Needed: Shimshon ha-Gibor

Yishai, Shalom,

Welcome back.
I enjoyed listening to your "Yishai in America" series.
I would be interested in hearing more about attitudes to Aliyah among the people you met in the states.

Is a free El-Al flight not enough for them? Do they want to be "beamed up" to Israel when the Beit ha-Mikdash drops out of the sky in pre-fab fire construction.

Or are they waiting for us in Israel to build the Beit ha-Mikdash like in "Field of Dreams" -- if you build it, they will come?

I saw a really nice article by Rav Shmuel Eliyahu in the parsha sheets this weekend.
Here's my own take on what he said:

Needed: Shimshon ha-Gibor to "shake things up."

He said that his son asked who killed the terrorist this time. It was another settler who fired the 1st shot. Will the police chief investigate all these border guards who stood by and watched in the recent attacks. No, because the judicial system would then go after him.

Just like the rulers of Judah were made uncomfortable by Shimon's daring attacks on the Philistines, because they preferred their comfortable existence as a vassal state to Philistia, so too our rulers try to suppress any bit of Jewish activism.

I myself never understood what was the point of Shimshon's career as a judge. What did he accomplish. But from the Rav's article, it all began to make sense. Shimshon woke up the people of Judah from their complacency, from their slave mentality.

What? You want to settler the land of Israel? You can't, this is an illegal outpost. Settling the land of Israel violates "international law" (what is that? something the nations made up to prevent us from returning to our land)

You want to protect yourself against terrorists, even by only firing in the air. We'll find an Arab to lie and say that he was hit by a bullet from your gun and throw you in jail.

But when we try to argue and say that actually, according to the San Remo agreement, this is actually part of the Jewish homeland, they just laugh at us.

But when 13 year-old girls call their bluff and refuse to recognize the authority of their kangaroo courts, then they get nervous. They are nervous because others might see "the man behind the curtain" pretending to be a wizard.

kol tuv,
Dan