Some of the best examples of coexistence in Israel can be found in the most unlikely of places. I recently met with Guy Solomon, the Executive Director of Tsad Kadima (A Step Forward), the Association for Conductive Education in Israel, a community-based agency started by a group of parents in 1987 who had children with cerebral palsy and other neuro-motor conditions.
One of these parents from Jerusalem embarked on worldwide search for the best treatment options and when they learned about the Conductive Education (CE) method that Professor Andreas Petõ, a Hungarian Jewish physician, developed in the 1920s and 1930s, they brought their daughter to Budapest for long training sessions. Soon, hundreds of other Israeli families followed the Jerusalem pioneering family, and now Tsad Kadima is the second largest center of Conductive Education (CE) outside of Hungary, and is recognized worldwide for its holistic approach to rehabilitation and education of children, adolescents, and young adults with cerebral palsy (CP) or motor dysfunctions. Conductive Education is used throughout Europe, but less so in North America although there are centers in Claremont, Menlo Park and Petaluma.
A key aspect of CE is making choices. From an early age, children with CP are asked to make choices, using picture cards, special software on Ipads and other technology. Also, Conductive Education takes into account the fact that for children with severe motor disabilities, learning even the most basic movements needed for everyday activities such as dressing and eating are extremely difficult, and most be learned and repeated over and over. It also recognizes that the disability, in and of itself, causes learning difficulties for children with disabilities and so there is a need for specialized education and teaching that will enable them to overcome these difficulties at home, at school, and in society. And lastly, there’s a large psychosocial component that goes way beyond conventional physical therapy approaches.
The Israeli teachers, known as “Conductors” study for three years post college to receive their certification in Conductive Education, and every year a professional instructor from the Petõ Center in Budapest comes to Israel to provide continuing education and administer the final exam to the graduating class.
Guy was in Los Angeles as part of the Kolot program for Israeli Leading Social Entrepreneurs funded in part by the Jewish Agency and the Los Angeles Jewish Community Foundation. He shared with me that his entire professional career has been helping adults with disabilities, including sports for the disabled and the Para Olympics. He told me about their preschool, elementary school programs, funded by the Israeli Minister of Education, along with the newer adult day programs for adults with severe disabilities, most of who use electric wheelchairs. The Adult Day Program, which has funding from several Israeli ministries but still needs private support includes teaching living skills, sports, therapeutic treatments and socialization in groups.
I asked Guy how public accessibility was coming along in Israel, knowing its challenges from own trips there with our son with CP, and he told me a story about checking out a new location for a school in Jerusalem, since they had outgrown their current location. The new site was large, and had seemed to have everything they needed. The real estate agent had been told the facility was going to be used by 40 people who use wheelchairs. But when the agent took Guy up the stairs to the entrance, and Guy asked where the ramp or elevator was, there was a blank expression on the agent’s face. There was no way to enter the building except up those stairs.
And here’s the coexistence part. I asked Guy if there were Haredi (ultra-religious) families who sent their children and young adults to Tsad Kadima’s programs. As it turns out, the clients in Tsad Kadima come from every sector, secular to very religious Jews, and also Arab Israelis and Druze. Watch the video to see for yourself the remarkable work they are doing, and support them by clicking here.
The final of the nation’s most prestigious spelling bee took a Yiddish turn Thursday night.
Scripps National Spelling Bee finalist Jairam Hathwar, a 13-year-old from Corning, New York, was asked to spell the word “chremslach” in the ultimate rounds of the competition.
Not up on your Yiddish and wondering what the word means? You probably aren’t alone. Chremslach are small, flat fried matzah meal cakes traditionally eaten by Jews during the Passover holiday.
Mazel tov to Jairam, who spelled the word correctly and went on to be crowned spelling bee co-champion, along with Nihar Janga, an 11-year-old boy from Austin, Texas. (After 39 rounds, the contest ended in a tie for the third consecutive year.)
#speller152 Jairam Hathwar spelled the word 'chremslach' (flat fried cakes) correctly #spellingbee
Jairam and Nihar were among ten spellers in the finals, broadcast live on ESPN. Both boys said they knew some of the words they were given and figured out the spelling of the rest. They will each take home $40,000 in cash and other prizes.
Jairam’s brother Sriram finished was co-champion in 2014.
Thursday wasn’t the first time a Jewish word popped up in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
In 2013, 13-year-old Queens, New York native Arvind Mahankali won the bee by spelling “knaidel,” the Yiddish word for a matzah ball or dumpling usually placed in matzah ball soup. The word’s spelling set off a Yiddish debate — the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, a New York-based organization seen as the authority on Yiddish history, claimed the correct spelling was “kneydl.”
In the same contest, 13-year-old Hannah Citsay correctly spelled the word “hesped” — a Hebrew-derived term for an oration or eulogy given after a Jewish memorial service.
In 2009, “kichel” — a Jewish dessert cookie — made a very Jewy appearance. The sentence used to put the word in context for a contestant was: “The thought of someone kvetching about her kichel gave Meryl the spilkes.”
In 2006, 14-year-old Saryn Hooks was eliminated after judges thought she had spelled “hechsher” incorrectly. But in a dramatic twist, the brother of a fellow contestant noticed she had in fact correctly spelled the word — which means a rabbinical endorsement of food prepared according to kosher laws — and notified the judges. She was invited back to the contest. She didn’t end up winning.
Israel’s environmental protection minister resigned, citing the recent dismissal of former Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon and disagreements on policy with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Avi Gabai, a member of the center-right Kulanu party, announced his resignation on Friday, a week after Yaalon resigned following Netanyahu’s decision to replace him as defense minister with Avigdor Liberman of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party.
Yaalon was offered but declined the post of foreign minister in the framework of coalition negotiations between Yisrael Beiteinu and Netanyahu’s Likud party.
During a press conference in Tel Aviv, Gabai said he “found it difficult” to be part of Netanyahu’s government for several reasons, including how it “totally upset the relationship with the world’s most important power – the one safeguarding our security interests,” referring to the United States.
Netanyahu has been widely criticized for having escalated disagreements between Israel’s government and the Obama administration over the Iran nuclear deal and other issues.
Yaalon’s resignation followed an open disagreement between him and Netanyahu over whether Israel Defense Forces officers are allowed to express themselves publicly on military and non-military issues. The disagreement surfaced after Netanyahu condemned statements by Deputy Chief of Staff Yair Golan, who on May 5 said Israeli society was witnessing trends reminiscent of those visible in Nazi Germany. Yaalon encouraged IDF officers to continue to speak their minds after Netanyahu condemned Golan’s remarks.
“I found it difficult to see the growing division in our people over the past year and the assault on our army, which is the last public institution enjoying widespread public trust,” Gabai added, according to Maariv. The resignation by Yaalon, who cited “growing extremism” as his reason for quitting, was “something I could not swallow.”
In his resignation speech, Gabai also said the government was behaving irresponsibly and “in an amateurish manner” in pushing through a program that offers gas drilling to commercial enterprises for the extraction of large deposits of natural gas discovered in recent years off Israel’s shores.
U.S. health officials on Thursday reported the first case in the country of a patient with an infection resistant to a last-resort antibiotic, and expressed grave concern that the superbug could pose serious danger for routine infections if it spreads.
“We risk being in a post-antibiotic world,” said Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, referring to the urinary tract infection of a 49-year-old Pennsylvania woman who had not travelled within the prior five months.
Frieden, speaking at a National Press Club luncheon in Washington, D.C., said the bacteria was resistant to colistin, an antibiotic that is reserved for use against “nightmare bacteria.”
The infection was reported Thursday in a study appearing in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology. It said the superbug itself had first been infected with a tiny piece of DNA called a plasmid, which passed along a gene called mcr-1 that confers resistance to colistin.
“(This) heralds the emergence of truly pan-drug resistant bacteria,” said the study, which was conducted by the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of mcr-1 in the USA.”
The patient visited a clinic on April 26 with symptoms of a urinary tract infection, according to the study, which did not describe her current condition. Authors of the study could not immediately be reached for comment.
The study said continued surveillance to determine the true frequency of the gene in the United States is critical.
“It is dangerous and we would assume it can be spread quickly, even in a hospital environment if it is not well contained,” said Dr. Gail Cassell, a microbiologist and senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School.
But she said the potential speed of its spread will not be known until more is learned about how the Pennsylvania patient was infected, and how present the colistin-resistant superbug is in the United States and globally.
“MEDICINE CABINET IS EMPTY FOR SOME”
In the United States, antibiotic resistance has been blamed for at least 2 million illnesses and 23,000 deaths annually.
The mcr-1 gene was found last year in people and pigs in China, raising alarm.
The potential for the superbug to spread from animals to people is a major concern, Cassell said.
For now, Cassell said people can best protect themselves from it and from other bacteria resistant to antibiotics by thoroughly washing their hands, washing fruits and vegetables thoroughly and preparing foods appropriately.
Experts have warned since the 1990s that especially bad superbugs could be on the horizon, but few drugmakers have attempted to develop drugs against them.
Frieden said the need for new antibiotics is one of the more urgent health problems, as bugs become more and more resistant to current treatments.
“The more we look at drug resistance, the more concerned we are,” Frieden added. “The medicine cabinet is empty for some patients. It is the end of the road for antibiotics unless we act urgently.”
Overprescribing of antibiotics by physicians and in hospitals and their extensive use in food livestock have contributed to the crisis.
More than half of all hospitalized patients will get an antibiotic at some point during their stay. But studies have shown that 30 percent to 50 percent of antibiotics prescribed in hospitals are unnecessary or incorrect, contributing to antibiotic resistance.
Many drugmakers have been reluctant to spend the money needed to develop new antibiotics, preferring to use their resources on medicines for cancer and rare diseases that command very high prices and lead to much larger profits.
In January, dozens of drugmakers and diagnostic companies, including Pfizer, Merck & Co, Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline, signed a declaration calling for new incentives from governments to support investment in development of medicines to fight drug-resistant superbugs.
In 2002 when Jean-Marie Le Pen— then the head of the extremist French Front National— shockingly made it to the runoff for the French Presidential election, French voters knew what to do: Repudiate him, and everything he stood for.
Le Pen is, not to mince words, a racist, a bigot, a bully, and a misogynist. In other words, he is a man exactly like Donald Trump. In fact, Le Pen endorsed Trump during this year’s Republican primaries— an endorsement that Trump never repudiated, not even in the half-hearted way he eventually did with that of former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke.
Prior to being trounced in the runoff, Le Pen, like Trump, was something of a “miraculous” candidate. Among 16 candidates (just one short of the 17-person Republican scrum from which Trump has emerged), Le Pen was able to secure 16.86% of votes in the first round of voting on April 21, 2002, placing him ahead of then-Prime Minister Lionel Jospin (16.18%), and second only to then-President Jacques Chirac (19.88%). The top two candidates went on to compete in a runoff election two weeks later. After major demonstrations against Le Pen, Chirac received 82% of the vote.
This November, Trump must not only lose. Like Le Pen, he must be shamed. American voters must send a message to him— and everyone who would be like him, here and around the world— that whatever shortcomings we may have as a country, Trump will not and cannot be our leader.
Elections, above all else, are moral choices. And we must be clear about what Trump represents: the abyss. As David Brooks described in his article “No, Not Trump, Not Ever”, men like Trump have cravenly sought power since time immemorial. In the words of Psalm 73: “pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence… They scoff, and speak with malice; with arrogance they threaten oppression. Their mouths lay claim to heaven, and their tongues take possession of the earth. Therefore their people turn to them and drink up waters in abundance…”
To be clear, many of the problems that Trump’s rise has helped expose— rising inequality, stagnating wages, a widespread distrust in government— are very real indeed. But his purported “solutions”— as best they can be defined— would only make these problems worst. Whatever legitimate grievances his supporters may have, his campaign has amounted to little more than a narcissist spewing a kaleidoscope of hate– against Hispanics, Muslims, women, veterans, the disabled, and indeed the American ideal itself.
In this, it is true that Trump represents, in many senses, not a break from the worst aspects of Republican ideology and tactics— with its dog-whistle racism and authoritarianism— so much as its apogee. Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 general election campaign with a rally near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where civil rights workers were James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were martyred for their work to ensure that all Americans had the right to vote.
Yet Trump is something far scarier: a man of unbridled ambition and aggression sitting in the Oval Office. A man without any understanding of policy, without capacity for empathy or sense of restraint, without shame or morality– in control of the nuclear codes. He is exactly the type of man our Founders’ feared, and that our Constitution was created to prevent. And yet, we still have difficulty believing the true threat that Trump represents: He is a buffoon, we assure ourselves; He doesn’t mean what he says; He’s an entertainer; We laugh it off.
Dictators are always petty. They are always buffoons. The always deliver circuses with their promises of bread. That is their nature. Laughter does not deter them; real or imagined, it motivates them.
As Adolf Hitler said in his speech to the Reichstag on September 30 1942, “Once the Germans Jews laughed at my prophecy. I do not know whether they are still laughing, or whether they are laughing on the other side of their faces. I can simply repeat— they will stop laughing altogether, and I will fulfill my prophecy in this field too.”
No, Melania, Trump is not Hitler. He is more Mussolini circa 1921– or Putin or Erdoğan circa 2016. The resentment and pretension, the forked-tongued appeal to that which is most base and inhuman in our characters, the false prophecy of redemption to make us “great again”– they are all the same. He is our proof incarnate that “it can happen here”. And if we don’t act, it will.
In years before the Second World War, there arose something called the Popular Front— an alliance of those on the left, the center, and the reasonable against the tide of fascism. It was initially defeated not only by the fascists but by its own internal divisions.
We now need a modern version of the Popular Front— and we need to be united: Bernie supporters, Hillary supporters, disaffected Republicans… everyone from the Black Lives Matters movement to the Neocons… everyone who recognizes what this man represents. We must keep our eyes on the prize: the defeat of a man who would destroy us all to soothe the demons in his soul.
Previous generations of Americans– those who stormed the beaches at Normandy and stood their ground against Pickett’s Charge in Gettysburg– paid the ultimate price for freedom. Previous generations of Americans– those faced down the fire houses in Birmingham and the Billy Clubs of Selma, those who stood up so that their voice could be heard in Seneca Falls and Stonewall– endured oppression, and scorn, and hatred for their rights, and for ours.
Because of their sacrifices, this November we can express our choice through the ballot box.
Every vote cast must be a statement: Never Trump, not for any of us.
Thank you, thank you, President Faust, and Paul Choi, thank you so much.
It’s an honor and a thrill to address this group of distinguished alumni and supportive friends and kvelling parents. We’ve all gathered to share in the joy of this day, so please join me in congratulating Harvard’s Class of 2016.
I can remember my own college graduation, which is easy, since it was only 14 years ago. How many of you took 37 years to graduate? Because, like most of you, I began college in my teens, but sophomore year, I was offered my dream job at Universal Studios, so I dropped out. I told my parents if my movie career didn’t go well, I’d re-enroll.
It went all right.
But eventually, I returned for one big reason. Most people go to college for an education, and some go for their parents, but I went for my kids. I’m the father of seven, and I kept insisting on the importance of going to college, but I hadn’t walked the walk. So, in my fifties, I re-enrolled at Cal State — Long Beach, and I earned my degree.
I just have to add: It helped that they gave me course credit in paleontology for the work I did on Jurassic Park. That’s three units for Jurassic Park, thank you.
Well I left college because I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and some of you know, too — but some of you don’t. Or maybe you thought you knew but are now questioning that choice. Maybe you’re sitting there trying to figure out how to tell your parents that you want to be a doctor and not a comedy writer.
Well, what you choose to do next is what we call in the movies the ‘character-defining moment.’ Now, these are moments you’re very familiar with, like in the last Star Wars: The Force Awakens, when Rey realizes the force is with her. Or Indiana Jones choosing mission over fear by jumping over a pile of snakes.
Now in a two-hour movie, you get a handful of character-defining moments, but in real life, you face them every day. Life is one strong, long string of character-defining moments. And I was lucky that at 18 I knew what I exactly wanted to do. But I didn’t know who I was. How could I? And how could any of us? Because for the first 25 years of our lives, we are trained to listen to voices that are not our own. Parents and professors fill our heads with wisdom and information, and then employers and mentors take their place and explain how this world really works.
And usually these voices of authority make sense, but sometimes, doubt starts to creep into our heads and into our hearts. And even when we think, ‘that’s not quite how I see the world,’ it’s kind of easier to just to nod in agreement and go along, and for a while, I let that going along define my character. Because I was repressing my own point of view, because like in that Nilsson song, ‘Everybody was talkin’ at me, so I couldn’t hear the echoes of my mind.’
And at first, the internal voice I needed to listen to was hardly audible, and it was hardly noticeable — kind of like me in high school. But then I started paying more attention, and my intuition kicked in.
And I want to be clear that your intuition is different from your conscience. They work in tandem, but here’s the distinction: Your conscience shouts, ‘here’s what you should do,’ while your intuition whispers, ‘here’s what you could do.’ Listen to that voice that tells you what you could do. Nothing will define your character more than that.
Because once I turned to my intuition, and I tuned into it, certain projects began to pull me into them, and others, I turned away from.
And up until the 1980s, my movies were mostly, I guess what you could call ‘escapist.’ And I don’t dismiss any of these movies — not even 1941. Not even that one. And many of these early films reflected the values that I cared deeply about, and I still do. But I was in a celluloid bubble, because I’d cut my education short, my worldview was limited to what I could dream up in my head, not what the world could teach me.
But then I directed The Color Purple. And this one film opened my eyes to experiences that I never could have imagined, and yet were all too real. This story was filled with deep pain and deeper truths, like when Shug Avery says, ‘Everything wants to be loved.’ My gut, which was my intuition, told me that more people needed to meet these characters and experience these truths. And while making that film, I realized that a movie could also be a mission.
I hope all of you find that sense of mission. Don’t turn away from what’s painful. Examine it. Challenge it.
My job is to create a world that lasts two hours. Your job is to create a world that lasts forever. You are the future innovators, motivators, leaders and caretakers.
And the way you create a better future is by studying the past. Jurassic Park writer Michael Crichton, who graduated from both this college and this medical school, liked to quote a favorite professor of his who said that if you didn’t know history, you didn’t know anything. You were a leaf that didn’t know it was part of a tree. So history majors: Good choice, you’re in great shape…Not in the job market, but culturally.
The rest of us have to make a little effort. Social media that we’re inundated and swarmed with is about the here and now. But I’ve been fighting and fighting inside my own family to get all my kids to look behind them, to look at what already has happened. Because to understand who they are is to understand who were were, and who their grandparents were, and then, what this country was like when they emigrated here. We are a nation of immigrants — at least for now.
So to me, this means we all have to tell our own stories. We have so many stories to tell. Talk to your parents and your grandparents, if you can, and ask them about their stories. And I promise you, like I have promised my kids, you will not be bored.
And that’s why I so often make movies based on real-life events. I look to history not to be didactic, ‘cause that’s just a bonus, but I look because the past is filled with the greatest stories that have ever been told. Heroes and villains are not literary constructs, but they’re at the heart of all history.
And again, this is why it’s so important to listen to your internal whisper. It’s the same one that compelled Abraham Lincoln and Oskar Schindler to make the correct moral choices. In your defining moments, do not let your morals be swayed by convenience or expediency. Sticking to your character requires a lot of courage. And to be courageous, you’re going to need a lot of support.
And if you’re lucky, you have parents like mine. I consider my mom my lucky charm. And when I was 12 years old, my father handed me a movie camera, the tool that allowed me to make sense of this world. And I am so grateful to him for that. And I am grateful that he’s here at Harvard, sitting right down there.
My dad is 99 years old, which means he’s only one year younger than Widener Library. But unlike Widener, he’s had zero cosmetic work. And dad, there’s a lady behind you, also 99, and I’ll introduce you after this is over, okay?
But look, if your family’s not always available, there’s backup. Near the end of It’s a Wonderful Life — you remember that movie, It’s a Wonderful Life? Clarence the Angel inscribes a book with this: “No man is a failure who has friends.” And I hope you hang on to the friendships you’ve made here at Harvard. And among your friends, I hope you find someone you want to share your life with. I imagine some of you in this yard may be a tad cynical, but I want to be unapologetically sentimental. I spoke about the importance of intuition and how there’s no greater voice to follow. That is, until you meet the love of your life. And this is what happened when I met and married Kate, and that became the greatest character-defining moment of my life.
Love, support, courage, intuition. All of these things are in your hero’s quiver, but still, a hero needs one more thing: A hero needs a villain to vanquish. And you’re all in luck. This world is full of monsters. And there’s racism, homophobia, ethnic hatred, class hatred, there’s political hatred, and there’s religious hatred.
As a kid, I was bullied — for being Jewish. This was upsetting, but compared to what my parents and grandparents had faced, it felt tame. Because we truly believed that anti-Semitism was fading. And we were wrong. Over the last two years, nearly 20,000 Jews have left Europe to find higher ground. And earlier this year, I was at the Israeli embassy when President Obama stated the sad truth. He said: ‘We must confront the reality that around the world, anti-Semitism is on the rise. We cannot deny it.’
My own desire to confront that reality compelled me to start, in 1994, the Shoah Foundation. And since then, we’ve spoken to over 53,000 Holocaust survivors and witnesses in 63 countries and taken all their video testimonies. And we’re now gathering testimonies from genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, Armenia and Nanking. Because we must never forget that the inconceivable doesn’t happen — it happens frequently. Atrocities are happening right now. And so we wonder not just, ‘When will this hatred end?’ but, ‘How did it begin?’
Now, I don’t have to tell a crowd of Red Sox fans that we are wired for tribalism. But beyond rooting for the home team, tribalism has a much darker side. Instinctively and maybe even genetically, we divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them.’ So the burning question must be: How do all of us together find the ‘we?’ How do we do that? There’s still so much work to be done, and sometimes I feel the work hasn’t even begun. And it’s not just anti-Semitism that’s surging — Islamophobia’s on the rise, too. Because there’s no difference between anyone who is discriminated against, whether it’s the Muslims, or the Jews, or minorities on the border states, or the LGBT community — it is all big one hate.
And to me, and, I think, to all of you, the only answer to more hate is more humanity. We gotta repair — we have to replace fear with curiosity. ‘Us’ and ‘them’ — we’ll find the ‘we’ by connecting with each other. And by believing that we’re members of the same tribe. And by feeling empathy for every soul — even Yalies.
My son graduated from Yale, thank you …
But make sure this empathy isn’t just something that you feel. Make it something you act upon. That means vote. Peaceably protest. Speak up for those who can’t and speak up for those who may be shouting but aren’t being hard. Let your conscience shout as loud as it wants if you’re using it in the service of others.
And as an example of action in service of others, you need to look no further than this Hollywood-worthy backdrop of Memorial Church. Its south wall bears the names of Harvard alumni — like President Faust has already mentioned — students and faculty members, who gave their lives in World War II. All told, 697 souls, who once tread the ground where stand now, were lost. And at a service in this church in late 1945, Harvard President James Conant — which President Faust also mentioned — honored the brave and called upon the community to ‘reflect the radiance of their deeds.’
Seventy years later, this message still holds true. Because their sacrifice is not a debt that can be repaid in a single generation. It must be repaid with every generation. Just as we must never forget the atrocities, we must never forget those who fought for freedom. So as you leave this college and head out into the world, continue please to ‘reflect the radiance of their deeds,’ or as Captain Miller in Saving Private Ryan would say, “Earn this.”
And please stay connected. Please never lose eye contact. This may not be a lesson you want to hear from a person who creates media, but we are spending more time looking down at our devices than we are looking in each other’s eyes. So, forgive me, but let’s start right now. Everyone here, please find someone’s eyes to look into. Students, and alumni and you too, President Faust, all of you, turn to someone you don’t know or don’t know very well. They may be standing behind you, or a couple of rows ahead. Just let your eyes meet. That’s it. That emotion you’re feeling is our shared humanity mixed in with a little social discomfort.
But, if you remember nothing else from today, I hope you remember this moment of human connection. And I hope you all had a lot of that over the past four years. Because today you start down the path of becoming the generation on which the next generation stands. And I’ve imagined many possible futures in my films, but you will determine the actual future. And I hope that it’s filled with justice and peace.
And finally, I wish you all a true, Hollywood-style happy ending. I hope you outrun the T. rex, catch the criminal and for your parents’ sake, maybe every now and then, just like E.T.: Go home. Thank you.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign is moving along to satisfy the liberal wing of the Democratic Party by indicating proposed changes to the Democratic Party’s platform on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be addressed by the drafting committee ahead of the convention in Philadelphia.
According to a report by the “>conceded that changes are forthcoming, pointing to recent polls that show a shift in liberal voters’ attitude towards Israel. But in private conversations, some are perplexed that Sanders decided to create buzz about an issue that he never campaigned on until recently.
Our guest this week is Rabbi Tuvia Brander, leader of Young Israel of West Hartford, CT. Rabbi Brander, a Wexner Graduate Fellow, was ordained at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. During his time there, he spent a year in the Gruss Kollel in Jerusalem, served as a fellow in Straus Center for Western Thought at Yeshiva University and coordinated the AIPAC Leffel Israel Fellowship. Additionally, he was a member of the Rabbi Norman Lamm Kollel L'Horaah, a program focused on training future rabbinic judges, completed the Katz Kollel and is still completing his M.A. in Jewish Studies from the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies. Rabbi Brander has held leadership roles in a number of different youth initiatives including NCSY, Shoresh, Plainview Friday Night Lights, and the Torah Leadership Network. He has served as Rabbinic Intern at the Young Israel of Plainview and Congregation BIAV of Overland Park, KS and has been invited to various communities as scholar-in-residence.
This week's Torah portion – Parashat Behar (Leviticus 25:1-26:2) – talks about Sabbatical and Jubilee years, regulations concerning commerce and the redemption of slaves. It also contains a description of the rewards for observing God's commandments and the series of punishments that will face Israel if they choose to disregard them. Our discussion focuses on the reason behind the idea of Shmita, the agricultural sabbatical taken every seventh year.