Hashem took the best of us, and left only us

Today, along with all of am yisrael, i mourn the loss of 3 of our sons.

truly, i'm surprised by the depth of my pain and sadness. i had suspected for 18 days that it would end this way, as many of us did. but somehow, the loss of hope that maybe, just maybe, we'd get a message that they were found alive and ok, has been a harder blow than i expected.

i do not remember feeling such a sense of bereavement before. 18 days of praying, of tears, of my sons praying, of my daughter praying, of wondering, of hoping, has welded gilad, naftali and eyal onto my heart as though they were my own. Like so many of us, i looked each of my children in the eyes today and told them that i have sad news for them, that the 3 boys who were taken have been found dead. I told my 9 year old daughter that it's ok to be sad, that it's ok to cry, and hugged her while we both cried. I told my 6 year old son, who had just received his siddur a few days ago along with the heartening message that Hashem is our Father and our King, Who wants to give us everything and also can give us everything. I explained to him, in the words of Noam Wachsman, that like every father, sometimes Hashem says No.

it has not, really, been a good month. i heard the news about our sons' murder while i was attending a memorial marking the sheloshim of a friend who was also taken too young, too soon, too unjustly. Roughly equidistant between these two deaths was the death of my cousin, a man who had a lived a long, successful, and fruitful life, in which he achieved much, planted much, and left behind a long trail of good deeds, lives saved, and descendants who continue in his footsteps. Much as Eyal, Gilad & Naftali would have done, had they had the time. Much as Malka would have done, had she had the time.

Before each of these deaths i reel somewhat, stagger somewhat, set myself back on my feet with the reminder that 'yesh din v'yesh dayan' - there is justice and there is a Judge. But sometimes i stagger just that bit more, and it takes longer to regain my feet.

I read once about a teenage boy, just after the liberation of the camps after the holocaust. He came from a respected long line of rabbis and talmidei chachamim and used to be an ilui (child prodigy at talmud), but he had lost all his family and seen his father shot before his eyes, and was no longer interested in anything to do with G-d or Torah or Judaism. He was brought to the Klausenberger rebbe by someone, who hoped that the rebbe would be able to convince him to return to his roots. The rebbe talked to the boy for a few minutes, then he sat down next to the boy and began to cry. The rebbe cried and sobbed "G-d took the best ones, and left only us. He took the best, and left only us". The boy cried with him, and together they cried and repeated those same words for a long time. Eventually the rebbe put his arm around the boy, and said 'We are all that He left. We have to try our best.'.

These are the words i hear in my head, now: "He took the best of us, and left only ourselves. He took the best, and left only ourselves".

I find that i'm unable to join in calls for vengeance. I'm aware that i have no answers. i know that no amount of palestinian blood will bring back our boys or lessen my sadness, our sadness. I know that there is just one reason why they were killed: esav sonei et yaakov, esav hates jacob. Why does it have to be like this? Because.

Before my daughter went to school, i told her that it's ok to cry, and ok to be sad, and it's also ok to enjoy the swimming that she has today, and to enjoy being with her friends. Because Hashem took the best of us, and left only ourselves. We have to try our best.

Mindfulness ... l'ilui nishmas Malka Baila

L'ilui nishmas Malka Baila

When Malka was so, so sick, I felt that I should be davening for her. It was reiterated recently, to daven again, or more, or renew the tefillos for her. And i did not know what to daven for her. I found it hard to daven for her to get better, and impossible to daven for her to be ... out of pain.

So although I did daven, i felt more heart and more comfort and more doing something when i did something else. Since I heard about Malka's death sentence, I have been trying my hardest to live for her.

It seemed so unfair to me that she would never marry, would never have children, would never clean her own dirty floors or feel that fear that one day, some awful illness would swoop down out of the clear blue nothing and claim her children. That not just had she never experienced that, but that the hope of one day experiencing them had suddenly been snatched away. That suddenly, there wasn;t a future ahead.

So every time I put on a wash-load, or exasperatedly picked up my children's shoes for the umpteenth time, or slowly plodded home with heavy shopping, I thought, 'Malka, this is for you. Malka, you'll never be able to feel this pain, this frustration, this irritation, and so I dedicate it to you. Malka, I swallow this retort as the retort that you will never get to swallow, in your zechus'.

Actually, i do not feel sure that 'in your zechus' is the right phrase. Ok i suppose it is, but what i felt, and still feel, was that i give this whole act over to you, Malka.

Mindfulness is a buzzword, nowadays. I try to avoid cliches, but sometimes they may be true.

For me, when Malka's days were numbered, I began trying to make mine count. But not in the ways you might think. Perhaps it's because it was Malka i was thinking of, and so something grand and brash and flashy would not be appropriate. Because she was never one of those peacock people, the one you noticed straight away, making a splash, achieving great glories. she was one of the unsung heros who deserved to be sung. She made a difference by being Malka. So i did not - do not  - feel led to create some big and bright merit or memorial. I feel driven to just    be. Just to be me, alive.

Malka, i kiss the children you'll never have. Malka, I live the mundane life that was stolen from you. Malka, the quiet moments and the busy ones, the slices of unremarkable time that together carve out my life, i give those over to you by trying my hardest to be aware of them.

I could create a beautiful dvar torah about Malka dying during the time of sefirat haomer. I could tell you about the significance of counting our days to make our days count. I could tell you that, although Malka was very drugged and asleep much of the time, she made sure to be awake at 9.30 (give or take) every night so that she could count the omer b'zman, which is something that will always stay with me.

But instead, i shall do what we all do. I'll live my life. I'll wash my floors, keep my own temper, fight my small battles and win, or lose, but in the small still voice of the day and the night, i'll think, Malka, this one's for you.

Who Is Lost In The Land Of Ashur?

I have just finished reading a most moving, eye-opening book. I recommend it to you all. It is called 'My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search For His Jewish Roots In Kurdish Iraq'. A few words of review about it, so that you'll understand all the rest of the points i want to make.

The writer, Ariel Sabar, describes in beautiful detail his father's childhood growing up in Zakho, an isolated town in Northern, Kurdish, Iraq, where his father's family had lived in the same town since they were exiled there in about the year 720 BCE by the terrifying empire of Assyria (Ashur). Where the local language is still the Aramaic that the Gemara was written in. He charts what happened to the town when Zionism rose, the State of Israel was declared, and finally, in retaliation, even the Jews of remote Zakho were declared stateless, possessionless, and encouraged to flee the country, forced to leave all their possessions behind. His father, his father's family, and all their town had to start over in an Israel that treated them as primitive, backwards hillbillies, and did all it could to stamp out their distinct, devout traditions.

I want to share some realisations it brought to me. It's clear to me, from reading this book, that when Zionists point to the millions of sephardi/mizrachi Jews who were thrown out of Arab lands, and say that this is why we need the State of Israel, to be able to receive them, so that no Jew will have nowhere to go, they are being either disingenuous or, more likely, ignorant of why Jews were thrown out of Arab lands in the first place.

Jews lived in Arab lands for centuries - millennia - with general average happiness and tolerance, certainly more, on the whole, than that extended to Jews in Europe. Perhaps it particularly hard for us to believe now, so used to looking at Arabs as our worst enemy, but Jews in Arab lands had much better lives than Jews in Christian lands. It was only the rise of Zionism and the creation of the State of Israel which caused their Arab hosts to finally kick them out for good.

It was startling to me to realise for just how long Jews had lived in the one same town in Arab lands. In Europe, every couple of hundred years, Jews were thrown out of a neighbourhood, town, or whole country. If that. In Arab lands - and in particular in Kurdistan, the focus of the book - Jews lived in the same village for millennia, not just centuries. There was stability. Yes, there was intermittent friction with Arab neighbours, and certainly life was hard for most Jews, but the thought of leaving their country never crossed their minds. It was only Zionism that forced them to leave.

One of the side points that became clear in the book, which I was already aware of and sad and ashamed of, was the extent to which the Zionist leadership looked down on, derided and really failed Sephardi/Mizrahi Jewry. Zionism, it is clear, is an Ashkenazi solution to an Ashkenazi problem, the creation of Jews who have spent centuries being hounded from one town to another, one pogrom to another, who had seen one safe haven after another grow sour and reject them. They needed a State which would never throw them out. They needed a State of Israel. The Jews in Arab lands did not, really, need a State of Israel at all. In fact, Zionism and the creation of the State made life much worse for them. It was the direct cause of their having to leave their homes where they had lived for generations. much of their culture, language, folklore and traditions were lost and deliberately squashed by the arrogant and patronising Ashkenazi Zionist leadership. Sephardi Jews in Israel are really only just beginning to emerge from the trauma caused by the way that their mass aliyah was handled.


At first i though, how unfair. Sephardi/Mizrahi jews should not have had to leave their ancestral lands. they shouldn;t have had to be kicked out just because all these Ashkenazi Zionists had a nationalist dream. The State of Israel didn;t 'save' any Eastern Jew from being homeless and stateless - it made them be homeless and stateless in the first place. AND then the leadership in Israel deliberately disadvantaged, derided, and despised the very Jews whom they forced to come to Israel in the first place.

But then I thought again. I realise some people - many people - will think i've been very unfair on Zionists and Zionism. be that as it may. i do, though, consider the creation of the State of Israel to be a 'Good Thing'. I recognise that the creation of the State required far too many things to happen, in the right order, for it to be only the 'fault' of the Zionist movement. I do very much see the hand of G-d enabling the establishment of modern Israel. Zionism on its own, without divine approval, couldn;t have done this. Man could not have achieved this. So then, to my worldview, G-d wanted the State of Israel to be created. And while no one but the individuals in charge are responsible for the shameful, reprehensible way that Jews from Arab lands were treated when they made aliyah, the fact that they were kicked out of their land, caused directly by the creation of the State, must have been what G-d wanted too.

So i thought about this a bit more.

As i pondered the book, i thought about a verse which is quoted often in it, and which i have long loved and mused over.
ובאו אובדים מארץ אשור, והנדחים מארץ מצרים, והשתחוו לה' בהר קודש בירושלים"
and those lost in the land of Ashur (Assyria), and those detained in the land of Egypt, shall come and bow down to G-d in the holy mountain, in Jerusalem."
I've long been familiar with, and fond of, the explanation that there are 2 'types' of Jews who make aliyah to Eretz Yisrael. Those lost in the land of Ashur are those who lost their way, forgot their destination as Jews, in the good lands, in the places of riches and success (ashur עשור means riches, while אשור, pronounced the same but spelt differently, means fortune, happiness). Those detained in the land of Egypt are those who were forcibly prevented, through hardship, suffering, physical detention, and the like, from returning to the Land (Egypt - mitzrayim מצרים in Bebrew - comes from the Hebrew root tzar- צר, meaning constricted, restricted, narrowed, hemmed in). Both those who forgot the desire to return home, and those who wished to come home but were unable to do so, will at the end of days come back to serve G-d in His temple in Jerusalem.

Rav Shlomo Carlebach used to quote this explanation, and add that those making aliyah from America are the ones lost in the land of Ashur, adrift in a sea of material success, who have managed to find their way out of the maze. And the refuseniks from Russia are the ones detained in Egypt-like hardship, restrictions and physical detention, but they have also managed to come back to the Land.

i still like his explanation. But having read about the jews of kurdistan, i realised another layer of meaning. The simple layer of meaning. Those lost in Ashur meant those who were lost in Ashur. The Jews of the Arab lands had stability. Only Zionism caused them to leave the homes they had lived in for millennia. It became v clear to me - G-d wanted the State of Israel to be created, not despite the hardship it would cause for these children of Israel, and not with their hardship being an un-foreseen side effect, but (in part) IN ORDER to cause them to be kicked out. Because nothing else was jolly well going to work! We are used, with our Western, patronising eyes, to looking at their often-primitive living conditions and thinking that they are the furthest you could get from people adrift in material success who had lost the desire to return home. Certainly the Jews of Zakho, as described in My Father's Paradise, were a very long way from material success, or even material average-ness. But remember, lost in Ashur actually is what and who they are. These are descendants of the Jews who didn;t return when Ezra led the first return to the Land to build the 2nd Temple. These are descendants of the original exiled Jews to Babylon and Assyria who just never came back home. Not when Ezra and Nehemia built the 2nd Temple. Not when the Maccabees rededicated it, or when Herod beautified it. The Ashkenazi Jews were detained in the land of Egypt, treated so harshly for generations across Europe, prevented by seas and deserts and hostile empires from returning to Israel. The journey was not quite so onerous for the Jews living already in Iran, Iraq, and the rest of the Arabian peninsula.

And i thought a bit more about the book. i thought about how Sephardi/Mizrahi Jews place so much emphasis on kabbalah and mysticism. It plays an integral role in their theology and dogma in a way that it just cannot in that of Ashkenazi thought. The Zohar, to a large extent, replaces the focus on the physical Jerusalem and temple with emphasis on a spiritual, mystical, conceptual one. The desire to return to the temple is not one of geography, but spirituality. For Jews in Arab lands, i wonder, which is cause and which is effect? Did their strong connection with the zohar cause them to assign their yearning for a return to Zion to a mystical 'yerushalayim shel maaleh', and thus cause their drive to return to the real Zion to wither? Or did their dwindling desire to return to the Land find in the mysticism of the Zohar a world-view and vocabulary that filled their need to replace a Land-centred dogma?

It was fascinating to me to realise that this is another - yet another - aspect of the pre-messianic era we live in, that even those lost in Ashur were finally dislodged. I wish their aliyah had played out differently. I wish they had been welcomed home positively. I wish so much that kibbutz galuyot - the ingathering of the exiles that was instigated as well as enabled by the creation of the State of Israel - could have happened/happen with more good feeling and acceptance of difference. But i'm glad they are here.

Yom Hashoah - Surviving

Yom hashoah. A day to remember the 6 million individuals who were killed for no reason other than that they were Jews. Over the years i've learned such a lot about the holocaust, tried so hard to come to terms with what happened, tried to find different ways to internalise, analyse, realise what happened to us. One year in school, a teacher said that we should draw a million candles, just to get an idea of how many six million is, because we just bandy the number around until it loses all relevance in our minds. So i actually started drawing little dots in the margin of my paper as he was talking, intending to get to six million. I thought,like a teenager, well, i'm only doing dots, not an actual drawing, so it won't actually take me that long.

I carried on in every lesson, dotting on this one piece of paper instead of doodling in some other way (as kids in school do). I got to about 100,000 in about a week, i think, before i ran out of interest and abandoned the project. it had made it's point, as far as i was concerned - if it took me that long just to get to 100,000 dots, then i begin to understand that six million is a really, really, really large number.

I just read this haunting and expressive post by Aryeh Myers on his blog InsomniacMedic (it's ok, go read it, i'll still be here when you come back. it's worth it). It got me thinking about survivors.

When we talk about 6 million lost, i think we should also remember those who survived. The survivors, like Rosa, who will always define themselves in relation to the terror and horror which they survived.  The ones who are still surviving, the ones who died in the last few years - few decades - with families and jobs and, well, lives behind them. Although they survived, part of them died, too. And perhaps, part of each and every one of us died also.


And because perhaps i can;t help casting about for wider patterns and ways of thinking, i think back to other traumas we have survived. We are all survivors. we, as a nation, have been through so much trauma. i remember that a teacher (i think it was in Midreshet Lindenbaum and it may have been R' Menachem Leibtag, but may not have been. i wish i could say it in the name of the original expounder) pointed out that at different stages in our history, the Jews who did not make a particular decision became irrelevant to the nation. Thus all of us now identifying as Jews today are the remnant who survived the tortures of Egypt and made it out; who entered the Land of Israel; who lived on the West Bank of the Jordan; who lived in Binyamin and Yehuda and not the other 10 tribes; who went to Babylon with the first wave of exile or are from the few who survived the massacre and forced marches of the second wave of babylonian exile, and did not stay in the Land to flee to Egypt and be lost; who chose to return to Israel with Ezra or Nechemia and did not stay in Persia or others of her 127 provinces; who survived the greek and roman massacres; who did not fall to the lure of Hellenism or nascent Christianity or any of the number of other possibilities that have been offered to us over the centuries; who survived pogroms and martyrdoms and crusades...and now this holocaust. We really have been whittled down so much over the generations.


The concept of post-traumatic stress disorder is only about a hundred years old, and it's a similar amount of time since Freud began the psycho-analytic approach and showed how much we are impacted by the experiences we go through, even when we do not realise it. I don't know about the whole concept of previous lives, but i think that we, as individuals who are part of this nation, carry with us a large and largely unnoticed psychological baggage from the lives that preceded our own. My mother says that the reason why no Jewish mother can go off on a trip without making sure that she has plenty of food is a sub-conscious response to the trauma that we all suffered when we left Egypt in such a hurry that we had nothing to eat but the dough that baked on our backs. Even now, however many centuries and generations later, we practise behaviour that was shaped by a trauma inflicted on our great-to-the-power-of-fifty-grandparents.

I think about how the Torah repeats so many times 'because you were slaves in Egypt'. The unconscious psychological baggage may be more intentional than it at first seems. There are behaviours and emotional responses that are expected of us because we suffered. Because we know what it's like to be beaten, to not be trusted, to be hunted and tortured and treated as expendable, and so we have to survive. Not to recover from it. When we say the slogan of 'we will forgive but not forget', is this why? Because we are survivors, and that shapes us differently. We were once slaves in Egypt - and Babylon - and Persia - and Greece - and Rome - and Spain - and Poland - and Germany - and Hungary. The trauma of those times cannot be wiped away. No amount of time, no amount of reparations, no amount of revenge can ever remove the scars of those experiences. It would be unfair, unreasonable, possibly insulting to expect us to grieve, accept, move on. Instead we have a framework that holds onto the trauma, the scars and the pain. We don't celebrate it, but we acknowledge it, and we acknowledge that it will never go away and SHOULD never go away. Every year we bring it out again, we revisit it and retell it and make sure that we never forget it, that even in 1000 years if we Moshiach has not come we will be reopening those wounds and crying again.

I think that tisha b'av, and yom hashoah, is not there for the dead. It's to make sure that we, too ,view ourselves as though we came out of Egypt - not for the salvation, but for the pain. Is yom hashoah there for the sake of the dead, that we remember them, or is it for us, that we remember them?

The Real Chillul Hashem

As a religious, Torah-respecting, semi-demi-hemi charedi, there is one aspect to last week's elections which still bothers me. in a sentence, it is this: the corrupt Abutbul election campaign has tarred by association a great number of talmidei chachamim whom i respect. had respected. not yet sure which.


You see, I who live in the eye of this particular storm know that the charedi mayor and his coterie are corrupt.
(Note: i do not want to say that chareidim as a group are corrupt. this is not true and an insult to the many many chareidim who are beautiful examples of G-d-fearing Torah-observing menstchen (and frauen). Also: those who do not live here need to know that Abutbul is the puppet at the tip of the iceberg, to woefully mix my metaphors. He is not calling the shots. If he was not there, someone else would be. This does not excuse his behaviour, though - he is a willing lackey).
And the vast majority of my fellow-townspeople know this too. even the ones who voted for him. (they just found different ways to make their own terms with it, some by saying 'it's irrelevant, i follow the gedolim', some by saying 'it's irrelevant because he is charedi' and some by claiming that the corruption is either practically irrelevant (eg 'only 36 fraudulent votes were actually cast and abutbul himself didn't know about it, so the Election Mark I should stand' - thus ignoring both the import of any sort of fraud, and the fact that it is the charedi-abutbul coterie who did it), or that it is a conspiratorial lie.)

I should note too that i am using the term 'corruption' in a very broad way. The Abutbul coterie (by which i mean not just the man himself but the group of people who surround him and direct him, & most especially directed his campaign) deliberately lied about past events; they deliberately misquoted and twisted the words of Eli Cohen; they lied about his intentions; they blackmailed individuals to vote for him using religious & communal coercion; they broke the laws of election campaigning repeatedly and ignored reprimands; they bribed individuals to vote for him; they gave him credit for achievements which were not his own; they used inciteful language to whip up hate; they falsely claimed that individuals who would appeal to particular communities supported him. I could give a longer and more detailed list, but that would be boring. Suffice to say: lies, cheating, blackmail, bribery, defamation, slander, incitement to violence.

So far, so bad enough - there is a large corrupt streak running through the charedi world, and abutbul and his coterie are major representatives of it. Thanks to the elections round one, and also various other infamous episodes in recent history, everyone knows that there are corrupt chareidim around.

However, it seems that some people do not know about this corruption: certain talmidei chachamim. And this is the crux of the matter.

The corrupt Abutbul coterie brought in numerous 'outside' talmidei chachamim (whom they termed 'gedolim') to tell the masses that they MUST vote Abutbul. Here's a partial list, off the top of my head: Rav Obadya Yosef z"l; Rav Chaim Kaneivsky; Rav Nebenzahl; Rav Tau; Rav Aron Feldman; Rav Shmuel Kamenetsky; the Novominsker Rebbe; Rav Ahron Leib Steinman; Rabbi Orlowek; Rabbi Leff; Rebbetzin Tzipora Heller, Rabbi David (? i think this was his first name) Abuchatzeira. By associating these individuals with the corrupt Abutbul campaign, his coterie besmirched them all with their own corruption. I can think of no greater chillul Hashem than to have made Torah and Torah scholars appear corrupt, through inducing them to support corruption.

So, all of us who care about Torah and her teachers face a problem: respected, knoweldgeable, wise talmidei chachamim who know so much Torah and give such good advice, have supported a corrupt group of political schemers.
It's a conflict: how do we resolve this?
I've read many individuals who've said that this just proves that all the aforementioned chareidi talmidei chachamim are corrupt themselves.
I've heard people say that all these Torah powerhouses are foolish, naive and ignorant indivuals who know only Torah but nothing of anything beyond the daled amos of their own beis medrash, and so were easily manipulated into saying whatever some bearded askan wished them to say.
I've heard still others say that this shows how unjust the 'gedolim' are, that they did not bother to check out the facts and speak to people on both sides of the mayoral race, but only listened to the chareidi one who asked them for support.
I've seen too the argument that all these gedolim were lied to by their gabboim and shamashim to convince them to support Abutbul, and/or that letters of support were forged, and so you can not believe anything a 'gadol' says, because they are manipulated by their gabboim and shamashim.
And many people say that this shows that the whole concept of 'Daas Torah' is a load of lies and placebos, because Daas Torah even see corruption when it was right before their eyes.

Others, who are more nuanced in their thought, are more conflicted. We feel betrayed and let down. How can someone so knowledgeable in Torah be so easily hoodwinked? How can someone we respected as thoughtful and wise decide to support one side in an election without properly investigating the whole situation? How can so much Torah knowledge leave one so foolish?

I don't really have any answers yet, but i have a few thoughts.

1. Some of the gedolim in question really do not know much about what goes on outside of their beis medrash. Some are particularly old and frail and reliant on their gabboim/shamashim to guide them.

2. Some letters of support really were forged (see: corruption).

3. A few years ago, my husband and I went to meet with Rabbi Orlowek (as mentioned above). He is well-known for his almost prophetic insight into children's characters and their educational/parenting needs: you bring him a photograph of your child, and he'll tell you about that child's nature and how best to help him. So we did this, we brought him photos of our three children. Before he began, R' Orlowek cautioned us that he is not a navi (prophet). This is not nevuah (prophecy), this is just his years of experience and his close reading of body language and facial cues that enable him to pick up on a person's feelings. He told us that, as he is not a navi, he is not infallible. These are your children, he said. You know them best. If i say something which does not sound right to you, then listen to yourselves, not to me, because you know them best. And sure enough, while what he told us was 95% accurate and 100% helpful and useful, there were a couple of times when we exchagned glances with each other and said no, that's not really what he/she's like at all. No, that's not a problem he/she has. And he said right, well it's your child and you know them best, i am not a navi.

And so now i remember this, and I think, if that was the case for our children, for their whole chinuch and discipline and life path, then why can that not be true too for our town? Perhaps here, too, neither Rabbi Orlowek nor the other 'gedolim' are neviim, and they are all, again, wrong about our town, because it is our town, and we know it best? We do not really believe that rabbis are infallible; can we just accept that they were wrong here, that yes, they were misled, that they did not dig deeply enough into the issue, that they were lied to and believed those lies - but can we still continue to trust and respect them as talmidei chachamim and wise Torah teachers despite the fact that they are human? It's a thought.

4. Perhaps, like many of us once did, these talmidei chachamim trusted chareidim to be honest. Perhaps they believed the apparently frum, G-d-fearing people who approached them and begged them hard to do what they can to convince people to vote for the chareidi candidate because of the chillul Hashem that would otherwise ensue.

This doesn;t solve it for me. I still ask myself why they chose to get involved; why they did not use their seichel to speak to both sides and check out the situation for themselves; why they were so naive that they could be taken in in this way; why their Torah learning did not make them wiser than this. I continue to try to retain my respect for talmidei chachamim, both in general and in the specifics listed above. I remind myself about shabtai zvi and the number of rabbonim at the time who believed him, too. I think of Rav Yaakov Emden and Rav Yonatan Eibeschutz, who had a fierce quarrel which bore very little in common with hillel and shammai, but we still learn and value both their Torah. I think about how the Dubner Maggid so misjudged the Vilna Gaon in giving him eitzah - but we still appreciate his teachings. I think too about Rabbenu Yonah, who did passionate teshuvah years after his scathing condemnation of the writings of the Rambam. Perhaps just not enough time has passed yet.

Perhaps, too, we just have to learn to live with the questions and confusion. It is Purim, after all.

For the want of some backbone, the country was lost

The more I mull over the results of yesterday's elections, the more i realise just how much was lost.

Had Eli Cohen won, he would, by his actions over the next 5 years of office, have shown Charedim that they have nothing to fear from living under a non-charedi mayor. Through his even-handedness in allocating resources, his respect for Torah and for Heaven, chareidim could gradually have learned that they had nothing to fear from a mesorati sephardi Jew. With violent extremists reined in, chareidim along with datiim and chilonim would have lived with more fear of Heaven than fear of their neighbour. Beit Shemesh could have become a model of peaceful co-existence, where charedi, dati, chiloni, masorati, ashkenazi and sepharadi and everything in between lived according to their own minhagim and rabbanim, but without fear of the Other.

We had the opportunity, yesterday, to open up a whole new chapter in Israeli history. We could have begun a period when, slowly, with trepidation and uncertainty at first, all sects and swathes of Jews could have discovered that different viewpoints need not lead to war. If Beit Shemesh had chosen differently, we could have had a mayor who would do the best thing for all groups within our divided little town, and slowly, each group would have come to feel valued and respected and accepted. And all the rest of the country, whose eyes are on us already, would have seen that a sepharadi masorati mayor does not have it in for chareidim, and would have seen that each group begins to feel secure despite the disparate nature of the town, that different types of Jews really can all live together in the same town, that violent religious extremists can be stopped without punishing their peaceable fellow ideologues. And across the rest of the country, chareidim would not fear moving into a dati-leumi neighbourhood, and dati-leumiim would not fear when chareidim did move in, because they would all have seen that it is possible for them to co-exist without the one group swallowing another.

And at a time when the Shaked law was just passed, when chareidim call other Jews amalek, and chilonim call chareidim parasites, and datiim think that everyone else just wants their children to risk their lives, we more than at any time before need somewhere to show us all that we don't have to fear. I do not exaggerate when i say that, had Eli Cohen won last night, it would have made a difference not just to Beit Shemesh, but to the whole country.

And i am all the more sad that this opportunity was thrown away. It won't come around again.

Instead, chareidi leadership has shown its most corrupt side. It has demonstrated that it believes it may lie, cheat, threaten and blackmail in the name of Torah, and through its victory, it believes that more than ever. It has shown no consideration for either the law or for their fellow Jews. It has taken talmidei chachamim and used them as - not a shovel, but as a carrot and a stick, to achieve their own ends. Even the extreme kannoim, who had a certain consistency in refusing to ever have anything to do with the State, have shown that they too have no ideals - when pressured enough, they too will vote.

And I am so disappointed in my fellow anglo-chareidim, who (by and large, this is drawn with a blunt pencil), let them, and let themselves down immensely in the process. I speak not about those who, out of their own consideration, concluded that Abutbul would be the better mayor. I believe they are in the minority amongst his voters. I am thinking instead about those who in all naivete and pashtus obeyed their rabbis and closed their eyes to what stared them in the face. Those who truly believed that they were voting for yiras shamayim, for Torah, for their children's Jewish future. Their naivete, trust, and peshute emunah (not a typo) was misplaced and, in my non-halachic opinion, halachically wrong. They bought into the Israeli-chareidi model of believing that one must follow the opinion of the 'gadol' in all things regardless of circumstances, and accepted that chareidi leadership is worth deceit and fraud. At a moment when the corrupt streak running through chareidi leadership could have been checked, the anglo-chareidi world gave them a mandate to continue to bludgeon, browbeat, blackmail and bribe their way to power l'shem shamayim. Oh, the irony.

When Eli Cohen lost the election last night, it was more than clean streets, pre-planned infrastructure, and responsible leadership that went with him. It was the chance to change the face of the whole country, at a time when tensions have never been higher.

It is for this, that I mourn.

Wonder, & no wonder.

I've been meaning to write a kind of 'chanukah reflections - year 2' post. i guess i am a little late. i won't take up much of your time.

It's interesting to see how much year 2 is different to year 1. on the whole, better. 300% better. And it makes year 2 stand out in its own way, since at every landmark on the path of time, we're remembering how it felt this time last year, and feeling thankful that we no longer feel that way any more.

Sometimes, as i walk down the street to pick up yc from school, and i gaze across at the undeniably Judean hills that march across the horizon, and pick out the site of an biblical canaanite kingdom in the distance, and reflect that i really am living here, walking one-two-three-mitzvah! on holy soil, and i feel the need to pinch myself. So many years i wished i was here, i asked Hashem why i couldn;t be doing exactly what i am doing now, and it's hard to believe that it really happened. is happening, every minute.

and yet sometimes, i take it all for granted. sometimes i am just living my life, cooking dinner, helping with homework, doing the shopping, working, looking after my children, and i just somehow slip between the moments of wonder without quite touching them. and i pull myself up and ask how i just went past that vista, the view i love the best from ramat aleph, where, on a clear day, i can see ashdod, and yet today i just went past without noticing. and i am so grateful for that, too. i am so grateful that living in the holy land can feel so normal. so much like real life. and that i can get so accustomed to it (although i do try to live more mindfully).

some moments are still full of wonder. when our daughter has no qualms about picking up the phone to call an israeli friend to arrange a playdate in ivrit. when i realise that our children sat down and did their homework in ivrit in a reasonable amount of time, and that i didn;t once have to translate a question. when i remember that this day a year ago, there were tears and fears that we would never understand and never feel at home. when it's a cloudy day and i think, hang on, the sun's not shining, that's really unusual. i still find it exciting when the buses say 'shabbat shalom' or 'chag sameach'.

some things are so so special about living here, and many of them are not the things i thought would be, or even was aware of, when we made aliyah.
i love that our children are in school with children who speak russian, ethiopian (amharic), french, spanish, english, or hebrew at home, but they are all israelis together in school and play together in ivrit.
i love that if i forget to take maaser from our home-grown fruits before shabbat, we will have to spend 25 hours looking regretfully at the mound of clementinas that we can't eat.
because i come from a country with very few towns with sizeable jewish communities, i love that even small villages can have shuls, mikvaot, kosher stores, and orthodox jews.
i love having major archaeological finds made almost on my doorstep.
i love how astonishingly, blurringly fast plants grow here, so that i haven;t yet slipped into the rhythm of when to expect to see fruits and vegetables in the shops (whoever heard of strawberries being ripe in december? wimbledon hasn;t even begun yet!).
i also, because i have friends from so many different points in my life and quite a few different countries, love that so many dropped threads and old friendships can be picked up again here, now that we are in the same country again.
i love the small things that remind me that we are all jews together keeping the same (or very similar) minhagim, like that the local supermarkets not only had special offers on oil and candles and potatoes before chanukah, but also on icing sugar, jam, and super-absorbent kitchen towels.
i love that the shop assistants chide my daughter not to suck her thumb, because we are all one family, after all.

and so, we move on to the next stage of aliyah. that of living life, the same as ever before, but this time in the right place. we move slowly into finding a new balance between wonder & excitement, and routine & the common-place. because we are no longer tourists or olim chadashim, pointing excitedly at every israeli experience. but we are & always yehudim, who are so grateful that we are blessed to live in our own holy land that we try to hold on to that wide-eyed, fresh-off-the-boat astonishment that all this could be real.

Baruch Hashem.

Women & Chanukah: Halachos, Heroines & Holiness

To go to the sources, click here.

A Review of the Chanukah Time Period:

• Greek rule 3468-3621/323-140bce begun by Alexander the Great (positive period).
• Increasing hellenization of Jews; rise of the Misyavnim: Jews change their names, attend gymnasiums, Torah-jews are forced to flee from cities. 
• Misyavnim fight Torah Jewry to gain political & cultural control. 
• Rule of Antiochus 3 (c.200-190bce): Misyavnim openly confront Torah-Jewry; impose control through taxation.
• Antiochus 4 (‘wicked King Antiochus’) forbids torah observance (shabbat; milah; taharas hamishpacha; rosh chodesh; possibly Jewish ownership of possessions); the Misyavnim begin to hide their milah in competitions, usurp the Kehuna & turn the Temple into pagan temple.
• 3597/165 BCE - Miracle of Chanuka. Temple rededicated, but Syrian-Greeks & Misyavnim control all the rest of the country. 
• 3621-3725/140-36 BCE - Hasmonean Dynasty. Jews in control of the country. 
• Ongoing conflict from tzadokim (breakaway Jewish sect) towards Torah Jews; 
• King Yannai murders Torah Jews in a 6-year purge c. 70 bce; 
• Eventually civil war b/w Hasmonean brothers Hyrkanus & Aristobulous leads to Hyrkanus calling in the Romans to settle their dispute. Romans then take control of country through puppet king Hyrkanus (from 63 bce). Hasmonean dynasty ends w/Herod’s murder of remaining Hasmoneans in 36bce

This is neither an article about halachah, nor to be taken as a psak halacha (halachic ruling). We are just going to do some intersting tracing of a practice through halacha.

We’re going to hear 3 stories of women today: Judith, Chana & her seven sons (which I’m sure you all learned in school or cheder); and the daughter of the Kohen Gadol, or at least of someone. There is a problem with the Judith and bat kohen-gadol stories, as we shall see; the sources are somewhat confused & not very reliable. All of them are all v late sources - midrashim are not real midrashim in their period of provenance but medieval, or are found in apocrypha which only survived to modern times through its inclusion in the Greek Septuagint of the Bible, and so because Jews did not keep them as holy texts, there is every likelihood that the text became corrupted at some point in its history. The versions we have today of the apocrypha were not even preserved in their original Hebrew, but in Greek, and then re-translated back into Hebrew.

You’ll find a translation of each of these stories - or a version of each of these stories - on the source sheet.

1-Judith: this is the most famous, and almost most confused, story. We have 4 versions of what happened: 1 is in the apocrypha, and 3 are medieval texts (so there is no reliable documentation of it from the time period in which it occurred). Furthermore, various important details were edited in the apocrypha so as to make it more acceptable to the Romans: for example, the name of the city was changed from Jerusalem to Betulia, the general in the story was named Holofernes even though the dates are wrong for this man, in order to make it not seem like the populist uprising propaganda which it secretly was.

(have a look at the story of Judith here).

Ok. So it may not come across in my translation, but the original - all the versions - borrow v heavily from megillas esther, especially, and also from the story of yael cutting off the head of sisera, and other good-sounding pesukim in tanach.

There is huge confusion about who Judith was - the Apocrypha & 2 of the medieval midrashim call her Judith & a widow, but they give different genealogies for her, and one just says she was a girl in the city and that’s all. None say that she was the daughter of any kohen or kohen gadol.
This medrash is the only one which mentions milk at all, and none mention cheese, which she is most famous for. The main point, in all the version, as one might expect, is that the general got drunk on wine. It is possible and necessary to ask how much of this can be relied on as having happened. We’re going to come back to that, because this story as well as the next one are quoted by rishonim and acharonim as having really happened, but as we will see the details are not at all clear.

Ok, so we will come back to the story of Judith and how it was transmitted in halachic literature, but first will look at another woman of Chanukah, who it seems is often confused with Judith. I’ve given you the translation of the whole thing because it is not as long. You can read it here.


Ok. As you can see, this is the one about a bride who avenges having to submit to this droit de seigneur-type practice. There is also another midrashic version of this, in which the girl is the daughter of Matisyahu Kohen Gadol - but this is always a problematic title. Was Matisyahu ever the Kohen Gadol? probably not, because the Misyavnim took over the priesthood before his time, so likelihood is that this girl was a daughter of Matisyahu, who was the son of Yochanan Kohen Gadol, and this was elided into the phrase we are so familiar with. Otherwise the second version is very similar, in that she tore her clothes and stood naked, her brothers were furious, and then she inspired them to avenge what she’d otherwise have to go through. But here it was not the woman who did the killing, but her brothers. This is a detail left out when elided with the story of Judith.

Right. Last story-you probably all learned about Chana & her seven sons. I'm not going to discuss this one so much because does not make a halachic appearance, but i've included it for the sake of being thorough. Chana is probably not a chanuka woman. Her story is included, in far more gruesome detail, in the Book of Maccabees in the Apocrypha, but this version is also in the Talmud, along with many other sad stories about the terrible things that happened during the Hadrianic persecutions after the Bar Kochba revolt, & seems likeliest it happened then not at chanuka time. You can read that here too.

Also while arguably heroic, Chana's story is not in the same catergory as judith & bas matisyahu (or whoever they were).

Halachic Impact:

Ok. Now lets  see what impact those first two women had on halacha.

The Talmud, in Masechet Megilla regarding Purim, and in Masechet Shabbat regarding Chanuka, says about women that they have to keep the positive mitzvot of those holidays, even though they are mitzvot aseh she’hazman gerama (positive, time-bound commandments from which women are usually exempt), because ‘af hen hayu b’oto hanes’- 'they too were incuded in the miracle'. I’ve given the source from Masechet Shabbat because that’s the one about chanuka, but the 5-word-phrase is the same. (see source 1)

שבת כג. דא"ר יהושע בן לוי נשים חייבות בנר חנוכה שאף הן היו באותו הנס:

I am not going to discuss what the halacha is practically, or give any psak or say what anyone should do. I am interested in this: what does ‘involved in the miracle’ mean?

So let’s jump around a bit - going to begin with Tosfos (a group of commentators writing about halachic issues in gemara b/w 1100-1500approx). You can read it here - it's source #4.

Tosfos includes 2 opinions - that of the Rashbam (earliest of the Tosfos and often taken on his own right), that women were primarily responsible for the miracle, in uniquely feminine ways (not just happened to be a woman not a man), thus women could/should join primary mitzva.
But then Tosfos rejects this and brings the version from the Yerushalmi that ‘women were included in that danger’: Ie, women join in the primary mitzva b/c they too were threatened by the enemy from which we all were saved.

The Mordechai (ashkenazi halachic commentary on Talmud who mostly follows Tosfos) gives a subtly diff middle-of-the-road view. See source #5 here. He accepts the opinion of the Rashbam that the miracle was done through women, but qualifies that miracle was done for them just as for men: not that miracle happened only because of women, also not just they also suffered, but they shared in the miracle AND in the suffering.

Now look at Rashi in sources 2 and 3 here. Rashi comments on phrase of 'they too were included in the miracle' in two different palce. 1st time seems to be saying that women shared in making the miracle, but in the second comment, he's saying that women shared in the danger.

Why does he give 2 different explanations? notice what his dibbur hamaschil is (the words one which he comments). In one, it is ‘af hen’ - that is, how were they included? because they were also included in the threat. In the other, it is ‘hoyu b’oso hanes’: ie. What miracle were they included in? that he was killed through a woman. So Rashi holds that a woman was the instrument of the miracle, but seems to hold that she is included in the mitzva on the strength of having been included in the danger.

Ok. Now moving on to halacha. Note that everyone agrees that women are involved in the mitzvos of Purim & Chankah because of their involvement in the miracle in some way:  either it came through them, or they too suffered, or the miracle was for them as well as for men. the stories seem to have meshed.

See source 5 here Shulchan aruch/rema.
Notice no reason is given here for the first custom, but later halachists do give a reason. The mechaber seems to be agreeing with rashbam that women had uniquely femenine role in the miracle.

Rema -he is not the only one to make the cheese point. The Rishonim (early Sages 1000-1500 CE approx) are all very adament about the role of cheese in the chanuka story, despite the fact that as we saw cheese never comes into anything (though milk does, once) and really, the point seems to be the wine which got him drunk.

Mishna brura in source 7 shows a real mix of the 2 stories. There is no version of the stories which says that Judith was the daughter of a kohen gadol, or that she was a bride. Equally, the story of the daughter of the kohen gadol did not involve cheese, nor did she cut off his head herself (it was her brothers who did it). Many rishonim - almost all of them actually - conflate the 2 stories in this way. It makes it quite hard to unravel what mish the Mishna Brurah thinks ‘af hen hayu’ means.

See source 9 here: the Mishna Brurah explains the ruling of the shulchan aruch that we saw above, that women can light the chanukah lights. It seems that he follows the opinion of the Mordechai, that the ‘miracle was for their sakes’, but in source 7  the Mishna Brurah seems to say that Judith carried out the miracle. The Shulchan Aruch seems to rule that 'af hen hayu' means that the miracle happened through the women's hands (like that Rashbam does).

So it’s v interesting that the Acharonim (later sages post 1500 CE approx) all say that 'af hen hayu' refers to either women doing the miracle, or that the miracle was done for their sakes - not just that they also suffered.
All the acharonim are adament that:
1. the judith/bat kohen gadol story really happened, even if they conflate the two,
2 about the cheese/milk involvement even though the important point is the wine, and only one version inplies it at all.

The interesting question is, why do they take the stories so seriously? I have several thoughts/possibilities, and maybe you can think of more.
A friend pointed out that since the midrashim about judith - & bat kohen gadol- are all late sources, it seems likely they were trying to inspire heroism and fighting-back with these stories.
Also, the idea that the miracle was done by a woman is v important in the theme of ‘lo bakoach lo bachoyil ki im b’ruchi’ ("neither by strength nor by valour will you succeed but rather by G-d's Will") - or as judith herself says, Hashem’s Name will be glorified even more if enemy is killed by a weak woman.

Regarding the cheese/milk theme:
1. possibly more feminine, more weak, and therefore more of a miracle if someone is killed through use of milk/cheese than wine.
2. milk we know is a metaphor for torah, so it is maybe better metaphorically to say he was killed with the milk, that is, killed through torah - again lo bakoach lo bachoyil idea.
3. maybe not a popular thing to say, but may be echoes of yael coming through.

The main and most important point is that someone was killed by a woman - this is definite, the details are unclear - and that’s what the halachic discussion centres on and also the central concept of the might of Rome/Greece being overthrown through the medium of a weak woman...

Final idea from the Bnei Yisaschar.  You're probably familiar with the thought that redemption came through women. He quotes the Ari - essentially, women's involvement in the miracle is not happenstance, but rather it had to be this way. See source 10 here.

The opinion of the Beni Yisaschar is that this redemption from Greece needed to come through women just as all previous redemptions had done. It's not that this story was made up to be a ‘woman’ story, but that a woman’s vital involvement was divinely prescribed. That redemption, like all the others, had to come about in a feminine way. And the Beni Yisaschar says that the future, final, ultimate redemption will come about through G-d's attribute of netzach, which is masculine - that is to say, through men.

There is a footnote of Rabbi Ellinson in his books 'Women and Halacha', stating that these differences of opinion over whether 'af hen hayu b'oto hanes' means that women were the instrument of the miracle of salvation, or that women, like men, were in danger from this threat, can have halachic ramifications. His example is that of women saying hallel on yom haatzmaut. Should women also say hallel, because women, like men, were part of nation which was threatened? Or should women not say hallel, because there was no uniquely feminine role in the miracle of salvation that was the establishment of the State of Israel (this presupposes that you would say hallel at all on yom haaztmaut. Just go with the assumption for now, ok?).

So i wonder, perhaps this is part of what the Bnei Yisaschar writes in the name of the Ari? In all the past redemption, we’ve had women bringing about the miracle of salvation specifically through their femininity, in the most feminine way. Whether Judith and the daughter of the Kohen Gadol are 2 events, or one, or more than that, is not important ideologically. What matters is that there was a woman who instigated the uprising, who encouraged men to fight, who through her femininity - like Esther, like Yael, like the Righteous Women mentioned in Egypt - conquered the enemy.

This matters, because it places Chanukah firmly in the annals as a real redemption, not just a pause in fighting. It also ensures that our focus is not on the military victory, which was anyway v small and temporary, but on the spiritual victory which did endure. Possibly without this tag of women's involvement in the miracle, we would not be sure that the Chanukah story could really be called a redemption, but rather a small, local, temporary victory.

So regardless of the halacha, the role of women in the Chanukah story is vitally important, not just for women, but for all of the Jewish nation, in making Chanukah into an enduring story of redemption. The exile of Greece is often described as a separate exile that segues immediately into the exile of Edom/Rome (which we still live within today). With the involvement of Judith and the bat-kohen-gadol, we now have a story of redemption from the Grecian exile which follows the same pattern as our redemptions from the exiles of Egypt, through the 'righteous women', and of Babylon/Persia through Esther. As the Bnei Yisaschar continues, we have now only one redemption. left to go, which this time will be masculine in its nature (presumably carried out by men, so the pressure is all on them, i reckon), and will be complete and final, bimheirah biyameinu - amen.

Women & Chanukah: Halachos, Heroines & Holiness - Sources

These are the sources to a chanukah shiur i gave. Write up of the shiur in article form is to follow.

The long midrashim in English are my slightly free translation of the version in Otzar Hamidrashim. Note the parallels to Esther and to Yosef.

1. Shabbat 23a

R’ Yehoshua ben Levi said, ‘women are obligated to light Chanukah candles, since they too were involved in that miracle’.

דא"ר יהושע בן לוי נשים חייבות בנר חנוכה שאף הן היו באותו הנס:

2. Rashi, Shabbat 23a

Since the Greeks decreed that all virgins who marry must lie first with the local governor, and a miracle was made through the hands of a woman.

היו באותו הנס. שגזרו יוונים על כל בתולות הנשואות להיבעל לטפסר תחלה ועל יד אשה נעשה הנס:

3. Rashi, Megilla 4a

Since Haman also decreed to kill the women; ‘to destroy and to kill and to wipe out, from young to old, infants and women, etc’.

שאף הן היו באותו הנס. שאף על הנשים גזר המן להשמיד להרוג ולאבד מנער ועד זקן טף ונשים וגו':

4. Tosfos, Megilla 4a

They too were involved in that miracle: The Rashbam explains that the real miracle occurred through women’s hands; at Purim through Esther, and at Chanukah through Judith, & at Pesach they were redeemed through the merit of the righteous women of that generation. But the language is difficult here, because the words ‘they too’ imply that their role was secondary, ... therefore it seems to me that ‘they too’ were subject to the uncertainty of being destroyed and killed, and similarly on Pesach, they were also enslaved to Pharaoh in Egypt, and on Chanukah the decree affected them greatly.

שאף הן היו באותו הנס - פירש רשב"ם שעיקר הנס היה על ידן בפורים על ידי אסתר בחנוכה על ידי יהודית בפסח שבזכות צדקניות שבאותו הדור נגאלו. וקשה דלשון שאף הן משמע שהן טפלות ולפירושו היה לו לומר שהן לכך נראה לי שאף הן היו בספק דלהשמיד ולהרוג וכן בפסח שהיו משועבדות לפרעה במצרים וכן בחנוכה הגזירה היתה מאד עליהן

5. Mordechai, Pesachim ch10

Since they too were involved in that miracle; ... They are obligated to hear the megilla because the miracle came about through Esther, and similarly in the chanukah lights because the miracle came about through Judith ... In the Yerushalmi it says that ‘also they were involved in that danger’, therefore it seems that ‘they too were involved etc’ is to say that the miracle was also done for them, just as as for the men.

שם ע"ב שאף הן היו באותו הנס פ"ה ע"י הנשים בא הנס ... וכן חייבות במקרא מגלה לפי שבא הנס ע"י אסתר וכן בנר חנוכה שבא הנס ע"י יהודית כדאיתא בשבת [דף כג א] ... מדקאמר אף ועוד דבירושלמי קאמר שאף הן היו באותו ספק לכך נראה דהכי פירושו שאף הן היו כו' כלומר שאף להן נעשה נס כמו לאנשים:

6. Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim 670:1-2

1. The eight days of Chanukah begin on the 25th of Kislev ... we are permitted to do work. Women have the custom not to work while the candles are burning, and there are those that say that one should not take this lightly.
2. Rema: Some say that we eat cheese on Chanukah because the miracle was made with the cheese which Judith fed to the enemy.

א) בכ"ה בכסליו (מתחילין) שמונת ימי חנוכה ... אבל מותרין בעשיית מלאכה: ונוהגות הנשים שלא לעשות מלאכה בעוד שהנרות דולקות, ויש מי שאומר שאין להקל להם. ב) הגה: ... יש אומרים שיש לאכול גבינה בחנוכה לפי שהנס נעשה בחלב (י) שהאכילה יהודית את האויב

7. Mishnah Brurah, 670:10

Which Judith fed: She was the daughter of Yochanan Kohen Gadol, and there was a decree that every bride lie with the governor first. She fed the leader of the enemies cheese to intoxicate him, and cut off his head.

י: שהאכילה יהודית: היא היתה בתו של יוחנן כ"ג והיתה גזירה שכל ארוסה תבעל לטפסר תחלה והאכילה לראש הצוררים גבינה לשכרותו וחתכה את ראשו וברחו כולם:

8. Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim 675:3

Women light the Chanukah lights, since they too are obligated in it.

 אשה מדלקת נר חנוכה, שאף היא חייבת בה

9. Mishnah Brurah, 675:10

Since they too are obligated in it: Since the miracle was also for their sakes, since the decree was that every virgin who marries  must sleep first with the governor. And also, the salvation occurred through the hands of a woman, since the daughter of Yochanan Kohen Gadol cut off the head of the leader of the enemy.

ס"ק י שאף היא חייבת בה-שהנס היה גם להן שהגזירה היתה על כל בתולה הנישאת שתבעל להגמון תחלה וגם התשועה נעשה ע"י אשה שבת יוחנן כ"ג חתכה ראשו של ראש הצוררים:

10. Bnei Yisaschar, Kislev-Teves 3

The Ari z”l writes, all redemption that have ever been have all come about through the illumination of the attribute of hod, therefore all redemptions have occurred in conjunction with a woman, through whose hands the miracle has occurred. (Hod is a feminine attribute, in opposition to netzach, which is masculine.) Thus, redemption from Egypt began to shine through the hands of Batya the daughter of Pharaoh; against Sisera, it was Devorah; ... from the Persian & Medean exile, through Esther; and from the Greeks through the hands of Judith, as we know. But the future redemption bimheirah b’yameinu, when we will leave the Edomite exile, will be through an illumination of netzach ... & this seems to me to be similar to all song being written in the feminine, but future song bimheirah biyameinu will be in the masculine. (& realise that after the Greek exile there is only this long exile over us, from which we will be redeemed through netzach...)

יח) והנראה דהנה כתב האריז"ל כל הגאולות שהיו מימות עולם הכל היה על ידי הארת מדת הוד, על כן כל הגאולות היו בצירוף אשה אשר נעשה הנס על ידה (כי הוד הוא בבחינת נוקבא איהו בנצח ואיהי בהוד) על כן גאולת מצרים התחילה להתנוצץ על ידי בתיה בת פרעה, ובסיסרא היתה דבורה ... פרס ומדי על ידי אסתר, יון על ידי יהודית כנודע, אבל הגאולה העתידה ב"ב בצאתנו מגלות אדום תהיה על ידי הארת נצח ... וזה מה שנ"ל שעל כן כל השירות היה לשון נקבה [ע"ח שער ל"ה פ"ה] שירה ולעתיד ב"ב אז יושר השיר הזה [ישעיה כו א] לשון זכר, הבן הדברים, (והנה אחר גלות יון שוב לא נשאר בחוב עלינו רק הגלות הארוך הזה שתהיה הגאולה ב"ב על ידי הנצח...

Midrash Chemdas Yomim: The story of Judith (abridged)

In the 12th year of the reign of Holofernes, the king of greece, he went up to conquer Jerusalem, and gathered 120,000 soldiers and 92,000 archers. All the people went out in to the streets and prayed all night.
The next day, Holofernes gave the order to go out to battle with the Jews. Holofernes ordered his soldiers to guard all the water sources around the city, so that no one would have any water and they would be conquered without a pitched battle. 20 days later, Jerusalem had barely any water & the people were very thirsty. The people gathered against Uzziah, men, women and children together with one voice, saying ‘Hashem has judged us & will give us over to the king. Let us give ourselves up to him. Isn’t it better for us to serve G-d as slaves to Holofernes than to die of thirst and be killed? When they had finished crying, Uzziah got up with his eyes swollen with tears, & said ‘Be strong and have courage! We may find chessed from Hashem. Allow another 5 days, and then if there is no salvation we shall do as you said’.
Judith the widow, daughter of Be’eri, was very beautiful & found favour in the eyes of all who saw her. She was G-d-fearing, & when she heard Uzziah’s words she sent to call the him and the chachamim to her. She said to them, ‘What is this that you have planned, Uzziah! To give this city into the hand of the enemy if there is no salvation after 5 days! Who are you to test Hashem!’ Uzziah and the kohanim said to her: ‘You are right in all that you say.’ Judith said, ‘I have a plan. At nighttime I will go out with my maidservant at night, and you will not ask me where I am going’. Uzziah said to her, ‘Go in peace, and may Hashem help you’.
Judith took off her widow’s weeds and sackcloth, washed and anointed herself, curled her hair and placed a tiara on her head, dressed in expensive clothes with gold and jewels, & scented herself so that any man would be charmed by her. She gave her maidservant a container of milk and a bottle of wine, little cakes of oil and honey, and bread and cheese, and she went.
Judith went out of the city with her handmaiden, until she encountered Holofernes’ guards.  She said to them, ‘I am Judith, daughter of the Jews. I am fleeing to you because I know that the city will be given into your hands. Please take me to Holofernes, so that I can tell him the secrets of the Jews and to show him the way to go to take the city’. When they heard this and saw her beauty they were befuddled, so they brought her to the king. As soon as the king saw her, he strongly desired her. Judith bowed down, and the king said ‘Do not be afraid, for I will not harm you, but tell me why you have come’. She said, ‘oh my king, we have sinned before our G-d, and our prophets have told us that we will be given into your hands. We are all so scared because we are dying of hunger and thirst. Soon we will be forced to ransack the holy Temple to eat the sacred wheat, wine and oil, for we will have no other food left. When that happened, G-d will surely abandon us for that sin, and we shall be given into your hands’. This was good in the eyes of the King and his servants. The king ordered her to be brought to his house and to eat at his table. Judith asked permission to go out at night and at dawn to pray before G-d. She went outside the camp and immersed in the mikvah. On the 3rd day the king made a great feast for all his princes, and told his harem-keeper to bring Judith. She said, ‘All the king says I shall do’. So she got dressed in her beauty, and came to stand before him. When the king saw her beauty immediately he was lovesick for her, and he said ‘Eat my bread with joy, and drink my wine, because you have found favour in my eyes’. And she sat and ate, and opened the container of milk and drank, and also the king drank. He drank more wine than he had ever drunk before. Then all his servants when to their own places and only Judith remained with Holofernes in his bed, and he slept as though he was dead. Judith told her handmaiden to stand outside and keep guard before the tent. Judith got up form the bed and took Holofernes’ sword which was hanging there, and she seized the hair on his head and cut at his neck until she had cut off his head. She called her handmaiden, and together they cut up the rest of his body into pieces, and then she put his head into her handmaiden’s basket, and they went out together to pray as was their way. They crossed the camp safely and came to the gates of the city.

Otzar Hamidrashim pp.189-90: The daughter of the Kohen Gadol

When the Greeks saw that Israel was not affected by their decrees, they arose and decreed a bitter and foul decree, that every bride must go from her wedding canopy to spend the first night with the Hegemon of that place. When Israel heard this their hands were tied and their strength diminished; they stopped getting married, and the daughters of Israel grew old as virgins. The Greeks raped the virgins of Israel, and this continued for 3 years and 8 months.
Until the case of the daughter of Matisyahu Kohen Gadol, who married the son of one of the Chashmonaim whose name was Eliezer. At her wedding she was sitting in a throne, and all the great men of Israel came to her wedding-feast to give honour to Matisyahu and the son of the Chashmonai, because there were none greater than them in that time. And when they came to eat, Chana bas Matisyahu arose from her throne, and she took hold of her gown in her two hands and tore it open, so that she stood revealed before all of Israel, her father and mother, and her bridegroom.
When her brothers saw, they were embarrassed and they bowed their faces to the ground and tore their clothing, and then arose to kill her. She said to them, ‘Listen to me, my brothers and loved ones! Why, when I stand before tzaddikim naked and free of any sin, are you jealous (to avenge) me, but you are not jealous for me when you give me into the hands of an uncircumcised one who will defile me?! Why do you not learn from the example of Shimon and Levi, the brothers of Dina, who were jealous for their sister and killed the town of Shechem even though there were only two of them. They gave their souls over to the unity of G-d, and He saved them and they were not destroyed. You are five brothers, and there are more than two hundred more of the finest youths of the priesthood. Place your trust in Hashem, and He will help you’. And she opened her mouth and wept. She said ‘Master of the Universe! If you do not have pity upon us, have pity for Your holy great Name, with which we are called, and avenge our vengeance today’.
At that moment, her brothers were filled with jealous zeal and they said ‘Come, let us consult about what to do’. They discussed it with each other and decided: ‘Come, let us bring our sister to the great king, and we will say to him ‘Our sister is the daughter of the Kohen Gadol, and there is no one in the whole of Israel who is greater than our father. It is not fitting for our sister to lie with the local hegemon, but only with the king who is as great as we are.’ Then we will go in to him and kill him, and go out, and then we will begin on his servants and princes, and Hashem will help us.’
This is what they did. Hashem made a great salvation for them, and they heard a heavenly voice coming out of the kodesh kedoshim saying: ‘All Israel has won over Antiochia; thus G-d has made a salvation for them in these our days’.

Channah and her Seven Sons

R’ Yehuda said: This refers to the woman and her seven sons. They were taken and brought before the Emperor. The Emperor said to (the first son): ‘Serve the idol’. The son said to him ‘It is written in the Torah ‘I am Hashem your G-d’. They took him and killed him. They brought the next one before the Emperor and told him ‘Serve the idol’. He said, ‘It is written in the Torah ‘Have no other gods beside me’. They took him and killed him. They took the third son and said to him ‘Serve the idols’. He said, ‘It says in the Torah ‘Offerings to other gods anger Him’. They took him and killed him. They brought the fourth son and said, ‘Serve the idol’. He said, ‘It says in the Torah ‘Do not bow down to another god’. They took him and killed him. They took the next son and told him ‘Serve the idol’. He said, ‘It says in the Torah ‘Listen O Israel, Hashem is our G-d, Hashem is One’. They took him and killed him. They took the sixth son and said to him ‘Serve the idol’. He said, It says in the Torah ‘You know this day and repeat it upon your hearts that Hashem is the G-d in the heavens above and on the earth below, there is no other’. They took him and killed him. They took the youngest son and said to him ‘Serve our idol’. He said, ‘It says in the Torah ‘Hashem says this to you etc and Hashem swore to you today.’ We have already promised the Holy One Blessed be He that we will not leave Him for any other god, and He too has promised us that He will not leave us for any other nation.’ The Emperor said to him, ‘I will throw my ring down before you and you can bend down to pick it up, so that they will think you have obeyed my command (to bow down)’. The boy said to him, ‘I pity you, Emperor, I pity you. If your honour is so great, how much more so is the honour of Hashem!’. They took him to kill him, and his mother said ‘Give him to me so that I can kiss him a little’. She said to him ‘My son, go and tell Avraham your father ‘you sacrificed one son, and I have sacrificed seven sons’. Then she went up to the roof and flung herself down and died. A heavenly voice came and said ‘Happy is the mother of sons’.

a response to rabbi kimche's open letter about limmud.

A guest post from my mother:

Dear Rabbi Kimche 

I read your open letter about Limmud  on Friday afternoon, and my menuchat shabbat was greatly challenged by what I read.   Having thought about it and reread your letter, I hope you'll consider my response. 

Yes, let's be honest:   Limmud is fun, different, vibrant, entertaining and a challenge to Orthodox Judaism.  Anglo-Judaism has by and large (rather successfully) avoided any challenge, particularly one that involves learning and education, creative thinking, discussion outside its own dalet-amos, or teaching its children/ young adults how to respond to the occasionally difficult and often daft things that the outside world (including non-orthodox, non-observant Jews) consider important.     

Let's be honest:   there is some stuff at Limmud that is apikorsus [and then some], and some of it is just plain incredible.  The Conference has no hidden 'agenda' -- it is an open opportunity.   Information in the handbook makes clear the affiliation of all presenters, and there is much that is good and valuable.   Since Limmud exists and is flourishing, I think that the Orthodox should be there, to teach and to talk and to share authentic Torah--  their continued absence creates a vacuum and suggests that they have nothing to give [or nothing they want to give] to their fellow Jews.  

Yes, Ruth Gledhill entertainingly compares Limmud to Glastonbury;   I think 'university' would be a better analogy.    Universities offer serious courses, and at the same time, provide lots of spare-time discussion opportunities over meals and coffee and just hanging about time, and also have space for special interest groups and clubs that are entirely optional.   Let's be honest:   living and learning involves thought and challenge and choice.       

Let's be honest:   after a shiur, never has the teacher/rabbi/ rebbitzen/ educator said to the four or five people who hang about at the end anything like 'come, let's find somewhere to sit down and continue this discussion'.   Never has it been said:   there are important ideas here,  good questions,  let's continue now or arrange to continue …    

Let's be honest:   North-west London Jewry discourages radical thought.  The community is so worried about other influences that its young are cautioned about university,  encouraged to live at home if they want tertiary education, put in fear of losing their yiddishkeit and their souls to a world that is only interested in corrupting them.    How often are youngsters at university asked 'how many frum Jews are on your course?'  as if that's the main consideration.  They scurry in to classes and race back to the safety of Hendon, Golders Green, Edgware.   Better they should do Open University!   Their intellectual worlds are shrinking as surely as their geographical boundaries -- they cannot imagine living anywhere other than the gilded ghettoes where everyone acts and dresses and shops alike;   how welcoming are we to those who are different?   

You mentioned a young man who should have known better than to fall for Reform Bible Criticism;   your description is not an indictment of Limmud but a ringing condemnation of his educational, religious, and social background and upbringing....   why does he [and the many like him in  our community] not know 'mah lehashiv'?     More than 40 years ago,  I encountered these ideas when I went to university and had a hard time with it precisely because my teachers of Kodesh subjects, whenever I asked a question, thumped the desk and told me to do and not ask.     

If you don't want to go to Limmud, fine, so be it.   If you don't want your children to attend, that's between you and them.   But please:  attending Limmud is not like attending Reform or Liberal Sabbath Services;   making that connection is inaccurate,  a false analogy, and a fine example of an attempt at marginalising thinking Jews.   

- Sandy Littman is an experienced educator, teaching regularly at LSJS and at many other forums for women's education around London. She is a veteran teacher at both Ner Yisrael Synagogue and at Limmud.