An Open Letter to Tehila Elitzur

Tehila Elitzur, a prominent religious Zionist Talmudist, penned a very emotional letter to  Haredi mothers. Mother to mother–does it get more emotional than that? Let me quote

“There is no longer any place in Israeli society for distinguishing between blood and blood. I wish to direct this painful voice to ultra-Orthodox women because I feel they are the ones who can lead the change, even if it is slow and gradual, within ultra-Orthodox society.

She’s got a point.

This morning, I woke to the news of four more deaths; judging from their first names, they probably hailed from the national religious community. Four beautiful dead boys. Four more tragedies. But the solution isnt to throw more young men and women into the battlefield. We need this bloodletting to end for all of us regardless of which headgear they wear or dont wear but how?

A ceasefire won’t solve our problems. Most of us know that, though the rest of the world is not so sure.

A two-state solution?. That’s just fancy semantics; no real security.

It’s time for us to unleash our secret weapon—not the atom bomb. As a Torah scholar, Mrs. Elitzur, you know what that is Prayer..Let’s cry and scream and yell out to Hashem. Yes, that sounds naive, but that’s what we Jews have always done, and Hashem listens.

Hanukah just ended, and Purim is just around the corner, followed by Passover–all three holidays are about salvation wrought through prayer. Prayer is real. It’s what G-d wants from us.

Here’s a strange but true historical fact. In 1943, Rommel and his Afrika Korps were just outside the land of Israel. Of course, Jews of the Yishuv were quaking in their proverbial boots, waiting to join their European counterparts in the ovens of Auschwitz.. It was during those challenging days that the Jews of Jerusalem gathered to pray. For three solid days, they prayed their hearts out, and it worked. G-d listened, and Rommel was defeated.

How? Not on the battlefield. His troops contracted a stomach bug. They were too indisposed to fight. Hashem’s vanquished them in the toilet.

That’s what we need now. Supposedly, intelligent people like General Yitzhak Brik believe our answer is to ally ourselves more closely with the US. He seems to have forgotten that the US looked the other way while the nazis exterminated European Jewry.

Anyone who follows geopolitics even minimally can see that we have no real allies, but we do have Hashem. We need to cry out to Him–prayer is free. We can use  King David’s words or our own.

And just as He has in the past Hashem will save us.

Am Yisrael Chai.