and do battle with Amalek. Tomorrow I will station myself on the top of the hill, with the rod of God in my hand.”
