Torah Umesorah Breaking News! A former president and a porn star walk into a Manhattan courtroom....

 וּבְלֶכְתְּךָ֣ בַדֶּ֔רֶךְ וּֽבְשָׁכְבְּךָ֖ וּבְקוּמֶֽךָ׃

וְלִמַּדְתֶּ֥ם

אֹתָ֛ם אֶת־בְּנֵיכֶ֖ם לְדַבֵּ֣ר בָּ֑ם בְּשִׁבְתְּךָ֤ בְּבֵיתֶ֙ךָ֙

וּבְלֶכְתְּךָ֣ בַדֶּ֔רֶךְ וּֽבְשָׁכְבְּךָ֖ וּבְקוּמֶֽךָ׃

VAAD ROSHEI YESHIVA

HaRav Hillel David
HaRav Shmuel Kamenetsky
HaRav Aryeh Malkiel Kotler

HaRav Dovid Schustal
HaRav Aharon Feldman
HaRav Dovid Harris
HaRav Elya Brudny

HaRav Shlomo Halioua
HaRav Yaakov Bender
HaRav A. Dovid Goldberg

HaRav Chaim Y. Hoberman
HaRav Yosef Eichenstein

(Pool / Getty)

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Donald Trump’s hush-money trial was already strange enough. A former president and a porn star walk into a Manhattan courtroom. But an additional cast of characters have recently inserted themselves into the drama. During this week’s testimony from Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen, Republican politicians of many different ranks donned their courtroom best and headed downtown to put on a show for the boss. Although these particular charges could be the weakest of the many indictments Trump faces, one got the sense that none of his party allies was there to discuss the finer points of the law.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who quite famously opposes pornography on religious grounds, nevertheless accompanied the man accused of cheating on his wife with a porn star to his trial yesterday. Outside the building, Johnson told reporters that the case is a “sham” and a “ridiculous prosecution.” At Monday’s session, Senators Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and J. D. Vance of Ohio apparently adopted the roles of Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot for the event, each offering running commentary on the “dingy” courtroom, with its “depressing” vibes; the disturbing number of mask-wearing attendees; and the “psychological torture” being inflicted on Trump (who, as a reminder, has been charged with 34 felonies in this case alone).

The former presidential candidates Vivek Ramaswamy and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum took turns bemoaning the state of the justice system. Even a few bit players wanted in on the action, including pro-Trump Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird, who flew all the way from Des Moines to stand before the news cameras and remind viewers that “politics has no place in a criminal prosecution.”

You might be wondering: Don’t these people have anything better to do? The answer is that, in today’s Republican Party, prostration before Trump is as much part of the job as anything else.

All of this showboating has been happening for several reasons. “At its most tangible level, what we’re seeing is a work-around to the gag order,” Sarah Isgur, a former senior spokesperson for the Trump-era Justice Department, told me. The ex-president was warned by the presiding judge, Juan Merchan, that if he talks or posts any more about the jury or the judge’s family, he could face jail time. So, just as in a political campaign, Trump’s surrogates are stepping up to stump for him.

Legally, Trump can’t ask these politicians to violate the order on his behalf. But why would he have to ask when they know exactly what he wants from them? “The playbook that Trump expects party members in good standing to follow is in public,” Amanda Carpenter, a former GOP staffer and now an editor at Protect Democracy, told me. Trump’s given these acolytes their cues with his posts on Truth Social, and they’re dutifully following them.

Lower Manhattan has, over the past week, become a pilgrimage site for those vying to be in Trump’s inner circle, with a court appearance carrying the promise of a holy anointing. You could also think about this courtside display as another audition in the early veepstakes. For Ramaswamy, Burgum, and Vance, in particular, this moment is a chance to demonstrate their abiding loyalty to Trump in the hopes of being selected as his running mate. Others may have reasoned that a little time in front of the cameras yelling “Sham trial!” will go a long way toward snagging a plum Cabinet position in a second Trump administration. (A virtual unknown such as Bird, of course, probably doesn’t expect to get either of these things. But, as every climber knows, one must never miss an opportunity to ingratiate oneself with the boss.)

Which brings us to one final observation. “There’s a larger, more philosophical reason they’re all there,” Isgur said. “That’s what the Republican Party stands for now.” There is no real platform, no consistent set of principles. There is only Trump, and degrees of loyalty to him. These courtroom groupies are simply responding to the obvious incentives—“If you didn’t know that the Republican Party is now focused on Trump,” Isgur said, “I’ve got an oceanfront property to sell you in Arizona.”

That’s their deal, but what about the boss’s? Trump no longer appears concerned only with shielding himself from political accountability. Now that he has almost clinched the nomination, he’s using the party to shield himself from criminal accountability, too. This has given the GOP a new rallying cry. “The Big Lie in 2020 was that the election was stolen,” Carpenter said. “The Big Lie 2.0 is that justice has been weaponized against him to deprive him of the presidency.”

The Incredible Genius That Is Rabbi Yitzchok Breitowtz Shlita - Every Word Is Brilliant - DO YOURSELVES A FAVOR AND LISTEN IN ITS ENTIRETY & SUBSCRIBE TO HIS FEED!

This is why Israel’s independence is so important and worth fighting for no matter whether we agree or not or what the rest of the world may think. Politics is corrupt and culture is both creative and divisive.

CAMP MESIFTA TORAH VODAATH SUMMER 1948

 

 

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https://boystownjerusalem.org/

 

Zionism vs. Judaism 

 

If Ben-Gurion went too far in implying that Jews must live in Israel, insisting that Jews have the right to live Jewishly there was exactly on target 

 

 

David Ben-Gurion in his library in Sde Boker.

 

Yom or Chag HaAtzmaut is this coming week. I don’t give a toss for what the world thinks. For me, it is a day to celebrate.

But there are issues worth dwelling on. Once that anti-Zionism and antisemitism were two different pathologies. After all, on the right and the left, the secular, and the religious there have always been Jews who have opposed Zionism as a political movement on principle.

Sadly, as a general rule, it is now clear that is not the case. Bomb threats against synagogues, schools, and Jewish institutions around the world are now everyday events. The pretense, or perhaps the delusion, is over.

I was brought up in a passionately religious Zionist family. My late father objected to religious parties on principle because of the inevitable corruption that is always associated with politics. At the same time, his religious inspiration came from what we would call the Haredi world, which certainly did not describe itself as Zionist. However, not all of them are opposed to the idea of a Jewish state. My father was not blind to Israel’s faults and fissures, but he was completely committed to the idea of a Jewish return to Zion. He insisted that we speak Hebrew and that even in prayer we used modern Hebrew or Ivrit, as opposed to the old Ashkenazi pronunciation that he was brought up on. And in the year before he died, in 1962, he had already decided to set up a Jewish school similar to Carmel outside Zichron Yaakov in Israel.

I went to a yeshiva in Israel first in the late 1950s. I witnessed then the divide that existed between the parties on the left and those on the right. The secular and the religious. In the early years of the state, Ben-Gurion, the prime minister held the view that now that political Zionism had achieved its aim of a Jewish state it was no longer necessary to preserve the distinction between Zionism and Judaism. But largely as a result of pressure from the United States of America and a reluctance to change, he was forced to backtrack on his assertion that what defined a Jew was whether he or she came to live in Israel in a Jewish homeland.

 I too always had deep reservations about Israeli politics. I identified with the worldview of the great Chief Rabbi Avraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), who tried to reconcile Jewish spiritual universality with deep religious commitment. I wholeheartedly supported the idea of a Jewish homeland not just for the negative reason that Jews needed somewhere to escape to when the world turned against us, but as a return to the biblical ideal of a holistic nation with its own traditions in an alien world. Over my career both in Israel and the Diaspora I have worked for reconciliation and understanding between Jews and other religions and between Israelis and Palestinians, both organizationally and personally.  I have always been a peacenik and believed in exchanging land for peace and reconciliation. I felt that occupation would have a negative impact on the occupiers. But one needed a willing peaceful partner and I have yet to be convinced that so far there has been one.

I was always aware of both Jewish and non-Jewish antisemitism in Britain. And political opponents of Israel both from Fascists and the Marxists. At Cambridge University, we had to defend our right to a homeland at Union debates. I recall a conference organized by the British Foreign Office I attended 30 years ago between Jewish and Palestinians, including Hamas representatives, that aimed to increase understanding on both sides. The Hamas spokesmen admitted quite openly that there would never be a lasting peace until Israel was destroyed and the most they would ever agree to, was a hudna, a ceasefire, no more.

I realized then that war, hot or cold, hatred for our very existence, would wax and wane, but never go away. Two families inhabiting the same house who will neither compromise nor fight. Intransigence and violence have always been at the root of the issue. From the era of Trumpeldor through the Arab massacres and riots in 1929 and declarations of war,  violence has never ceased. And now more than ever it is clear that it never will. When all nations lay down their swords, when all nationalism is abolished, then perhaps we may enter a messianic perfect world. But as long as hatred, competition, and ideological conflict persist we will never know permanent peace. That is the sad and at the same time the noble reality of being Jewish.

Ben-Gurion was wrong to imply one cannot be a Jew outside Israel. But he was right to stress that it was the Jewish right to live Judaism in their own land (in whatever degree they chose), without having to live under other nations. This is why Israel’s independence is so important and worth fighting for no matter whether we agree or not or what the rest of the world may think. Politics is corrupt and culture is both creative and divisive. This is probably why all religions have some form of messianism that looks to a supernatural force to bring everyone together. It hasn’t worked so far. But we must not give up the idea or stop fighting for it.

I do incline to retire Zionism as a separate ideology. But either way and regardless we celebrate Yom HaAtzmaut this year, even as we are also experiencing universal hatred as never before in our lifetime. Which only reinforces how important it is for us to be strong. And combat negativity with joy, celebration, and optimism.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/zionism-or-judaism/

In the eyes of the Biden administration Hamas is the smaller problem. The bigger problem is Benjamin Netanyahu. The U.S. is willing to live with Iran’s proxies everywhere, as part of its “regional integration” policy—i.e., appeasing Iran.

 

The Gantz Megillah

 

How America is using ex-IDF Chief Benny Gantz as its Trojan horse to impose U.S. demands—and ensure Israel’s defeat in Gaza

 

Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz arrives at the U.S. State Department in Washington ahead of a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on March 5, 2024

 

 

 

In the eyes of the Biden administration Hamas is the smaller problem. The bigger problem is Benjamin Netanyahu. The U.S. is willing to live with Iran’s proxies everywhere, as part of its “regional integration” policy—i.e., appeasing Iran. But they are unwilling to live with Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. The stubborn Netanyahu clearly does not want to learn from his would-be tutors like U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken how to “share the neighborhood” with genocidaires in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, Lebanon, and Tehran, whom his electorate understands to be bent on murdering them.

If the Netanyahu problem is too big to contain, then it follows that it must be solved. And it seems that the Biden administration has zeroed in on what Tony Badran has called a Herodian solution: finding a local proxy who will impose the U.S. agenda on a reluctant Israeli electorate.

King Herod the Great won his throne because the Roman Empire stepped in and helped him defeat his Israelite adversaries. The American empire wants to help install Benny Gantz as Israel’s next prime minister for the same reason: The plan is for the administration to help him defeat Netanyahu, then for him to assemble a dovish coalition that will return Israel to the two-state track negotiations—which, though unlikely to produce two states, would nevertheless help “de-escalate” in Gaza, the last hot spot in the region where Iran’s power is actually challenged.

Since the whole Democratic Party’s Middle East policy is at stake, the pressure on Israel has been relentless. Never before has an American administration worked so systematically to undermine Israeli democracy and sovereignty, an effort that is especially shocking in the context of an existential war for survival following a heinous, large-scale terrorist murder spree. Wars provide opportunities, and it seems clear that the opportunity that the Biden administration saw in the Oct. 7 attacks had less to do with ensuring Israel’s security than it did with stifling any remaining resistance to Washington’s pro-Iran regional integration policy.

If it is to survive at all, Israel must break the noose that Iran is assembling around us, and which the Biden administration is actively promoting and protecting.

The U.S. is holding Israel on a leash by rationing the American-made ammunition on which the war effort depends; it has forced us to supply our enemies with “humanitarian aid” which Hamas controls and which sustains its ability to fight; the U.S. is building a port to subvert our control of the flow of goods into Gaza; it refrained from vetoing an anti-Israel decision at the U.N. Security Council at the end of March; it leaked its intention to recognize a Palestinian state unilaterally; it allowed Iran to attack us directly with a barrage of over 300 rockets and drones without paying any price whatsoever; and then told us that Israel’s successful defense against that strike (which was mostly stopped by a combination of superior Israeli tech and faulty Iranian missiles that crashed all over the Middle East, and to some extent by U.S. interceptors) should be considered “victory”; it consistently protects Hezbollah from a full-fledged Israeli attack; it did all it can to prevent the ground invasion of Rafah, which is necessary for winning the war; it is trying to stop the war with a hostage deal that would ensure Hamas’ survival.

The U.S. is not protecting Israel from the kangaroo courts in The Hague which now threaten to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and others. Instead, it is goosing those warrants, in part by itself threatening to impose sanctions on a unit of the IDF, thus subverting the chain of command and pressuring IDF units to comply with American demands rather than with orders from their superiors. At one point, Secretary of State Blinken outrageously asked for a one-on-one meeting with IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi (he was refused), treating the commander of Israel’s armed forces as if he was answerable to a delegate of a foreign power.

Meanwhile, the entire Democratic Party apparatus from Joe Biden on down has continued directly attacking Netanyahu in the harshest, most personal and demeaning terms, publicly proclaiming their contempt for Israel’s wartime leader. Biden called Israel’s elected prime minister “a bad fucking guy,” while Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer went so far as to explain to Israelis they made the wrong choice in their elections. Senior Democratic Congressman Jerrold Nadler went Schumer one step better, proclaiming Netanyahu to be the worst Jewish leader in “2,000 years”—i.e., in the period since Herod.

The White House appears to be pushing prominent Jewish Democrats to attack Israel’s prime minister in order to avoid charges of being “anti-Israel” or “antisemitic”—a charge that could damage Democrats in key states like Florida, Arizona, and Michigan as Jewish voters see their children pushed off campuses by a combination of anti-Jewish DEI bureaucrats and pro-Hamas mobs. But it’s not hard to see through this ploy. In fact, the White House has its own proxy mobs of demonstrators inside Israel, which it regularly encourages to take to the streets at key moments. According to the leaders of the Never-Bibi demonstrators, the White House is in constant touch with them for coordination.

What all of these shockingly openly subversive moves against a key U.S. military ally have so far not produced is the desired result—a subservient government run by the would-be King Benny. The American candidate for the Herodian role kept straying from the script (which is reportedly why he was summoned to Washington to be reprimanded).

There were reasons for his straying, though. Whenever the attack on Israel’s sovereignty, democracy, or even on Netanyahu personally, became too blunt, Gantz who understands his electorate well enough, rallied to defend Israel’s sovereignty and our right to choose our own government. This is not because Gantz has given up on replacing Netanyahu: It’s just that he knows he cannot win an election in Israel by appearing to join the U.S. in attacking Israel’s most vital interests or in undermining our independence. Most importantly, any attempt to topple Netanyahu in the name of imposing a two-state solution is bound to backfire, especially with the post-Oct. 7 Israeli electorate.

Now, however, it seems that Washington and its would-be Herodian candidate are finally on the same page. This may be because the administration learned how to drape its attacks in the clothes of Israel’s interest: Emphasize “Saudi normalization” and “international coalition,” downplay “two-state solution,” stress “saving the hostages,” tone down talk of ending the war, and so on. Or it may be that Gantz has received assurances from the U.S. that it will turn its maximum pressure campaign against Netanyahu all the way up, by facilitating the delivery of ICC indictments. Whatever the reason, Gantz has finally thrown down the gauntlet.

Gantz announced his open challenge to Netanyahu in a strained, grammatically tortured tweet burdened by the need to pretend that his new position is not a betrayal of his old one. It is a jumble of contradictions revolving like space debris around a dying star. It reads:

The incursion into Rafah is important in the long struggle against Hamas. Returning our hostages, who were abandoned by the government of October 7, is of far greater importance. If a responsible deal for the return of our hostages, with the backing of the whole security establishment, and not conditioned on ending the war, will be prevented by the ministers who led the government on October 7, then the government would no longer have the right to continue to exist and direct the war.

The gist of it is not hard to decipher: Let’s end the war but call it something else. Otherwise, we’ll topple Netanyahu. But the packaging is no less instructive. First Gantz accepts the terminology of the permanent Never-Bibi protest, which keeps blaming this government for having “abandoned” us on that terrible Shabbat. Gantz further emphasizes that the responsibility lies solely with Netanyahu and his government of Oct. 7—that is before Gantz and his party joined the coalition.

That’s precious, because Gantz himself was an active party to, and in important cases the main author of, the misconceptions that led to the failure of Israel’s defenses on Oct. 7. He was deputy IDF chief of staff, IDF chief of staff, minister of security, and also “alternate prime minister” with Netanyahu.

As chief of staff, Gantz drastically cut the IDF’s ground forces in line with the vision of “a small technological army” based on the false assumption that large-scale ground wars are a thing of the past. He was the highest-ranking member of a security establishment that pushed their belief that Hamas could be pacified by allowing in Qatari money and letting Gazans work inside Israel. As minister of security, Gantz oversaw the inauguration of the high-tech security barrier on the Gaza boarder, which he assured the West Negev residents will protect them from Hamas and allow them to flourish, and that, he said, will be “our great victory” over the terrorists. So confident was Gantz in the effectiveness of the high-tech barrier that he ordered disarming civil defense squads in small villages and kibbutzim in the Negev due to repeated theft of assault firearms. We know what that led to. The places that disregarded Gantz’s orders and retained their weapons were able to hold out longer and save many more lives.

But Gantz’s tweet was more than an exercise in self-absolution for people with short memories. He also inched toward adopting the reframing of Israel’s war aims so as to make returning the hostages Israel’s foremost goal, even at the price of defeat in the war. Returning the hostages is “of far greater importance” than invading Rafah now, he proclaimed, offering the fig leaf that Rafah can be invaded at some other point in time, “in the long struggle against Hamas.”

Lastly, Gantz created a dichotomy between “the whole security establishment,” which endorses a deal, and the “ministers who led the government on October 7,” who are against it. The security establishment is presumably rational and professional, and the “ministers who led the government on October 7”—including Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, it seems—are a bunch of heartless right-wing amateurs. Except, of course, the job of the security establishment is to be in charge of security. After Oct. 7, the massive failure of 20 years of security establishment doctrine is fully out in the open. Unsurprisingly, Gantz’s tweet received a very uncomfortable ratio of comments to likes.

Still, Tony Blinken had reason to be satisfied. At long last, Gantz seems willing to play the role the administration has assigned him: exploiting the rift in Israel’s society by unequivocally taking the side of the small but powerful Never-Bibi faction, in a bid to replace Netanyahu at the helm.

Tony Badran wrote “The New Herodians” back in the days of the struggle over the reform of the judiciary. Netanyahu was already a thorn in the side of Biden’s “regional integration” policy, since he insisted that Iran’s drive to attain nuclear weapons must be stopped by any means necessary. The Biden administration pretended to care about judicial reform, but, as the Democrats’ critique of the Dobbs decision by the U.S. Supreme Court clearly suggests, it is not because they are for all-powerful judiciaries. The issue was always Netanyahu.

What Badran argued about the American intervention back then is doubly true now that the interventions are so much more crude. But his argument was not just a critique of American hypocrisy and anti-democratic tactics. The comparison with Herod was meant to teach a lesson about the price Judea paid for Herod’s strategy. The alliance with the Roman giant ensured Herod’s victory over his Jewish rivals in internal Judean politics, but the cost was the loss of Jewish independence altogether.

Herod gained power and prestige, and his family became intimate with Rome’s rulers—but none of that saved Israel. Instead, the Herodian policy eventually turned the land of Israel into a province of the empire under direct Roman rule. Judea’s loss of independence from Rome led in turn to the destruction of the Second Temple and the exile for two millennia for most of the Jewish people, leading to a situation of existential powerlessness in the face of expulsions and pogroms which culminated, within living memory, in the Holocaust. So how did the Herodian strategy turn out for the Jews? Not well.

Can such a nightmare return? Yes, it can. It is not at all clear that Israel can survive four more years of a Democratic administration determined to carve out a Palestinian terror state in the heart of the land of Israel, as part of an “integrated”—that is, Iran-dominated—Middle East. If it is to survive at all, Israel must break the noose that Iran is assembling around us, and which the Biden administration is actively promoting and protecting. Once Iran actually gets nuclear weapons, the danger will increase exponentially.

But it is also not clear that the attempt to install Benny Gantz at the head of a dovish coalition, subservient to the administration, can actually work.

True, the U.S. has a lot to work with. Israel’s progressive elites are small but formidable, as they have demonstrated in defeating an elected government in the struggle over judicial reform. And that elite still believes in a two-state solution and is very much on board with the American plan to impose it against the majority’s will. Israel’s left long ago gave up on persuading the electorate to support the creation of a Palestinian state, and is entirely comfortable with the use of extra-democratic means to impose its desired solutions on its domestic foes. Like the Hellenized elites of Herod’s day, it sees imperial domination as a way to support its own idea of Jewishness allied with power against the retrograde elements in its midst.

Gantz’s tweet underscores that the elite power base, which is entrenched in the upper echelons of the military and security establishment, supports the cease-fire plan. This group already exercises great influence on the way the war is waged. It has worked to undermine the possibility of Israeli long-term control of the Gaza strip and has dragged its feet against Netanyahu’s promise to enter Rafah. Then there is also the almost unanimous support of the press, whose major role here has been to demonize anyone who opposes surrender to Hamas via a hostage deal as heartless. There is also our all-powerful Supreme Court and highly politicized law enforcement agencies, and finally, the business community and especially its high-tech sector whose entrepreneurs tend to lean to globalist views and are funding the ubiquitous billboard campaign that blames Netanyahu for everything (and no one else for anything).

But there is also one deep flaw in the plan to impose the American policy via an alliance of elites under the figurehead of Gantz. Gantz’s popularity rests on ambiguity, which is why he persistently declined to answer questions about his views on the question of a Palestinian state. His only path to victory is by striking a hawkish security pose, and remaining vague about two-state negotiations. That’s because the hawkish majority in Israel has only grown after Oct. 7.

This majority will be furious with Netanyahu if he does not deliver victory. But to capture the disaffected vote, you can’t offer defeat, let alone a nonexistent two-state solution. There are still some 100,000 evacuees who cannot return home to the western Negev or to the north near the border with Hezbollah in Lebanon. No hostage deal will convince them they will now be safe. Moreover, Israelis saw what a determined band of terrorists can do from tiny Gaza. They will not easily opt for a government willing to give the much better armed and trained terrorist Palestinian Authority a chance to do the same from the far bigger area of Judea and Samaria, perched above Israel’s vulnerable coastal plain.

While King Herod’s power relied on making his ties with the all-powerful Rome as conspicuous as possible, rubbing shoulders with the would-be rescuers of Hamas is bound to be a liability for Gantz with his potential voters. And once the U.S. recognizes a Palestinian state, as is rumored to happen this summer, Gantz’s electoral intrigues will become a historical footnote—while the U.S. campaign against its Middle Eastern ally continues.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/gantz-megillah-biden-gaza

It is time to tell Rich Uncle Joe and Chuck the Schumer to take their money and stuff it. They can go take weapons and stuff it. They just gave us the excuse to flatten Rafah

The message of defeating Hamas in Rafah without Biden

Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer

 

 

13th Avenue Rafah

Have you ever personally been in a position in which you always relied on someone else’s financial support so that you could realize your goals and dreams? Like a father or mother or rich uncle. Or, let’s say, like a miserable dictatorial tyrannical father-in-law? (Just saying . . .)

And did that support sometimes come with strings? Strings that not only tied your hands but curtailed your dreams? (Just saying . . .)

Have you ever reached a moment in your life where you decided “Either I spend the rest of my life toeing to his every command, and later look back ruefully on my deathbed wishing I could go back in time and live the life I had wanted to live — or I tell him right now to stuff his money, and I will be liberated to return to living the life I was meant to live, to pursue my dreams? (Just saying . . . )

So you stopped being an attorney at a major law firm, where you were earning a boatload of money, and returned to being a rabbi because that was your calling? (Just saying . . .)

There is nothing in all the world that compares to standing on your own two feet, living the life you were called to live, the life you want to live, even though now struggling to make it work financially without that old standby monetary support you always had relied on, but now figuring out how to do it yourself, albeit with G-d’s primary help.

This is Israel’s moment right now.

It is time to tell Rich Uncle Joe and Chuck the Schumer to take their money and stuff it. They can go take weapons and stuff it. And then do what obviously must be done: go into Rafiach (Rafah) with guns blazing and aerial bombs dropping, and utterly eradicate Hamas, and — if necessary — flatten that region of Gaza like a tortilla. Indeed, as a humanitarian gesture after flattening the region like a pancake, drop gallons of maple syrup.

But what if innocent civilians are hurt?

First of all, which innocent civilians are we talking about?

-The ones who, in a free and democratic election supervised and validated by Jimmy Carter, elected Hamas to be their voice and actualize their dreams of wiping out Israel?

-Or are we talking about the innocent civilians who danced in the streets of Gaza every time Hamas started a war, Israel fought back until a ceasefire, Hamas declared victory, and the masses danced in the streets?

-Or the innocent civilians who danced in the streets and distributed candies to children when Bin Laden took down the Twin Towers on 9-11?

-Or the innocent civilians who crossed the border into Israel on Shabbat Shmini Atzeret of October 7 and also raped women, and also murdered babies, and also plundered every bit of merchandise from furniture to food in the refrigerators of the murdered Jews?

So which innocent civilians are we worrying about here?

-The ones who refuse to leave Rafah because Hamas wants them to stay as human shields?

-The ones who have lived for years in homes throughout Gaza with entrance points to Hamas underground tunnels etched into the floorboards of their homes, in their children’s bedrooms, under cribs and beds?

Well, here’s the thing. Uncle Joe and Chuck the Schumer won’t give Israel the precision weapons that Congress authorized, capable of pinpointing targets. So Israel will just have to make do with older weapons that sort of come close to their targets, give or take a few buildings or blocks. In the end, it’s like what my Mom of blessed memory would say when, as a finicky boy, I complained that, although I like peas and I like carrots, I don’t like it when the can contains a mixture of peas and carrots together. “David,” she z"l would say, “What’s the difference? Mixed or separate, it’s all going to end up in the same place.” Words to live by (though I still don’t like them mixed).

Same here. An embargo on precision weapons to avoid hitting unintentional targets? Eh, what’s the difference? Rafah needs to be flattened anyway.

Israel does not need America, Uncle Joe, or Chuck the Schumer. (Chuck always told American Jews that his last name means “Shomer” — Guardian of Israel. In reality, G-d Almig-ty, who never slumbers nor sleeps, is the Guardian of Israel. As we now know from Ancestry.com, “Schumer,” by contrast, means “Good for Nothing.”)

Israel has enough firepower to handle Rafah on her own. And the act of doing it without Biden and Chuck the Schumer will be liberating, as it was for that once-young man who finally broke from his controlling source of funds and determined to make it on his own. He was liberated, and the message was sent: “No one but G-d Almig-ty controls me or bosses me around anymore.”

Likewise here, too, the message it will send the Arab world is extraordinary: “If you think Israel needs America to wipe out enemies and flatten regions, think again. It’s just that we sometimes miss, now that we can’t get the precision stuff, so apologies in advance if we accidentally kill more of you and destroy more buildings than we intended.”

Israel had far fewer weapons in 1948 when Harry Truman, who gets far more credit than he deserves, imposed a brutal arms embargo on Israel as she was fighting for her life against seven Arab armies only a few years after Hitler had murdered six million. She had almost no weapons. The Guardian of Israel fixed that. The heck with Truman. Anti-Semitic Poland trained and armed the Irgun, the Lechi, and the Haganah. Czechoslovakia sent weapons. Italian American mafiosi and Irish American dockworkers colluded with young Jewish teens in running guns illegally to Israel. There was always someone.

In 1956, America again turned her back, this time under Eisenhower, so DeGaulle and France stepped in.

In 1967, France backed out, so others stepped in, and — in desperation — Israel defied the pressure of the Americans and launched the preemptive strike that beat the Arabs and liberated the rest of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, the Golan — and, yes, Gaza — in less than a week.

In 1973, Nixon — despite all the anti-Semitism expressed on his secretly recorded White House tapes — rushed to the rescue, even over the objections of the Schumer House Jew of that day, Heinz Kissinger. It’s always someone. Even a wild hotel-and-casino developer who came outta nowhere to recognize United Jerusalem as the capital and move the American embassy there, and recognize sovereignty over Golan and the legality of Jewish communities throughout Judea and Samaria, and who now has moved toward taking “The Two-State Illusion” off the table.

G-d always sends someone. Obama and Kerry left office by slashing Israel with a parting stab, refusing to veto U.N. Security Council resolution 2334, which declared even the Kotel (Western Wall) to be occupied Arab territory. Months later the American embassy in Israel was being opened to the public, moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and Trump Administation officials were traveling to the Kotel, wearing kipot, putting notes in the Wall. G-d has an endless list of messengers.

It’s always someone. America pressed Ben-Gurion not to declare independence. Well, next week will be the 76th anniversary of his telling the U.S. to stuff it. Even dear Ronald Reagan pressed Israel not to go after Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor. So Menachem Begin did it anyway, with G-d’s primary help — and, even though Reagan condemned it at the time, Americans fighting years later in Kuwait against the same Saddam blessed Begin for it.

Biden does not matter. It does not take a prophet of G-d to prognosticate that Israel will outlive Biden. Kamala and her “Jewish husband” with his non-Jewish anti-Israel daughter do not matter. Throughout Jewish history: been there, done that. Rather, the blessing will be that, if Biden and Kamala no playa the game, they no make-a the rules.

Israel can go it alone, and it will be with the blessings of a majority of the American public. She will show that all the riots on American college campuses and the louts in the White House cannot tell her how to live. She will live very, very well despite them. She will earn another layer of international respect, as she did when she grabbed those five gunboats that France embargoed even though Israel had paid for them.

And Arabs will watch and take notice. They will see that Gaza has been bombed into the Stone Age, and they will contemplate how their own countries and landmarks would look if converted to dust and rocks. And especially in Judea and Samaria, where Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) still presides, the message will be even more clear: “Talk and bombast all you want. But if you cross a line, the same destiny will unfold in the rest of Judea and Samaria as unfolded in 1967 when Jordan overplayed their hand. Jericho, Shechem (Nablus), Bethlehem — we hear them calling, Mother Rachel crying for her sons because they are not there. Our hope is not lost, and the sons will return to their true borders. Just give us an excuse, chabibi (pal).”

It all is a blessing.

To receive Rav Fischer’s Weekly Extensive Torah Commentaries or to attend any or all of Rav Fischer’s weekly 60-minute live Zoom classes on the Weekly Torah Portion, the Biblical Prophets, the Mishnah, Rambam Mishneh Torah, or Advanced Judaic Texts, send an email to: shulstuff@yioc.org

His 10-part exciting and fact-based series of one-hour classes on the Jewish Underground liberation movement (Irgun, Lechi, and Haganah) and the Rise of Modern Israel can be found here. In it, he uses historic video clips of Irgun, Lechi, and Haganah actions, decades of past Arab terrorist atrocities, as well as stirring musical selections from the Underground and video’d interviews of participants, to augment data, statistics, maps, and additional historical records to create a fascinating, often gripping, and scholarly enriching educational experience about issues that remain deeply relevant today as Israel engages in an existential war in Gaza against Hamas terrorism.

His latest deeply moving weekly series of informational and inspirational programs on the Hamas Gaza war may be found here.

His 40-part Bible Study series covering all of I Samuel (First Samuel) intensively with Talmudic and Midrashic commentaries is now up here.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/389727?utm_source=activetrail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

Sam Harris on Donald Trump - "Every word Trump utters is a lie, including “and” and “the.”

Samuel Benjamin Harris is an American philosopher, neuroscientist, author, and podcast host. His work touches on a range of topics, including rationality, religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, psychedelics, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence.

 

The character of presidential candidates, shown in their treatment of others, should matter greatly to voters. We don’t know how every member of the jury will vote, but regular American voters will have an opportunity to show that basic decency still matters.

The Tawdry Decade of Trump Could Desensitize Any Juror

Not long after Donald Trump was criminally charged in four state and federal cases last year, many people who want to see the former president held to account expressed an understandable fear: A MAGA mole would sneak onto the jury and then refuse to vote guilty, no matter how damning the evidence.

The resulting hung jury would be just the vindication that Mr. Trump needs. But following Stormy Daniels’s dramatic testimony on Tuesday in Mr. Trump’s New York hush-money case, which delved into graphic detail about what she said was a brief, unpleasant encounter with Mr. Trump in 2006, I am inclined to worry about a more mundane but similarly grave threat: call it the Desensitized Juror.

This person, a decent and upstanding citizen who treats his or her duty with appropriate gravity, could nevertheless decide that all of this tawdriness — cheating on his new wife, seducing Ms. Daniels with false promises of reality-TV stardom and so on — is just Mr. Trump being Mr. Trump. Even if hiding the purpose of the $130,000 payoff to Ms. Daniels violated New York law, the juror might think, so what? 

Everyone already knows Mr. Trump is a liar and a cad, a womanizer and a cheat. Is this really a serious crime or is it, like so much connected to the Trump lifestyle, just one big tabloid joke?

The tabloid element of the case has been there all along, of course, but it was never more evident than on Tuesday. Again and again, Ms. Daniels testified in much greater detail, and with more editorializing, than was asked of her. Mr. Trump’s lawyers objected often, and when they didn’t, Justice Juan Merchan stepped in himself, testily warning Ms. Daniels more than once to “just answer the questions.”

Prosecutors, who made a calculated and possibly dangerous bet in calling her to the stand, could not have been happy to watch one of their star witnesses get reprimanded over and over by the court. But the judge’s frustration was no surprise; salacious details like the ones Ms. Daniels kept offering can be especially prejudicial to a defendant. In response, the former president’s lawyers requested a mistrial. Justice Merchan denied the request, although he agreed that numerous parts of Ms. Daniels’s testimony were “better left unsaid.”

Even when she left out the details, Ms. Daniels was not always consistent in her testimony. She insisted, for example, that she was not motivated by money and only wanted to tell her story, a less-than-convincing claim given her decision to accept Mr. Trump’s payoff to keep her mouth shut. Mr. Trump’s lawyers took every opportunity they could to highlight these inconsistencies and poke holes in Ms. Daniels’s credibility.

The prosecutors no doubt made their risky decision because it would have been quite strange if they had not brought in Ms. Daniels to testify. Their whole theory of the case is based on Mr. Trump’s reaction to a few minutes with her in a Lake Tahoe hotel room. Jurors are human, and they have common-sense human reactions. What would they think if one of the two central characters in the story didn’t show up to confirm the underlying conduct?

This brings us back to my concern about the impact of Ms. Daniels on the jury. Remember, the prosecution needs all 12 jurors to agree to convict; the defense needs only one to disagree to produce a hung jury and thus a mistrial. So far, the prosecutors have presented a very strong case centered on financial documents and testimony from the people who helped Mr. Trump arrange the payoff. But they have also had to do a lot of explaining about how it all fits together and why it all matters, which risks confusing and exhausting the jurors. Now, with the most garish part of the case front and center, it’s not so hard to imagine one or more jurors throwing up their hands and letting the tabloids sort it out.

I continue to believe strongly in the jury system as a core institution of American self-government and in the integrity of this group of 12 regular New Yorkers. The problem is the damage done to American society over the past nine years, a sense of lowered expectations about politics that affects all of us, including those of us selected for jury duty.

During that period, Mr. Trump upended every reasonable expectation of how a presidential candidate, a president and then an ex-president should behave. In the process, he managed to do exactly what many farsighted people warned he would: inure large parts of the public to his depredations against honesty, integrity and decency. He has, in effect, increased our tolerance for inexcusable behavior by our leaders.

That is a tragedy on several levels. It can be easy to forget how shocking it was when, in October 2016, a tape emerged on which Mr. Trump could be heard years before bragging about grabbing women’s genitals. Top Republicans withdrew their support for their party’s nominee only weeks before the election, and the G.O.P. came achingly close to extracting itself from Trump mania. In that light, it makes sense that Mr. Trump would do whatever he could to keep the Stormy Daniels story out of the news. At the time, it really could have been a death blow.

And that would have been the proper outcome. Mr. Trump was seeking the highest office in the country, the most important position of public trust we have. Ms. Daniels’s story, which she would have told at the time but for the payoff, has offered yet another window into his awful treatment of other people, especially women, and the manner in which he sought to keep Americans from knowing about it.

It is essential to remember the unspoken premise underlying the hush-money trial: As even Mr. Trump appeared to understand in 2016, the character of presidential candidates, shown in their treatment of others, should matter greatly to voters. We don’t know how every member of the jury will vote, but regular American voters will have an opportunity to show that basic decency still matters.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/opinion/the-tawdry-decade-of-trump-could-desensitize-any-juror.html

TORAH UMESORAH BREAKING NEWS - STORMY DANIELS TAKES THE STAND!

וְלִמַּדְתֶּ֥ם

אֹתָ֛ם אֶת־בְּנֵיכֶ֖ם לְדַבֵּ֣ר בָּ֑ם בְּשִׁבְתְּךָ֤ בְּבֵיתֶ֙ךָ֙

וּבְלֶכְתְּךָ֣ בַדֶּ֔רֶךְ וּֽבְשָׁכְבְּךָ֖ וּבְקוּמֶֽךָ׃

 

Ms. Daniels, who received $130,000 in hush money to keep silent about her account with Donald J. Trump, is the biggest witness to testify so far in the case.

ON THE STAND

Donald Trump told Stormy Daniels 'you remind me of my beautiful daughter,' court hears

 

The Issue With Saying The Rebbe Is Moshiach... (CAUTION --- VERRRRY PAINFUL!) *An honest Jew would have said: We thought the Rebbe could be Moshiach, but the Rebbe passed away and obviously was not!* PM

"Every individual with firsthand knowledge or reasonable cause for suspicion of child abuse has a Torah obligation to promptly notify the proper civil authorities."

 

Rabbi Perr Z"L - He was one of the first rabbis to stand strong against child molesters in Jewish education.

 "The undersigned, affirm that any individual with firsthand knowledge or reasonable basis to suspect child abuse has a religious obligation to promptly notify the secular law enforcement of that information. These individuals have the experience, expertise and training to thoroughly and responsibly investigate the matter. Furthermore, those deemed “mandated reporters” under secular law must obey their State’s reporting requirements.

Lives can be ruined or ended by unreported child abuse, as we are too often tragically reminded. The Torah’s statement in Leviticus 19:16, “Do not stand by while your neighbor’s blood is shed” obligates every member of the community to do all in one’s power to prevent harm to others. In conclusion, every individual with firsthand knowledge or reasonable cause for suspicion of child abuse has a Torah obligation to promptly notify the proper civil authorities."

Rabbi Yechiel Perr

The Pathetic Realisim of Today - How did this happen, this sea change in American consciousness?

 

Jews may win Nobels, but the Gazan terrorists are the geniuses New Nazis!

 

What subterranean think tank created the plan to force it to stand alone against the world after brutalizing it in a manner unthinkable to the civilized mind?

Pro-Palestinian protesters maintain an encampment on Columbia University campus on April 24, 2024.

Jews may have a lion’s share of the Nobel Prizes, but I’m beginning to think that the smartest people on Earth are Palestinians. Make that Gazan Palestinians. No, Gazan Palestinian terrorists. Only geniuses could make a proud, strong country like Israel a universal pariah in six short months; Israel, a country full of freedoms and democratic ideals, much admired, armed, educated, and moneyed, courted by even its most powerful Arab neighbors. What subterranean think tank created the plan to force it to stand alone against the world after brutalizing it in a manner unthinkable to the civilized mind?

And how did that brain trust prepare the ground for such a coup? Perhaps long before October 7, these meddling geniuses took note of growing worldwide antisemitism, sowed seeds of the same in American and European universities and streets, while magnifying Israel’s fractured politics. Presto! An army of activists were nestled in their palm ready, eager for deployment.

Most American students, like those who mounted an antisemitic protest at Columbia University in April, will tell you that Israel is guilty of genocide, which trumps all other guilts. It would help if these instruments of social justice knew what the word meant, especially to Israelis and Jews. 

How Hamas terrorists turned Israel into a pariah

It would also help if they did some due diligence and read Hamas’s genocidal charter, calling for the elimination of the Jewish people “from the river to the sea,” a fundamental phrase conveniently obscured or falsely denied by its authors. Meanwhile, attacks from the South, attacks from the North, and death by urban terrorism plague Israel daily, and none of these cap-and-gown warriors raise a fuss.

Do they listen when respected, worldwide experts report that the Israelis employ more methods to prevent civilian injury than any other army in all of military history? According to the UN, a normal war statistic would reflect nine times as many civilian as combatant deaths, while Israel statistically reflects 1.5 civilian to each combatant death.

 

A STUDENT protester waves a Palestinian flag above Hamilton Hall on the campus of Columbia University in New York City on Tuesday.

 

But the young adults-made-children incapable of hard analysis by authoritarian, proselytizing professors do not believe it. Their minds are closed, their reading perversely curated. Across the US, cowards cancel the Jewish concert, book talk, speech, fundraiser. By their mealy-mouthed protestations about the safety of the public and their employees, they endorse the shutting down of museums, the defacement of paintings, the blocking of highways because it is easier to cancel Jews than it is stand up to the intimidation of bullies, even intellectually juvenile ones.

How did this happen, this sea change in American consciousness? We are less religious than ever before, that’s part of it. We are barely connected to community, apart from the ephemeral, endlessly seductive type online. We marry less, have fewer children, are not especially tied to our jobs. Having in our slumberous excess discarded a heritage of ideals and law, we are rootless, empty, prey to whoever wants to fill our heads with their self-serving ideas. Even those clinging to the old ways will not be saved by them. The propagandists are legion, and we are all lost. In a world where “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity” (thank you, W.B. Yeats), there is no path out of darkness.

The God of the Jews instructed His people to be “a light unto the nations.” But it seems a multitude of American Jews cower before the escalating antisemitism of our time. They remain silent in the shadows but whisper their despair only to each other. They grieve the taking of hostages but fail to defend Israel’s prosecution of a just war. This must end. Voices must be raised and shouted from the rooftops.

If they do not, some day a new, braver generation may rise up, one fierce in rebellion against its elders, quick to spot hypocrisy and corruption and act against them. If the beatniks and the hippies could rise up against the gray flannel that smothered and cowed young people in the 1950s and ‘60s and transform the world, this new generation in a reborn age might breathe back reason into us.

But where will they get this wisdom? Imagine all the books that might teach them are suppressed, canceled, while the entire world suffers the same disease of willful ignorance. The heel of intolerance will be on their necks. How will their souls come to understand that they have been muted, restrained, and that if they rebel, they will blossom? Who will guide them there?

Damn sure they’re going to need some Jews. May enough of us survive!■

 

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-799565?

Religion doesn’t need to be abolished—merely fixed - No miracles allowed - The truth really does matter - Reality is more magical than miracles

 

10 Brilliant Insights from Daniel Dennett 

 

אִם יֹאמַר לְךָ אָדָם יֵשׁ חָכְמָה בַּגּוֹיִם, תַּאֲמֵן, הֲדָא הוּא דִכְתִיב (עובדיה א, ח): וְהַאֲבַדְתִּי חֲכָמִים מֵאֱדוֹם וּתְבוּנָה מֵהַר עֵשָׂו. יֵשׁ תּוֹרָה בַּגּוֹיִם, אַל תַּאֲמֵן, דִּכְתִיב: מַלְכָּהּ וְשָׂרֶיהָ בַגּוֹיִם אֵין תּוֹרָה.

איכה רבה ב׳:י״ג

 

A glimpse of a mind jammed to the rafters with ideas. 

 

Daniel Dennett, who died in April at the age of 82, was a towering figure in the philosophy of mind. Known for his staunch physicalist stance, he argued that minds, like bodies, are the product of evolution. He believed that we are, in a sense, machines—but astoundingly complex ones, the result of millions of years of natural selection.

Dennett wrote more than a dozen books, some of them aimed at a scholarly audience but many of them directed squarely at the inquisitive non-specialist—including bestsellers like Consciousness Explained, Breaking the Spell, and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Reading his works, one gets the impression of a mind jammed to the rafters with ideas. As Richard Dawkins put it in a blurb for Dennett’s last book, a memoir titled I’ve Been Thinking: “How unfair for one man to be blessed with such a torrent of stimulating thoughts.”

Dennett spent decades puzzling over the existence of minds. How does non-thinking matter arrange itself into matter that can think, and even ponder its own existence? A long-time academic nemesis of Dennett’s, the philosopher David Chalmers, dubbed this the “Hard Problem” of consciousness. But Dennett felt this label needlessly turned a series of potentially-solvable problems into one giant unsolvable one: He was sure the so-called hard problem would evaporate once the various lesser (but still difficult) problems of understanding the brain’s mechanics were figured out.

Can we build from an account of rudimentary, strained aboutness all the way to human consciousness?

Because he viewed brains as miracle-free mechanisms, he saw no barrier to machine consciousness, at least in principle. Yet he had no fear of Terminator-style AI doomsday scenarios, either. (“The whole singularity stuff, that’s preposterous,” he once told an interviewer for The Guardian. “It distracts us from much more pressing problems.”)

As keen as the workings of his mind may have been, Dennett was among the least pretentious of scholars. As one journalist noted, he dressed “like a Maine fisherman”; for many years, he and his wife, Susan, spent their summers in a farmhouse a five-hour drive north of Boston. His passions extended beyond science and philosophy: He mastered at least five musical instruments—for a time he earned money as a jazz pianist—and, in spite of his avowed atheism, sang Christian hymns like “O Hearken Ye” like a practiced choirboy.

To give a sense of the breadth and depth of Dennett’s thinking, we have compiled here 10 snippets from his writings and from interviews he gave over the years.

The mind is a “user-illusion” that we mistake for reality
And what is this self? Not a dedicated portion of neural circuitry but rather like the end-user of an operating system. … Curiously, then, our first-person point of view of our own minds is not so different from our second-person point of view of others’ minds: We don’t see, or hear, or feel, the complicated neural machinery churning away in our brains but have to settle for an interpreted, digested version, a user-illusion that is so familiar to us that we take it not just for reality but also for the most indubitable and intimately known reality of all. That’s what it is like to be us. We learn about others from hearing or reading what they say to us, and that’s how we learn about ourselves as well. This is not a new idea, but keeps being rediscovered apparently. The great neurologist John Hughlings Jackson once said, “We speak, not only to tell others what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think.”
—From Bacteria to Bach and Back (2017)

Free will is a fantasy, but a welcome one
The traditional view of free will, as a personal power somehow isolated from physical causation, is both incoherent and unnecessary as a grounds for moral responsibility and meaning. The scientists and philosophers who declare free will a fiction or illusion are right; it is part of the user-illusion of the manifest image. That puts it in the same category with colors, opportunities, dollars, promises, and love (to take a few valuable examples from a large set of affordances). If free will is an illusion then so are they, and for the same reason. This is not an illusion we should want to dismantle or erase; it’s where we live, and we couldn’t live the way we do without it. But when these scientists and philosophers go on to claim that their “discovery” of this (benign) illusion has important implications for the law, for whether or not we are responsible for our actions and creations, their arguments evaporate.
—From Bacteria to Bach and Back (2017)

Consciousness runs on multiple parallel tracks at once
According to the Multiple Drafts model [of consciousness], all varieties of perception—indeed, all varieties of thought or mental activity—are accomplished in the brain by parallel, multitrack processes of interpretation and elaboration of sensory inputs. Information entering the nervous system is under continuous “editorial revision.” For instance, since your head moves a bit and your eyes move a lot, the images on your retinas swim about constantly, rather like the images of home movies taken by people who can’t keep the camera from jiggling. But that is not how it seems to us. People are often surprised to learn that under normal conditions, their eyes dart about in rapid saccades, about five quick fixations a second, and that this motion, like the motion of their heads, is edited out early in the processing from eyeball to … consciousness.
—Consciousness Explained (1991)

Darwinian evolution has extraordinary explanatory power
Let me lay my cards on the table. If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. But it is not just a wonderful scientific idea. It is a dangerous idea. My admiration for Darwin’s magnificent idea is unbounded, but I, too, cherish many of the ideas and ideals that it seems to challenge, and want to protect them. … The only good way to do this—the only way that has a chance in the long run—is to cut through the smokescreens and look at the idea as unflinchingly, as dispassionately, as possible.
—Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995)

No miracles allowed
The two related philosophical problems I was trying to solve—at least in outline—can be rendered quite straightforwardly. First, how can it be that some complicated clumps of molecules can be properly described as having states or events that are about something, that have meaning or content? And second, how can it be that at least some of these complicated clumps of molecules are conscious—that is, aware that they are gifted with states or events that are about something? You and I have thoughts and ideas and hopes and fears and we know that we do, and we can tell others about them. How is that possible? … Can we build from an account of rudimentary, strained aboutness all the way to human consciousness? That is the task that any physicalistic or materialistic theory of the mind must execute. No miracles allowed.
—I’ve Been Thinking (2023)

Cultural evolution can mimic biological evolution 
The concept of cultural replicators—items that are copied over and over—has been given a name by Richard Dawkins, who proposed  [in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene] to call them memes, a term that has recently been the focus of controversy. For the moment, I want to make a point that should be uncontroversial: Cultural transmission can sometimes mimic genetic transmission, permitting competing variants to be copied at different rates, resulting in gradual revisions in features of those cultural items, and these revisions have no deliberate, fore-sighted authors. The most obvious, and well-researched, examples are natural languages. The Romance languages—French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and a few other variants—all descend from Latin, preserving many of the basic features while revising others. Are these revisions adaptations? That is, are they in any sense improvements over their Latin ancestors in their environments? There is much to be said on this topic, and the “obvious” points tend to be simplistic and wrong, but at least this much is clear: Once a shift starts to emerge in one locality, it generally behooves local people to go along with it, if they want to be understood.
—Breaking the Spell (2006)

Religion doesn’t need to be abolished—merely fixed
Does religion “poison everything,” as my dear, late friend Hitch [Christopher Hitchens] insisted on saying? Only in a very attenuated sense, I think. Many things are quite harmless in moderation and poisonous only in quantity. I understand why Hitch emphasized this view; as a foreign correspondent he had much first-hand, dangerous experience with the worst features of religion, while I know of all that only at second hand—often from his reportage. I, in contrast, have known people whose lives would be desolate and friendless if it weren’t for the non-judgemental welcome they have received in one religious organization or another. I regret the residual irrationalism valorized by almost all religion, but I don’t see the state playing the succoring, comforting role well, so until we find secular successor organizations to take up that humane task, I am not in favor of ushering churches off the scene. I would rather assist in transforming these organizations into forms that are not caught in the trap of irrational—and necessarily insincere—allegiance to patent nonsense.
—“Letting the Neighbours Know,” a chapter in The Four Horsemen: The Conversation that Sparked an Atheist Revolution (2019)

Behavior is predictable
Here is how it works: First you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. A little practical reasoning from the chosen set of beliefs and desires will in most instances yield a decision about what the agent ought to do; that is what you predict the agent will do.
—The Intentional Stance (1987)

The truth really does matter
The real danger that’s facing us is we’ve lost respect for truth and facts. People have discovered that it’s much easier to destroy reputations for credibility than it is to maintain them. It doesn’t matter how good your facts are, somebody else can spread the rumor that you’re fake news. We’re entering a period of epistemological murk and uncertainty that we’ve not experienced since the middle ages.
—The Guardian, Feb. 12, 2017

Reality is more magical than miracles  
Some people don’t want magic tricks explained to them. I’m not that person. When I see a magic trick, I want to see how it’s done. People want free will or consciousness, life itself, to be real magic. What I want to show people is, look, the magic of life as evolved, the magic of brains as evolving in between our own ears, that’s thrilling! It’s affirming. You don’t need miracles. You just need to understand the world the way it really is, and it’s unbelievably wonderful. We’re so lucky to be alive! The anxiety that people feel about giving up the traditional magical options, I take that very seriously. I can feel that anxiety. But the more I understood about the things I didn’t understand, the more the anxiety ebbed. The more the joy, the wondrousness came back.
—Interview in the New York Times Magazine, Aug. 27, 2023

https://nautil.us/10-brilliant-insights-from-daniel-dennett-567922/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us