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The teenage girl’s future looked bright. Immigrating to Israel from Russia for an academic program, Nadia finished her economics degree with honors. She found a good job in her field, and her parents and sister planned to move to Israel and join her. Then, tragedy struck.

Suddenly, Nadia’s father was diagnosed with cancer. Her family needed her help, so she moved back, transferring to her company’s Russia office. Soon, she fell in love and got married, and gave birth to a baby boy. But within six months, her world fell apart. The cancer took her father’s life. And then, without warning, her husband deserted her and their baby.

Devastated, Nadia moved back to Israel to start over. She had lost her good-paying job and worked several jobs to make ends meet. Juggling the demands of motherhood alone was overwhelming. One day, a friend at work shared her faith with Nadia, and invited her to church.

There, she discovered CBN Israel’s outreach to single mothers. We provided her with two months’ rent—and a plan to pay off her debts and get financial relief from the banks. We also helped her find a better job. Today, she is remarried to a man from her church, serving there together in ministry. And CBN Israel is training her to offer financial guidance to others!

CBN Israel is helping many like Nadia, who are in crisis situations. Friends like you are there with food, financial aid, job training, and vital encouragement.

And your support is crucial, especially during this global pandemic. You can bring Holocaust survivors and refugees essential relief aid—while sharing Israel’s story with the world through CBN News and insightful documentaries. Your help is so important—thank you for caring!

“They went to the Jordan and began to cut down trees. As one of them was cutting down a tree, the iron axhead fell into the water. ‘Oh no, my lord!’ he cried out. ‘It was borrowed!’ The man of God asked, ‘Where did it fall?’ When he showed him the place, Elisha cut a stick and threw it there, and made the iron float. ‘Lift it out,’ he said. Then the man reached out his hand and took it” (2 Kings 6:4-7 NIV).

Do you ever imagine that God is too big and that His responsibilities are too vast to care about the daily details of our lives? After all, He has the universe to run, right?

The man lost a borrowed axe-head in the water. That was his problem, nothing that God should concern Himself with. Yet He did.

The Bible never presents God as so transcendent that the common, everyday details of our lives do not move Him. Jesus stated, “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matthew 10:29-30 NIV).

God is not distant from us even if it may seem like that at times. He cares deeply for us, and He is near to us. He cares enough to involve Himself in the issues of our daily lives.

The man in the story did not own the iron axe-head. It was borrowed. Its loss troubled him, as anyone could imagine it would. God caused the axe-head to float, permitting easy retrieval.

Many of the stories about Elisha describe miracles he performed for the common, daily life of the people: multiplied oil in a jar (2 Kings 4:1-7); revived the Shunammite’s son (2 Kings 4:18-37); purified a pot of stew (2 Kings 4:38-41); fed 100 men (2 Kings 4:42-44). And he made an axe-head float. These stories demonstrate that the God of Israel was concerned about the daily needs and lives of the people. He is for us, too.

No issue is too small for His concern. He is a loving Father. Like any parent, He delights in taking care of His children.

He is the King of the universe, the all-powerful, the creator of everything. He is awesome and majestic. He is also the God who makes the axe-head float. Never forget that.

PRAYER

Father, show us today that even in the smallest details of our lives—those things that matter to us—You are near and they matter to You, too. Amen.

By Mark Gerson

The Jewish year and, thus, the annual cycle of the Torah reading is coming to an end. As we reach the latter half of the concluding book of the Torah, Deuteronomy, Moses knows that he is soon to die without being able to enter the Promised Land. But he is determined to leave his people with the disposition, ideas and attitude they will need to survive and thrive.

In Chapter 27 (of 34), Moses says that we will see two mountains upon entering the Land. There will be a mountain of blessing, Mt. Gerizim, and a mountain of curses, Mt. Ebal. Why does he associate blessings and curses with different mountains? The Torah, which always privileges the unseen over the seen and hearing over sight, is too sophisticated to have a physical place of goodness and one of badness. But the Author of the Torah knows us well. He knows that people have a remarkable capacity to either mischaracterize or justify cursed ideas and actions. When you enter the Land, he is telling us, remember: you can, if you choose, tell the difference—just like you can between two mountains.

And the consequence of our choice of blessing or curse is everything. The listing of blessings is a catalog of delight and the listing of curses is an exercise in horror. The curses include drought and floods, military defeat, robbery, madness and blindness, incurable hemorrhoids, fever, lesions and marriage followed by infidelity. Then there is: “You will grope at noontime as a blind man gropes in the darkness.”

What could this mean? The experience of being blind is one of perpetual darkness. There is no difference for the blind between “noontime” and the dead of night. Why, then, would a curse be that of a blind person groping in the darkness—as if his daytime experience is different?

Rabbi Yossi Bar Halafta stated, as is recorded in the Talmud, that he spent his entire life troubled by this verse. Then he saw a blind man walking at night and holding a torch. He asked the blind man why, given that he couldn’t see, he was carrying a torch. 

The blind man answered, “So long as I carry this torch, other people can see me and they can save me from the pits and thorns and thistles.”

In a good community, a blind man never has to grope in the daytime. There are always people around who will identify his suffering and seek to diminish it. A community is  biblically cursed when suffering goes unnoticed, unrelieved and unredeemed. One is cursed when one has to suffer in silence, alone.    

This curse was foreshadowed in a previous passage in Deuteronomy. 

In Deuteronomy 21, Moses addresses the problem of what to do with an unidentified corpse found in a field. The priests and the elders of the city are commanded to perform a ritual and proclaim that they did not kill the man nor see what happened. Then, they offer an atonement. Why do the leaders of the society—the elders and the priests—atone for something that they did not do? Because having an unidentified corpse near their city—having someone die with no one to mourn for him—shows a systemic failure that requires atonement by those with responsibility. Such a community will soon be considered cursed, and it does not have to— and should not be— that way.

There is nothing theoretical, anachronistic or necessarily ancient about this curse or anything else in the Bible. The Torah is our great guidebook, specifically designed “for [our] benefit”— to help us live better today. There are no easy answers or pious declarations that might help us determine the extent to which our society is, along the lines of the blind man groping at noontime, acting as if it is cursed. On the one hand, life expectancy in the United States has declined three years in a row (and that is pre-COVID-19 ) and is nowhere near the global top fifty. This is a consequence, as numerous studies in the past several years have demonstrated, of the “deaths [or ‘diseases’] of despair” that afflict people in a state of loneliness, hopelessness and desperation.

On the other hand is what my wife Rabbi Erica Gerson and I first saw two years ago at Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas. Dr. Paul Osteen, a pastor at the church and a missionary doctor who spends much of his time each year doing surgery in impossible conditions in the most deprived places in the world, showed us the chapel—a vast space that once served as the Houston Rockets stadium. There were boxes of tissues in front of many of the 17,000 seats. We had never seen anything like this in synagogue, so we asked Paul to explain. He said that there was a moment in each service when congregants were invited to go to a leader (of whom there are dozens) to say and pray whatever is on their minds. People often cry in these moments; hence, the tissues. The leader, upon hearing the pain of the congregant, is then able to direct the person to the social service within the church that can best help to alleviate the pain the congregant describes. We asked Paul how long this process lasts, and he replied,  “However long it takes.” 

A few months later, we spoke at Tabernacle Church in Buffalo, New York, which is run by the great church leader and Christian Zionist, Bishop Robert Stearns. We saw the tissues again, but this time we knew what they were for. There was a church leader in the front and behind each person who came to the front in order to, literally, catch them if they fell. And later still, we spoke at Revival City Church under the inspired leadership of Pastor George Searight, Jr. Again, there were tissues and a person in front and behind each penitent. This church had blankets alongside the tissues, so that one could be gently carried to the ground and rest comfortably.

This is the antidote to the curse of Deuteronomy 28:29. Each of these church leaders has created an institution with structures that ensures that no congregant is like a blind man groping at noontime. They have constructed a community where every person’s pain can be voiced, validated and eased — in the process effectively assuring Moses that they appreciate his concern and are always addressing it.

This is, for us Jews, the month of Elul, where we prepare for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when we contemplate our shortcomings, failures and how we should improve. Perhaps the most helpful way to approach this holiday and its responsibilities is through contemplation of the blind man groping at noontime. The first question to ask is: Who might be the blind man suffering at noontime? The aforementioned American life expectancy statistics suggest that he is ubiquitous—and the Talmud suggests a way to help. If one is suffering in silence (emotionally, physically, spiritually, psychologically), like the blind man groping at noontime, he is in such a prison. A prisoner, the Talmud teaches, cannot free himself from prison. 

In this month of Elul, especially, we can ask: Am I sufficiently helping to ensure that my communities are those where a blind man would never need to grope at noontime? Or am I the blind man groping at noontime who should seek the guidance that a biblically construed community will provide? What, per Deuteronomy 21, are the structures and measures of accountability that ensure that each member of the community is provided the recognition and the dignity such acknowledgment confers?

Mark Gerson, a devoted Jew, is an entrepreneur and philanthropist who (along with his wife, Rabbi Erica Gerson) is perhaps the world’s largest individual supporter of Christian medical missions. He is the co-founder of African Mission Healthcare (AMH) and the author of a forthcoming book on the Haggadah: The Telling: How Judaism’s Essential Book Reveals the Meaning of Life.  

Website: therabbishusband.com
Twitter: @markgerson
Podcast: The Rabbi’s Husband

By Arlene Bridges Samuels

Israel creates outsized innovations that sometimes border on the impossible. Making water from air and helping paraplegics walk are only two of this nation’s modern-day miracles.

Perhaps another of Israel’s most remarkable accomplishments is that it makes the world better against a backdrop of constant terror on three sides—from Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. Slightly bigger than New Jersey, its narrowest slice of land is just eight miles across; its widest is 85 miles. From top to bottom, it is only 290 miles. Yet its diminutive size does not stop Israel from also being known as the “innovation nation.”

When the Bible describes Israel, the profound meaning stretches from ancient to modern history. In Isaiah 49:6 God declared, “I shall submit you as a light unto the nations, to be My salvation until the end of the earth.” God has kept His word by sending His son Jesus, the Light. Now, He uses Israeli innovations 2,000 years later empowered by His favor.

The Jewish nation has pioneered thousands of innovations and implemented them in virtually every realm of human endeavor. I want to highlight three of my favorites—Watergen, ReWalk, and OrCam—whose lifechanging inventions I saw demonstrated at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) Policy Conferences. To describe these as astonishing would be an understatement.

Watergen makes clean water out of thin air! When the Watergen generator was rolled out onto AIPAC’s stage, a company executive asked an attendee to participate in a demonstration. He set a glass into place, pushed a button, and we watched the glass fill with water on the big screens situated throughout the convention center. The 18,000 of us in the audience gasped and applauded when we saw the attendee drink fresh water. It wasn’t a magic trick; it was real! As Watergen’s website explains, the generator first cleans the air it draws in, then submits it to a heating and cooling process that allows condensation to occur—and high-quality fresh water is created!

You can imagine what such a tool has meant for nations around the world. Varying models are already installed in dozens of countries, many in partnership with humanitarian organizations.

One of the most poignant Watergen stories comes from Gaza. When Watergen’s President—Israeli Michael Mirilashvili—learned that Palestinian children in Gaza’s only pediatric hospital were not getting enough safe water, he collaborated with Fayez Husseini of Mayet Al Ahel, a Palestinian Authority company that facilitates water and power plants in Gaza. Watergen installed a generator for the hospitalized children. Mr. Husseini commented, “We are very proud of our partnership with Watergen to provide clean water and save lives.”

ReWalk is a robotic exoskeleton created for those with spinal cord injuries. The wearable device was invented by Israeli Dr. Amit Goffer, who was injured in an all-terrain vehicle accident that left him a quadriplegic. He founded ReWalk Robotics to enable people with lower-limb paralysis to walk again. In 2013, Dr. Goffer propelled his wheelchair out onto AIPAC’s stage and told the story of a middle-aged man who had become paralyzed after falling out of a tree—changing his life in an instant. Then, from stage right, the subject of Dr. Goffer’s story triumphantly came walking out in his exoskeleton with his specialized crutches. All of us in the audience rose to our feet with tears in our eyes as we applauded a walking paraplegic!

Another beneficiary of this life-transforming technology is U.S. Marine Captain Derek Herrera, who was paralyzed from the chest down by a sniper’s bullet while on a combat mission in Afghanistan. ReWalk changed his life after he was first fitted for a device in 2014. The retired Captain described his life with the apparatus: “My ReWalk system has afforded me the opportunity to participate in many important milestones in my life on my own two feet.” Through the Veterans Administration, he obtained the newer model, the ReWalk Personal 6.0. Then, in 2015, Captain Herrera walked out onto a stage to receive his Bronze Star, one of the military’s highest honors.

OrCam helps the blind and visually impaired to read and recognize faces and colors! The company describes its product in this way: OrCam MyEye provides independence by allowing access to visual information, conveyed by audio, on a tiny camera which can be attached to any pair of eyeglasses. Using Artificial Intelligence it reads text, recognizes faces, identifies products, and more. MyEye is helping tens of thousands of users in 25 languages and 50 countries, from ages 6 to 100+. The company is careful to say, “OrCam improves a person’s quality of life but it does not improve eyesight.”

Here’s how OrCam works. Glasses are mounted with a small 13-megapixel smart camera on one side (called the “temple or arm”). The camera takes pictures of the wearer’s surroundings. The information is then sent to the wearer audibly. Their “sight” comes through hearing! It is real-time communication. When a blind woman was seated on AIPAC’s stage, huge screens showed us closeups of the demonstration. She was able to identify colors placed on the table in front of her and read the page of a book, which touched every one of us with awe and gratitude for such an unbelievable innovation.

In addition to the companies and products that were highlighted at AIPAC conferences, there are two others I want to mention: Netafim and Nanox.

Netafim is a global leader in a precision irrigation technique that can boast using less water to grow more crops. The company has developed systems that release exactly the right amounts of water and fertilizer at a lower cost than any other system available. Its stated purpose is “Helping the world grow more with less.” Since Israel is 60% desert, Israeli farmers set about to reclaim land from the Negev desert and make it thrive. Launching Netafim in 1965, these entrepreneurs are still impacting nations worldwide with projects like their premier drip-irrigation system. The benefit—more plentiful crops, no matter the climate—is especially critical in famine-ridden nations suffering severe food and water shortages. 

One of Netafim’s most recent projects is taking place in India. Netafim’s drip irrigation will boost crops for 97,000 farmers cultivating 247,000 acres of land. Israeli experts will train the farmers in a project that will save about 40% of India’s water in that locale over less-efficient irrigation techniques. Crops like onions, chili peppers, corn, peanuts, beans, and sunflowers will thrive and bless the lives of Indian families in more than 200 villages.

Nanox. Finally, I want to highlight an innovation that will impact millions of women: cold cathode imaging technology. This was developed by Israeli entrepreneur Ran Poliakine, who believes it will advance 125-year-old X-ray imaging “from the dark ages to the 21st century.” Abigail Klein Leichman is a writer and associate editor at www.Israel21c.org, which tracks thousands of Israel’s innovations. In an article she describes this technology’s benefits to women: “Imagine a single machine quickly scanning your whole body for signs of cancer during your annual checkup. It could perform tests such as computed tomography (CT) and a no-squish mammogram for women.” Poliakine hopes it will be on the market in two years.

Now that you have read a tiny sample of Israel’s blessings to our world, isn’t it even more baffling that her enemies want to destroy the “innovation nation”?

Join CBN Israel to pray in gratitude for Israel, “a light unto the nations.”

• Pray first with thanks for many Israeli innovations that may help your own family, such as a drug for Parkinson’s Disease or a flexible stint to treat coronary heart disease.
• Pray asking the Lord to open the eyes of Israel’s enemies to view Israel as a help to their own people. Perhaps they already use the Waze navigational app without realizing that Israel invented GPS.
• Pray that the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement—economic warfare against Israel’s businesses and institutions—will fade away.
• Pray that Israelis’ strength and can-do spirit will continue to increase and bless even more people.

Remember, God’s promise to bless the nations with light from Israel surely blesses us.

Arlene Bridges Samuels pioneered Christian outreach for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). After she served nine years on AIPAC’s staff, International Christian Embassy Jerusalem USA engaged her as Outreach Director part-time for their project, American Christian Leaders for Israel. Arlene is now an author at The Blogs-Times of Israel and has traveled to Israel 25 times. By invitation, she has attended Israel’s Government Press Office Christian Media Summit twice. She hosts her devotionals on her website at ArleneBridgesSamuels.com.

God’s mercy offends us. When God forgives our sins and we do not receive the reward of our disobedience, we revel in His mercy toward us, and we may even desire such for those like us. But what about those we don’t like, or even our enemies? That is more problematic.

God called Jonah to go to Nineveh, the capital of the brutal kingdom of Assyria. Jonah went the opposite way. God tracked Jonah down. As a result, Jonah found himself inside a fish. Jonah then cried out to God for mercy, and God heard him and gave him a second chance.

Jonah went to Nineveh and preached its impending doom in forty days. At least, he’d now be able to see the destruction of this wicked city of the Assyrians. But the people believed in God, and they repented. And when they did, so did God. “Then God saw their actions—that they had turned from their evil ways—so God relented from the disaster He had threatened to do to them. And He did not do it” (Jonah 3:10 HCSB).

You would think Jonah would be elated. The people listened to his message, and the city was safe. Shouldn’t Jonah, who recently tasted God’s mercy in his life, welcome God’s mercy to others? He didn’t. God’s mercy displeased him greatly.

We want God to be “merciful and compassionate … slow to become angry, rich in faithful love” (4:2) to us. But we want to keep those blessings for ourselves and those we deem worthy of receiving it. You would imagine that by this point, God would have reached the end of His patience with Jonah, but He hadn’t.

He provided shade for Jonah in the form of a plant, as the prophet awaited the destruction of the city. God still wanted to teach Jonah a lesson. He also appointed a worm that caused the plant to die. Once again, Jonah complained to God, “I’d rather be dead than alive!” (4:3 NLT). God now had Jonah where He could teach him.

“You cared about the plant, which you did not labor over and did not grow. It appeared in a night and perished in a night. Should I not care about the great city of Nineveh, which has more than 120,000 people who cannot distinguish between their right and their left, as well as many animals?” (4:10-11 HCSB).

Too often we think of ourselves as special and as more deserving of God’s mercy than others. To Him, we are special, but so is everyone else, even those we don’t like or agree with—even our enemies. We find ourselves displeased and offended when God shows His mercy to those we deem unworthy of it.

We usually focus upon one aspect of Jonah’s story—him inside the fish. When we do, we miss the point of the book—God’s mercy comes in ways that may displease us, to those we do not like because God is gracious and merciful and cares for everyone.

PRAYER

Father, may we walk more like You showing mercy to those we may not like, those who have hurt us, but those You care about. May we be more like You in every way. Amen.

By Mark Gerson

Last week, Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli became the latest two people to be sentenced for their crimes in the college admissions scandal—where parents cheated in a variety of ways in order to get their kids into high-ranking universities. Dozens of parents—all wealthy, sophisticated and intelligent—risked (and received) the destruction of their careers, the diminution of their fortunes, the loss of their freedom, and the ruination of their reputations. 

Moreover, the odds of this being the outcome were always exceptionally high. This scheme involved dozens of untrustworthy people—from William “Rick” Singer, the mastermind, to young men posing as teenagers to take the tests, comic ridiculousness (a photo faking being a rower), and the developing consciences of lots of teenagers. If only one person in this theater of the absurd was caught or cracked, the whole system and everyone in it would be destroyed. 

If, somehow, the system did not crack, then the parents would have lived in fear that a phone’s ringing was from someone about to tell them they’d been caught. And even if they never were caught, surely their children would have developed a serious and deserved case of imposter syndrome—while learning that the way to accept privilege is to use it to cheat and get more.

If there was ever a lose-lose proposition—if there was ever a dynamic where there was no possible way to benefit, regardless of how one valued the potential outcomes—this was it.

So why did these parents—all of whom had demonstrated a lifetime of thoughtfulness and intelligence and had at least intuitively mastered the calculus of risk and reward—even engage with Rick Singer?

It is very simple. They were just enacting what so many parents have told their children: I would do anything for you. Even simpler: They loved their children.

But wait! The Beatles (the best rock musicians this side of Elvis Presley) told us, “All you need is love”—a sentiment that has been effectively reiterated by songwriters, poets, preachers, and bumper stickers everywhere. 

To assess that statement, we have—as we always do, with any word or deed—the ultimate source: the Torah.

One very helpful way of understanding the Torah is through the “law of first mention.” This teaches us that the best way to comprehend a word in the Bible is to examine its initial use. And the first mention of “love” in the Torah is not Abraham/Sarah, Isaac/Rebecca, Jacob/Rachel, or any other romance. It is in God’s instruction to Abraham: “Please take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac … [and] offer him as a burnt offering.”

We are introduced to love, therefore, through the parent-child relationship. Imagine Abraham walking up the mountain with the beloved son he has been instructed to slaughter—and hearing John Lennon in the background: “All you need is love.” Love, he likely would have concluded, is a lot of things—but it is certainly not “all I need”!

We are introduced to an intense parental love, again, at the end of Genesis—that of Jacob (whose name had been changed to Israel) toward Joseph. “And Israel,” we learn in Genesis 37:3, “loved Joseph more than all of his sons.”

Israel had made no attempt to hide the preeminence of his affection. Joseph’s brothers took note of this and “hated” him for being the favored son. They threw Joseph into a pit, and he survived and thrived only as a consequence of divine providence and his extraordinary intelligence.

Fast forward to Deuteronomy. The parsha (“portion” of the Torah) Ki Teitze is largely about the seats of love, family, and then community. Several parshas mention songs and poems, but not this one. This parsha contains a discussion of what to do with the children of two wives who are loved differently, the cause of wayward children, the treatment of a brother (or neighbor) whose animal collapsed in the road, divorce, and a variety of other topics. 

And it is loaded with rules and laws—adding to those throughout the Torah governing love between parents and children, spouses, siblings, people and the stranger, and man and God.

This is discordant to the modern ear. We are accustomed to thinking of rules as necessary to compensate for the absence of love. There are rules governing how to take medicine, where to park in cities, how to pay taxes, and what one can carry onto an airplane. All are important for individual and societal health, but none is enhanced by a Frank Sinatra ballad setting the mood.

Moses, in making the parsha on Deuteronomy so rule-laden, is guiding us toward a realization. First, most people think of themselves—and want to think of themselves—as fundamentally good. Most people also have outcomes that they deeply desire. Sometimes, the outcome or the only pathway to the outcome is obviously bad. So being good should be easy. One might desire to do something bad, but—wanting to be good—won’t. 

For instance, let’s say that a married man is attracted to another woman. He knows adultery is wrong and, like most people, wants to be a good person. Therefore, he won’t do the wrong thing. Consequently, there must be few, if any, affairs—and the same for other kinds of sin.

But wait! There is plenty of adultery, and sin is common. So, what happened?

We have, using our God-given creativity, discovered how to both preserve our morally positive ambition and pursue outcomes that seemingly contradict with it. This is the ability to use our intelligence to justify and overrule anything that gets in the way of simultaneously reconciling our need to be good and our desire to achieve a particular outcome. This sometimes means convincing ourselves that bad things are actually good, that a bad act is a “small price to pay” for achieving a desired outcome that will benefit lots of people, burying the badness of an act in its prevalence (“everyone does it”), maintaining that it is impossible for our goodness to manifest (“it’s a hard world out there”), sideswiping the question (“nobody is perfect, including me”), strategically contextualizing the badness of the act (“I do so much good that this act barely shows up on my register”), and lots more.

These rationalizations, which seem convincing to the one conjuring them, usually sound ridiculous to everyone else. And that is where rules come in: to align our principles with our actions and to vanquish the rationalizations that would create a gulf between them. The areas where we have the deepest affections, the most intense passions, and the greatest impartiality generate unique and ripe opportunities to make mistakes. The Torah’s answer is to provide rules governing all kinds of love, thus protecting us from making mistakes in the situations where we are most vulnerable to catastrophic consequences in their absence. 

Mark Gerson, a devoted Jew, is an entrepreneur and philanthropist who (along with his wife, Rabbi Erica Gerson) is perhaps the world’s largest individual supporter of Christian medical missions. He is the co-founder of African Mission Healthcare (AMH) and the author of a forthcoming book on the Haggadah: The Telling: How Judaism’s Essential Book Reveals the Meaning of Life.  

Website: therabbishusband.com
Twitter: @markgerson
Podcast: The Rabbi’s Husband

By Arlene Bridges Samuels

“We will get slaughtered if we are not defended,” warned Security Chief Elan Isaacson in summing up the daily terror reality for Jews living near Gaza. “We are stopping two million Palestinians from infiltrating.”

Hamas—Iran’s terror surrogate—has ruled Gaza since 2007, when the enclave’s 2 million Palestinian Arabs elected them. Since that time, Israeli civilians along the Gaza/Israel border have already endured 15,000 rocket attacks. The country has been infiltrated by well-equipped terror tunnels that used Palestinian children to dig into Israel. They have faced weekly border riots and the stench of burning tires as thousands of Arab protesters riot in the “Great March of Return” demonstrations—uprisings staged to let Palestinians overtake Israel.

Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus, whom I have met several times, is the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) international spokesman. He explained, “Hamas organizers are trying to use the riots as a diversion to open up the fence and then to insert terrorists into Israel.” That means thousands of Palestinians with murder on their minds would overrun nearby Jewish communities and towns—some a mere block away from the fences.

Currently terrorists are going under while weaponized balloons are going up aware that Israel’s leaders are deciding a range of defensive measures. For Hamas’s military and political terror leaders, who know that Israel will not attack civilian locations and institutions, going “underground” means hiding in mosques, schools, and hospitals. Terror bosses also hide, sometimes in luxurious five-star hotels in other Arab countries. They leave behind a poverty-stricken population to do the dirty work of terror—using rockets plus balloon “bouquets” to set fire to Israeli crops next door.

Such border disturbances have been going on for years. Hamas terrorists first used kites and then switched to fire balloons, escalating their violent tactics into another form of intifada in 2018. The word “intifada,” which is of Arabic origin, is defined as “to shake off” or “get rid of.” It is an apt definition that embodies the Gazan uprising of hatred. While Americans and Israelis often celebrate happy occasions with balloons, Hamas has transformed this symbol of delight into one of devastation and destruction. The terrorists celebrate knowing their balloons have set fire to thousands of acres of Israeli crops—a kind of environmental terrorism.

Years before, during the Al-Aqsa Intifada of 2000–2004, Israel lost more than 1,000 citizens—murdered by suicide bombers in restaurants, hotels, and on buses. Those devastating losses were then capped on August 15, 2005, when a series of decisions came to a head. After the murderous Al-Aqsa Intifada—along with a succession of rejected peace overtures—former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel’s Knesset, and the IDF enacted one of the most painful episodes in their modern history. Under the “Unilateral Disengagement,” the IDF removed 8,000 Jewish men, women and children from 25 settlements in Gaza, never to return. These Jewish families left behind their homes, schools, businesses, and synagogues and were transplanted to other parts of Israel—all in the hope that peace might be achieved by their absence.

Unfortunately, that outcome never materialized. The day that the IDF completed this agonizing evacuation, they closed the gate behind them. Israelis hoped that Palestinians would establish prosperous lives, a “Singapore by the sea,” while maintaining the detailed agreements engineered in order for peace to reign. Instead, the Palestinians rushed to destroy thriving greenhouses and other businesses that Israelis had left behind to help Arabs. Thus, this hopeful peacekeeping effort proved fruitless.

Since that exceedingly controversial and painful disengagement in 2005, only Arab Palestinians have lived in Gaza—no Jews whatsoever. Therefore, Jews do not “occupy” Gaza. The more than 1 million Israelis who presently live within a 30-mile danger zone could have never imagined even in their worst nightmares the barrages of rockets and weaponized balloons that would be launched against them.

Those barrages have been so relentless that Israelis now suffer from epidemic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Frightened young children often cannot potty train until they are six years old. Kindergartens are situated either underground or behind thick, rocket-resistant walls. If only one parent is home, they are afraid to take a shower in case an alarm goes off, worried that they cannot get their children to a safe room in time. When one’s Red Alert phone app or an outdoor alarm sounds, it signals incoming rockets. Families have just 15 seconds to take cover or go to safe rooms. When they are out and about, they hope that one of the 500 bomb shelters is nearby. During briefings on trips to Israel, my Christian Leadership groups and I packed like sardines into a shelter for briefings. Designed for 12 to 50 people, the bomb shelters have saved many thousands of lives. 

In 2006, Operation Lifeshield (OLS) began manufacturing Israel Defense Forces-approved portable bomb shelters via private donations from Christians and Jews. OLS Executive Director Shmuel Bowman explains, “Hamas terrorists have improved their weapons’ accuracy and distance. Around 30 to 60 fires per day rage in the Israeli communities nearby Gaza. Farms, forests, nature reserves and homes have been destroyed. In the past two weeks, over 500 fires were caused by arson terror. Operation Lifeshield firefighter trailers and ATVs have been in full force. The victims are traumatized by the realization that the horrors of last year are back again—and more violent than ever.”

Against this background of near-constant terror attacks, it’s nothing short of remarkable that Israelis maintain their culture of celebrating life at weddings, bar and bat mitzvas, synagogues, and schools. On several of my visits to Kibbutz Kfar Aza, only feet from the Gaza border, longtime resident Chen Kotler Abrahams has briefed my Christian Leadership groups. Chen declares, “We have fought for this land to be ours for so many years. In my lifetime, we have had a country for the first time—and we’re not leaving.” Chen also showed us the “Red Alert” board game developed for children, to teach them what to do when the alarm sounds.

While Israel is almost always blamed for the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, the truth is that Israel has allowed thousands of tons of food, medicines, and necessities into Gaza for years—even during times of conflict—at the Kerem Shalom Crossing. Hamas, on the other hand, uses Iran’s donations to purchase and store weapons in apartments and hospitals and has even attacked Israeli workmen who are attempting to repair electrical lines into Gaza damaged by Hamas’s rockets. Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs calls out Hamas, saying, “It has systematically been committing a double war crime, by deliberately targeting Israeli civilians while using the Palestinian civilian population for cover.”

When praying for Israelis near Gaza, embrace this reminder in Isaiah that God has preserved a remnant of the Jewish people from ancient to modern times. “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by your name; you are Mine. I will be with you when you pass through the waters, and when you pass through the rivers, they will not overwhelm you. You will not be scorched when you walk through the fire, and the flame will not burn you” (Isaiah 43:1-2 HCSB).

Join with CBN Israel in praying for Israeli communities on the front lines of terror:

• Pray for Israelis suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for strength, endurance, and healing.
• Pray for children who are growing up with Red Alerts, running to shelters, and with disrupted school days. Children born around 2005 are now teenagers, so they have always dealt with the threat of violence. 
• Pray for Israel in real time by downloading the free app Red Alert: Israel—which notifies you, along with Israelis, about incoming rockets.
• Pray for Israel’s military to employ the most appropriate defensive measures to safeguard their civilian population.
• Pray that true facts about Israel will increase and that slander will decrease.

Together, may we remember the promise in Isaiah: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you.”

Arlene Bridges Samuels pioneered Christian outreach for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). After she served nine years on AIPAC’s staff, International Christian Embassy Jerusalem USA engaged her as Outreach Director part-time for their project, American Christian Leaders for Israel. Arlene is now an author at The Blogs-Times of Israel and has traveled to Israel 25 times. By invitation, she has attended Israel’s Government Press Office Christian Media Summit twice. She hosts her devotionals on her website at ArleneBridgesSamuels.com.

They are widowed, divorced, or abandoned. They are Israel’s single mothers, making up over 95% of the 130,000 single parent families there. Many are in crisis situations, relying heavily on government assistance. When COVID-19 hit, survival became even harder.

Thousands lost jobs. Others struggled to find childcare during school closures—often forcing them to stay home and lose their paychecks. These hardworking mothers have enough challenges making ends meet in normal times. But the recent lockdown robbed many of income, childcare, and the mobility to seek new options. Where could they turn?

Thankfully, friends like you were there through CBN Israel. Since the pandemic began, we have distributed more food packages, plus extra food vouchers and many other forms of aid. We have also helped with medical care, medicine, and care for special needs children requiring 24/7 supervision.

Arik, the head of our family department, is in constant contact with many single mothers, offering emergency relief, financial planning, and encouragement. Caring friends like you have made it possible for him and our volunteers across the country to shop for house-bound mothers and desperate families—and deliver groceries, diapers, and medicine to their homes.

Arik says gratefully, “We are making such a difference in so many people’s lives… Thank you for blessing Israel and her people in need.” Your support can make a tremendous difference in these challenging times. Please join us in reaching out!

“For the High and Exalted One who lives forever, whose name is Holy says this: ‘I live in a high and holy place, and with the oppressed and lowly of spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and revive the heart of the oppressed.’” (Isaiah 57:15 HCSB).

We live in a culture that frequently gravitates toward the cult of personality. Most often, we get star struck, either with our star or someone else’s. This is true even in the church. How often are we more likely to position ourselves to be closer to the greatest among us rather than choosing to share life with the humble and lowly among us?   

The prophet described God, however, as “high and exalted,” inhabiting eternity. Yet He also dwells with the contrite and humble. God resides in both places—in the highest heaven and with the lowly and oppressed. If you’re looking for Him, that is where you’ll find Him.

The Bible describes God as the defender of the “fatherless and the widow” … and “the foreigner” (Deuteronomy 10:18). These were three classes of people that did not have an advocate within ancient Israelite society, yet God identified with them and continually came to their defense.

He dwells on high and with the contrite and humble. Amazing. He resides among the lowly and oppressed to revive them, to strengthen them, and to sustain them.

People in our world get caught up in their position, power, and press. But the God and Creator of the universe, who lives in a high and holy place, is never beyond the lowly, the humble, the widow, orphan, and foreigner.

Humility and contriteness are both characteristics that we can control. “He mocks proud mockers but shows favor to the humble and oppressed” (Proverbs 3:34 NIV). We choose how we posture ourselves. Do we humble ourselves and make ourselves contrite? Or do we do the opposite and become arrogant and proud?

If God, who resides in the high and holy place, can stoop to dwell with the humble and lowly, then none of us has anything to be proud and haughty about. God is our model. He not only commands us how to live; He behaves in that way, too.

We should resist the temptation of our cult-of-personality society and remember that the One who dwells in eternity resides with the lowly. And so must we.

PRAYER

Father, may we be where You are. May we always walk in humility and contriteness to experience Your presence. Amen.

By Mark Gerson

Jews and Christians are accustomed to think of God in conjunction with “love.” But the author of the Torah, who taught us to think of God this way, occasionally injects something that is discordant and thus causes us to consider deeply the source of and reason for this discordance. This is when the Torah tells us that God “hates” someone or something—particularly when that person or practice is obviously evil, like a murderer of innocents. 

One of those examples is in Deuteronomy 18, when the Torah tells us that God “hates” the practice and practitioners of “divination,” including “an astrologer, one who reads omens, a sorcerer, an animal charmer…or one who consults the dead.”

There are forbidden practices in the Torah that we confidently say are of little relevance, at least in their literal sense. For instance, the prohibition immediately preceding the one about “diviners” concerns causing one’s “son or daughter to pass through the fire.” That prohibition, thankfully, has worked. But astrology has made up for it. In 2019, Vice magazine reported “We’ve hit peak astrology”—and there is plenty of evidence, from surveys to app downloads, that this is correct. The data is unambiguous that this popularity is universal, from secular millennials to adherents of every traditional religion. Indeed, it seems as though the one commonality among people of the most divergent philosophies is a belief in, and devotion to, astrology and other forms of divination.

Why? Why would people who profess belief in scientific rationalism and/or the sovereignty of an almighty God also rely on palm readers, tarot cards, astrology apps, and fortune tellers? Similarly, why would the belief in the latter be so persistent? It obviously existed in the time of the Torah and subsequently in the ancient world (despite the prohibition within Judaism and Christianity; the common Hebrew expression “Mazel Tov” does not mean “good luck” but “good constellation”) and, per Vice, it is more popular than ever today. The persistence of the belief in divination despite its religious prohibition, ignorance of any scientific principle, and immunity from any rational claim is so astonishing that it must have something profound to teach us. 

I am not sure that I know what it is. Perhaps it is just that the future is a terrifying place. We all know that our lives could be transformed at any instant by disease, natural disaster, man-made catastrophe, the loss of a livelihood, the disappointment in a partner, or the sadness of a child. It could be later today or in many years that we face the ultimate uncertainty.

Of course, the future could also contain plenty of good things. But as animals conditioned by evolution, we are trained to be “loss avoiders”—which means, in the words of psychologist Daniel Kahneman, “The response to losses is stronger than the response to corresponding gains.” Even if the chance of a good event is equal to the chance of a bad event, we will focus on and prepare for (correctly or incorrectly) the bad event. It is no wonder that people are unified around their commitment to anything—even the most prohibited and ridiculous things—that could help them control or at least understand the terror that lies ahead.

So why would God, as we are told in the Torah, “hate” these practices? They are not necessarily opposed to any of the core tenets of ethical monotheism. One could believe, without any contradiction, that God is the ultimate and only sovereign and that He, by exercising His omniscience and omnipotence, dictated the future in our palms and His stars. 

However, there is a significant contradiction, and it is not only logical—it cuts to the very nature of God’s project in the world. God may be omniscient in that He knows everything that we are doing, thinking and feeling, but the God of the Torah gives people—most importantly Abraham and later Moses’ Pharaoh—“tests,” indicating that God does not know what people will do. In fact, the God of the Torah is often surprised—at Jews who worship the Golden Calf, at spies/scouts who produce a negative report of the land, at the daughters of Zelophehad who demand to be able to inherit in the land, and at nameless men who tell Moses that their inability to celebrate Passover just because they were in a state of impurity is unjust. 

In each of these instances, God changes. After the Golden Calf, God fires the firstborn and gives their authority to the Levites (who did not participate in idolatry). After the spies/scouts incident, God delays our entrance into the land by several decades. After hearing from the five daughters of Zelophehad, God changes the laws of inheritance and hence decrees a new system of gender justice. After considering the complaint of the nameless men, God institutes a new holiday, “Pesach Sheni,” which provides those who were impure or “on a faraway journey” the opportunity to celebrate the most important Jewish occasion.

If God changes, how about those created in His image? In an iconic moment in Genesis, Jacob wrestles with an angel—or was it a man? Jacob, after a long struggle, tells his assailant that he will not let him go. The assailant changes Jacob’s name to Israel—from “heel” to “you have struggled with God and men.” And then Jacob lets him go. 

Rabbi David Wolpe reminds us that Jacob says he would not end the encounter without a blessing—but Jacob ends the struggle without receiving a blessing. What happened? Jacob did receive a blessing. In the changing of his name, Jacob receives the seminal human blessing: the ability to transform himself.

This, perhaps, is why God hates all forms of divination. Card readings, astrology, and fortune- telling all share one heresy: They presume that the future is set, and thus that change is impossible. Accordingly, there would be no point in trying to improve oneself or to enact social change. Divination embodies one of the worst philosophies: nihilism.

This would explain what immediately follows God’s condemnation of divination. Moses, channeling God, tells us to pay special attention to prophets. We might regard this as confusing. After all, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the word “prophetic” means, “accurately describing or predicting what will happen in the future.” This is completely wrong. The biblical prophets warn us what will happen if we behave—or, more frequently, keep behaving—in a particular way. As with anyone who warns, they want us to change so that their prediction does not come true!    

With God’s help, we can all be prophets by identifying what is good, how we are falling short, calling attention to the consequences of right and wrong, and calling us to change personally and socially en route to a more sacred place. That task is much more difficult than learning the “future” from a palm reader—but it is our highest task, gifted to us by God.

Mark Gerson, a devoted Jew, is an entrepreneur and philanthropist who (along with his wife, Rabbi Erica Gerson) is perhaps the world’s largest individual supporter of Christian medical missions. He is the co-founder of African Mission Healthcare (AMH) and the author of a forthcoming book on the Haggadah: The Telling: How Judaism’s Essential Book Reveals the Meaning of Life.  

Website: therabbishusband.com
Twitter: @markgerson
Podcast: The Rabbi’s Husband