Category Archives: Politics

Taking Aim At Massacres

What does the word “magazine” bring to mind? A glossy periodical or, perhaps, a news program? To many Americans, the word would more readily conjure a metal receptacle holding up to 30 or more bullets, inserted into a semi-automatic weapon. The sort favored by soldiers on battlefields. And people intent on killing as many civilians as possible at, say, a school, military base, office party, church or club.

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which provides American citizens a right to own lethal weapons, was, in my opinion, a bad idea. Had I been a Founding Father (instead of a Fumbling Grandfather – though I much prefer my current role), I would have opposed it. And were there a current effort to repeal it, even though I own a gun, I’d readily support it. Many civilized countries, including Israel, manage quite well without any such right. The Constitution, after all, isn’t Torah MiSinai.

It is, however, for better or worse, the law of the land. And so we must face the fact of repeated mass shootings in America squarely within the context of a right to bear arms.

But that right, like every Constitutional right, can be limited.

There are more types of guns than you can fire an automatic rifle at. A short primer, for unarmed readers: There are handguns, like pistols and revolvers, that are usually semi-automatic – meaning that they can fire rounds in close succession, one round with each pull of the trigger. They are, however, limited in how many bullets they can hold. Most hold only a few, although the handgun used by the Fort Hood shooter was equipped to shoot 20 rounds in 5.3 seconds.

Then there are semi-automatic rifles, like the one the Sandy Hook shooter used as his primary weapon. His Bushmaster M4 Type Carbine held magazines of 30 bullets each. Semi-automatic rifles were used as well in the Aurora, Colorado massacre, the Roseburg, Oregon community college massacre and the San Bernardino, California massacre.

And in the recent carnage in Orlando, Florida, where Omar Mateen, employing a Sig Sauer MCX rifle, murdered 49 people and wounded 53.

Then there are “fully automatic” weapons, often called “machine guns,” which have high-capacity magazines and fire bullets as long as the trigger is squeezed.

Fully automatic weapons have long been strictly regulated by the federal government. Most semi-automatics were banned for sale in the U.S. for many years but Congress allowed the 1994 federal ban to expire in 2004. Efforts to renew it have failed.

Semi-automatic weapons, which were developed for military use, are marketed as “sporting rifles.” A popular one, the AR-15, is lauded as “America’s rifle” by the National Rifle Association (and who among us doesn’t aspire to being a patriot?). But it’s an unusual deer that requires more than a shot or two to fell. Maybe a crazed family of them headed straight at the hunter, but no such attacks are on record (and Jimmy Carter, facing a killer rabbit, did just fine with a paddle).

There are many ways that bad people can wreak havoc. No amount of gun control can prevent a person intent on killing people from doing so with a knife or homemade bomb.

But there are also many tikkunim that could at least limit the likelihood that high-capacity weapons and people with evil intentions can be kept apart. Like “no-buy” lists (with requisite due process protection) and universal background checks for gun purchases (currently not required for purchases from individuals at gun shows or over the internet). And like a new ban on high-capacity semi-automatic weapons.

And, yes, yes, of course, banning Muslims from entering the country. The only problem is that Canada has a larger population percentage of Muslims than we do, and has admitted more than 10 times the number of Syrian refugees since November than we have; and while our country has experienced 136 mass shootings (defined as four or more casualties) thus far this year, Canada has had 8 – over the past two decades. (Only one Canadian gun rampage took place this year, in Saskatchewan. And the killer was a bullied teen, and not Muslim).

Those of us who learn Daf Yomi were recently reminded (Bava Kamma, 15b) of Rabi Nosson’s dictum that a home must be rid of a dangerous dog or wobbly ladder. Is it too much of a stretch to see one’s country as, in a sense, one’s larger home? And to see it as our responsibility – executed to the degree we can as voters – to rid it of lethal weapons?

Revisiting the Iran Deal

I’ve been asked in recent days whether my feelings about last year’s Iran nuclear deal have changed. What prompted the inquiries was the lengthy New York Times Magazine profile of deputy national-security adviser Ben Rhodes, in which he claimed to have “actively misled” the media on the virtues of the deal.

My feelings have indeed evolved, although not as the result in any way of the Rhodes piece.

At the time the agreement was being debated, I expressed ambivalence about it, seeing both its upsides and downsides. Now, though, I am persuaded that the opposition to it was misguided and that the deal, now that nearly a year has gone by, was a wise and responsible move. Perfect? No. But the perfect is often the enemy of the good.

This, with all due respect to Mr. Rhodes (whatever respect may be due to a shamelessly self-aggrandizing, cynical self-described manipulator). In the magazine piece, the White House aide was quoted as belittling members of the media as “often clueless” … and contended that “they literally know nothing.”

Much controversy came to swirl around not only the piece itself but both its subject and its writer. Whatever the biases of either or the accuracy of the article, its revelations, titillating as they may have been to Beltway insiders and assorted pundits, have nothing at all in the end to do with the wisdom of the deal.

Whether major media reporters were as naive or malleable as Mr. Rhodes is quoted as contending, and whether they were in as much awe of him as he imagines, are not things I can claim to know, or very much care about. The upshot of the interview was that – please sit down if you’re standing – the Obama administration, once it and its allies had forged what they felt was the best deal possible… pushed for it.

That meant charging administration officials and advisors (including Mr. Rhodes) with the task of conveying the plan’s virtues to reporters, making experts available to the media, lobbying foreign leaders and making the case for the deal directly to the American public. Not exactly the most shocking bit of news to trickle down the news pipeline in recent days.

What apparently hasn’t trickled down to some observers, though, is the more trenchant fact that Iran is currently defanged, and that deal’s opponents’ fears and predictions have not come to pass.

Iran has abided by every condition the agreement placed upon it, and thereby removed for now the shadow of a nuclear attack, chalilah, on Israel. That is not a small thing. It is the most important thing.

Some had predicted an Iranian about-face once the frozen funds were released, and that the money would yield a great upsurge in Iranian-sponsored terrorism. The latter concern was and remains a real one, to be sure. But, at least so far, neither it nor any treacherous Iranian change of heart has materialized.

Assuming that Mr. Rhodes is not suffering delusions of grandeur (to which even bright young people are not immune), that he indeed exerted a Svengali-like influence over reporters, bending them to his iron will, it wasn’t the media that sealed the deal and won over skeptics. It was the contention of nuclear and military experts, not only American but Israeli. And those experts feel vindicated.

“A historic turning point… a big change in terms of the direction that Iran was headed, a strategic turning point.” Those were the words, this past January, of one knowledgeable observer, General Gadi Eizenkot, the IDF’s Chief of Staff. General Eizenkot was not, to the best of the public record, among those hypnotized by Ben Rhodes.

To be sure and of course, Iran maintains its unhinged and threatening rhetoric. Recently, a Quds Force advisor declared that… “If the Supreme Leader’s orders [are] to be executed, with the abilities and the equipment at our disposal, we will raze the Zionist regime in less than eight minutes.”

But such bluster is in truth the loudest proof of the nuclear deal’s success. In the Middle East, there is an inverse relationship between such braggadocio and actual might. Iran is summoning words in the absence of aptitude. Yes, it has conventional missiles, but it would be suicidal to use them against Israel, which, unlike Iran – may we say it? – likely possesses nuclear weapons.

No, evildoers and their bluster aside, what we remain with eleven months after the Iran deal isn’t a perfect or even good world. But it’s clearly a safer one.

No Regrets

My employer, Agudath Israel of America, as a non-profit organization, is not permitted to endorse any candidate for public office. I, however, write this column each week as an individual, not as an organizational representative. Even so, though, I take no public position on the presidential race.

Aspects of the race, though, do strike me as worthy of consideration.

Like a recent radio interview with Donald Trump. Among the candidate’s many interesting comments over the course of the campaign so far was his assertion last summer that Senator John McCain was “not a war hero.”

This, despite Mr. McCain’s having flown missions during the Vietnam war, having been shot down, seriously injured and captured by the North Vietnamese, having endured torture and languished as a prisoner of war for six years (two of them in solitary confinement) and having refused an out-of-sequence early repatriation offer. Still, said Mr. Trump, Mr. McCain wasn’t “like people who weren’t captured.”

For his part, Senator McCain recently reiterated that he didn’t take the candidate’s comment personally, but he did, he said, object to the insinuation that other POWs were something less than heroic for their endurance of their own captures and imprisonments. “What [Mr. Trump] said about me, John McCain, that’s fine,” said the senator. “I don’t require any repair of that.”

“But,” he continued, “I would like to see him retract [his] statement, not about me, but about the others.”

During a May 11 radio interview, Mr. Trump had the opportunity to do just that, and took it. Well, sort of. At least for a few seconds, before he cast doubt on what he had just said.

Asked about Senator McCain’s wish for a retraction, the presidential hopeful told his interviewer, “Well, I’ve actually done that.” And, to make thing clear (at least for the moment), he added, “You know frankly, I like John McCain, and John McCain is a hero.”

The interviewer, seeking clarity, asked if that meant that Mr. Trump then regretted his earlier comments. The response: “I don’t, you know… I like not to regret anything…. And what I said, frankly, is what I said. And, you know, some people like what I said, if you want to know the truth. Many people that like what I said. You know after I said that, my poll numbers went up seven points.”

One wonders who was converted to the Trump candidacy as a result of his demeaning of Senator McCain’s experiences. (Does some sizable number of unrepentant former North Vietnamese lurk within the American electorate?) But, be that as it may, Mr. Trump’s bewildering backtrack was a striking contrast to an American official’s unqualified expression of regret a few weeks earlier.

Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, traveled to Kunduz, Afghanistan to issue an unreserved apology to the families of victims of the United States’ bombing of a hospital in that city last year that killed 42 people.

“As commander, I wanted to come to Kunduz personally and stand before the families and the people of Kunduz to deeply apologize for the events which destroyed the hospital and caused the deaths of staff, patients and family members,” he said. “I grieve with you for your loss and suffering, and humbly and respectfully ask for your forgiveness.”

Shortly after the mistaken bombing, President Obama also personally apologized for the carnage in Kundu.

The general and the president likely wish that they didn’t need “to regret anything,” no less than Mr. Trump. But when regret is called for, they feel and express it.

No reader of this periodical needs to be reminded of the fact that feeling regret is a high Jewish ideal, the very fundament of teshuvah. Many of us recite Viduy twice daily, and all of us on Yom Kippur. Regretting a wrongdoing is something for which our illustrious forebears Yehudah and Reuvein are praised, and for which they “inherited life in the next world” and were rewarded as well in this one (Sotah, 7b).

Whether the willingness to feel and express remorse is something desirable in an American president or something that will hinder him in dealing with the challenges of his office is, one supposes, an open question. And how the American electorate feels about the matter is a question open even more widely.

But that, as Jews, we are enjoined to see regret, when it is indicated, as a desideratum, not a weakness, is no question at all.

Visitation Rites

The saintly aura that has enveloped Ronald Reagan in the minds of many who consider themselves social conservatives and independent thinkers – and I count myself among them; and I voted for Reagan in both 1980 and 1984 – has eclipsed the memory of his infamous 1985 visit to the military cemetery in Bitburg, Germany. Elie Wiesel famously told Mr. Reagan, “That place, Mr. President, is not your place.”

Bitburg comes to mind in the wake of the announcement that President Obama will be visiting Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, Japan, more than 70 years after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city – and then, three days later, another, on Nagasaki – killing upward of 200,000 people and leaving unknown numbers with illnesses born of radiation exposure. Mr. Obama will be the first sitting president to visit the site, and is being criticized by some for his plan to do so.

The wisdom, propriety and necessity of President Harry Truman’s decision to unleash nuclear destruction on the Japanese cities on August 6 and August 9, 1945 have been debated for decades. Japan had attacked the U.S. first, at Pearl Harbor, had starved, beaten and executed American prisoners of war and seemed undeterred by Germany’s May 7 surrender to the Allies.

Truman maintained that the bombings, by accelerating the Japanese surrender, saved countless American lives. “The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor,” he proclaimed. “They have been repaid many fold.” And the bombings had been ordered “in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.”

Some historians, however, have judged these decisions harshly, maintaining that there were other paths toward Japanese surrender, and that the loss of life at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unconscionable.

For its part, the White House has stressed that the visit is not intended as an apology, but rather is a symbolic gesture to promote Mr. Obama’s nuclear nonproliferation message and highlight the reconciliation between wartime enemies that are now close allies.

Nonetheless, knee-jerk Obama-bashers and knee-jerk “progressives” alike have registered their respective disgruntlements. The former have long characterized the president’s acknowledgments of U.S. misjudgments as unwarranted and unpatriotic apologies; they claim that the president’s very presence at the site is an unspoken expression of regret. And the latter believe that the U.S. in fact does owe Japan an unqualified and open mea culpa for the bombings.

Thus, “The Obama Administration Is Now Apologizing For America Winning World War II” reads the title of an opinion piece by David Harsanyi, a senior editor at The Federalist. And “America’s enduring Hiroshima shame: Why Barack Obama should apologize for the atomic bomb — but won’t” is the title of an essay by syndicated columnist Jack Mirkinson.

The guy in the Oval Office just can’t win.

Lost, though, in the political discussion of the impending visit – as is so often lost in so many political discussions – is reason. Not every expression of pain is a confession of guilt. One can regret the effects of an act without regretting the act.

I don’t know if pediatricians apologize to toddlers for the pain they have inflicted on them after a required inoculation. But I can certainly imagine a sensitive doctor acknowledging his small patient’s pain, including his role in creating it, while seeking to soothe the child.

Is the Commander in Chief of the United States visiting Hiroshima really much different? Even if the optics indicate something more than a celebration of how far U.S-Japan relations have come over the past half-century, even if Mr. Obama’s presence at the site is seen as an expression of anguish at the great loss of life caused by our country’s nuclear attacks on Japan, even if one believes that President Truman was entirely right in his decisions, is it somehow un-American or reckless to be perceived as pained by the incineration of two cities’ populations?

Elie Wiesel was right about Bitburg. It was not, and is not, a place for an American president. It is a cemetery for a military that fought to advance the cause of an evil regime. But, even if the Japanese regime was contemptible too, those who perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilians.

Words from the end of Sefer Yonah come to mind:

“Now should I not take pity on Nineveh, the great city, in which there are many more than one hundred twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and many animals as well?”

And The Winner Is…

“Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser,” the famous, and famously blunt, General George S. Patton declared in a 1944 speech. “When you were kids,” he explained, “you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big league ball players, the toughest boxers.”

A few years later, UCLA Bruins football coach Henry Russell (“Red”) Sanders effectively concurred with the general. “Winning isn’t everything,” the coach told his charges, pausing a moment for effect, “It’s the only thing.”

Fast-forward to today, when presidential candidates seem tireless in trumpeting victories and portraying themselves as winners.

It’s not just wishful thinking that impels coaches and politicians to promote their winning ways. They know there is practical value in that self-portrayal. Namely, the “bandwagon effect” – the fact that winners tend, by their very victories, to pick up fans.

And indeed, while correlation isn’t causation, Donald Trump’s popularity seems to have risen at about the rate at which he has labeled himself a winner, and other people losers (among them an 87-year-old woman who sued him over a real estate venture, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer and Senator John McCain).

Politics, though, are just politics. And sports are only sports. There is, though, also these days a very different example of the allure exerted by “winning teams.” That pull, unfortunately powers not only mundane enterprises but some of the darkest evils that humanity (using the word in its broadest sense) has to offer.

There’s no doubt that Islamist groups whose members exult in killing and maiming men, women and children who pose them no threat are manifestations of what is implied by pereh adam: utter barbarism. Terrorists revel in violence for violence’s sake.

But the mayhem that such groups spawn and celebrate also serves to garner them new recruits. It might seem confounding to civilized people that terrorists’ carnage advances their recruitment goals. Sadly, though, it does.

“My brothers,” enticed a French-language social media message sent to young people’s phones in the immediate wake of the recent terror attacks in Brussels, “why not join us in the fight against the Westerners, make good choices in your life?” Don’t you see, the message seems to be saying, how successful we’ve been?

To be sure, psychological frailty, vulnerability to radical politics or theologies and even boredom play parts in leading some young Westerners to join barbarous organizations. But those who study terrorism confirm another factor in those decisions: a perception of the sociopaths as “winners” in some malignant Monopoly game, in which the board pieces are human beings and the currency is destroyed lives.

Through would-be recruits’ loony lenses, the civilized world, by virtue of its inability to eradicate the evil players, would seem to be a “loser.” The crowded bandwagon these days is the wicked one.

There is no word for “winner” or “loser” in Tanach. To be sure, there are advances and retreats, as when Yisrael is “gavar” – gains the upper hand – and when, chalilah, Amalek does; and military gains and defeats. But the word we use in Hebrew for victory, “nitzachon,” seems to date only from later times.

In fact, the closest nitzachon-relative in Tanach, used repeatedly in Tehillim, is menatzeiach, as in “lamenatzeiach,” where it means “leader” or “conductor.” The implication of the word isn’t power or victory, but, rather, example-setting and facilitating.

Maybe that’s a lesson about how to understand true success. Yes, there are indeed enemies to be fought, like those who threaten innocents today. And even an irredeemably evil one, Amalek, to be utterly destroyed in the future. But, here and now, our success lies in our being the best specimens of a tzelem Elokim we can be: not “winners” in any temporal contest but examples of dedicated service to Hashem.

As to the “loser” called civilization, it in fact cannot effectively prevent people bent on murder from acting on their evil urges. But an eventual vanquishing of all evil does, nevertheless, await, ready to arrive with the geula shleima, may it be soon.

There will then be a true nitzachon over evil, exemplified in what the Navi Yeshayahu (11:9) foresees and relates in Hashem’s name: “They will not harm nor destroy in all My holy mountain; for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of Hashem, as the waters cover the sea.”

That victory may still lie in the future, but it will be an ultimate, permanent one. The root of nitzachon, after all, is netzach.

A Troubling America for Jews…

American Jews might be excused for finding the circus more formally known as the current presidential campaign unthreatening, even amusing. Unthreatening, because the leading Republican candidate has a Jewish daughter; the leading Democratic candidate, a Jewish son-in-law; and her rival is a bona fide member of the tribe himself. All the candidates, moreover, have expressed support for Israel.

And amusing? Well, no need to go into detail on that one. We need a dictionary with more expressive words than “grandstanding” and “mudslinging.”

Some Jews, though, are worried by the Republican front-runner, despite his Jewish connection. After all, Mr. Trump at one point indicated that, if elected, he would approach the Israel-Palestinian impasse as “a sort of neutral guy.” But he later explained that he simply meant that he didn’t see how he could promote negotiations if he openly took sides. “With that being said,” the candidate added unequivocally, “I am totally pro-Israel.”

More troubling to many Jews, and understandably so, is Mr. Trump’s dog whistling (actually, often, out-loud shouting “Fido!!!”) to American bigots and general lowlifes.

To read the rest of this piece, which appears in Haaretz, please click here.

Voting Advice

Few things outrage people as greatly as the suggestion that their vote doesn’t really make a difference. “Your vote counts!” is, after all, the essence of Civics 101.

And yet it is the most straightforward of truisms that – other than, say, a vote for gabbai in a very small shul – no election is ever decided on one vote. Or, in national politics, many thousands.

“But if everyone thought that way, no one would vote!” comes the immediate, irritated reply.

True. But an observation isn’t an argument. The bottom line remains that… well, you know.

Please don’t misunderstand. It is important to vote, and each of us should make every effort to do so, for several reasons. Firstly, it’s a privilege of citizenship, and seizing it is a sign of respect for the wonderful country in which we live. Secondly, as observant Jews, with particular needs and interests, it is vital that we be perceived as voters, not as complacent, unengaged citizens. What’s more, if we live, as many of us do, in fairly homogenous voting districts, elected officials take note of our voting turnouts, and that can influence decisions they make about things that matter to us.

But all of that is in the realm of hishtadlus – appropriate efforts to effect proper goals. The bottom line remains: our individual votes don’t really count. (Sorry.)

Is there any point to revealing how we are being brash to imagine our individual votes as crucial, any tachlis to bringing up the shocking reality that they are not? I believe there is, and that it’s important and timely.

Because too many of us tend to get very – how shall we put it? – agitated over politics. Should someone dare support what we feel is the “wrong” candidate, or take a “misguided” position on an issue, he isn’t just mistaken; he has become the enemy!

Politics has become, even, lamentably within parts of our community, something akin to what soccer is in some European and Middle Eastern countries: an utterly overheated choosing of teams, followed by zealous, uncompromising rooting, and vilification of those who dare support other teams. People have been injured and even killed as a result of “football hooliganism,” and fans of opposing teams are routinely segregated in stadium stands, to minimize the likelihood of carnage.

We may not express our political sureties and affiliations with the sort of violence that accompanies some soccer matches. But, from a Jewish perspective, words can be instruments of violence, too. And, in a way, worse ones than bats and rocks.

Is getting angry over politics in keeping with Torah values? With mentchlichkeit? With reason?

“Just as people’s faces all differ,” we are taught by Chazal, “so do their opinions” (Bamidbar Rabbah, 21:2).

The Imrei Emes, zy”a, commented on that truth with a question: “Can you imagine disdaining someone because his face doesn’t look like yours?” The question’s implied lesson is obvious: Neither does a person deserve contempt for having a different view of things from yours. His eyes are a different color from yours; his mind isn’t the same as yours either.

Maybe stopping and thinking about the fact that a vote is only a vote, and that an election’s outcome will not hinge on our ballot, can help us turn down the volume a bit, not to mention lower our blood pressure.

There’s nothing wrong with having political points of view, with discussing national and international issues. But there is something very wrong about allowing opinions to ferment into anger or resentment. Choose positions and candidates. Just don’t overinvest your choices with an importance they simply don’t have.

One of my brothers-in-law once told me, with a sly smile, that, in his house, he makes “the big decisions” and leaves the “small ones” to his wife. He then explained that he decides what should be done about world affairs, the economy, immigration and crime; his wife takes care of raising the children, chinuch matters, the atmosphere in the home…

In fact, if we want to do something to influence world affairs, we do well to remind ourselves that lev melech bi’yad Hashem (Mishlei 21:1) that, in the end, it’s the Bashefer, not the ballot box. Our power lies in choosing how to live, not how to vote. Deciding to daven more mindfully, to learn more seriously, to engage in chessed more frequently – those are the choices that count.

Bernie’s Kibbutz and Mine

The disclosure of which kibbutz Senator Bernie Sanders spent time at in1963 was red meat for the voracious purveyors of what, regrettably, passes for political commentary these days.

Mr. Sanders – now the first Jew to win a U.S. presidential primary – lived for several months in Sha’ar Ha’amakim, near Haifa, a kibbutz affiliated with Hashomer Hatzair, the secular, Zionist-socialist movement. (It was quite an active one during part of last century; this one, not so much.)

Right-wing media seized on the socialist element, with the American Thinker featuring an op-ed with the headline, “Bernie Sanders Spent Months at Marxist-Stalinist Kibbutz.”

On the other side of the partisan divide, various blogs attacked Mr. Sanders for having been part of a kibbutz that was founded, in the words of radical leftie Philip Weiss, on “ethnic cleansing.”

Intelligent discourse proceeds apace.

For my part, the disclosure of Sanders’ sanctuary evoked memories of my own time on a Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz – beautiful Ein Hashofet, a mere ten miles from where Bernie bedded down less than ten years before I arrived in the area.

I spent only two days at Ein Hashofet, having traveled there before the start of Elul zman in Yeshivas Kol Torah to visit one of the kibbutz’s founders, my uncle Nachman.

Back in pre-war Poland, when my father, shlit”a, was a little boy, two of his older brothers became involved in a Zionist youth enterprise and surreptitiously made their way to Eretz Yisrael. My father was determined to study Torah and, after he became bar mitzvah, just as the war broke out, he left his parents and other siblings to learn in a Novardok yeshivah that had been relocated to Vilna. Eventually, the Soviets sent him and his chaverim , along with their Rosh Yeshivah, Rav Yehudah Leib Nekritz, zt”l, to Siberia. Eventually, my father emigrated to America; of his large family, only he and his two brothers in Palestine survived the war.

The kibbutzniks were very welcoming of the young yeshivah bochur who had come from America (no, he told them all, he didn’t know their cousins there) to study in Yerushalayim. I must have seemed, and definitely felt, out of place there. But I was “Nachman’s nephew,” so I got the royal treatment.

During my stay at the kibbutz, I lived on Tnuva products and some packaged foods I had brought with me. When it was time to leave, some of the kibbutzniks gave me small gifts – a Hebrew booklet about Van Gogh, a plastic Egged tik, some doodads – that (despite the place’s strict socialist ethos) they possessed. I was very touched, and remember the residents’ kind sentiments fondly to this day.

My greatest takeaway, though, was from my uncle, in the words he spoke a year later, when he visited me in Bayit Vegan as I prepared to return to the U.S. Tears welling in his eyes, he wished me well and said, wistfully, that he wondered if, had he retained his Jewish observance, his children might have remained in Eretz HaKodesh. Most of them, despite their father’s dedication to the Land, had left Eretz Yisrael to find their fortunes in other places. I didn’t know what to say, and just hugged him goodbye.

Fast-forward fifteen years. My Israeli uncle and aunt, visiting the U.S., were driven by my father, shlita, from Baltimore all the way to Providence, Rhode Island, where I and my family were living at the time. It was wonderful to see them again, and, at some point, my uncle mentioned – and there was pride in his voice – that the kibbutz had recently put mezuzos on its doors.

I noticed, too, that he had brought with him a pair of tefillin.

My uncle is now long gone from this world, but I’m reminded of the Gemara about a man who betroths a woman on the condition that he is a righteous person (Kiddushin 49b). Even if the man was not known to be righteous, the Gemara says, if the woman accepts his kiddushin, they are married. Because “perhaps he mused about repentance in his heart.”

A hirhur teshuvah – a “mere musing of repentance” – can change a person. And what matters more than where we are is the direction in which we are headed.

I don’t know if Bernie Sanders’ few months on a kibbutz had any impact on him. But, as I recall my uncle’s words about his children, and those tefillin, it seems to me that his more than half-century on his kibbutz, ironically, may have yielded him a keener perspective.

Iranian Elephant

“Whatsa matter, you don’t like the other one?”

That was what an old-time comedian claimed his mother-in-law said when she saw him wearing one of the two neckties she gave him on his birthday.

The line comes to mind amid the lamentations over the lifting of sanctions on Iran in the wake of the country’s compliance with a main part of the deal it struck last year with the U.S. and other nations. Iran has shipped 98 percent of its fuel to Russia, dismantled more than 12,000 centrifuges so they cannot enrich uranium, and poured cement into the core of a reactor designed to produce plutonium, the other path to a nuclear weapon.

In return, though, the U.S. and its partners agreed to lift international sanctions that had crippled Iran’s economy, releasing many billions in frozen oil-sale assets. That’s not good news for the world, to be sure. Iran is the greatest sponsor of terrorism in the world, and its religious leaders, who control the country, harbor a homicidal antagonism toward, among others, Israel. The country was a most worthy candidate for membership in what George W. Bush named the Axis of Evil, and remains so.

Iran’s current leadership didn’t enter into the agreement out of any desire for peace or willingness to curb its nuclear ambitions. It was brought to its economic knees by the sanctions (ridiculed as worthless when enacted), nothing more.

Still and all, seeing only the necktie not worn, the downside of the deal, isn’t right or wise. There’s no question that the Western world’s high-stakes diplomacy with regard to Iran has made the world safer, at least for the next 10 to 15 years.

And afterward?

No one who isn’t a navi can know. But for those inclined toward informed prognostication, something to consider is the elephant in the Iranian room.

That would be the fact that the country has, in effect, two governments. One is the elected administration of its president, Hassan Rouhani, which includes his Western-educated foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif.

The other is the unelected clerical and military power center, the Revolutionary Guards, controlled by Iranian “Supreme Leader” Ali Khamenei, who, in the end, currently rules the roost.

Mr. Rouhani is considered reformist and pragmatic. While he toes the anti-Israel “occupier” line, he famously condemned the Nazis’ murder of Jews during the Holocaust, in pointed contrast to his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Mr. Khamenei, on the other hand, although he held his nose and permitted the Iran deal to go forward, makes no bones about his antipathy (to put it mildly) toward the West, spewing anti-American and anti-Israel venom in practically all of his speeches.

And since the nuclear agreement was reached in July, his security forces have stepped up arrests of political opponents, a crackdown seen as ensuring that hardliners dominate in national elections scheduled for Feb. 26, when voters will choose a new parliament and the administrative body empowered to select the successor to the 76-year-old and ailing Khamenei.

Some observers, however, see the hard-liners’ assertiveness as evidencing panic, born of what they perceive as a confluence of internal unrest – particularly among young Iranians, who chafe under the regime’s strict religious rules, and who protested en masse against the government in 2009 – and the impact of newly opened avenues to the West.

An Iranian businessman in Tehran recently told a visiting European delegation in hushed tones that “the fear is penetration from the West through business… They want to send the message that they still count.”

Hard-liners are trying to limit the number of reformist politicians eligible to run in next month’s election. But Iranian analysts and politicians contend that Mr. Rouhani is working with a coalition of loyalists, technocrats and moderate religious leaders, in an effort to gain control of parliament.

Mindful of Chazal’s teaching that the only semblance of nevuah these days resides in children and fools (and well aware that my childhood lies in the distant past), I will not attempt to predict whither Iran is headed – whether, by the time the Iran deal’s term expires, the country’s government will be as intractably malevolent as it is under its current high administration, or whether a new generation of Iranians, having come of age since the “Islamic Republic” was created in 1979 and unhappy with its policies and rules, will have assumed the mantle of leadership.

Will the Western world’s gamble pay off? None of us can know. But we can hope that it will, and be mispallel.

Howling Hounds and Golden Calves

Whether or not they happen to own dogs, some politicians have an affinity for dog whistles, at least the political type.

That term plays on the fact that dogs can hear frequencies inaudible to humans, and refers to catchwords or phrases used in speeches and such to signal things, usually ugly things, to particular parts of the body politic.

When segregation became socially unacceptable, many pro-segregationists began instead calling for “states’ rights,” as a euphemism for the right of individual states to racially discriminate. Used in a speech, it was an ultrasonic call-out to racists. Now “states’ righters” has become a dog whistle of its own, used by some speechifying liberals to insinuate that anti-big government sorts are all racists.

In the current presidential primary race, Jeb Bush has accused Donald Trump of “dog whistling,” citing, among other things, the latter’s endless stream of insults to various groups of foreigners or non-males. But those aren’t really dog whistles at all; they’re more like raucous tuba blasts, blown by a clown.

Some dog whistlers have long sought to call out to people not well disposed toward Jews or Israel, using well-placed phrases like “dual loyalty” or “powerful Congressional lobby.” Back in 2012, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd upset many when she accused Republican presidential hopefuls as being guided by a “neocon puppet master,” a reference that was heard as referring to Jewish former administration officials.

A recent dog whistle sounding anti-Jewish notes was wielded by Congressional candidate Dan Castricone, a former Orange County legislator seeking the Republican nomination for New York’s 18th District congressional seat, which includes all of Orange and Putnam counties and parts of two others.

A little background: Kiryas Joel, in case you aren’t aware, is a village and Hassidic enclave founded by the Satmar Rov, zt”l, that is part of the town of Monroe, in Orange County, New York.

A 2011 New York Times report noted that, despite the town’s very high poverty rates, “It has no slums or homeless people. No one who lives there is shabbily dressed or has to go hungry. Crime is virtually nonexistent.”

Some residents of the surrounding communities, however, view Kiryas Joel as encroaching on them, particularly because of the growth of the village and its residents’ desire to annex additional land to accommodate its growth.

In September, the Monroe Town Board approved a petition to shift 164 acres (approximately a third of what was requested) of the town into Kiryas Joel.

The concerns of those in opposition to that plan cannot be dismissed out of hand. They prefer that the bucolic nature of their surroundings be undisturbed by new residential developments and the construction attendant to creating them. At the same time, though, neighborhoods change, and development impinges on rural areas all the time; many a once-verdant, pastoral setting has been transformed into a vibrant residential community. Some things in life might be bothersome, but need to be accepted all the same.

What isn’t acceptable – or shouldn’t be – is opposition to development that is wrapped in religious prejudice.

Which brings us to Mr. Castricone.

In a fundraising letter, after declaring his opposition to Kiryas Joel’s bid to expand, he announced that he will “fight until my last breath to stop it.” All right, he’s impassioned. No crime there. But he also seems, unfortunately, to be something else.

In one speech, he railed that the current holder of the Congressional seat he seeks, Democrat Sean Patrick Maloney, “sits in Congress today only because of a certain bloc of votes [emphasis – or, at least, italics – mine] he obtained from a certain village in the center of a town called Monroe.”

Woof woof.

And if that didn’t get the hounds howling, the calculating candidate, in another address, railed against “one community” that he said has “run roughshod over the culture” of his beloved fatherland – pardon, region. And, in case anyone might have wondered what “culture” he meant to reference, he helpfully continued by accusing Mr. Maloney of having made “a pact with the golden calf.”

Last we checked, democracy was alive and well in the United States, including upstate New York. And members of all American communities were free to vote, individually or en masse, for whomever and whatever they believed to be in their best interest.

Mr. Castricone, no doubt, would affirm that all of that remains the case, and will wave the flag of freedom alongside all who are proud to live in this great country. But the whistle he blows sounds a rather more sour note.

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Reflections on Jews, Judaism, Media and Life