The Call to Lips

Remember what Hashem, your God, did to Miriam, on the way when you departed from Egypt. (Devarim 24:9) 

This has to be one of the hardest parts of the morning service to internalize. It’s the second to last line of prayer we recite before we eat breakfast.  

As a Jew, I saw a direct relationship between my concentration level during prayer and the time remaining until my morning bagel. 

That has changed.   

Our War is on Three Fronts 

The War of Simchat Torah is being fought on three fronts.  

The first front is the military front. Our brave soldiers are pushing into the belly of the beast inside Gaza to clean this Philistine stronghold of all terrorists threatening every Jew in Eretz Yisrael.  

The next front is the media front. From government representatives to volunteers on Facebook, an army of social media and PR warriors are boldly volunteering their time to fight for the hearts and minds of the good people of this world.  

The third front is the spiritual front. It’s vital. It’s overlooked by many, but without it, we cannot win. Without God’s blessing, the IDF can’t win. Without Hashem blessing, the State of Israel can’t survive.  

Even as we destroy half of Hamas, America is pushing us to a cease-fire. That’s not Joe Biden. It’s a warning from Hashem telling us to look higher than the Merkava tank guns for our salvation.   

The History 

Our enemies are not the Arabs per se, but rather the Palestinians and their supporters.  

Who are their supporters? Iran, the UN, Europe, Russia, and America.  

Where do their supporters originate? Rome and Iran.  

The word “Palestine” derives from “Philistia”, the name Greek writers gave to the land of the Philistines and of Israel. King Shaul, defeated in battle against the Philistines at Mount Gilboa, killed himself.  The victorious Philistines recovered his body and that of his three sons who died in battle. The Philistines beheaded all four of them and desecrated their remains.  

When the Romans destroyed the Second Temple and sent us into exile, they renamed the Land of Israel “Palestine”. This name was given to remind us that, once again, we were exiled from our land. 

Who created the modern-day “Palestinians”? It was another nation that couldn’t recognize the nation of God: The Soviet Union, descendants of the Romans. The modern day “Palestinian Authority” comes from the former “Palestine Liberation Organization” (PLO). The PLO’s founder, Yasir Arafat, was an Egyptian whom the KGB trained in the early 1960s to form the PLO. The PLO’s mission was to destroy the “client state” of America – Israel. 

The cabal of western nations (Rome) and Iran (a descendant of Yefet) all prop up the concept of “Palestine” and everything it stands for.  

How do we defeat them? 

How did we lose to them in the first place? 

The Strategy 

The Roman war against the Jews was the Roman version of the modern-day Vietnam war. Rome barely won, and they suffered heavy losses. It took more Roman troops to defeat us in Israel than Romans to conquer India’s entire continent.  

Our Sages, of blessed memory, didn’t attribute our loss to military reasons. Like today, the Jewish soldiers then were fierce as lions, the best of the best.  

We lost because Hashem didn’t bless us. As amazing as our warriors were, without Hashem’s blessing, there was nothing we could do.  

Our Sages attribute the fall of our last great era to baseless hatred. We lost Hashem’s blessing because we hated each other for no reason. The Roman armies had laid siege to us, and we were bereft of food and supplies. But instead of fighting them, we also fought each other. Had we remained united, we could have won.  

What caused this military loss? The sin of loshon hara (evil speech). We would tell tales about one another. We spoke negatively about one another. People were embarrassed and enraged at what was being said about them.  

The Call to Lips 

For the nations of the world, war is a call to arms. 

For the Jewish People, it’s a call to lips.  

If we remain united, we can win. We can defeat Hamas. We can defeat Iran. We can defeat their suitors in Beijing, Moscow, Brussels, and Washington.  

It’s up to us to stop looking at the IDF or to the USA for our protection and focus on GOD to save us.  

For six hours on October 7, nobody protected the people of South Israel. For those 360 minutes, the area became an instant Auschwitz. Women and children were systematically shot. Men were decapitated and murdered – exactly like our King Saul. Babies were burned in ovens. 

We now know for a fact that every inch of our Land that our Philistine enemies might take will turn into another Treblinka.  

This is a battle of life and death.  

Hashem commands us to be a holy army. He commands us to be holy people. From the first war against the Egyptians that Hashem fought for us, to the War with Amalek that was only won when Moshe raised his hands in prayer, we win with only one factor: 

God’s Blessing.  

What can we do to earn it? Guard the laws of proper speech (Shmirat HaLoshon). 

Miriam spoke loshon hara (bad speech) against Moshe and she was exiled for seven days. The spies spoke loshon hara about the Land and we listened, so Hashem exiled us for forty years. We spoke constant loshon hara about each other, and Hashem sentenced us to a nearly two-thousand-year exile that hasn’t ended.  

We are commanded to remember the tragedies of loshon hara every single day.  

Beyond the tragedy is redemption. After we atone for the sin of loshon hara by following the laws of Shmirat HaLoshon, everything reverses. The exile will end. We will merit Hashem’s blessing and He will grant us victory over Hamas, the Palestinians, Europe, Russia, China, the UN, and America.  

No matter how tempting it is to say something against any Jewish leader, from Prime Minister Netanyahu to opposition leader Lapid, we must fight like lions. We must do what every IDF solider is trained to do when he must overcome his limitations for the sake of us all: 

Bite your lips.  

I just found a brilliant podcast on Shmirat HaLoshon by Rabbi Nachum Meth: https://open.spotify.com/show/6yB1MQzO7o4ctiSHbHds3B   

You can also sign up to receive a daily lesson, a few minutes a day of Shmirat HaLoshon here: 
https://www.shmirashaloshonyomi.org/  

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David Ben Horin lives in Afula with his family, millions of sunflowers, and Matilda, our local camel. David‘s Israeli startup, 300 Marketing Solutions, is a lean marketing agency for startups and small businesses that creates and promotes SEO-optimized ROI-driven to the right audience on LinkedIn to make your business the star of the show.