Yoel Berman’s Living in the Land’s USP: No ‘Aliyah Bullying’!

Book Review: Living in the Land – A Book to Both Grace Your Coffee Table and Your Mind, Heart, and Soul

29/11/2023

A valuable new book has just made its way into the frum world:
Living in the Land, Mosaica Press 2023 by Yoel Berman:

Fifty frum olim describe the joys, challenges, and opportunities of making the move to Eretz Yisrael, as well as the resources and strategies that made for success.

And it comes with a strikingly beautiful cover by the gifted frum artist Yehoshua Wiseman.

I think we have really been needing a book like this and it’s great that Yoel Berman fulfilled this need.

Why Focus on Charedi Aliyah?

We need a book that focuses solely on charedi aliyah and the settlement of Eretz Yisrael.

And charedim from outside of Eretz Yisrael, despite not being “Zionist,” comprise a huge percentage of aliyah.

​You run into them everywhere in Eretz Yisrael.

Charedim really need guidance devoted to their specific needs — needs which vary from group to group and family to family and individual to individual.

With most aliyah organizations having been secular or traditional, charedi needs & interests traditionally got shoved to the side — though that never stopped charedi aliyah.

​In fact, the charedi aliyah continues to increase.

Despite lots of propaganda to the contrary, charedim (though they weren’t called that then) built the foundation for Jewish settlement in Eretz Yisrael.

With humbling self-sacrifice, they settled the Land, built up & expanded Jewish settlement — even sacrificing their lives for this goal.

And Charedim continue to contribute to Jewish growth in every way.

I remember when Ramat Eshkol was a depressingly secular Israeli neighborhood. Within 20 years, it transformed into a vibrant charedi community, encompassing a thriving English-speaking community.

The face of Yerushalayim also changed with the growth of Torah-observant communities in all sectors.

I remember Yerushalayim over 30 years ago and feel awe at how it transformed, with frum people vastly outnumbering the secular, and secular ads and stores shrinking while you can see things like a huge sign advertising for “Savta Sara’s Cholent!”

Continue reading…

From Myrtle Rising, here.

Self-Esteem Is Not the Jewish Goal but HUMILITY!

First-principles thinking by Dr. Elliot Resnick on Arutz Sheva here.

An excerpt:

What’s the difference between promoting self-esteem and promoting humility if a caveat needs to be added either way?

The difference is that humility is a middah that’s extolled in virtually every single Jewish ethical work ever written whereas self-esteem appears as a virtue in almost no Jewish ethical work at all.

…

Frum self-esteem proponents – desperate for legitimacy – comb through all of Torah literature and manage to come up with a smattering of sources to support their position. For example, the Gemara says that a person should think, “For me alone the world was created.” Rav Tzadok HaKohen writes that a person should believe in himself. The Alter of Slabodka would often stress that man is great.

Yet, all these statements are clearly only prologues to unspoken conclusions.

“For me alone the world was created” – and therefore I have to fulfill my destiny.

Man is great – and therefore I have a responsibility to develop myself and serve Hashem to the best of my ability. An implicit “therefore” always follows.

The Torah doesn’t sanction feeling good about oneself as an independent value (which is what the self-esteem movement promotes). It may believe in feeling good about one’s potential or one’s pure soul so that one lives up to that potential and one does credit to that soul. But this attitude is a means to an end, not an end unto itself.

Read the rest here…

Javier Milei on the Connection Between Peace and Prosperity

From an interview in the paywalled “Economist” (sent by a reader, not checked inside):

Where you give way to freedom, society flourishes. Not only economically, but it flourishes also in social aspects. There is a phrase by [Frédéric] Bastiat that is wonderful, which says: “Where commerce enters, bullets do not enter.”

And there is another wonderful phrase that is by Bertrand de Jouvenel who says: “Where there is a market, manners are sweet.”

Notes: I don’t get the impression Mr. Milei understands the full implications of the freedom philosophy for foreign policy. He’s no Ron Paul, to put it lightly. Why does he support school vouchers? And I don’t see him seeking advice (dogs aside).

(I’ll admit, I’m quoting him because it’s far easier than carefully checking Bastiat and Bertrand de Jouvenel in the original!)

By the way, here is a Gemara that might be hinting at the same idea, Berachos 57a:

אמר רבי חייא בר אבא הרואה חטים בחלום ראה שלום שנאמר השם גבולך שלום חלב חטים ישביעך.

And see this title.