Rosh Message on Israel

From Peggy Shapiro to Rabbis
We are hours away from Rosh Hashana and before we begin our holiest prayers, I ask you to consider these thoughts as you put the final touches on the most important message you may deliver to your congregants this year.

It is the time of year for introspection and now when Israel is more isolated and vulnerable than it has been since the rebirth of the state, I ask you to ask your congregants to reflect on Eretz Yisrael, and if they have done all that they could do to keep it safe.

It is also a time of year for apologies, and I ask you to ask your congregants never to apologize for Israel’s right to exist.

It is a time of year for resolutions, and I ask you to speak up for the following resolutions which can protect both Israel’s future and the future of the Jewish people.

As Jews, we cannot except the outrage of a Judenrein state anywhere, especially in our ancient homeland, and in our eternal capital of Jerusalem.

Remind your congregants that Israel has been the Jewish homeland and Jerusalem our capital for over 3,000 years and our claims exceed those of the French to Paris, the English to London and certainly the Americans to Washington D.C.

Just as we must speak against efforts to deny a Jewish future to the land of Israel, so must we speak against efforts which deny Jewish history and our connection to Israel. (Both are part of the same assault.)

Exhort your congregants to fearlessly stand up and refuse to submit to the lies and slanders against Israel.



From Bad Rachel Blog
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

May It Be a Sweet Year
To the Jews of Jerusalem, Holy City, whose sovereignty over the eternal and undivided capital of the Jewish state of Israel is disputed and oppugned, though it is as ancient as King David’s: May it be a sweet year.

To the Jews of Judea and Samaria, whose every stud hammered and floor tile laid in that magnificent, empty lunar landscape summons the disapproving scrutiny of allies and the menacing outrage of foes, and who must contemplate the possibility of expulsion—or worse—every day for the sake of a “peace” with a people whose declared war against them has never abated: May it be a sweet year.

To the Jews of Ashkelon, Ashdod, Be’er Sheva, Sderot, Sde Boker, Mitzpeh Ramon, Eilat, Netanya, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Tsfat, Rosh Pina, Tiberias, Mahanayim, Kiryat Shmona, and all the kibbutzim and moshavim of the Negev and the Galil and the Golan—ha am im ha Golan!—who live every day under a death warrant issued by Israel-hating nations passing increasingly sophisticated weaponry into the hands of their proxies, Israel’s bloody, baleful neighbors to the south and west, north and east, for whom even the sacrifice of their own children is tolerable—worse, a cause for celebration—in the name of destroying Jews: May it be a sweet year.

To the Jew of Gaza, Gilad Shalit, whose Rosh Hashana this year will be spent, as have the last five, imprisoned in a Hamas hell-hole: May it be a sweet year.

To all the Jews of Israel, surrounded, admonished, maligned, despised, threatened, condemned, attacked, wounded, murdered: May it be a sweet year.

And to the Jews of the United States whose astoundingly self-negating souls are fixed as if by bolts to the chilling heart of a president and a party and a politics progressively ill-disposed toward Zion: Please, wake up, wrench out those bolts, free yourselves, and tell the truth, before the Jewish homeland is destroyed by the erosive thrust of its friends and the blazing bombs of its enemies. And may it be a sweet year.