BH, a lot of people got to Meron today.

The Rav got to Meron, a few of my family members got to Meron – all on buses, and with a definite ‘down vibe’this year, as the Erev Rav have effectively taken all of the joy out of Lag Bomer.

All week long, we got bombarded by messages on Koh Hai, and via the media, how those ‘dangerous, irresponsible’ religious people who make a bonfire for Lag Bomer are going to set half the country on fire….

How those ‘dangerous, irresponsible’ religious people who go to Meron are going to push and shove another 5 million people to death, unless, they are carefully corralled like cattle, set against a stop watch, and prevented from doing anything that would make Lag Bomer at Rashbi the joyful event it was, before Covid.

==

Getting to Meron was never easy, before Covid.

It was usually hot. There were always crowds and queues, and not enough toilets.

You were tired, squashed and thirsty.

BUT – when you got to the Tzion, there was (too loud) happy music; there were people lining up to give you free food and water by the side of the road, free ice lollies… There was a carnival atmosphere (maybe, now I think of it, an OTT ‘carnival atmosphere, with hundreds of frum charidees blaring loud speakers telling you how they were the best address for the tzedaka you came to give, in the zchut of Rashbi.)

==

There is no doubt, that Hashem has arranged all this, because something had gone a little ‘wrong’ at Meron, in terms of who was running it, and all the money passing through various hands, in various ways.

At the same time, there is also no doubt that the ‘stick’ Hashem used to dismantle the joy of Lag Bomer in our failed State is going to have to answer for a great deal…. when judgment day finally rolls around.

==

I spent yesterday around a small bonfire lit in the hills overlooking Shechem.

Even with the fire and the obligatory loud ‘Rabbi Shimon’ playlist, I wasn’t feeling a lot of ‘joy’ this year, I’ll be honest.

I was feeling thoughtful, and yearning for all the evil to finally break, and fall apart, and burn up.

This morning, I came back home and learned a mother got shot to death by a ‘terrorist’ whilst in labor, on the way to give birth, on the other side of the city of Ariel, the side that’s generally considered to be the ‘safer’ side of the Shomron, as it’s literally five minutes away from Rosh Ayin, and 15 minutes from Petach Tikva.

My daughter told me she cried a lot of yesterday night, and was still crying this morning.

I sighed a big sigh, and thought to myself: they still managed to get their korban, for the 33rd day….

==

Apparently, the army saw that ‘terrorist’ coming, and flagged him as a potential ‘terrorist’.

But then, did nothing to stop him going and shooting that poor woman to death in her car.

All these ‘terrorists’ were released by our wonderful government a few weeks ago, as part of the deal to get all the hostages back to Israel.

Remember?

Israel released literally thousands of terrorists…. before the hostages came back.

How does that make sense?

(If you aren’t a ‘conspiracy theorist’….)

==

In the meantime, my daughter told me that she is starting to worry about Trump.

This daughter is way more mainstream than me, but the last few months, as more and more of the pieces have been slotting into place, she’s starting to realise that I’m not the crazy lunatic she thought I was (at least, not as much as she thought I was…. ;-))

What’s going to happen with Trump? She asked me.

I have no idea.

But, I am a good student of history, and I can tell you there is a set pattern that recurs every few decades, of a ‘Pharoah arising’ that doesn’t remember the Jews.

That guy then starts waging a campaign of persecution against his country’s particular Jews, which has the same aim of getting rid of them, one way or another.

==

In Alexandria, 38 CE it was state-sponsored eradication of civil rights and destruction of synagogues, plus a ghetto, and no more Jews allowed into the country.

The Jews who remained were in such a bad state, many of them ‘converted’ to become pagans, to try and regain their materialistic standard of life – including Philo’s own nephew, Tiberius Alexander, who helped Titus destroy the Temple in Jerusalem, as his second-in-command.

France and England taxed their ‘King’s Jews’ almost to death, accused them of blood libels, burnt them in castles and churches, and stam, outside in the market place, drowned them… and also, finally, expelled them.

When the Jews left, they had to leave their property behind.

That was a great way of the Kings ALSO cancelling their financial debts owed to the Jews, and ALSO enriching themselves further, by acquiring the Jews’ property for the crown.

====

Something similar happened in 1492, in Spain.

Something similar – but even worse – happened in Germany in the late 1930s….

====

It couldn’t happen here, it couldn’t happen today….

I’m not so sure.

There’s a blueprint, a pattern, that you see repeated again and again throughout Jewish history.

Long story short… I’m also worrying about Trump.

That freemason-billionaire who was maneuvred especially in position, who has a big national debt to deal with, who they went all out to make the ‘Q-tard’ campaign for, so otherwise sane people keep explaining away the red flags as ‘8D chess’.

Or something.

====

Ultimately, everything is God.

That’s the bottom line.

Wherever we live, whatever we are doing with ourselves, every single one of us has our own teshuva we still need to make, for many different things.

What that actually means, tachlis, what that actually requires – each person has to do their own cheshbon hanefesh, and to think for themselves.

==

So, now the music is back on, and I’m trying to make Shabbos.

I’m trying to ignore all the madness still going on, but it’s seeping through the cracks, nevertheless.

We don’t live in a vacuum, after all, in an hermetically-sealed environment, where sad news about dead Jews can’t infiltrate, no matter how much we’re trying to ignore it all and just get on with life.

==

BH, all this turns around for the good, very soon.

BH, all the people who made a huge effort to get to Meron again this year, even though they have taken the joy out of the event, sweetened stuff for all of Am Yisrael.

And BH, this time around, the pattern will be disrupted by sincere, mass teshuva, before it plays out the way it always plays out, when Jews get too complacent, and too disconnected from what we’re really down here to do.

Bezrat Hashem.

 

 

This has been going on for a longgggg time….

You know, how all those antisemites online like to try and hide their antisemitism behind statements that they are just incensed about what’s going on with the ‘genocide in Palestine’?

Or, how the only reason they hate Jews so much, and believe we all worship in the ‘synagogue of satan’, is because of the ‘brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine’?

Well, almost two thousand years ago, there was a terrible, awful pogrom against the Jewish community of cultured Alexandria, in Romanized-Egypt.

That was back when the native population of ‘Syrian Palestine’ was none other than…. The Jews.

And yes, there was an awful, brutal, terrible ‘occupation of Palestine’ going on back then: the Romans were killing, abusing, torturing, impoverishing and destroying Jews, and everything that Jews stood for, morally and religiously, anyway they could.

==

Those Romans devolved into the Roman Catholic church and then made up a bunch of fairy tales about how it was the ‘Jews’ who were killing and crucifying other Jews – and not the Roman occupiers of ‘Palestinian Syria’.

Once the Romans decided to ‘go xtian’, they had to make up these fairy tales, to shift the blame for ‘killing Yoshki’ off the Roman rulers of Judea – who were killing and crucifying Jews all day long – and on to the poor Jews.

(It’s a side point, but I saw a retarded meme put out by an online xtian antisemite stating that ‘the bible’ blames the Jews for killing Yoshki 9 times, and doesn’t blame the Romans once. The ‘bible’ (i.e. the New Testament) was written by the Roman Empire 2-300 years after the events it pretends to describe. Like, duh.)

==

Point is – the Romans, and Greeks, and Egyptians have ALWAYS hated the Jews.

And more specifically, they have ALWAYS hated what the Jews really stand for in the world, namely, a belief in One God, who expects human beings to act morally and righteously, and not just enslave and murder other people, to gratify their own base desires and lust for power.

Come with me, as go back in time to 38 CE, where we can finally start to figure out the real reason why the Romans and Greeks (who became today’s ‘West’) hate the Jews so much.

==

The story begins around 300 BCE, give or take, around the time when ‘Chonyo and Shimi’, the sons of Shimon HaTzaddik are arguing over who gets to be the next Kohen Gadol in the Temple of Jerusalem.

The Gemara brings two different versions, one where Shimi is the bad guy, and one when Chonyo is the bad guy. But the outcome is, Chonyo moves to Egypt, which has just been freshly conquered by the Macedonian Greeks, under Alexander the Great.

Alexander the Great (if he even really existed…) dies young, and his kingdom is split between his four generals, called Diodachs (who then start fighting it each other, for a bigger share of the pie.)

==

The Diodach who gets Egypt is called Ptolemy.

Don’t get confused, because ALL of the kings of Egypt from his line call themselves ‘Ptolemy’, and also marry their own sisters, so getting the genealogy straight is very difficult even for geni pros that can read Demotic Egyptian.

But in terms of our story, Ptolemy has all this newly-conquered territory, he has a captive Egyptian population who don’t like him very much, (and those poor Egyptians are calling the BBC as we speak, to make a new documentary about it called ‘The Settlers’….) And, he’s looking for hired mercenaries to come and help him guard his cities, and consolidate his power.

A strange group of mercenaries who are known in academic history only as ‘the Jews of Onias’ (Onias = Chonyo) answer his call, and get given the Delta quarter of the newly built city of Rhakotis-Alexandria, to live in.

Ptolemy says these Jews can continue to worship God in their own way; they can continue to send money to the Temple in Jerusalem; they are exempt from paying taxes to the local city; and they have a whole bunch of political and civil rights that the local Egyptians don’t have.

(Call the UN!)

==

In return, the ‘Jews of Onias’ man the garrison in Alexandria, act as high-level military advisors to many generations of the Ptolemy monarchs of Egypt – and at some point, also build their own copy of the Temple, at Leontopolis.

Because remember, Chonyo is a Kohen. A potential Kohen Gadol. That was the root of the whole big argument he had in the first place.

==

(This for sure connects up with the whole civil war that erupted back in Eretz Yisrael between the pro-Hellenization Hashmonaim Kohens lead by ‘Jason’, and the anti-Hellenization Hashmonaim Kohens (who were in a tiny minority, within their own family of kohanim) – lead by Matthias ben Yochanan.

What really happened back there has been deliberately obscured, because it’s ALWAYS the same story of a family feud. The ‘good’ guys in the Jewish community leadership and the ‘bad’ guys have exactly the same yichus.)

==

Fast forward 300 years, to around 37 CE, when a new Caesar comes to the Roman throne, Gaius, aka Caligula.

Roman history likes to claim Caligula was insane. Yeah, he was insane, that’s the only reason he arbitrarily murdered people, set violent upheavals in motion all over the world, openly lived with his sister, and proclaimed himself a ‘living god’…

I dunno. Judging by the Caesars who came after him, he actually sounds par for the pagan-satanic Roman course.

But where Caligula is innovating, is that he wants to be proclaimed as a ‘living god’ while he’s actually still alive, and for his subjects to offer sacrifices directly to him, and not just ‘on his behalf’ to another deity.

Not only that, Caligula wants big images of himself set up in all of the temples in the Roman world – including, in Jerusalem.

The Roman governor in Jerusalem, Petronius, now has a sticky problem. If he doesn’t stick the massive gold statue of Caligula in the Holy of Holies – Caligula will kill him for treason. If he does stick the massive gold statue of Caligula in the Holy of Holies – it’s going to spark a really nasty, open war with the Jews.

So, he tries to stall for time, and tells Caligula that he’ll stick the massive statue in the temple just as soon as they deliver it from where it’s being built, in Lebanon.

==

Caligula doesn’t buy the story, but he can’t kill Petronius just yet, as he’s still trying to pretend that the last few people he murdered really deserved it, and that honestly, he’s just a good, regular, guy, and not a murderous, evil, incest-practising psychopath.

But, that doesn’t mean he’s going to let the Jews get away with worshipping anything other than him.

So he writes a secret edict to Flaccus, the governor of Alexandria, which basically instructs Flaccus – and the Greek-Egyptian mob of Egypt – to execute the first state-sponsored pogrom against the Jews, in history.

==

Let’s go to our eyewitness on the scene, Philo Judea, who wrote two long treatises describing what was done to the Jews back in 38 CE – and more crucially, why. 

Philo explains that the Emperor Caligula:

“Looked with disfavour on the Jews alone because they alone opposed him on principle, trained as they were… to acknowledge one God who is the Father and Maker of the world….”[1]

So then, Caligula:

“Having conceived a violent enmity to [the Jews] he took possession of the synagogues in the other cities after beginning with those of Alexandria, by filling them with images and statues of himself in bodily form….”

And when the Jews of Alexandria try to stop this desecration of the synagogues in Alexandria – that’s when the state-sponsored pogrom really begins.

==

Like all pogroms that come after it, this one follows the same set course.

Let’s go back to our eyewitness, Philo:

They collected great bodies of men to attack the meeting-houses, of which there are many in each section of the city.

Some they ravaged, others they demolished with the foundations as well, others they set fire to and burnt …

Think of it as the Roman blueprint for kristallnacht.

==

Next, the mob turn on the Jews themselves.

They burn down at least 400 Jewish houses, force the Jews out into the streets – and then force the Jews into the cramped ‘Delta’ neighborhood of Alexandria, which is now formally designated their Jewish ‘ghetto’.

Any Jew who is caught outside the ghetto walls is beaten and tortured, and many of them are burnt to death in the street.

If these civilised ‘Roman-Greeks’, apparently all members of the local gymnasia in Alexandria, catch Jewish women in the market, they take them to the theatre, force them to eat pork, publically – and any woman who refuses is then assaulted, in front of the crowd.

All of the Jewish shops and businesses are also looted, while the Egyptians and Greeks haul away all of the Jews’ good and possessions – and the Jews are powerless to stop them, because Caligula made a secret edict that stripped the Jews of all of their civil rights.

Everything is being done legally and methodically, according to the justice of Sdom.

==

There was apparently a Jewish Senate – or alternative ‘sanhedrin’ – of 72 Jews in Alexandria in 38 CE.

Let’s go back to our eyewitness Philo, to see what happened to them:

Our Senate had been appointed to take charge of Jewish affairs by our saviour and benefactor Augustus, after the death of the ethnarch…

Of this Senate the members who were found in their houses, thirty-eight in number, were arrested by Flaccus, who having ordered them to be straightway put in bonds marshalled a fine procession through the middle of the market of these elderly men trussed and pinioned, some with thongs and others with iron chains, and then taken into the theatre, a spectacle most pitiable and incongruous with the occasion.

Then as they stood with their enemies seated in front to signalize their disgrace he ordered them all to be stripped and lacerated with scourges which are commonly used for the degradation of the vilest malefactors, so that in consequence of the flogging some had to be carried out on stretchers and died at once, while others lay sick for a long time despairing of recovery.[2]

==

That’s not even the worst of it.

The Roman-Greeks also set up wooden crosses in the local theatre, the place where everyone used to come for some entertainment of an evening, and publically crucified a whole bunch of Jews to death.

By the way – the Roman Catholic church was still making the same sort of public spectacle out of their auto da fes, or public Jew-burnings, even 300 years ago.

We are dealing with the same people here, in case you hadn’t figured that out.

==

For two years, the Jews of Alexandria are stuck in their ghetto, unable to use their desecrated synagogues, and unable to rebuild those that had been burned and dismantled.

They had pretty good ‘civil rights’ for 300 years, but with the stroke of a pen, Caligula took them all away, and left most of Alexandria Jewry destitute, broken – and walled-up in a ghetto.

This only changed when Caligula was murdered by one of his body guards, paving the way for the Emperor Claudius to take over.

Claudius ordered all of the statues of Caligula to be taken out of the remaining synagogues – but he didn’t restore the Jews’ previous rights to them. From that point on, most of them had to start paying the horrendous ‘poll tax’ to Rome, and had no formal rights of residence, or ability to own property in Alexandria.

And Claudius is mostly considered to be a ‘good’ Emperor.

By Roman standards.

==

We’ll stop there, but the point is – there is nothing new under the sun.

Rome-Greece morphed into Roman-Catholicism, and all parts of the ‘West’ and also Russia, come from this Jew-hating, pogrom-enacting tradition.

And why do they hate the Jews, really?

Because we stand for One God in the world, Hashem.

And we have a God-given Torah, that spells out clearly what’s right and wrong, and what God expects from His creations.

And these Greek-Roman-Catholics can’t stand that.

Exactly the same way they couldn’t stand it 2,000 years ago, when Philo was castigating them for being incest-practising pedophiles who enslaved people, pillaged the world of its natural resources to fuel their own profligate lifestyle ‘back home’, and insisted on worshipping dogs, snakes and yucky human beings as ‘deities’.

Or, to put this another way:

There is nothing new under the sun.

==

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Embassy 115.

[2] Embassy, 74-75.

The BBC just aired this documentary.

Here’s how it’s being described on X:

Here’s the FULL Louis Theroux documentary on Israeli settlers.

Ziønists are FURIOUS. They DON’T want you to see this.

They’re scrambling to get it taken down so it would be a real shame if you shared this… 😊

Watch, clip, share before it disappears.
pic.twitter.com/eK0ZG414K9

— ADAM (@AdameMedia) April 30, 2025

====

This is what we are up against. In all senses of the word.

We only have Hashem to rely on to resolve what’s going on in Eretz Yisrael.

 

 

Shavua Tov!

First, here’s another translated excerpt from the Rav, from motzash last week:

Motzae Shabbat, 3rd May 5785

Now, it’s 22:45.

In another three hours it will be 1.45 – chatzot. All the girls should clean the mishkan, spill a bucket of water [on the floor] – in every room, a bucket of water, three buckets.

The girls should know that the mishkan – the mishkan is the bed, to make the bed, to arrange the table, to put the chairs up.

מ = mita (bed)

ש = shulchan (table).

כ = kisaot (chairs) and

נ = menora (lights) [ This spells out in Hebrew MiShKaN].

You need lights, to arrange the lights.

Today, there is nothing to prepare, once upon a time, they had oil lamps, lamps of…wax candles, everything was candles, there was no budget for electricity. Lieberman didn’t give any funding.

So, it was impossible to use the electricity, they just used candles, or oil lamps… With this, they used to walk around.

==

Rabbi Chaikel said this.

The Rebbe told him: Be a chazan! [R Chaikel didn’t want to be a chazan. He told R Natan that] I’m going to walk with a lantern, with a lantern I’m going to walk on the streets in the night, during slichot, or on chanuka?!

They used to walk from house to house, with a tiny, tiny bit of light, a drop, to light up the holes [in the road]. Whoever used to wake people up for slichot – once upon a time, everything was holes. A person would leave his house – he’d fall into a hole. Everything was potholes.

In Tsfat, everything is holes.

I was in Tsfat with your father [the Rav is talking to someone next to him] – so, everything was holes. Everything was potholes. It’s impossible to leave the house, there’s no light.

So, they walked along with a lantern, which diffused a bit a of light. So, you’d need to organise it.

==

So, the women would arrange it, and this is the ‘nun’ – the hanora, because the woman, when she washes the house, she is building the mishkan.

==

Now, the mishkan is underneath Shuvu Banim [ in the Old City – right next to the Temple Mount]

The mishkan was not destroyed. The beit olam (i.e. Temple building) was destroyed – but the mishkan, not.

Shlomo built the mishkan underground. It’s written “Your House, the Sacred Dwelling, O Hashem, may it be for lengthy days.”[1] 

Translated from Shivivei Or, 407.

==

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Tehillim 93:5.

====

The Rav has been talking a lot the last few months about the importance of washing the floors motzash.

I don’t know what the deeper meaning is, but nothing the Rav says is stam.

I’m really bad at doing sponga, and the kid that used to do it got married a few months back.

So last week, I finally took the plunge and bought an electric floor cleaning / mopping thingy – and I love it!

[Arrogant and stupid…] people like to mock the Rav, God forbid, and some of what he says.

What I can tell you, is that relating to the Rav’s words with as much simplicity as possible, and not trying to be too clever, mamash helps me to live a much better life, in so many ways, big and small.

Without the ‘push’ about mopping the floor regularly from the Rav, I really don’t know if I’d have got past my inertia and ‘stuckness’ to get a floor mopping thingy.

Once I understood it’s important spiritually, as well as for other reasons – it helped me get past my yetzer, and we went to buy one.

====

Next thing: MERON.

The good news, is that apparently it’s happening this year.

The bad news, is that they are basically moving it to Wednesday night (Lag B’Omer is on Thursday night) and are telling people they can only get there by bus, like they did two years ago, when the army killed 3 terrorists in Gaza at 1am in the morning, and tried to start a war mamash on Lag B’Omer.

For some reason, that didn’t happen….

At least, not on the Lag B’Omer that preceded that awful Simchat Torah.

==

The good news, is that Shuvu Banim are apparently putting on 50 buses – and need help with the sponsorship, as each bus costs 6,500 shekels.

The bad news, is that the ‘official’ buses put on by the government seem to be sold out – and they were like that from day one….

https://meron.glatticket.co.il

This is the link, try for yourself, maybe you’ll have more luck.

==

The good news, is that bonfires will be lit and allowed again this year, after last year where they tried to close down the whole site and ban everyone – but the lightings are taking place at the bottom of the site, away from the tomb of Rabbi Shimon.

The bad news, is that the government recently passed ANOTHER law, making it ‘impossible for someone with a criminal record to be on the stage, when they light a bonfire at Meron’.

That law had one person in mind: The Rav.

You tell me, how our government has time and energy to make passing this law a priority in a middle of a war, when there are five billion more pressing things they could be doing in the knesset.

(And then understand, again, just how much of a spiritual war is really being waged against Shuvu Banim and the Rav.)

==

Honestly?

My husband is going to try to go with the Rav’s buses this year, if he’s not already too late to get a seat, but I am feeling pretty exhausted by the never-ending attempts to close down Meron to the public, and to make it as hard as possible for people to go on Lag Bomer.

I’m feeling like I just can’t do it this year, that I’ve run out of ‘oomph’ for all this, at the moment.

I’m feeling like that about a bunch of things at the moment.

And I’m also pondering how many of us have some sort of permanent ‘PTSD’ going on, from living in a state of constant tension and ‘bad news’, wondering when on earth, how on earth, all this is somehow going to break.

Even World War II only lasted six years….

The ‘Covid’ nightmare started five years ago, 2019…. and we’ve been bounced in to one yucky thing after another, ever since, particularly here in Israel.

Surely, this can’t carry on like this for much longer?

Can it?

====

PS: I had someone complaining over email that 6,500 nis sounds like a lot for sponsorship.

1. I don’t run Shuvu.
2. It’s at least possible that as well as sponsoring the bus, they are also trying to put on some ‘chai rotel’ for the people going – the food and drink that in the past, was freely available in Meron, but which for the last four years has effectively been ‘banned’ by the government.
3. It’s not a simple bus journey – I went two years ago, and it literally took all day, to go at night and come back the next afternoon.

It’s one of those things, that if someone actually did it themselves, they would understand a lot more what’s involved, and that it’s not a tourist trip…. it’s mamash a pilgrimage, with tons of traffic, obstacles and miniot. Not simple at all, even before five years ago.

And now, not simple, mamash.