Judea-Samaria Is forever, but Modern Orthodoxy in America is not

Not only are non-Orthodox rapidly self-destructing and disappearing, but these fault lines extend into “Modern Orthodoxy”.

By Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer, INN

What “The World” says about Israel does not matter. Through 75 years of Israel, and 50 before, G-d’s miracles have predominated despite enemies afar and snakes within. Like the Babylonian, Mede, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine empires, those enemies have met their fate, and Israel grows only stronger.

Israel exists by different rules of nature. By all odds, it never should have emerged. Hebrew was going the way of Latin and Celtic. The name “Israel” was supplanted by “Palestine.” Two thousand years of Exile persuaded the world we were consigned to be “Wandering Jews.” They even mockingly named a plant for our disgrace.

Then the worst anti-Semites helped midwife Israel. Stalin voted for it. The world center of Jew hatred, the United Nations, legitimized it. It was too small to survive, so G-d hardened the Arabs’ hearts, and their wars expanded Israel into the Negev, Galilee, and Judea-Samaria. Even before 1948, virulently anti-Semitic Poland miraculously helped build the Jewish armed resistance, arming and training all three underground groups — the Haganah, the Irgun, and the Lechi — until Hitler arrived. Communist Czechoslovakia emerged to arm Israel when America demurred. The Italian Mafia, controlling Manhattan and Jersey docks, helped run arms to Israel when Truman embargoed.

Miracles.

• In 1956 during the Suez crisis, France was Israel’s champion while Eisenhower was hostile. In 1967, France reneged, so Israel found post-Eisenhower America ready. And Israel sailed away two years later with the five French gunboats she had paid for but that DeGaulle would not release. C’est la vie. When he was needed in 1973, Nixon — of all people — stepped in, even as his Vice President Agnew was pleading nolo contendre on the exact day the arms shipments to Israel were authorized.
• Israel survived the Ford-Kissinger “Reassessment,” the anti-Semitic Jimmy Carter, Reagan’s condemnations of Israel’s conduct of the 1982 war and of Begin’s bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor, George Bush and James Baker, Clinton hosting Arafat more than any other White House visitor and inducing Ehud Barak to offer Arafat parts of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount; Obama, Biden, Hillary, and Kerry, and aspects of Trump’s “Deal of the Century” that would have compromised Jewish sovereignty over parts of Judea and Samaria.
• The Obama-Biden-Kerry refusal to veto UN Security Council resolution 2334 in December 2016 ultimately proved meaningless as, only months later, Trump — of all people — arrived to recognize Jerusalem as capital, move the embassy, recognize Golan sovereignty, and recognize the legality of Jewish communities throughout Judea and Samaria.
• Israel has prospered by G-d’s miracles. Peres preached a vision of “Palestine” as a Maui or Tahiti. The “Palestinians” helped clarify reality by bus-bombing Bibi to a miracle election victory. Bibi then broke faith at the Wye Conference, so G-d replaced him with Ehud Barak. Barak unilaterally handed over South Lebanon to become a Hezbollah stronghold and tried giving away parts of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount so G-d gave him an Intifada that exposed his military incompetence, and replaced him with Sharon.
• After Sharon broke his pledges to voters and perfidiously imposed a national catastrophe on 8,500 Jews in Gush Katif, he turned next to ceding Judea and Samaria. Instead, he sustained a debilitating stroke. He recovered, got a second chance perhaps by merit of his 1950’s Unit 101 and his Yom Kippur War heroism, but he had learned nothing. He sustained another stroke so massive that his plans and he ended for good.
• Ehud Olmert — now revealed as a crook, prisoner, and villain who urges countries to withhold support from Israel — followed and tried actualizing the give-away. He was stopped by a Hezbollah kidnaping that launched a war he proved incapable of waging, alongside his hapless “Defense Minister,” a Labor Party union hack. When Netanyahu returned, he had learned never to cede Judea and Samaria.

So, although Zionists must advocate passionately for Israel, it kind-of does not matter except for fulfilling one’s duty to G-d and His Torah, land, and people. With some 350,000 Jews now living in eastern communities of Jerusalem that were liberated from Arab occupation in 1967 and more than 500,000 in the rest of Judea and Samaria — totaling 850,000 Jews — and recognizing the logistical mess the Israeli government encountered in relocating, resettling, and reemploying 8,500 Jews from Gush Katif (one percent of 850,000) in 2005, it is clear the “Two-State Solution” never will happen, no matter what anyone says or does. One million Jews cannot be forcibly uprooted and relocated. Indeed, Israel now is reversing the 2005 Gush Katif surrender by restoring Chomesh and other communities in Northern Shomron.

Chief Rabbi Yitzchak HaLevi Herzog said in the 1940’s, when he refused to relocate temporarily from Eretz Yisrael as Hitler’s Gen. Erwin Rommel approached the Holy Land during his North Africa campaign, that the Tanakh (Bible) and all of Judaic theology speak of only two destructions. There will not be a third Churban (catastrophe).

One should not be nonchalant about threats of America reducing aid to Israel. But one should not lose sleep over it either. When a parent threatens to cut off a college-age son or daughter financially, that worries the child. But once the child becomes a successful entrepreneur, professional, TikTok Influencer, or $350,000-a-year Israeli Supreme Court justice, that threat evaporates.

Israel is that matured entity. Yoram Ettinger has shown that Israel is a better financial and military value to America than vice-versa. Several recent influential think pieces have made the argument that Israel even can benefit from living without American aid — if it comes to that. In time, Israel would actualize Moshe Arens’s dream and create its own jet fighters, and Americans would lose restrictive influences. India will buy. Finland will buy. Arabs will buy. The whole world will buy. They do now.

Miracles. All fears that Arab birthrates would imperil Israel’s Jewish demographic majority have been vanquished. A million Jews from the former Soviet Union arrived. Jews from France, Argentina, Ethiopia came — always some anti-Semitic eruption to augment Israel’s population. Even the miracle of 850,000 Jews arriving in the 1940’s and 1950’s as Arab countries secured Israel’s Jewish demographic majority forever and laid the groundwork for Edot HaMizrach (Sephardic Jews) to save Israel from the godless Marx-inspired Ashkenazic elite who had laid the foundation for a secular socialist society whose last entrails are found at Tel Aviv restaurants on Tisha B’Av. The Opposition’s perpetual protests reflect they have lost; otherwise, they would be celebrating.

Australia? Kangaroos, the Koala, the Wallaby. They don’t matter. Neither do Canada, England, France, Russia, America, anyone.

While Israel is secure and forever, peril faces American Jewry. Not only are non-Orthodox rapidly self-destructing and disappearing, but these fault lines extend into “Modern Orthodoxy”:

1. At least 33-40 percent or more of American “Jews” are not Jews. American Orthodox rabbinic and lay institutions are terrified to reveal they know this and its ramifications. All practicing American rabbonim (Orthodox rabbis) know they secretly undertake lineage investigations before conducting weddings for anyone not engaged in their communities because odds are that one or both prospective spouses is not Jewish. For that same reason — encountering “Jews” who are not Jews — they turn away even relatives of paid synagogue members from being buried in their shul cemeteries and from having their kids “bar- or bat-mitzva’d.”

American rabbonim regularly encounter people who tell them they or their spouse is “Jewish,” or their child is marrying someone “Jewish,” even though the rav knows the person is a “Marilyn Monroe convert.” Because the Orthodox Union and Rabbinical Council of America, terrified to offend members and donors, deliberately evade the issue and stopped educating the public years ago, many Jewish parents affiliated with O.U. shuls and RCA rabbonim have evolved to accept when their boys marry non-Jewish and tell them “Mom, she’s doing a conversion with a reform/conservative rabbi, so it’s OK and you will have Jewish grandchildren, and don’t write me out of your will.” Jewish parents no longer feel stigma: “Well, Rabbi, at least she is undergoing some kind of conversion. Right?”

Wrong.

The local synagogue rabbi is afraid to speak the Truth because he may get fired. He rationalizes: “If I tell them the hard truth, they will fire me, and then what will become of the shul?” (Answer: They will hire someone else with the exact same skills-set but more docile.) Tragically, the RCA and OU, who cannot be fired by local congregants but fear donors, also resist speaking the Truth. That is the meaning of Exile. The lesson for Israel: Jews vigilantly must guard against similar erosion in Israel’s Law of Return and Grandparent Clause. The toxicity poisoning American “Judaism” must not attain a foothold in Israel. This is Judaic life-or-death.

2. Secondly, mainstream American Modern Orthodox institutions proceed with contempt-of-court toward their own Poskim (Torah Authorities) and fear speaking with clarity on issues regarding the pernicious pretense of “Open Orthodoxy.” The “Maharat” Academy (“Yeshivat Maharat”), which contravenes Judaism and ordains “Orthodox women rabbis” (“Maharats”), now proudly and publicly endorses lesbian marriage, even among their own Maharat “Yeshiva” students. Yes, “Orthodox women rabbis” in lesbian marriages.Other “Maharats” advocate for transgender legislation, claiming they speak for Orthodox Judaism. Such “Maharats” amplify the disgrace; one is “Rabbi in Residence” at Missouri’s Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion. Another is a professor of Feminism at the seminary for “Reform Rabbis,” where she is proud to be called “Rabbi.”

The Orthodox Union asked their Poskim to pasken (Judaically rule) on whether “women rabbis” may serve O.U. congregations, and their revered Torah Authorities unanimously paskened in an extended learned Teshuvah (Responsum) in February 2017 — more than six years ago — that women rabbis are absolutely forbidden. Yet, to this very day, there are O.U. congregations in public contempt of their own rabbinic judges, and Orthodox Union knows it — because all know it, because it is so public — and yet O.U. has not implemented the very rabbinic ruling it sought. That is contempt of court.

Even so, the same O.U. “boldly” lectures Israelis on how to deal with their courts. Nor does Rabbinical Council of America conscientiously enforce its own explicit requirement: “. . . [W]e cannot accept either the ordination of women or the recognition of women as members of the Orthodox rabbinate, regardless of the title.” Indeed, RCA even has bumbled into becoming a back-door vehicle for “Open Orthodox” female and male rabbis to gain legitimacy.

And the third “pillar” of American Modern Orthodoxy, Yeshiva University, now has a “Vice Provost for Values and Leadership” who leverages her YU status to legitimize “Maharat women rabbis” in a number of venues. The university’s Cardozo Law School awarded Jimmy Carter their “International Advocate for Peace” award, and 21 of their faculty signed a letter opposing Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination for the Supreme Court. Cardozo even has mandated that all students must take a course in critical race theory to graduate.

How far YU has descended from Presidents Rav Bernard Revel, Rav Samuel Belkin, and Rav Norman Lamm of blessed memory and the overriding spiritual leadership of HaRav Yosef Ber Soloveitchik!

Greater Israel is safe and secure forever. American Modern Orthodoxy?

Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer is Senior Contributing Editor at The American Spectator, Vice President of the Coalition for Jewish Values, was adjunct professor of law at two prominent Southern California law schools for nearly twenty years, and is Rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California.