לפזר ולפרז את הפארסה הנקראת צה”ל

תחקירים? הצחקתם את צה”ל

דווקא בשעה שהאמון הציבורי בצה”ל במבחן, בוחרים ראשי הצבא לתחקר ולנזוף בפקודיהם באופן סלקטיבי

״מנהרה התקפית של חמאס הושמדה״. לכאורה הודעה משמחת שיש לברך עליה אבל מאז שהיה פה מישהו שחתם בשידור חי על הבטחה שהפר לא לפני שהקים באמצעותה ממשלה – אני יודעת שעליי להטיל ספק בכל מה שמתרחש כאן. בתמימותי הנחתי שדיווחים מבצעיים של צה״ל אינם טעונים בדיקה, שהדיווחים של הכתבים הצבאיים שנשענים ברובם על הצהרותיו של דובר צה״ל הם דיווחים אמינים. ואז הגיע ציוץ של הכתב הצבאי של ערוץ 14 הלל ביטון רוזן ובו נכתב במפורש, ללא רמז וללא התפתלות: ״בצה״ל שיקרו במצח נחושה. בושה וחרפה״.

גם הכתב הצבאי של גלי צה״ל דורון קדוש הביע תמיהה: ״צה”ל שיקר לציבור הישראלי, ובאופן ספציפי לתושבי עוטף עזה, ואמר מפורשות אינספור פעמים בתדרוכים ומפגשים שונים שאין יותר מנהרות שחודרות מעזה לשטח ישראל… לא ברור מי קיבל את ההחלטה לשקר כך לציבור אז ב-2019, אבל רבים בצמרת צה”ל המשיכו ותחזקו את השקר מאז. עכשיו, כשתושבי עין השלושה מגלים שמנהרת חמאס הגיעה כל כך קרוב אליהם, כך צה”ל מבקש לשקם את האמון שנפגע אנושות ב-7.10?״

ובכן, מסתבר כי בצה״ל ידעו על קיומה של המנהרה שתחילתה בחאן יונס שבעזה והמשכה על פני מאות קילומטרים עד תוכה של מדינת ישראל. לתושבי הדרום סיפרו מפקדי צה״ל כי אין מנהרות שכאלה והניחו להם לישון שנת ישרים גם בערב שבת שמחת תורה של הטבח הנורא, לישון כמו ראש אמ״ן אהרון חליוה שנתן לנו להבין שחמאס מורתע והאיום הנורא באמת הוא משבר האקלים. אי אפשר להמעיט בעומקו של הקרע שנוצר לאחר הטבח בין אזרחי ישראל לבין צה״ל שאמור להגן עליהם. שאלות קשות מרחפות באוויר בין כלי טיס עוינים שמגיעים מכיוון חיזבאללה לבין כטב״מים של החות׳ים מתימן ותשובות, מסתבר, אי אפשר לקבל ״כי עכשיו מלחמה״.

פעמים רבות נשמעו טענות של תושבי הצפון בדבר רעשים שנשמעים מתוך מה שנראה כמו מנהרות שמגיעות מלבנון, טענות דומות נשמעות גם מפי תושבי עמק חפר באשר למנהרות שמגיעות לכאורה מהשומרון. נראה כי יהיה קשה מאוד לשכנע את התושבים כי אין מנהרות כאלה.

הרמטכ״ל רא״ל הרצי הלוי שאמר כי לא נכון לפגוע בצה״ל בזמן מלחמה מוצא מדי פעם זמן להעיר הערות פיקודיות ואף להדיח בסלקטיביות ניכרת. רמטכ״ל שבכהונתו התבצעה שואה שניה בעם היהודי וראשונה במדינת ישראל אינו מוצא לנכון להדיח את עצמו על אף אלפי ההרוגים, אלפי הפצועים ומאות החטופים. גם הערה פיקודית טרם נרשמה.

תא״ל ברק חירם שאחראי לפיצוץ האוניברסיטה בעזה שהייתה קן טרור יותר מכל דבר אחר, קיבל הערה פיקודית שתבטיח כנראה את אי קידומו. הערה שלא היתה נרשמת אלמלא הואשם קודם לכן בגרימת מותם של חטופים בירי שהורה לבצע על בית בבארי. מאוחר יותר התבצע תחקיר והסתבר כי הירי עליו הורה לא גרם להרג של אף אחד מהחטופים שנרצחו על ידי חמאס אך כל אלה שמיהרו לגנות את חירם טרם התחקיר שכחו להתנצל.

המשך לקרוא…

מאתר מידה, כאן.

Tour de Force: Rafi Farber Gives Genuine Hope

The Reset Will Be On Our Terms, Not Theirs; Let the Bastards Drown in their Own Inflation

This is the speech I gave at Agenda 2030, Petach Tikva, Israel, March 18, 2024; Adar 8, 5784

RAFI FARBER

MAR 20, 2024

 

  • I gave this speech in Hebrew, but since I wrote it in English and then translated it, the original is actually in English.
  • I actually got a standing ovation when I finished, so I guess they were receptive.
  • This is a remix of things I’ve written in the past, with an Israeli/Jewish twist on it.

 

Note: The End Game Investor is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Many of us in this room are afraid that the elites are going to take over the world completely. They already control medicine, academia, the school system, and pretty soon they’re going to sterilize us all and feed us bug powder through a tube (grasshopper powder for those who keep kosher, with kosher certification from a Yemenite Rabbi of course).

Yuval Noach Harari, may he live a long and peaceful life, the Gadol Hador (Titan of this Generation) of the Torah of the elites, is already talking openly about sticking sensors under our skin so the government knows exactly what we’re thinking at all times. The best part about that is if we crack the wrong joke or don’t take every injection they want us to take or if we even think the wrong thing, they’ll know about it, and they’ll cut our universal basic income of central bank digital currency for the month so we can only afford a half ration of bug powder while we watch our children we’re not even allowed to have, slowly starve to death for lack of bug sandwiches.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have good news for you. I want you to internalize it and understand it well. This is not going to happen. This is not a prediction. It’s just simple logic. Let me explain to you how I know this.

Please, my friends, think back to when you woke up this morning. How did you know what you’d have to do today? How did you know how much you’d have to work and how much you’d have to spend to basically keep up your standard of living? How did you even decide if you could afford coming to this conference? Basically, how did you happen to know exactly where you fit in to the division of labor that spans the entire planet and feeds every human being on Earth?

The answer is prices. Prices are the signal that tells every person in the world what he has to do in order to be part of global production. Without prices, everyone would wake up in the morning and they’d have no idea what they’re supposed to be doing. Very quickly, within a matter of days, there would be chaos, the zombie apocalypse, mass murder and mayhem.

But where do prices come from? When you woke up this morning, how did you know what prices were? The answer is that you remember what prices were, basically, from the day before, and if you don’t remember, you can ask someone or look it up. You knew yesterday from the day before that, and so on and so forth back into the past.

This, my friends, is what Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises called the Monetary Regression Principle. Many of you probably have never heard of Mises unless you are familiar with the Austrian School of economics. Mises was one of us. He was a Jew, a holocaust survivor in fact, but he was one of those survivors that the mainstream, including the propagandist rabble rousers at Yad Vashem, would rather you know nothing about. Mises opposed the power of the State and championed liberty and free markets. His greatest work was published just after he escaped the Nazis by the skin of his teeth.

Anyway, Mises’s Monetary Regression Principle is cold, hard, economic law. It is as inescapable as gravity. It is simple deductive logic. It says that there is no such thing as prices in a vacuum. Prices cannot simply be made up out of whole cloth. They need to flow from some prior source, all the way back to the origin of exchange itself. Otherwise, prices have no connection at all to what came before, and in that case they would convey no meaningful signal as to the supply of and demand for anything at all. The result would be, necessarily, the breakdown of the division of labor and the zombie apocalypse.

Now, tell me, my friends. What the hell is a “shekel”? When I ask people why the shekel has any value, the most common answer I get is along the lines of “people just agree on it”. As if there was some kind of Rousseauan social contract for money, some sort of colossal meeting at Israel’s biggest football stadium where everyone took a vote on a medium of exchange and then just distributed it amongst the population ex nihilo.

This never happened.

There is no monetary contract and there never was. There can never be a manufactured, top-down agreement that determines what will constitute money on planet Earth, ever.

True, people do seem to agree on the value of a shekel, but why? How? Where does this agreement come from? As I said before, it came from yesterday. Your “agreement” with everyone else today as to what a shekel is worth is based only on your extrapolation from that same agreement from yesterday.

And so on until we get all the way back to the invention of the New Israeli Shekel itself. How did that happen? Well, the old Shekel hyperinflated to nothing in 1984, and so the Bank of Israel issued a new currency in exchange for dollars from the Federal Reserve, and promised not to directly finance the Knesset’s deficit ever again, and the New Shekel came into existence based on and backed by the US Dollar.

The shekel, my friends, is just a derivative of – a substitute for – the US Dollar. That’s all it ever was. That’s what it is right now. The Bank of Israel issues the Shekel as its liability, and the Bank of Israel’s only assets are US dollars. Literally. Maybe a few Euros, but that’s it.

Now, we come to the next question. What the hell is a dollar? If we can answer that question, we can figure out what a shekel is.

The agreement about what a dollar is started long before the dollar was ever born. The word “dollar” was just like the word “gram” or “ounce”. Just like the word “shekel” means weight in Hebrew, literally, a dollar was simply a unit of weight of gold or silver. A silver or gold dollar was just a standardized coin that weighed one dollar. As for the paper dollar bill, it was born as a receipt for a dollar’s weight of gold or silver. It was the first dollar “derivative”, having “derived” its already agreed-upon value from a weight of gold or silver.

If you go back in time all the way back to when the dollar was born as a unit of anything, you will reach gold and silver. There is no avoiding it. The widespread agreement as to the value of a dollar today stretches all the way back to the agreement on the value of gold and silver.

But where did this agreement come from? A meeting? No, there was never any meeting on the value of precious metals.

What happened was people just started trading things for other things, which is better and more productive than murdering one another for stuff, generally speaking. In trading, they figured out that some things like gold and silver trade better. Why? It doesn’t really matter why, but it’s probably because they never go bad and you can divide them easily. And you can make them into stuff. Beautiful stuff. And so even if I don’t personally want gold or silver now for itself, the guy who I trade it with next seems to want it, and so I’ll keep it for now and exchange it for something else later because it works better than these goats, which smell bad and you can’t divide them without them trying to eat your pants and bleeding to death.

Eventually, someone down the chain of exchange will use the gold. Who cares who or why? The point is, if that were not the case, that somebody at some point will actually use the stuff, gold and silver would have no value at all.

Trade is an organic process that ferments and matures from the bottom up. “Money” is simply the word we use for “most liquid commodity available in a given economy”. In a prison it could be cans of fish or cigarettes. It doesn’t have to be gold and silver, but it does have to be the most liquid commodity available. Money is the commodity that changes value the least from day to day. It is the commodity that the most people in the world want to buy, and the most people in the world want to sell, all at the same time. The dollar began as a unit of weight for these most liquid commodities, gold and silver. Then something weird happened.

People realized it was much more convenient to trade around the receipts rather than the money itself, which is heavy and you can lose it. And so paper promises for dollars started circulating, and they became known as “dollars” themselves, even though they were only receipts for dollars, and not themselves dollars. This continued to morph into still more promises for those paper promises for money, what we call “bank deposits”, much more of which exist than actual paper dollars. And again, it continued to morph into what we call “debt” or “bonds”.

What the hell are those?

Debt, or bonds, are promises for bank deposits which are promises for paper receipts which are promises for money, which is gold and silver.

But it doesn’t stop there. Not even close. It keeps going and going. It is the Tower of Babel itself. It goes higher and higher and higher still, promises upon promises stacked upon promises for money, piled up to heaven in an increasingly unstable pile of garbage. And the foundation of that entire global tower is physical gold and silver. It has to be. Because of the Monetary Regression Principle, there is no other possibility.

What about Bitcoin? Isn’t that new? No, it is not. Again, how does anyone know how much stuff a bitcoin can buy? Because bitcoin attached itself to the existing dollar price array, and so did the shekel. What is a bitcoin then? It is simply the next layer of the Tower of Babel of dollar derivatives.

And what, my friends, is a central bank digital currency? If and when the bank of Israel hands us all our universal basic income in blockchain shekels and tells us we can all eat 2 kilos of grasshopper powder for the month with a Badatz hechsher by Rav Machpud, how will anyone know what a blockchain shekel can buy? Because the price array of blockchain shekels will feed off the existing shekel price array, and another layer of the same damned Tower of Babel will be put into place.

But at the base of this disgusting tower of evil, of derivative after derivative piled up to heaven, is physical gold and silver.

The shekel is a dollar derivative, and the dollar is still ultimately a gold derivative. It must be, or the chain back in time on which the entire agreement on the value of a dollar is based, collapses, and the division of labor breaks down. Meaning, you wake up in the morning and you have no idea what to do, and neither does anybody else. That’s a zombie apocalypse.

So what happened in 1971 then when President Richard Nixon supposedly “closed the gold window”? That was simply an admission that the statutory rate of $35 per ounce was a lie. There were too many money derivatives, and not enough money to redeem them all. But this doesn’t change the fact that the gold window is still open. For both the dollar and the shekel. For that reason alone, people still agree that the dollar has any value whatsoever.

But the gold window will not remain open for much longer. The dollar will go off the gold standard at some point, when nobody will accept any amount of dollars for any amount of gold or silver, not even at coin shops.

This is a scary prospect indeed, but it is also liberating, exhilarating, even cathartic. Because on that day, the entire massive engine of corruption that is poisoning every aspect of human society – medical, academic, military, nutritional, all funded by the inflation of the dollar and shekel supply, it will all end. All at once. My God, it’ll be beautiful.

When all the myriad layers of promises for money are dead and gone, the only thing left to maintain any semblance of a division of labor on Earth will be money itself – gold and silver. When all the promises for money are all revealed to be lies, literally all of the goods and services on planet Earth will be on offer for physical money, at rates so desperate that even the most hardcore of gold and silver collectors will be absolutely astounded.

Why? Because all currencies in the world today, without a single exception, are based on the US dollar, which is based on gold and silver, through the monetary regression principle. When the dollar falls, all currencies fall, including the shekel. In a world where currencies no longer work, there are no prices in currency terms, and so there can be no division of labor in currency terms. Therefore, the absolute most important thing in such a society is not food, and not water, but money.

Food and water are obviously important, but famines do not happen because there is no food. They happen because food cannot be distributed, because there is no money. The only way to establish any kind of division of labor in a world where currencies are dead, is to return to money itself. Prices will regress back to real money in terms of ounces of gold and silver, through the logic of the Monetary Regression Principle of Ludwig von Mises, the Jewish holocaust survivor they do not want you to know about.

Ladies and gentlemen, we live on a massive monetary Tower of Babel with our heads in the clouds. Most of us have no idea where we are, and the air is getting way too thin and it’s driving us insane for hypoxia. The Torah opens the story of the Tower of Babel with this verse:

וַיְהִ֥י כׇל־הָאָ֖רֶץ שָׂפָ֣ה אֶחָ֑ת וּדְבָרִ֖ים אֲחָדִֽים׃

“And the land spoke one language, and was concerned with singular matters.”

This is the first communist society. The first economic central plan. Nothing matters but singular things, not “one thing” which would be דבר אחד but “singular things” in the plural, דברים אחדים. You all will focus on these singular things or the government will kill you. Whether it’s the coronavirus, or “Judicial Reform”, or “Peace Now”, or – I’m sorry to say – “Bring them Home Now”. It’s all BS.

We are deep in it, my friends, high in the clouds, but God has promised that He will not let the evil elites take over the whole world. Never again. It is impossible, by His word, because of monetary regression. Their sick tower will collapse. And how will it collapse? Because in the end, as the dollar falls, and as the shekel falls with it, everyone will rush to gold and silver out of necessity, the base of the Tower itself, and knock it over once and for all.

If we picture the inverted pyramid, the Tower of Babel of our monetary system as an actual physical structure rather than strictly an intellectual concept, then to acquire an ounce of gold is to pile that pyramid with more and more dollars, with more promises, and at the same time hack away physically at the gold base supporting it all. Take a piece of that gold base while you still can. Keep it with you, and keep hacking away. Methodically. Intentionally. Consciously. And fully understanding the consequences, both good and bad.

At some point soon, very soon, the gold base of our pyramid will be thin enough that the entire thing will topple over. At that point, the elite can print as much currency as they want, but it won’t matter, because it will not have any gold or silver value. Any central bank digital currency will not be able to base itself on a dollar price array that no longer exists. The elites will lose control entirely, and it will be up to us to rebuild from the ground up. Those of us with real money we hold in our hands will be responsible for how the new world takes shape.

Rabeinu Sa’adya Gaon, from the period of the Gaonim (literally “The Greats”) just after the Talmud was finished, asks this basic question in his book “Beliefs and Opinions”. He asks why the Torah forbids theft. His answer is obvious. If theft were allowed, everyone would steal, nobody would produce, and eventually everyone, including the thieves, would starve to death.

You can have a society with thieves. They must be punished, yes, but society can survive some amount of theft. But a society based on the idea of theft itself as a good thing, that is bound to collapse, because eventually you will run out of stuff to steal.

Inflation, my friends – the act of printing currency that is a claim on money that does not exist – is itself theft, literally. There is no denying it. Our monetary system is based on theft, and therefore, according to Rabbi Sa’adya, and Moses and Mises, one who brought down the Torah from Sinai, and the other who explained Monetary Regression all the way back to Sinai and before, this society must collapse, the entire disgusting thing.

And it will. Just like the Tower of Babel. When it does, the elites will lose control of everything, and their central plan to have us eat bugs will fail completely. And it will be up to us to rebuild. We must be up to the task, because there is nobody else to do it.

How did Joseph the Righteous save the world in his day? By collecting silver. What did Moses our Teacher, the greatest prophet in history whose level of prophecy will never, ever be equaled and the closest man to perfection who ever existed, what commandment did he relay from God right before we left Egypt forever? The commandment to collect all the gold and silver in Egypt, and we emptied the whole damned country. Then God drowned all the murderous bastards for drowning our babies. I cannot wait until He drowns the elites in their own inflation. Please God, exact Your vengeance in our days.

All monetary pyramids of tyranny are based on gold and silver, and once we destroy that base by collecting it for ourselves, we destroy the entire evil machine. It will be dangerous, and it will be glorious, and it is inevitable anyway, and so it must be done by good people like us.

This, ladies and gentlemen is the monetary reset. And it will be on our terms, on God’s terms. Not theirs. Keep calm, keep stacking, and let’s finish the job.

The End Game Investor is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

From The End Game Investor, here.

One Answer to Most of Your Questions: ‘Some Men Just Want To Watch the World BURN!’

Some Men Just Want…

March 29, 2024

In the movie The Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne (the Batman) confides to his butler Alfred that he’s having trouble anticipating the psychotic Joker’s next move and figuring out his motives.

Alfred blinks his owlish, bespectacled eyes, and then, in his British accent, says, “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money.  They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with.  Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

So true.

And with that excellent answer, Alfred the butler has just educated the rather naïve Master Wayne on the presence of pure evil in our world.

Doing bad just for the fun of it.

Sacrilege for sacrilege’s sake.

This brings me to our sad, decaying country, led by our sad, decaying president and his Deep State/media minions.

Let’s pretend for a moment that you’re a naïve bleeding-heart, albeit quite muscular, orphan like Bruce.  (I was an orphan; therefore, by The New Rules, I can say orphan.)  And I’ll be Alfred.  Ancestry DNA says I’m overwhelmingly British, plus I’m paler than freshly bleached bedsheets.

You start.

Why would the people in power leave our country open for anyone in the world to waltz in and potentially bring with them terrorism, crime, disease, drugs, a welfare mentality, and illiteracy?

Me: Because some men just want to watch the world burn.

Why would politicians, academicians, and the media labor strenuously to convince minority children that they’re helpless victims of an unjust system, while telling white kids they’re the problem, whether they know it or not?

Because some men just want to watch the world burn.

On the subject of kids, why on Earth would our leaders, child psychologists, and medical “experts” allow minors — who, last time I checked, are not allowed to smoke cigarettes, drink booze, own guns, or drive a car — to take dangerous hormones, amputate their penises or breasts, and consign themselves to a life without procreation or sexual pleasure?

Because some men wanna watch the world burn, that’s why.

Can you explain to me why certain of our public health experts helped fund the Wuhan, China lab that synthesized COVID-19, then lied about that, then tried to float a narrative that the bug came from eating pangolins or bats, and then attacked anyone trying to tell the truth about the disease’s origin?

And why these same supposed caregivers, along with their political compañeros, made up social distancing; promoted useless (against aerosolized viruses) paper and cloth masks; and mandated improperly tested vaccines that, while failing to prevent the acquisition or spread of disease, did and continue to do grave damage to the poor souls who trustingly bared their arms for multiple injections?

Because some men just…well, you know the rest.

OK, please explain this.  Why would anyone who purportedly cares about the welfare of his parents, spouse, or children, not to mention his fellow man, think it’s a good idea to hamstring law enforcement while making it easier for criminals to roam the streets?  Or useful to allow the mentally ill to roam the subways while arresting good Samaritans seeking to protect their fellow riders?  Or prudent to allow some folks to riot, causing deaths, injuries and destruction — even during a pandemic — while other folks go to prison for a long, long time for taking a walk in the Capitol, with the Capitol Police kindly opening the doors and providing tours?

(See watch the world burn, because some folks just want to.)

Continue reading…

From American Thinker, here.

A Short Story of Capitalism: The Charity of the Free Market

Title:     How Good Fortune Came To Pierre
Author: Orison Swett Marden [More Titles by Marden]

Many years ago, in a shabby room in one of the poorest streets of London, a little golden-haired boy sat singing, in his sweet, childish voice, by the bedside of his sick mother. Though faint from hunger and oppressed with loneliness, he manfully forced back the tears that kept welling up into his blue eyes, and, for his mother’s sake, tried to look bright and cheerful. But it was hard to be brave and strong while his dear mother was suffering for lack of the delicacies which he longed to provide for her, but could not. He had not tasted food all day himself. How he could drive away the gaunt, hungry wolf, Famine, that had come to take up its abode with them, was the thought that haunted him as he tried to sing a little song he himself had composed. He left his place by the invalid, who, lulled by his singing, had fallen into a light sleep. As he looked listlessly out of the window, he noticed a man putting up a large poster, which bore, in staring yellow letters, the announcement that Madame M—-, one of the greatest singers that ever lived, was to sing in public that night.

“Oh, if I could only go!” thought little Pierre, his love of music for the moment making him forgetful of aught else. Suddenly his face brightened, and the light of a great resolve shone in his eyes. “I will try it,” he said to himself; and, running lightly to a little stand that stood at the opposite end of the room, with trembling hands he took from a tiny box a roll of paper. With a wistful, loving glance at the sleeper, he stole from the room and hurried out into the street.

“Who did you say is waiting for me?” asked Madame M—- of her servant; “I am already worn out with company.”

“It is only a very pretty little boy with yellow curls, who said that if he can just see you, he is sure you will not be sorry, and he will not keep you a moment.”

“Oh, well, let him come,” said the great singer, with a kindly smile, “I can never refuse children.”

Timidly the child entered the luxurious apartment, and, bowing before the beautiful, stately woman, he began rapidly, lest his courage should fail him: “I came to see you because my mother is very sick, and we are too poor to get food and medicine. I thought, perhaps, that if you would sing my little song at some of your grand concerts, maybe some publisher would buy it for a small sum, and so I could get food and medicine for my mother.”

Taking the little roll of paper which the boy held in his hand, the warm-hearted singer lightly hummed the air. Then, turning toward him, she asked, in amazement: “Did you compose it? you, a child! And the words, too?” Without waiting for a reply, she added quickly, “Would you like to come to my concert this evening?” The boy’s face became radiant with delight at the thought of hearing the famous songstress, but a vision of his sick mother, lying alone in the poor, cheerless room, flitted across his mind, and he answered, with a choking in his throat:–

“Oh, yes; I should so love to go, but I couldn’t leave my mother.”

“I will send somebody to take care of your mother for the evening, and here is a crown with which you may go and get food and medicine. Here is also one of my tickets. Come to-night; that will admit you to a seat near me.”

Overcome with joy, the child could scarcely express his gratitude to the gracious being who seemed to him like an angel from heaven. As he went out again into the crowded street, he seemed to tread on air. He bought some fruit and other little delicacies to tempt his mother’s appetite, and while spreading out the feast of good things before her astonished gaze, with tears in his eyes, he told her of the kindness of the beautiful lady.

An hour later, tingling with expectation, Pierre set out for the concert. How like fairyland it all seemed! The color, the dazzling lights, the flashing gems and glistening silks of the richly dressed ladies bewildered him. Ah! could it be possible that the great artist who had been so kind to him would sing his little song before this brilliant audience? At length she came on the stage, bowing right and left in answer to the enthusiastic welcome which greeted her appearance.

A pause of expectancy followed. The boy held his breath and gazed spellbound at the radiant vision on whom all eyes were riveted. The orchestra struck the first notes of a plaintive melody, and the glorious voice of the great singer filled the vast hall, as the words of the sad little song of the child composer floated on the air. It was so simple, so touching, so full of exquisite pathos, that many were in tears before it was finished.

And little Pierre? There he sat, scarcely daring to move or breathe, fearing that the flowers, the lights, the music, should vanish, and he should wake up to find it all a dream. He was aroused from his trance by the tremendous burst of applause that rang through the house as the last note trembled away into silence. He started up. It was no dream. The greatest singer in Europe had sung his little song before a fashionable London audience. Almost dazed with happiness, he never knew how he reached his poor home; and when he related the incidents of the evening, his mother’s delight nearly equaled his own. Nor was this the end.

Next day they were startled by a visit from Madame M—-. After gently greeting the sick woman, while her hand played with Pierre’s golden curls, she said: “Your little boy, Madame, has brought you a fortune. I was offered this morning, by the best publisher in London, 300 pounds for his little song; and after he has realized a certain amount from the sale, little Pierre here is to share the profits. Madame, thank God that your son has a gift from heaven.” The grateful tears of the invalid and her visitor mingled, while the child knelt by his mother’s bedside and prayed God to bless the kind lady who, in their time of sorrow and great need, had been to them as a savior.

The boy never forgot his noble benefactress, and years afterward, when the great singer lay dying, the beloved friend who smoothed her pillow and cheered and brightened her last moments–the rich, popular, and talented composer–was no other than our little Pierre.

[The end]

(Find it here.)

התפילות בכותל הקטן ורדיפת השלטונות

התפילות בכותל הקטן נעשו כבר לדבר שבשגרה, אולם עדיין המשטרה מסרבת לאפשר להכניס למקום ספר תורה או כל ציוד זמני אחר כגון כסאות ושולחנות מפלסטיק. בתענית אסתר נאלצו המתפללים לקיים את התפילה ברחוב מול הר הבית

הכותל הקטן. המקום הקרוב ביותר למקום הקדוש ביותר ‘קודש הקדשים’ הוא מקום תפילה ידוע ומוכר כבר רבות בשנים. בתקופה האחרונה ישנה קבוצה של יהודים תושבי העיר העתיקה שביקשו לקבוע מקום לתפילותיהם במקום המקודש.

ואכן יהודים רבים מוצאים במקום מקום מתאים לפרוש בו את כפיהם לשמים ולהשתטח בתפילה על אבני הכותל הקדושות. המקום נמצא בתוך הרובע המוסלמי סמוך לשער הברזל של הר הבית. נציין כי הכותל הקטן מחולק לשני מפלסים, כאשר אחד מהם ממוקם בלב מנהרות הכותל, ואילו האחר נמצא מעל בסוף רחוב במעין חצר קטנה ברובע המוסלמי.

אולם דומה כי מי שאמונה על שמירת החוק והסדר במקום משטרת ישראל שמה מקלות בגלגלים למתפללים. ובכל פעם שהם מנסים להביא למקום כיסאות כתר עבור המתפללים או ספר תורה השוטרים המוצבים במקום דרך קבע מונעים את הכנסת הציוד וספר התורה למקום.

בתיעוד שהגיע לידינו מיום צום תענית אסתר האחרון, נראים שוטרים מעכבים מתפללים הנושאים בידיהם ספר תורה, ומונעים מהם לעבור לחצר בו ממוקם ה’כותל הקטן’.

המתפללים שהבינו כי לא יוכלו להיכנס לכותל הקטן קיימו את המניין והתפילות מול שער הר הבית כאשר הם חוסמים את המעבר להר. לזה המשטרה כנראה לא התנגדה.

המשך לקרוא…

מאתר JDN, כאן.