Ben & Jerry's Age Old Mistake - Ari Abramowitz: The Land of Israel Fellowship

anyways i believe the most interesting part of all this the most noteworthy the part i want to discuss with you the reason i really brought this up is that ben and jerry are of course say it with me what are they they're jews ben and jerry are jews that's right ben cohen and jerry greenfield it's as jewish as it gets and why do i say that why do i say of course because this is nothing new often the loudest and most vociferous israel bashers are and jew haters are actually jews themselves today there's i don't know if you know these names and i bless you should never have to know them there's peter beinart and jeremy benami and noam chomsky and these are just a few examples and going back we've had these healthy self-hating jews in every generation just a couple fellowships ago we talked about max naumann you remember this guy who founded and led the association of german national jews yeah that's a group of jews that supported hitler himself even when it was already clear what he was doing these jews came and supported hitler himself because it was for the greater good of the fatherland or whatever anyways without getting too deep in the psychology which can be understood by analyzing 2 000 years of irrational jew hatred that transcends any specific reason i believe the most simple explanation for the deep emotional psychological pathology of these jews like ben and jerry to turn against their brethren and identify with those who hate them is that they believe that if they turn against their fellow jews then these woke progressives or communists or socialists or whoever they are trying to curry favor with at the moment that they will welcome them that they'll accept them and they'll even love them as as the good jews and that they will be spared whatever dark fate may await the rest of the jewish people but this never works it always always comes back to bite them and most often they inadvertently forward and amplify the hate from which they're so afraid i mean look they're leading this boycott there could be tremendous waves of hate against israel and jews that come back to them that they're amplifying it's always that way whatever you resist persists they should make a flavor called bet but anyways i really believe that this is a sickness and the ben and jerry should not be hated for it but we should have compassion on them for being so spiritually ill and disconnected from their identity from being disconnected from themselves that they could do such a despicable thing because if they saw clearly even for a moment they would weep and they would beg both hashem and their people for forgiveness for perpetrating these lies and persecutions against them now if if ben and jerry or even one or the other of them read this week's torah portion they would have known that this is not the way to cause the nations to respect you or love you as a matter of fact their actions only cause those to whom they are seeking to ingratiate themselves to resent them and to disrespect them even more it's like intuitively obviously true who would respect people like that to turn against their own particularly when it's just it's one thing to be a whistleblower it's another thing just to be filled with lies and deception that's what they're doing if they only opened up to this week's torah portion they would read in one of the first verses this is deuteronomy chapter 4 verse 6. observe these decrees carefully for this is your wisdom and understanding in the eyes of the nations who will hear about these decrees and say surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people what is hashem telling us here something that is so to the mind of jews like ben and jerry that it's not assimilation and self-hate that will cause the nations to love us but exactly the reverse by embracing our jewish identity studying our torah understanding loving and living by the meat's vote the commandments not seeking to blend in but on the contrary being willing and proud to stand out to be different to take off the baseball hats and put on our keepers to wear our seat seat right the fringes on our garments to wear them out not tuck them in but wear them out so that everyone in the world can see them but most importantly so that we can see them so we can gaze upon them and remember that we are surrounded by and entrusted with a divine and holy mission by god himself and that mission does not include friday night cocktail parties with vogue progressives and to sharpen this point even further the ramban nahmanidi says the statutes and ordinances you want to put it up in the statues and ordinances have the great benefit that they will bring honor from others to those who observe them i even see this here in israel having lived surrounded by arab villages for years now and having worked alongside them nearly every day we have had some interesting conversations open conversations and the truth is that the verse in the torah that i just quoted it applies here as well in an even stronger way because in the exile this honor is limited judaism there is much more of a religion than it is here in the land where the meets vote the commandments are starting to be applied on a national and societal level which was the whole purpose to begin with after all the torah tells us as do the sages from rashi to ramban and uh and others that the torah was given to us in order to be lived in the land of israel and the reason that we even keep the commandments in the exile is so that we remember how to keep them when we return to the land of israel please remind me i need to share with you jeremy shared with me a metaphor in allegory i think he made it up about um a piano player i'm gonna try to get it and share it with you next time it's just so beautiful but our portion the torah portion tells us this deuteronomy chapter four verse 5 behold i have taught you decrees and commandments as hashem my god has commanded me to do so in the midst of the land to which you come to possess it so when i speak to my arab friends and this isn't a singular conversation but it's thematically repeated itself many times over they tell me that those who they really resent are the secularized leftist jews in tel aviv which a lot of people just wouldn't think that because these jews are always acting like they're standing up for the arabs and you think that they would love them and of course keep in mind that this by no means describes all the jews of tel aviv by any means of course not but the type they're describing well most of them are in tel aviv anyways they see them as these westernized european colonialists importing ideas and values to the region which are foreign and unwelcome to this region and if i were to be honest when seeing things through their eyes i can understand why they would see it that way and i could actually empathize forgive me one moment but anyways as we live amongst each other and we work together and not only get to know each other but we actually observe each other you know we're around each other all the time we witness each other and it causes us to see each other differently i know i see them differently i've been inspired by them in many ways which i never imagined before just their work ethic the how hard they work many of them it's inspiring anyways many of these arabs have told me that when they see us fervently praying to god and working the land and wearing our ancient traditional jewish garb and willing to fight and sacrifice for the land when they see us animatedly immersed in studying torah then they say that indeed these are al-al-kitab these are the people of the book these are the children of abraham and i'm not saying that this shift happens overnight and i'm not saying that they will immediately love us but there's no question that they respect us and that they honor us even if they don't yet see how we are a blessing to the land and how we're a blessing to them even though more and more are seeing it and the story that stands out the most prominently in my mind i believe i may have told you this in the past so i won't go into depth here but it's when our farm was being raided by this group of israeli leftists called shalom ironically peace now and they're funded by these foreign governments foreign governments particularly from europe who seek to subvert and sabotage the jewish return to judea so they fund these non-profits to destroy us from within because they would never get that sort of funding and power if it wasn't for these foreign governments anyways they came onto the farm and i was in the olive groves and they all had their cameras in my face and i went up to the head woman and i tried to be a mensch i tried to just be a good guy even though i knew who they were and i knew it was about and i said shalom hello what's your name and she said just with such hatred like what is your what is your name so i said asham my name is ari bat levaquer did you come to visit she says no no no you are here to visit you understand what she's saying that we're not living there we're just there to visit and i didn't know what to respond so i said we're all just visiting here in this world i didn't know what to respond but on the way back i'm going back and of course i'm feeling all of this like hatred and anger we've put all that we have everything that we have into this farm and now they just want to destroy it just for the purpose of destroying it and that's their whole mission and i was feeling hatred and anger and then we've talked about it before one of my most important principles is that whenever i feel these negative emotions hatred and anger i always try to replace them with compassion and it almost always works i think it always works and it wasn't hard to work here to see these leftist jews and and understand and be compassionate to them that they're just missing out on the life and vitality of judea and what it is to be a jew anyways the reason i'm telling you this story is because about 15 minutes later um i get back to my house and who arrives at my house is these imams these uh muslim arab bedouin spiritual leaders they show up at my house they walk right onto the room they show up at my house and thank goodness yossi was there who speaks fluent arabic and and they said i said what are you doing here they said in in arabic they said to us we heard what happened we heard that these people came against you don't let them dishearten you don't listen to them this is your land and since you've been here you've been a tremendous blessing to us you've respectfully employed our people and you treat us honorably and our trees are growing better than they were before you got here meaning they believe like even like the deep mystical blessing that we've been bringing and it was just such a crazy day a day that i'll never forget because these leftist jews that are trying to endear themselves to arabs are really alienating the arabs even further while we're actually building real friendships and relationships based on our fear of god and living holistically as jews in the land of israel this highlight was taken from the land of israel fellowship every week hundreds of families from literally around the world come together on our live zoom sessions to strengthen each other to inspire each other and to learn torah from the land of israel in which we connect the dots between the bible the hebrew language and the confusing events of our times go to www.thelandofisral.com backslash fellowship or click on the link below to join thank you