Letters To The Editor – December 20, 2024

A Teacher’s Impact

I read the article “Our Impressionable Children” by Rabbi Mordechai Weiss (Dec. 13) and I knew I had to write about my experience in first grade.

I was a little six-year-old girl and this was my first school experience (in those days we didn’t go to kindergarten or pre-1A). It was the third day of classes and we were given workbooks. The teacher explained how to do pages 1 and 2. I finished quickly and saw that I could also do page 3. I was very proud of myself when she explained how to do it, and I saw that I had gotten them all right. When she saw me sitting quietly, she asked me why I wasn’t writing, and I told her that I had already completed the assignment. She screamed at me and told me to close my book, and shamed me in other ways.

I have never forgotten that incident and even remember her name. Fortunately, I had a very wise mother and she promptly took me out of that yeshiva and enrolled me in another one.

So Rabbi Weiss, I am now in my eighties, and like you, I have never forgotten.

N.M.
Jerusalem, Israel

Trump’s Lucky Break

In reference to your recent editorial “Recognizing the Hand of G-d” (December 13), I would like to add that Hashem not only saved our former president Donald Trump physically from a foiled assassination attempt, but also politically as well.

After the January 6, 2020 assault on the Capitol, President Trump’s role in that horrendous event should have disqualified him from ever running for any public office again, and he could have been facing a prison term for it. But instead, Hashem came to his rescue, by causing the various justice departments and AGs and DAs to very foolishly first focus on the very least of his many criminal charges, namely the hush money case in New York. And in fact, they inflated it to such an extent that a jury found him guilty of all related 34 felony counts which the majority of the public believed was totally outrageous. This, in turn, elicited much sympathy for him, and overshadowed the more serious criminal charges that should have been levied against him, particularly the January 6 insurrection case that, fortunately for him, never came to fruition.

I do hope and pray that in these next four years, Hashem will help save our newly-elected president from his innate impulsivity and quest for vengeance, and instead direct him on a more stable and corruption-free path that will not only benefit Israel in defeating all of its enemies, but also the American public as well.

Josh Rosenthal
Queens, N.Y.

There Are Miracles, And There Are Miracles

On July 26, 2024, The Jewish Press printed a letter of mine, “The IDF’s Amazing Stats,” praising Israel’s stunning achievements against Hamas in Gaza, eliminating it as a major fighting force embedded in an urban environment and in miles of underground tunnels, while minimizing collateral population damage, and sustaining relatively low Israeli casualties, calling it a model for future militaries to emulate.

Little did I realize then that Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon would even exceed that in brilliance. Hezbollah appeared to be a more formidable foe, with its arsenal of tens of thousands of rockets and missiles that were within range of major Israeli cities and population centers, many of which had to be evacuated as a precaution. Also, the terrain was not conducive to the kind of swift, armor-led attacks that the Israeli army is used to conducting.

Instead of engaging Hezbollah in an all-out war like with Hamas in Gaza, Israel relied on superior intelligence and guile to decapitate Hezbollah’s top leadership by systematically taking out their top military leaders and commanders with pinpoint precision attacks, thus rendering them impotent to carry out any sustained attacks against Israel. The “exploding pagers” were a striking example.

As for Iran itself, the one large-scale attempt to launch a barrage of missiles against Israel was a colossal failure and an embarrassment to them. And finally, the collapse of Iran’s ally, Assad’s regime in Syria, was a devastating blow to Iran’s dream of becoming a world power.

Additionally, in Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, the IDF Air Force systematically destroyed all their air defenses, naval capability, and stores of arms and chemical weapons to keep them from falling into the wrong hands, as well as leaving the path wide open for potential further attacks on Iran’s nuclear and oil facilities at a later time, if deemed necessary.

In essence, in a war which Iran and its proxies started to try to destroy Israel, Israel turned the tables on them, and now leaves Iran as a pathetic, weak country unable to even defend itself. Its status as a major power in the totalitarian “Axis of Evil” with China and Russia is now in shambles.

David Ben-Gurion once famously said, “Anyone who doesn’t believe in miracles is not a realist.” The remarkable survival, with Hashem’s blessings, of the tiny band of Jewish people throughout the ages against constant, sustained, barbaric attempts by much of the world to destroy them is a stirring testament to that sentiment. It is a miracle.

Today the Jewish people make up only about 0.2% of the world population and Israel is about half of that. And this tiny country sits in the center of a global struggle between two huge blocks of countries, the “Axis of Evil” including China, Russia, and Iran on one side, and the free democracies of the United States and the NATO countries, including Britain, France, and Germany, on the other. Yet this tiniest of countries has just effected a major reassessment of the world’s two great superpower blocs.

That is a miracle.

Max Wisotsky
Highland Park, N.J.