The report as described raises interesting questions about US-Israeli cooperation, but those of us who remember the 1980's remember that at the time no one seriously doubted that Israel had nuclear weapons, notwithstanding Israel's policy of neither affirming or denying that it had them. If there had been any doubts, they were dispelled when Mordechai Vanunu's disclosures were published in 1986.
Rabbi Lopatin, with great respect for you personally, and without questioning your good faith, I question whether you speak for "Modern Orthodoxy." "Orthodoxy" of any variety by definition draws lines, lines that rule out certain positions, the differences representing where the lines are drawn. To welcome "discussions and disagreements" per se strikes me as a self-destructive position -- unless you are relying on Divine intermeddling in the debate.
Which was, of course, intended irony. Message to Mr. Netanyahu: Without denying the value of your service to the State of Israel, its continued existence does not depend upon you, B"H. There is a time for everything; please go in peace.
It's only superficially illogical that Arab Israelis might favor a Zionist coalition and their party might join it, if a face-saving excuse/explanation could be found. IIRC, a majority of Israeli Arabs prefer Israeli citizenship to becoming citizens of an Arab-Palestinian state, given the authoritarianism and corruption of the PA, let alone Hamas. In Israel, Arabs may be de facto second-class citizens, but not so de jure, so they have room to argue and hope for improvement. Jews ought to understand that the mentality of "taking what you can get" under an existing order does not necessarily imply planning to overthrow it.
Thank you for explaining what the author did not. Not sure I "buy" something based on a kerei-ketiv difference that lay dormant until the Vilna Gaon's explication many centuries later. It's intriguing, but would not "buying it " imply Divine input into our mesorah "correcting" the transmission of Nevi'im? After all, although pi cannot be expressed exactly as any fraction, the author of Melakhim could have used (within a reasonable number of letters) a fraction closer to pi than 3.
If I agreed with what you say concerning Obama's prospect of success and the Republicans' motivation in opposing him, I would have to call the Republicans evil. If politics is a "game," some things are out-of-bounds.
Wrong. Israel and Iran have no competing territorial claims. Israel has never expressed the desire to destroy Iran as a nation, or as an "Islamic Republic," but Iranian leadership has often called for he end of the "Zionist entity."
Having deadly weapons does not make one an "existential threat" to one who doesn't. If my neighbor is a sane, law-abiding citizen who keeps a gun in his home to protect himself and his family, my knowing that he has it and could kill me with it does not make me want a gun of my own to protect myself from him.
What is your point - what do you find objectionable in what Ms. Miller wrote that should be "taken with a grain of salt"? If you are objecting generally to recognition of unconverted "patrilineal" Jews, you are off-topic. Plenty of sons and daughters of Jewish mothers would take no exception to anything she wrote. She is offering words of common sense and wisdom, so why is it relevant whether she is halakhically Jewish? "If you hear there is wisdom among the nations, believe it."
Thank you. I agree that "multitasking" as commonly used really means keeping track of multiple tasks to be done and the progress made on each, rather than actually performing them simultaneously. Because there are two cerebral hemispheres, and hemispheric dominance varies from person to person, "bi-tasking" may be possible in varying degrees.
To make explicit the serious side of my joking response, Jews (and certainly others) can "compartmentalize" and accept religious laws that conflict with what would be a reasonable understanding of what God would want. In the case of Judaism, which, unlike Christianity, is community rather than individual-based, one can rationalize that a system of law that is best as a whole may still be unjust in particular cases. Cf. Tehillim 19:10: "the judgments of Hashem are true and just altogether/combined (yachdav).
No lack of a sense of humor when one doesn't laugh at something that isn't funny. I was born Gentile, was circumcised at birth, went through four years of public school and college gym classes, and nobody ever suggested I was (or might be) Jewish. (My subsequent hatafat dam brit milah, of course, left no visible trace.)
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