Opinion

An Orthodox Jew looks at his community, post-Trump

As a proud member of the Orthodox community – one increasingly embarrassed by the behavior of a large part of our community – I take pride in our openness to asking challenging questions. The question-and-answer format of the Talmud. The give-and-take of a beis midrash study hall. The no-holds-barred approach of students towards a rabbi’s Torah lecture.

Rav  Dovid Feinstein ZT”L

 A few weeks ago, I wrote an article that mostly focused on the political situation at the time, and felt that I was not up to the task of writing any words of hesped on Rav Dovid Feinstein zt”l who had passed earlier that week. Sergey Kadinsky and Nachum Segal wrote a beautiful article about Rav Dovid, while I had not known him personally that well.

 New York Times bestselling author Governor Andrew Cuomo, who literally wrote the book on how to defeat COVID, is a blight on this once-great state.  That’s it.  That’s the article.

The world breathes a collective sigh of relief that 2020 is at an end.  It is superstitious, perhaps, to believe that when the clock chimes midnight on New Year’s, the problems of 2020 will be behind us. Nevertheless, the general public remains hopeful that 2021 will be better than its predecessor. However, as painful as 2020 was, this year saw one of the greatest accomplishments of the Trump presidency: the decimation of Iran as a regional power.

Just about two weeks ago, around mid-December 2020, the 50^th anniversary of the Leningrad trial was marked. The Leningrad trial involved eleven individuals, mostly Jews, who stood trial for attempting to carry out the hijacking of a small empty airplane in June 1970. It was a fantasy; under the disguise of a trip to a local wedding, the hijackers would buy every ticket on a 12-seater plane, so there would be no passengers but them.  Their plan was to board the empty 12-seat plane from inside the Soviet Union, in an effort to escape the USSR by landing the airplane in Sweden.  Later on, this story was dubbed Operation Wedding. 

As the end of the year approaches and the future of Washington politics is taking shape, the Senate race in Georgia is taking on far greater importance than a normal runoff election would.  Should the Democrats win, there will be a 50-50 split in the Senate (with Vice President Harris as the tie-breaker), a Democrat House majority, and a Democrat President.  There will be little to nothing to stop the socialist leftwing of the Democratic Party from enacting their policies.