A California Court Prevents a Yom Kippur Ritual

On the eve of Yom Kippur, a time-honored tradition, now preserved mainly by the ultra-Orthodox, is to perform kapparot, a ceremony in which a chicken is offered up as a sort of atonement offering and then slaughtered and its meat given to the poor. This year, United Poultry Concerns—which campaigns against cruelty to domestic fowl—sued the Chabad house of Irvine, CA for violating a statute prohibiting the “malicious” and “intentional” killing of an animal, and succeeded in obtaining a temporary restraining order from a federal judge, thus effectively preventing the performance of the ritual. Howard Slugh comments:

In their briefing, the plaintiffs lay out a vision in which private morality and individual conscience are replaced by a one-size-fits-all, government-mandated morality. . . . In their complaint, [they] caricature religious liberty as a matter of religious people asserting that “they are above the law and can conduct themselves as they wish because of their religious beliefs.” The plaintiffs’ objections are not limited to the realm of law. They object to Chabad’s desire to “determine for themselves what is . . . moral conduct.” They argue that only the legislature can determine “legal and moral behavior in the state of California.” The plaintiffs do not want to control only Chabad’s conduct. They want to control its conscience.

[They] describe the Jewish tradition as a “societal evil” and mock kapparot as “taking out vengeance on an innocent animal for one’s own shortcomings.” . . . The plaintiffs are no more subtle about the scope of their ambitions. They acknowledge that their lawsuit is merely “the first step” toward their “ultimate goal” of banning the religious ceremony nationwide. . . .

[Furthermore], the plaintiffs openly dismissed the importance of the fulfillment of [the] religious obligation as understood by Alter Tenenbaum, [the rabbi of the Chabad of Irvine]. United Poultry Concerns argued that “the relative harm to the defendants” in preventing them from exercising their religion was “minimal,” [because] not all Jews use live chickens for the ritual and that therefore doing so must be “completely optional” and a “mere preference.” They implied that Tenenbaum preferred to use live chickens because doing so was “more lucrative.” Whether [this] explanation of Jewish law is the only valid interpretation of Judaism—it is not—is beyond the point. Even if . . . a single, correct form of Judaism existed, American courts would be neither qualified nor constitutionally empowered to settle such doctrinal disputes. . . .

[T]he American notion of religious liberty has traditionally prohibited, and must continue to prohibit, judges from making such determinations in all but the most extreme of cases. . . . Defenders of religious liberty—and, in fact, of individual liberty—should stand united and refute the . . . argument that only the government can determine morality and that an individual’s understanding of his own conscience has “minimal” value.

Read more at National Review

More about: Chabad, Freedom of Religion, Religion & Holidays, Yom Kippur

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF