Yom Kippur’s Tel Aviv Jew-Haters
Embody a Strange Biblical Verse
G-d allows purveyors of iniquity to bloom in seeming victory, but it is a pyrrhic victory. They have shown their true colors.Op-ed.
Sep 26, 2023, 6:19 PM (GMT+3)
There is a seemingly strange verse that Jewish worshippers (the ones who do not break up public Yom Kippur prayer services in Tel Aviv) recite. It appears in a psalm dedicated to the Shabbat day, Psalm 92: “While evildoers spring up like the grass, and the workers of iniquity blossom, it is so that they shall be destroyed forever.” 92:8.
What does that mean? If they are blooming, it seems they are coming into strength. Doesn’t that make them more dangerous? How does their sprouting foreshadow their eternal destruction?
Look at what is happening with the treasonous Ehud Barak Front and the nine months of weekly leftist demonstrations that break laws and close down parts of Tel Aviv every week at a cost of over $100,000 per “spontaneous demonstration.” Recall that each “spontaneous demonstration” entails paying the cost of setting up expensive platform staging and sound systems that carry clear transmissions to tens of thousands of people. Each “spontaneous” weekly demonstration entails hiring scores upon scores of buses to transport the “spontaneous” demonstrators. It entails tens of thousands of dollars to pay salaries to otherwise-unemployed full-time “spontaneous” demonstrators to be at the ready every week. It entails massive advertising.
This is so expensive that it even emerged in the media that the Israeli Left has been holding massively expensive fundraising dinners in the United States to raise hundreds of thousands dollars more to keep the “spontaneous” demonstrations going as long as it takes until Ehud Barak finally gets to see some of that blood in the streets or bodies floating in his nearest body of water, whether in the Kineret, the Yarkon, the Dead Sea, or Jeffrey Epstein Island.
MIDA reports that some $10 million (27 million shekels) has been pumped into keeping the weekly anti-Israel “De-mo-krat-yah” “spontaneous” rallies afloat:
The budgets collected by the NGO [are] intended for “buses, stages, signs, flags, amplification equipment and screens, safety and authority approvals, branded clothing and more”, for “special projects – demonstrations in front of the houses of members of the Knesset, marches and the Democracy Outpost in Jerusalem, the shutdown of the economy”, and to “put banners balconies, bridges and billboards across the country.” For these purposes, the association has raised more than NIS 27 million in recent months.
Nevertheless, here is what is finally beginning to happen after nine months of this garbage: The “spontaneous” demonstrators are getting bored and disheartened. They have not achieved their key goals after nearly a year. They are no closer to bringing down the government or breaking Simcha Rotman or Yariv Levin. Bezalel Smotrich still is Finance Minister with his fingers also all over a massive expansion of Judea and Samaria community legalizing and construction permitting. Maybe it is not enough for those of us who would like to see even more, but there is nothing more heartening than each new public report issued by Left Wing Israeli organizations, and of course given massive leftist mainstream media coverage, that Israel is building more in Judea and Samaria than ever before.
Itamar Ben-Gvir still is a minister in the government. One day he wants to take away luxuries from Arab prisoners. Another day to cut down on their shower time. Another day to cut down on family visits. He wants a national guard under his control, threatens to bring down Bibi if Netanyahu trades Jewish land for a Saudi kaffiyeh. After nine months, the Leftists have been unable to dislodge Ben-Gvir. Nine months of hundred-thousand-dollar-a-week “spontaneous” demonstrations, and they have not accomplished a doggone thing except putting the judicial reform on hold, but that was not really their goal.
There is only one word that truly describes such extraordinary ineffectiveness, such waste of millions of leftist dollars, nine months of screaming and yelling and blocking Yarkon Highway — and accomplishing absolutely nothing. You know what that one word is to describe a movement that has spent ten million dollars to accomplish nothing?
Bushah. Shame.
What a bushah, what incompetence, what waste, what uselessness!
This nine-month testament to ineffectiveness is prompting the Left to show its first signs of beginning to crack. The “spontaneous” rallies are not cutting it. The first cracks are now showing, and they are getting more desperate. You see it everywhere. They get Air Force reservists to say they won’t serve, but so many more are on record signing petitions saying they will serve. And everyone knows that, if G-d forbid there is a real war, they all will serve because Nasrallah and Iran and Hamas will be shooting missiles at their homes, too, and their mothers’ and fathers’ and sisters’ and brothers’ homes. And their wives’ and sons’ and daughters’ and grandparents’ homes.
So they will be back in their fighter aircraft faster than a speeding bullet. The thing is, some of them will be a bit rusty, just as I was when I had not driven my car for nine months after being hospitalized to get a lung transplant. As a driver of forty-plus years it took me an hour or two to get reacquainted with all the gears and night traffic when I first got behind the wheel after nine months laid up in a hospital bed and then a wheelchair. But it was not terribly dangerous for me to need that hour or two because traffic moves so slowly on the 405 Freeway in Los Angeles that it is faster just to walk from Los Angeles to San Diego.
The thing is, some of these brave “spontaneous” treasonous air force reservists, who surely will race like crazy to get into their aircraft to defend their families and their homes if Nasrallah strikes, may find that, by skipping regular reserve duty when they were called, they have become rusty, and they may find that, with Iran and Nasrallah up in the sky against them, they do not have the luxury of two hours to refresh their readiness, and may end up getting themselves killed. So there is that. And that would be unforgivable, considering the millions Israel spend to train them.
Meanwhile, the Left is getting itchy. Their efforts are not working. So they show signs of desperation. They have now begun taking their fight to America, something no other country’s malcontents do. And they themselves never would have done that six months ago. But they are not seeing fruits. Therefore, suddenly they harass MK Simcha Rotman in Manhattan and Prime Minister Netanyahu at the U.N., sharing space with other anti-Netanyahu demonstrators who back Hamas and Iran. By doing so, they still accomplished nothing. Bibi still made excellent headlines with a brilliant one-on-one schmooze with Elon Musk viewed by millions on social media. He spoke at the UN and had a successful American visit.
And, frankly, it was exciting to see so many shameless Israeli anti-Israel demonstrators yelling “Bushah” in Manhattan. First, any regular New Yorker passing by and hearing “Bushah, Bushah” figured these were demented homeless maniacs (one of New York City’s larger demographic groups) or illegal Hispanic immigrants (another large city population group), in this case demonstrating hysterically against George W. Bushah, unaware that there are no more upper-echelon George Bushes to go around for now. And second, it is heartening to know they are in America, where they can scream but cannot vote, rather than in Israel. That may be several leftist seats wasting away in America.
Good.
And now, even more desperate that nothing is working, the Left is getting even more violent and hateful, attacking Yom Kippur prayers. For this, one has to go back to Stalin’s KGB and Hitler’s Stormtroopers for historical points of reference. This is important. For too many middle-of-the-road Israelis, there is an uncertainty now as to which side is more evil: the coalition side for court reform — because endless mass media falsehoods leave the “undecideds” confused — or the opposition who obviously stand for evil.
Well, not obvious to everyone, only to those of us who can read between the headlines and analyze how media distort the truth. We are those who note that a Ron Huldai never would dare forbid Muslims from worshipping with partitions separating genders, and we are grateful that our, uh, “cousins” have made circumcision a core rite of theirs, or Huldai conceivably would ban that, too. And we do hope the Jerusalem municipality gets the memo: if traditional Yom Kippur services are to be banned on the public streets of Tel Aviv out of deference to the municipal population’s preferences, then let “Pride Parades” be banned in Jerusalem on the exact same basis — or re-routed through Arab neighborhoods like Shuafat, Silwan, and “Sheikh Jarrah.”
And that is the explanation of the Biblical verse in Psalm 92:8. There comes a point when G-d decides He has had enough of the evildoers and needs to change the paradigm. So, in His infinite mercy and wisdom, He allows the purveyors of iniquity to bloom and to sprout, to blossom seemingly in unbridled victory. But it is a false bloom and pyrrhic victory. What actually is happening is that the perpetrators of evil are being lulled into showing their true colors, who and what the extremsts among them really are. They are not about the waving of Israeli flags and shouts of “De-mo-krat-yah.” Rather, they are enemies of Judaism itself. They hate the essence of Judaism. They hate Yom Kippur. They hate prayer to the G-d of Israel in the way Jews have prayed for 3,300 years. Their predecessors were the worshippers of Ba’al whom Elijah the Prophet dispatched in Mount Carmel and of the Sadducees of Talmudic times.
They now have shown themselves in full sprout. By so doing, they have brought enormous shame to themselves and have hastened their descent. “Undecideds” now finally can start getting a good look at them. Their slogan and motto is their eternal destiny:
Bushah. Shame.
And so 5784 begins.
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