DON’T Promise an Apartment!

Be the change…

An excerpt from Tzarich Iyun here:

For several years now, there has been an undercurrent of feeling that common behavior concerning children’s marriages is “abnormal,” to put it mildly. There is also a general sense that there is not much to be done about it. I have been dealing with this issue for many years, and every time I present the economic infeasibility of our existing conduct, the typical response is: “We agree with you, of course, but there is nothing we can do.” Or, in a similar vein: “This is the situation, these are the community norms, and you and I will not be able to change it.”

These kinds of responses reflect an approach whereby change can only come through intervention from above. They may even pin the blame on Rashei Yeshivah who encourage their students to demand apartments—which is far from a false accusation. However, it is worth noting that over twenty years ago (in Adar 5750), the great Torah luminaries in Israel published a joint letter declaring that the current reality that requires parents to purchase an apartment for their children “involves severe prohibitions” and even advised the correct way to marry off children. Those parents who complain today about the absurdity and impossibility of the situation might have been some thirty years old back then. Has anything fundamentally changed?

I keep this letter framed for all those who await the day when “the rabbis will wake up” to come to save us from ourselves. Everyone tells me that “public change is needed.” But the public is you and me. Rashei Yeshivah do not force parents to buy an apartment for their children. They, just like the parents themselves, are also waiting for the norm to change. But so long as it doesn’t, every groom will say to himself with some justification, “Why should I be the one to lose out?”

The truth is that change depends on us. If you and I refuse to resign ourselves to this absurd reality, there is a chance that something will change. But if we continue to wait for some higher authority to fix it, we are inevitably doomed to continue suffering from cultural standards that impoverish us all.

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Vietnam, Afghanistan, Ukraine… Seeing a Pattern Yet?

The Evil Strategy of “Degrading” Russia

One of the fascinating aspects of the war in Ukraine has been the extreme reluctance of the mainstream press and Pentagon-CIA supporters to acknowledge, much less condemn, the Pentagon for its role in bringing about this war. After all, the two concepts — the Pentagon’s bringing about the crisis and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — are not mutually exclusive. You can have both things happening — the Pentagon gins up the crisis with the aim of “degrading” Russia and then Russia falls into the trap by getting mired down in a deadly and destructive war against Ukraine.

But when one raises the first part of this equation — that is, the Pentagon’s role in ginning up the crisis — the mainstream press and Pentagon-CIA supporters go ballistic. For them, it’s heresy to point out what the Pentagon did to gin up the crisis. For them, the Pentagon and the CIA are innocent, virtuous babes in the woods that would never do such a thing. For them, the Pentagon and the CIA are nothing but a “force for good” in the world. 

But we know that the Pentagon and the CIA do engage in these types of evil machinations. In fact, they did the same thing to Russia in 1979. They lured the Russians into invading Afghanistan, with the same goal they had with their Ukraine machinations — to give the Russians their own “Vietnam,” which meant “degrading” Russia through the killing of massive numbers of Russian soldiers. 

“Conspiracy theory”? Well, not exactly. That’s because National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, in a remarkable degree of candor, admitted that they had knowingly, deliberately, and intentionally done it. He was proud of it. He was bragging about how they had gotten the Russians to fall into their trap. The entire national-security establishment loved the fact that tens of thousands of Russian soldiers were being killed in the process. The more soldiers being killed, the more Russia was being “degraded.”

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From LRC, here.