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Introducing a Pair of ‘Very Ordinary’ Jews Who Made Aliyah

Eretz Chemdah: An Inside View – How We Made It in Eretz Yisroel

Various Perspectives and Experiences of English speakers Living in Eretz Yisroel

How We Made It in Eretz Yisroel

It was over fifty years ago when my husband, Meir Miller, first came to Eretz Yisroel as a bochur to learn in yeshiva. He had a strong desire to learn Torah in Eretz Yisroel and therefore worked hard as a waiter for a whole summer just to save up for a ticket (by boat, in case you were wondering). The difficulties that such a move involved did not daunt him.

He grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, in one of the few shomer Shabbos families there. As there were no options for proper chinuch in his hometown, from the age of eight and a-half he would commute daily to cheider in Boston, Massachusetts, a commute of over fifty miles that took an hour and a-half each way, all by himself. In the following years, he would take along his younger siblings as well. This arrangement lasted until he advanced to yeshiva high school in New York.

Not knowing anything about the yeshivos in Eretz Yisroel, he inquired about them at the Jewish Agency in New York. They suggested he enroll in one of them, but when he arrived at the yeshiva, he found that they could not accept him because they didn’t have room. He then decided to go to Yerushalayim. He was referred to a Zionist yeshiva there, but he felt the atmosphere just wasn’t right for him.

Soon thereafter he chanced upon a childhood friend from America while walking through the Geula neighborhood in Yerushalayim. This friend had been referred to Yeshivas Kamenitz and was slated for an interview with the rosh yeshiva, HaRav Yitzchok Scheiner. The friend suggested that Meir join him at the yeshiva where the rosh yeshiva was American-born, and several talmidim were from America.

Meir was accepted warmly into the yeshiva by Rav Scheiner, and was quickly absorbed into the atmosphere of Yerushalyim, including being exposed to many of its special personalities. It was clear to him that he was here to stay, with his future awaiting him in Yerushalayim.

About four years later, Rebbetzin Herman, the wife of R’ Nochum Dovid (son of R’ Yaakov Yosef of “All for the Boss” fame) suggested our shidduch. I was an American girl, the daughter of Holocaust survivors from Europe, who had come to visit Eretz Yisroel after my first year as a teacher in New York. I was staying by my aunt and uncle in the Yerushalayim neighborhood of Sanhedriya. Yerushalayim captured my heart, and I dreamt of building my life here.

We shared the dream of building a true Jewish Torah home and being zoche to doros yesharim mevorachim, not in Providence, not in New York, but in Yerushalayim—shel matah and shel ma’alah.

After getting married in the U.S., we came back and settled in Yerushalayim. It wasn’t easy, but no one promised me a life of roses. All we had was the shirts on our backs, no money and no “P.H.D.” (Papa has Dough). I knew that chazal say that Eretz Yisroel is only acquired through yissurim (by the way, Torah and Olam Haba, as well, are acquired through yissurim), so I decided to accept these yissurim with simcha!

Both of us were at a tremendous distance from parents and family, without the support that many young couples have. We really missed our family, but we did put in a lot of effort to make it here and build our own home by ourselves. We did have, though, the love and help of the Kamenitz rosh yeshiva and his wife, and of our dear aunt and uncle. As time went on, we also made many new friends. To quote Dovid HaMelech, Yerushalayim is the city “shechubera lah yachdav“—that makes all Yidden friends.

Throughout the years there were financial ups and downs. In one of the financially difficult periods, my husband, who had meanwhile received semicha, was offered a respectable rabbinic position in Providence with a high salary. It wasn’t easy to decline. We did have what to miss in the land we both grew up in, but Yerushalayim won out.

I think it was our firm resolve, perseverance, determination, and will power that brought about the tremendous Siyata Dishmaya that allowed us to fulfill our dream. Boruch HaShem and bechasdei HaShem, today we own a spiritual empire! Bli ayin hara, we built four generations here in Eretz Yisroel—children, grandchildren and a slew of great-grandchildren—all chareidim l’Dvar HaShem, bnei Torah, and all living in beautiful homes purchased here. They all have a chelka in Eretz Yisroel.

It all happened here in Eretz Yisroel, from scratch! HaShem saw we had the will and He did all the rest! We are very ordinary people, nothing special, so if we did it, you certainly can too.

“Ani Ma’amin” — My Beliefs

These are the beliefs that got me to decide, over fifty years ago—as an eighteen-year-old—that I was coming to live in Eretz Yisroel.

Without going into the essence of the mitzvah of yishuv Eretz Yisroel, and of the practical pros and cons, I firmly believe that Eretz Yisroel is the safest place in the world to live in.

Why? Because the Torah says that this is the Land which HaShem’s “eyes” are always on, throughout the whole year.

Is this not enough of a guarantee for me to be satisfied?  What safer place in the world can there be?

Also, I firmly believe that Moshiach can come any day. I surely do not want to get caught up in the rush hour when throngs of Yidden from all over the world will be trying to come here to Eretz Yisroel when Moshiach arrives.

I want to be settled here before Moshiach comes! I want to have enough time to get dressed in my best to greet him and be able to absorb the highlight of the most magnificent moment of the world’s existence. 

– Meir and Leah Miller, Sanhedriya, Yerushalayim

This article is part of our Eretz Chemdah series featuring Anglo-Chareidim living in, settling, and building up Eretz Yisroel. A joint project of Avira D’Eretz Yisroel, Kedushas Tzion and Naava Kodesh, coordinated by Yoel Berman – info@naavakodesh.org.

Reprinted with permission from Naava Kodesh.

Chamas: Legalized Theft – Parshas Noach

Devar Torah Parshas Noach

“…ותמלא הארץ חמס“ …and the world was filled with wrongdoing.

The sages define חמס (Chamas) as legalized stealing.

Rav Shimshon Rafael Hirsch writes:

“חמס is גזל (robbery) that cannot be recovered through legal proceedings. One who perpetrates חמס is not penalized by any human court: but if committed over and over again, חמס gradually leads to the ruin of one’s fellow man.” Rav Hirsch brings from Iyov (Job) 15:33) “If a vine sheds unripe grapes, it commits חמס against the fruit. The חמס is not committed at all once; rather, the fruit’s drawing of substance from the vine is slowly stopped, until the fruit drops off”.

Rav Hirsch continues, “But חמס – wrongdoing facilitated by cunning – destroys a society.

חמס is rampant in our society today. It is pervasive in a wide variety of our normal daily transactions – financial and non-financial. But when trusted pillars of society commit חמס as a regular and mundane matter of their business and actions, it catalyzes societal breakdown. Two such pillars of society are banks and the police. We trust them out of necessity. These two pillars, sadly, are at the forefront of חמס today.

It is well known that before the economic crash of 2007 – 2008 banks were engaging in predatory lending, getting people to commit to bigger mortgages than they could reasonably afford. My bank engaged in a practice where the due date for their credit card changed each month by a couple of days. For one month the payment was due on the 11th, the next month the 9th, the next month the 12th. This caused people with limited cash flow and reserves, who pay on the due date, to frequently miss the payment date by a day or two. The bank – and many banks – used an algorithm that became stated policy (in the fine print of their credit card agreement) that would generate millions of dollars in fees. One bank was fined for earning $500 million dollars in fees from this legal scheme. The U.S. Congress put a stop to this and other such bank practices.

Banks continue, though, to earn enormous profits through another scheme. Their algorithms tell them that if they offer consumers 0% to 3% credit card loans for terms of 9 to 18 months they will get the financially weaker consumers to utilize these loans liberally to add to their current credit card balances. Of course, there is a 3% to 5% upfront transaction fee. At the end of the low-interest period, the loan reverts to a high-interest loan. This practice literally traps weaker consumers into a situation where they are forever paying a high interest while barely able to lower the principal amount owed.

Now let’s turn to the police, another necessarily trusted pillar of our communities and society. In most municipalities, there is an arrangement whereby a civil servant’s monthly pension is determined by their income from the last several years of service. This leads to a legal scheme where civil servants, including police officers – especially the police leadership – give themselves liberal overtime hours to greatly increase their income during their last several years in order to maximize their pension. There is an unwritten tacit policy to allow civil servants to take nearly as many extra hours as they want.

For the police, we are not talking about extra hours working the street where their lives are in constant peril. These hours are spent at their offices or engaged in meetings or lots of training – putting aside the question of whether a soon-to-retire police commander is the best candidate for training resources. In this manner, civil servants, especially the police, are able to drain hundreds of millions to many billions of dollars from municipal budgets, far beyond the total of pension payments if they were to maintain their usual hours. This fits squarely into the category of legalized stealing, of חמס.

When the banks and the police misbehave, society breaks down, with all its attendant trauma and pain. Then the cycle begins anew, with a newly formed society and a new hope, until it, too, falls to legalized corruption and moral bankruptcy, as history testifies….

May G-D spare us.

Bar Ilan University FINALLY Halts the ‘Religious’ Charade! (When Are They Going to Fix the Logo?)

Bar Ilan University Cancels Tznius Guidelines, Yarmulke Requirement

Fri, 10/25/2019 – 14:10

Bar Ilan University has removed from its student discipline rules the requirement that male students wear yarmulkes in classes on Judaism, as well as the requirement to “avoid wearing revealing apparel” on campus.

Haaretz reported that the demands have anyway not been enforced in recent years, and it has now been decided to remove them from the “Student Declaration” of the institution, which students are asked to sign.

The university also noted that the change comes as a result of the decline of religious students in the institution compared to the secular ones.

Read more at Arutz Sheva.

From Matzav, here.

Do Government Building Codes Blunt Earthquakes’ Effects? NO WAY!

Statist Myths About the Japanese Earthquake

Walter Block refutes them.

Posted Jun 25, 2012

The usual Keynesian suspects have come out from under the rocks of economic illiteracy which they inhabit, to claim that the Japanese earthquake of 2011 will actually help the economy of that country. We need not spend too much time refuting this broken window fallacy yet again. Bastiat and Hazlitt have already done so. Perhaps it will suffice to point out that these advocates of the benefits of destruction are guilty of a performative contradiction. If it is so advantageous for a city to be destroyed by a tsunami, why don’t these Krugmanites obliterate their own properties? That is, they could enrich not only themselves, but society as a whole, by taking the wrecking ball to their homes, yachts, automobiles, factories, fancy restaurants, night clubs. Yet, we never see any such thing happening. If it is argued that this can only be done on a massive, not an individual scale, then we would expect entire communities, such as the Peoples’ Republics of Santa Monica, Ann Arbor, San Francisco, Cambridge Mass, the upper west side of New York City, etc., wherever “progressives” congregate, to engage in such activities. We await with baited breath these occurrences. The fact that the Keynesians continue to drive around in their cars, inhabit their homes ought to put paid to this malicious and erroneous theory. And this would indeed likely occur, if we did not live in a world where the mainstream media still hold sway.

Another error takes this form: All thanks to the Japanese government. It had the wisdom and foresight to mandate strict building codes, which safeguarded its people. Japanese skyscrapers were built so as to bend, not snap, in the wind. All of their edifices withstood the challenges of the earthquake to a far greater degree than would otherwise have been the case, due to these benevolent statist regulations. For example, states a USA Today editorial of 3/14/11 entitled “Japanese earthquake sends sobering message for USA” (the message: we have to strengthen, and attain greater compliance with our own building codes): “If any country understands this interplay of earthquakes, waves and buildings it is Japan, which has developed stringent building codes….” According to this fallacious argument, the Haitian government fell down on the job of inculcating such building codes. The latter country lost a greater proportion of its population with a lower intensity earthquake than the former, with a higher count (8.9) on the Richter scale because it did not enact strict building codes.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The reason the Japanese suffered relatively fewer losses had little to do with statist real estate regulations. Rather, they were able to build better because they were richer, and “wealthier is healthier.” And why, in turn, were the Japanese more prosperous than the Haitians? This was at least in large part due to the fact that the country in the Far East had a far freer economy than the Caribbean nation. (The Fraser Institute study of 2008 ranked Japan as the 27th most economically free country out of 141 nations they surveyed, while Haiti took 96th place.) Economists all the way from the Salamancans to Adam Smith to Mises to Hayek to Rothbard have demonstrated why it should be the case that to be economically freer is to be more affluent. Private property rights, free market prices, allow for economic growth, rational calculation, proper allocation of resources and spread of vital economic information. They provide incentives for innovation. In contrast, central planning, socialism, government regulation, the mixed economy, are recipes for economic stultification. Mises, in his book Socialism, has done more than anyone else to drive home this point.

Why should wealthier be healthier? Because, in a word, the richer is an economy, the more wherewithal it has with which to purchase all sorts of things, safety among them, and, usually, preeminently so.

But are not government building codes of help too, in this context? Are they not at least sufficient, if not necessary? No. This may be seen by assuming that Haiti had adopted the selfsame earthquake protection building codes operational in Japan (or in the U.S.). What, then, would have occurred in Haiti, had they engaged in this “progressive” legislation? Nothing, that is what. Namely, if these regulations were scrupulously adhered to, either no building would have occurred at all, or very little, and the people would not have been sheltered at all (or to an inadequate degree, leading to many more deaths.)

It is the same old story. An economy, such as that of the US, or the UK, or Japan, benefits from economic growth. As it does, regulations mandating good things that would have occurred anyway are promulgated, in order to falsely take credit for them, when they are due to the greater wealth. For example, this occurred with child labor laws, maximum hours legislation, regulations stipulating minimum numbers of years of education, etc., and, in the present case, requirements that dwellings be constructed more safely. These gains would have been registered in any case; they are due, solely, to economic progress, which takes place in spite of such bureaucratic regulations, not because of them. The proof of the pudding? Suppose that the UK banned child labor in the early 17th century. Would the kiddies all been placed in nice schools? Not a bit of it. They would have, instead, starved in droves, because the economy simply was not well enough developed at that time so as to afford this luxury of universal schooling.

One objection to the foregoing is that people, even rich ones, are simply too stupid to insist upon earthquake-protected buildings. If so, then by what magic do they become smart enough to elect politicians who will then turn around and force the populace to do what it refuses to do in the first place? This premise, moreover, must be rejected at the outset. Even ordinary folk are smart enough to purchase fire insurance (if they have a mortgage, and there is even a vestige of free enterprise, their bank will insist upon this). Why, not, then, expect the average man to be willing to pay a bit more for housing with built-in protection against earthquakes, vis-à-vis residences that do not boast of these benefits?

Private insurance, moreover, would not cover geographical areas located in dangerous areas subject to storms, flooding, or lying below sea level (e.g., New Orleans). Or, rather, would charge prices that fully reflect these threats. Government “insurance” in sharp contrast, typically bails out those foolish enough to again and again locate in these areas, as if the phenomenon of moral hazard did not exist. Thus, the state subsidizes irrational geographical location decision-making, unlike private insurance that can be bankrupted if it erred in any such manner.

From Psychology Today, here.