‘Anyone Who Dwells Outside Israel Is As if He Worships Idols’ – The Simple Meaning

Idol Worship in Exile

The Rabbis taught: One should always dwell in Israel, even in a city that is mostly heathen, and not dwell outside of Israel, even in a city that is mostly Jewish – for anyone who dwells in the Land of Israel is likened to one who has a God, and anyone who dwells outside the land is likened to one who has no God, as it states “To give you the land of Canaan, to be for you a God.”

But does anyone who does not dwell in the land not have a God?! Rather, it is coming to tell you that anyone who dwells outside the land is as if he is worshipping idolatry. And so by David it says, “For they have driven me out today from being gathered in the inheritance of Hashem, saying ‘go worship other gods.’” Now who told David to go serve other gods? Rather it is telling you that anyone who dwells outside the land is as if he is worshipping idolatry. (Kesubos 110B)

Contemporary events lend insight into this famous Gemara that, on the surface, is difficult to comprehend.

At the very outset, it must be noted that this teaching is not an allegory or a philosophical remark. It is codified by the Rambam as Jewish law – the same Rambam that some Jews rely on for staying in galus. I have no doubt that clever Jewish minds will split hairs or otherwise explain this away to justify remaining in their steplands until the bitter end, but that is their choice. The Rambam has nothing to do with it.

The Gemara first likens a Jew who dwells outside of Israel to one who has no God. This is extremely difficult; God is everywhere and is with Jews in galus as well. The Gemara therefore likens him to one who worships idolatry, but this too is difficult. We can understand that a Jew in exile may lack some measure of God’s protection and closeness. But how can we say that they are like idol worshipers? Our Talmudists, Geonim, and many of our holiest people lived outside of Israel. How can the Gemara make a blanket statement that seemingly associates even them with any semblance of idolatry? Instead of solving the initial problem, it seems the Gemara only made it worse.

Yet all we need is to look around and we will see how true both comparisons are. The Jew in galus knows deep down how quickly things can change. Even if he lives in a democracy in which all ethnicities have equal rights, the Jew is never secure. On the surface they forget – they drive it out of their consciousness – but the Jew instinctively knows that he is a stranger in a strange land.

He is not like the gentiles, no matter how much he tries to imitate their ways, or even outdo them. Unlike his neighbors of other ethnicities, he must suppress much of his identity, even if he may be outwardly Jewish and proud of it.  Even if the Jew achieves some measure of power, he must always rely on the gentile to safeguard him. Even if the Jew is a wealthy landowner, he is really just a tenant.

Because of this, the Jew will make many accommodations to get along with his gentile neighbors, hoping to be tolerated. His gentile neighbors of other ethnicities do not feel this same instinctive need to ingratiate themselves with Jews or others. It is not built into their psyche.

They do not have to wonder whether their brothers and sisters are “too visible”, have “too much power”, or contribute enough to the community to earn the good graces of their neighbors.

They do not instinctively feel the need to be polite and kind to the doorman, the delivery man, the policeman, or the person they pass every day on the street just in case…just in case if things get bad, maybe that person will remember the Jew was kind and hide him or help him escape. This is something Jews are taught. We should be polite and kind to all people to sanctify God’s name…but also because it might one day save a Jew’s life. He might one day wave you to the right instead of to the left, just because you said good morning. You never know.

The gentile does not have to think like that. Only the Jew.

Rather, only the Jew in galus.

This is what the Gemara means when it says the Jew outside of Israel is like one who serves idols. Of course he does not actually serve idols…but he must ingratiate himself to those who do.

A guest does not criticize the lifestyle of his host, at least not while in his home. A Jew therefore does not criticize the lifestyle of the gentile while in his land. The guest can be thrown out, and so can the Jew. Even if the host is gracious, it is likely to cool the relationship – something the Jew cannot risk.

The Jew cannot even decide when his synagogue may be opened or closed. The Jew must make sure his yeshiva curriculum conforms to standards set by gentiles. The Jew must ensure that his right to kosher meat and circumcision is not challenged. So the Jew doesn’t make a fuss about his host’s, shall we say, idiosyncrasies.

The Jew looks the other way. He engrosses himself in his religious studies and his community, ignoring all that goes on in the society around him, so long as it does not directly pertain to him. He censors his religious texts if necessary. He is both ashamed and fearful of expressing certain Jewish ideas that might not go over well with his gentile neighbors. They can afford to offend the Jew without fear of reprisal. The Jew cannot take the chance.

He is a stranger in a strange land, no matter what.

He does not worship idolatry, but he dare not say boo about it.

Today we see Jews kneeling to show solidarity with people who hate them. They pay homage to a man who was murdered not because they are leaders in social change, but because they must follow. The same rabbis who compose eloquent expositions about the responsibility of the Jew to speak out (after seeing how the winds were blowing) have nothing to say about fifty million abortions in America, nothing to say about gay parades and the war on the nuclear family, nothing to say about religious business owners under attack by the anti-God movement, nothing to say about men dressing up as women and forcing others to play along with their charade.

But a man is murdered thousands of miles away, and suddenly the Jew must speak out!

The Jew in exile is a shmatta. This is what the Gemara is telling us. A Jew who lives in Israel – even if he must live among heathens – is still in his home. His mere presence in Israel is a powerful theological statement that cannot be ignored. Even if he must fear the heathen, the heathen is the stranger.

The initial comparison in the Gemara of a Jew in exile to one who has no God is not inaccurate, either. We see this illustrated in our time as well. The Jew in exile claims that he cannot earn a living in Israel; God cannot and will not support him there. He is afraid that there is not enough water; God will not send enough rain for His people. He claims that there is not enough room in Israel to accommodate all the Jews; God gave them a home that is too small. He fears that one missile could wipe out the entire country; God’s chosen land for His chosen people is a death trap.

Is this not someone who can be likened to one who has no God?

Perhaps the Gemara backed away from this initial comparison only because for thousands of years it was unfair. The land of Israel was closed to the average Jew. He simply had no choice. It would be unfair to liken this Jew to one who has no God, for this Jew devoutly yearned for the day when he could return, and made the best of the curse of exile until then. He is likened “only” to one who worships idols, for he must remain in the good graces of his host.

Today, however, we see that both comparisons of the Gemara ring true. The Jew in exile licks the boot of his gentile host because he must, no matter where he dwells, and he does not speak up about social issues unless it is expected of him.

But the Jew in exile also does not believe that God will sustain him anywhere else. God has already brought back many millions of Jews just like him, defeated their enemies over and over again with miracles, and sustained his people despite their best efforts to sabotage themselves. God has enough water, and food, and money, and land, and protection for all His people. The Jew in Israel knows this, even if he is secular, for he lives it every day of his life.

The Jew in Israel who keeps no mitzvos has a closer connection to God than a devout Jew in exile, for he is home. He can also speak up about any social issue he pleases – and he does so loudly and proudly – because this is his home.

We are long past the stage of arguing over whether a Jew has a religious obligation to live in Israel, or whether God wants the Jews to be here, or whether the right time is now or some distant future. It is time for all the Jews in exile to thank their gentile hosts for their hospitality, let them sort out their own social issues, pack their bags, and return home.

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www.chananyaweissman.com

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endthemadness@gmail.com

חינם: שיעור שבועי בזום לכהנים ולוויים

מצטרפים מהבית לשיעור לכהנים ולוויים מפי הרב אריאל

שיעור שבעי לכהנים ולוויים • מפי הרב ישראל אריאל שליט”א • מצטרפים באמצעות הזום או קבוצת ווטצאפ שקטה • מדי יום שני ב-20:30

יצחק אלבוים
יום שני, כ”ג סיון ה’תש”פ

שיעור חדש לכהנים ולויים מפי הרב ישראל אריאל שליט”א, ראש ישיבת המקדש ויו”ר ומייסד מכון המקדש.

השיעור מתקיים בע”ה בכל יום ב’ בשעה 20:30 בזום במשך כשעה.

לקבלת עדכונים בבקשה לשלוח דוא”ל לר’ יוסי סבאט: jsabet@clairfield.com

להצטרפות לקבוצת ווטסאפ שקטה בקישור: https://bit.ly/2B9mACs

קישור לזום: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87802736563

מאתר חדשות הר הבית, כאן.

Mission Aside, Why Is Jacob DeHaan Considered Jewishly Respectable?

Why does the popular Charedi calendar (עתים לבינה) today mark the murder of a lifelong pedophile?!

As Wikipedia puts it:

Religious and anti-Zionist phase

De Haan rapidly became more religiously committed. He was angered by Zionist refusals to cooperate with Arabs.

At first he aligned himself with religious Zionism and the Mizrachi movement, but after meeting Rabbi Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld, leader of the ultra-conservative Haredi Jewish community, he became the political spokesman of the Haredim in Jerusalem and was elected political secretary of the Orthodox community council, Vaad Ha’ir.

De Haan endeavoured to get an agreement with Arab nationalist leaders to allow unrestricted Jewish immigration into Palestine in exchange for a Jewish declaration forgoing the Balfour Declaration.

During this time it is alleged that he continued to have relationships with men, including Arabs from east Jerusalem. In one of his poems he asks himself whether his visits to the Wailing Wall were motivated by a desire for God or for the Arab boys there.

(Emphasis added.)

Mr. Mayor, Respectfully: How DID You Kill All Those Old Folks in Nursing Homes?

A Killer Encourages Us To Ask How He Did It

Governors are a repulsive breed, for sure, but New York’s Andrew Cuomo may out-repulsive them all. Corruption and arrogance ooze from every pore under his menacing aura.

Some of that was on display at “his daily press briefing” when he opined, “I hope people learn from what we have accomplished here in New York … I hope people around the country look at New York and say, ‘how did they do that? How did they go from the worst situation in terms of transmission to the best? How did they do that?’”

No doubt this megalomaniac wants people asking because he’s sure all credit will redound to him. And I admit it should: Andy’s word has been law, including decisions on who lives and who dies, since March, when the legislature handed him even more immense power than he already wielded.

So I, too, urge Americans to ask how he did it. Perhaps then the thousands of folks in nursing homes who died because of his diktats will at last find some justice.

But I’m not holding my breath. And I bet Felix Bronstein, who sent me the link, isn’t either.

2:56 pm on June 17, 2020

From LRC, here.

The Two-Tiered Corona Laws, One for Each Caste

We’re Not All In This Together

Daniel Greenfield – June 14, 2020
“We’re All In This Together,” the sappy title of one of several bad songs, has become the Ministry of Information slogan of the pandemic. You hear it while shopping for groceries at the supermarket, see it on billboards that tell you to social distance your way off the street, and in every single ad on TV.

And then, after months of being locked indoors and that we were out to kill grandma if we left the house, the same media lauded massive numbers of rioters crowding together to curse the cops.

The political fiction of the pandemic died once its administrators found a shiny new fascist object.

Mayor Bill de Blasio went from threatening the Orthodox Jewish community for holding a funeral to appearing without a mask at an anti-police rally even as much of New York City is still shut down.

“Mr. Mayor, are we in a pandemic or not? And do we have one set of rules for protesters and another for everyone else?” Hamodia, an Orthodox Jewish publication, asked De Blasio.

“When you see a nation… grappling with… 400 years of American racism, I’m sorry, that is not the same question as… the devout religious person who wants to go back to services,” he snapped back.

Governor Murphy described anti-lockdown and anti-police protests as being in “different orbits”.

Just to be clear, we’re not all in this together. And we never were. Social distancing doesn’t apply when you’re burning down cities, you can only get sick when you’re praying to G-d or burying your dead.

The lockdowns existed at the pleasure of the politicians implementing them. And when the politicians found a lefty cause that they really liked, the rioters and looters were exempted from social distancing like kids told that they can leave algebra class early on Tuesday to go protest for the environment.

Lockdowns were always for little people. Not for celebrities, politicians or political radicals.

Martha Stewart is quarantining with her driver, housekeeper, and gardener. Lefty author Neil Gaiman decided that he needed to get away from his wife and flew from New Zealand to Scotland. David Geffen, the Hollywood billionaire tycoon who helped finance Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, tweeted, “Isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus” from his $590 million yacht which boasts a staff of 55.

The riots just applied to the rioters and looters the same privilege that politicians had enjoyed.

Governor J.B. Pritzker’s wife and daughter enjoyed the lockdown far from Illinois on their equestrian estate near Palm Beach, and then headed to the 230-acre horse farm in Wisconsin that the Illinois boss had bought his wife as an anniversary present. After claiming that his family deserved privacy and was being endangered by reports of his hypocrisy, the billionaire contended that their travel was essential.

“We have a working farm. They’re there now. There are animals on that farm, that it’s an essential function to take care of animals at a farm, so that’s what they’re doing,” he argued.

He didn’t explain who was taking care of the horses once his wife and daughter went on to Wisconsin.

Then he banned a reporter who had first tweeted about it from his press conferences.

The same media which had howled in outrage when President Trump had dumped CNN and Playboy correspondents for egregious behavior, including assault, had nothing to say about a free press.

Not only was it essential for Pritzker’s family to vacation on one massive horse ranch and then another, but it was essential for Illinois workers to travel to Wisconsin to help build a huge home on the ranch. Local residents reported 20 to 30 trucks a day coming from Chicago to labor on this essential project.

“They’re operating an essential function. Construction is an essential function,” Pritzker whined.

Around the same time, Pritzker was using the slogan, “We’re all in this together” to promote his, “All in Illinois” initiative to tell everyone to stay home. “‘All in’ is our anthem and point of pride,” Pritzker had falsely claimed. “Illinoisans staying home for the good of each other and the good of our state.”

Unless it’s to work on the billionaire governor’s latest mansion. Or loot some Chicago pharmacies.

The difference between essential and non-essential was always a political fiction. The protesters who were told that their protest was non-essential were just protesting for the wrong cause. Going to church or synagogue, burying your dead, or protesting for your rights was non-essential in the same way that Pritzker’s mansion and family vacations were essential. What was essential was who was in charge.

We’re not all in this together. Ask New York Governor Cuomo’s brother Chris, who casually violated quarantine, and then starred in a fake news CNN video of leaving quarantine for his coronavirus infection. Ask Virginia’s Governor Northam who didn’t wear a mask to the beach before ordering everyone to wear masks. Ask Wisconsin’s Justice Rebecca Dallet who opposed the court decision ending the state lockdown, warning, “Wisconsinites will pay the price”, before allegedly going on a boat trip.

Ask New Mexico’s Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham who told non-essential businesses they had to shut down and then had a non-essential business open up so she could get some expensive jewelry.

Ask Professor Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College Model who was caught sneaking out for an affair or Chicago’s Mayor Lori Lightfoot who got a haircut after shutting down salons and barbershops. Or ask Dr. Richard (Rachel) Levine whose policies at the Pennsylvania Department of Health introduced coronavirus patients into nursing homes, but made sure to remove his mother from her nursing home.

Michigan’s Governor Whitmer had issued orders banning just about everything. And then a marina operator got a call from her husband about getting their boat in the water for Memorial Day.

“I am the husband to the governor; will this make a difference?” Whitmer’s husband asked.

Governor Whitmer claimed that her husband was joking and that he only traveled to a second home to rake leaves. That comes from the same tyrannical termagant whose bans had extended to yardwork.

We’re not all in this together. We never were.

The coronavirus touched Manhattan only lightly. That was partly because its residents could afford to get away.

When rentals were shut down, they bought houses elsewhere, sight unseen. About 5% of New Yorkers, over 400,000 people, left the city, abandoning trendy and wealthy neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The pandemic spread along their wake. Those who left included not only the elite, celebrities and billionaires, but the upscale wealthy liberals who keep the Democrats going nationwide.

The abandoned zip codes are also the ones that have been pouring money into left-wing politics.

When you hear another, “We’re All In This Together,” commercial, remember that it’s probably the brainchild of a Bernie Sanders supporter who found a second home in upstate New York or Vermont.

That includes the 10022 zip code, the top money source in the 2018 election cycle, where between 40% to 30% of the population vanished. A quarter of the population of 10075, the tenth biggest money zip code in the cycle, vanished. Ditto for the eleventh, twelfth and fifteenth top election cash zip codes.

The New York City cash that fueled the 2018 Democrat wave was not together in this with us.

The posh parts of Manhattan are being looted because they were abandoned. All the rich toys being stolen by thugs are there because the elites who would normally be buying them are out of town.

Lockdown culture was an elite scam. The politicians, the technocrats, and the ad geniuses who imposed and sold lockdown culture to the country weren’t living it.

The pandemic and lockdowns did not hit us all equally. The division of society into essential and non-essential workers made certain of that by protecting some jobs while eliminating others. This plague year experiment in the New Deal 2.0 replaced any kind of togetherness with a political class system.

The administrators of that system, like Pritzker and Whitmer, were never living under it.

“We’re All In This Together,” does not offer unity or togetherness. It demands compliance from us for our assigned roles. Like 1984’s slogans, it means the opposite of what it actually says. Freedom was slavery, ignorance was knowledge, and being in it together meant that none of us had any say in it.

The lockdowns weren’t driven by science, but by ideology. That’s why the rioters crowding in D.C. and NYC are immune from the coronavirus while the spring breakers in Florida were going to kill everyone.

Underneath the sappy ad-speak was a Maoist Confucianism worthy of the Little Red Book in whose Communist system the coronavirus pandemic had originated. It has largely gone unnoticed that the coronavirus slogans we hear are minor variations of those deployed in China by the Communist Party.

“Better to wear a mask than a ventilator; better to stay at home than in an ICU”, “this year a house visit, next year a grave visit”, or “stay in and don’t wander around, you have AC, television and Wi-Fi as your friends” should sound familiar. It’s not just our electronics that are made in China. So is our propaganda.

And, just as in China, the lockdown is applied unequally by a tyrannical leftist political system.

Togetherness, in our pandemic propaganda, is defined as being isolated members of an unseen collective, reinforced by slogans like #AloneTogether or “Stay Apart, Stay Together”. It means complying with directives, informing on the disobedient, and listening to the experts without asking any questions.

“We’re All In This Together” manufactures mass consent. The “We”, “All”, and “Together” represent a conformist mass in whose ranks the individual is only valued for his or her willingness to obey.

All of it, as Mary McCarthy said of a Communist hack, “is a lie, including ‘And’ and ‘The.’”

When the collective was told to stop watching Netflix and start burning and looting, the “We” went out and did it, while the rest of us who are mere individuals looked on in horror and bewilderment.

No one in the collective can or will note the radical shift from mandatory isolation to mass riots. Collectives don’t recognize that their herd impulse has changed. Life for the brainwashed is unchanging. Once there was always isolation and now there are permanent protests. Tomorrow there will be something else. But that is not a concept that the “We” are capable of embracing as a collective.

“We’re All In This Together” is a state of mindless and unquestioning conformity. And it’s un-American.

Americans are not a Communist collective: we are a nation of individuals. Our togetherness doesn’t come from the illusion of functioning as an undifferentiated mass, but of pursuing our own individual strivings for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Collectivism is a lie that conceals the humbug wizards behind the curtains, and the oligarchies that make the decisions. It tells us to set aside our own interests and needs, to become part of Zamyatin’s “We”, to stop thinking and believe the lies.

The lies keep changing.

Yesterday we were huddling in our homes in our togetherhood of apartness. Now we’re supposed to be rioting together and calling for the abolition of the police. Each false cause is replaced by another big lie. If you can see past the lies, you’re not “Together” with the “We”. You’re one of the last Americans.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.