Thursday, September 25, 2025

Am Livadad

Years ago when I was in camp [Hashem, PLEASE forgive me!! I was a תינוק שנשבה כפשוטו!!], we went to an amusement park. One of the attractions was a man who guessed your age. [I assume that you pay and if he gets it right you get nothing and if he gets it wrong you get a stuffed animal]. I had a friend who was a very sweet and pleasant boy that I really liked whom I will call Jason [*partly* because that was his name]. Jason was very short and didn't at all look his age. He approaches the age guessing guy and challenges him to guess his age. Surprisingly - he got it right!! 

How did he know?? 

He explained that he looks at the person's friends!! He could tell his true age by looking at the people who were with him. 

I learned mussar from this. You can tell a lot about a person by who his friends are. 

We are an עם לבדד ישכון. A nation that dwells alone. So it is not that *all* the גויים hate us. Some do - some don't. I will give an example: Recently, the left wing PM of Canada came out in favor of an independent State in Eretz Yisrael for a group of people who actively desire the extinction of the Jewish people [and have plans to carry it out]. However, the former right wing PM made it his business to publicly express his opposition to such a horrrible idea and expressed his conviction that Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East is a friend of Canada. Listening to him speak he really sounds like a friend of the Jewish people. So one גוי is against us but the other גוי is on our side. It is a mixed bag.   

But you can never be sure when their minds will change. The only person you can really trust not to hate Jews is a Jew whose core identity is his being Jewish. [I will add that I know "religious" Jews who are filled with שנאת ישראל but the hatred is not b/c the objects of their hatred are Jewish but for other whole ranges of reasons]. 

The whole world [well - not in Bnei Brak and Kiryat Sefer where the TRUE world exists - עולם התורה] is talking about Charlie Kirk. He is touted as being a friend of Israel and the Jewish people. 

Maybe. So it seemed. 

But when you look at who some of his good friends were you will find hard-hard-hard core anti semites, including the redneck promoter of Holocaust revisionism who got up at the memorial service and insinuated that just like the Jews killed Yoshke [they planned it while eating chumus...] - they also killed Kirk. One of his favorite tools is to insinuate and imply things but you can't catch him on it b/c he can just answer "I never said that". That was one of CK's friends. Another was the meshugena-stupid-black-lady-flaming-anti semite who should get no attention from anyone but nevertheless has millions of followers. 

So it could be that CK was a friend and supporter of the Jewish people - but don't forget the Torah's consistent admonitions to distance ourselves from the אומות העולם. Two thousand years of Christian hatred of Jews does not just dissipate like nothing.