Some people have the notion wanting and envisioning a certain way can manifest the object desired. They need to do Chazarah on their nursery rhymes; see the title!
Yes, those who succeed are obsessed and trust they’ll succeed, but mimicking them to gain success is like saying wet sidewalks cause rain. It’s more complicated, but we’ll leave it at that.
About 3 or 4 times Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveichik hints in his “Five Addresses” (mentioned here), and once says forthrightly, that had the Jews ascended to Israel, they would have escaped the destruction of the Holoucaust, a topic we discussed here elsewhere.
The quote is in Lecture 4:2:
Our movement [Mizrachi] appeared as a saviour and redeemer of a mitzvah which was, to borrow an expression from the Mussar literature, “an orphaned mitzvah” [the mitzvah to settle in Eretz Yisrael]… If Jews had fulfilled this mitzvah in full measure and in proper time, hundreds of thousands of Jews would have been saved during the years of the holocaust. Our movement was perhaps the only one that demanded, night and day, of Jews to go up to Eretz Yisrael; and even today our movement demands of religious Jews to go up to Israel.
(By the way, do Rabbi Soloveichik’s students heed this demand? Or do they all claim they have great excuses, just like their master?)
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And don’t hurt that index finger!
I was playing a game where an interlocutor and myself took turns naming wicked individuals in Scripture whose name begins with letters from the Hebrew alphabet. Then we did righteous personalities. We got stuck on the letter Vav.
If I had internet access, I could have gone here on Hyehudi.org and got help. Another name for Yoel is “Vashni” (not Vashti!).
Hyehudi doesn’t just save you money…
A disciple and vigorous popularizer of a certain living rabbi wrote me this:
.. Please desist from denigrating any Torah sage, never mind accusing him of heresies or such like. Having to be exposed to such things is a terrible experience and should be enough to reduce anyone to tears.
But the magic word “Please” failed. There is no scarcity of Jewish websites made of sugar and spice and all things nice.
I responded:
… What if I am, in fact, correct? Being “exposed to such…” I see whom you fear and whom you don’t.
Rhetoric aside (two can play that game!), I notice their own popularizers cannot defend them against a startling array of obvious issues, noticed even by someone puny like me.