A Fowl Custom: The Ongoing Debate over the Pre-Yom Kippur Chicken Sacrifice

The custom of swinging a chicken over one’s head on the eve of Yom Kippur, slaughtering it, and giving it to a poor family was once widespread among Jews. Now this exotic ritual is primarily relegated to the ultra-Orthodox. But even despite its former prevalence, it is nowhere mentioned in the Talmud, and was condemned by some medieval and modern rabbis. Shlomo Brody recalls:

When I was a sixteen-year-old yeshiva boy studying in Jerusalem, my friends invited me to go with them to “shlug kaparos” on the day before Yom Kippur. Though I grew up Orthodox, in Houston, I was not familiar with the term (which translates loosely as “beat the atonements”), but I was quickly off to the Mahane Yehuda market, where we muttered a quick prayer as a shohet [kosher slaughterer] waved a chicken over our heads. He slaughtered the animal and threw it into an overflowing bin destined for the poor. . . . As I recited Kol Nidre that evening, murmurs of angst crept into my head: Was that really a holy act? As it turns out, many commentators, both medieval and modern, have called it a grave mistake.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Halakhah, Jewish holidays, Kaparos, Minhag, Shulhan Arukh, Yom Kippur

How Democrats Will Blame Israel for Their Defeat

Sometimes it takes a smart outside observer to see things about U.S. politics that Americans might miss. Stephen Daisley is one such observer:

Progressives in search of a scapegoat for their defeat will quickly arrive at Israel, specifically what they regard as the Biden administration and the Harris campaign’s support for Jerusalem in its fight against Hamas and Hizballah terrorists. Expect leftists to point to Harris’s loss of Michigan and especially the collapse of the Democrat vote in Dearborn, a city with significant Arab and Muslim populations. Expect them to say that a different approach, one supportive of the Palestinians rather than the Israelis, would have seen the Democrats hold on to Michigan.

It won’t matter that Michigan voted for Trump in 2020 and that his support there has much more to do with non-graduate white men than it does with Arab-American voting behavior. It won’t matter that Trump’s attitude towards Israel is far more sympathetic than Harris’s. It won’t matter that going down this path will bring resentment and hostility to bear on Arab Americans or Jews or both.

Progressives will see their chance to do something they have longed to do for decades: cleave the United States from Israel and leave the Jewish state vulnerable in a dangerous neighborhood. The surest way to do that is by adopting for the Democrat party the sort of views about Israel seen in center-left parties across the West.

Read more at Spectator

More about: 2024 Election, American Muslims, Democrats, U.S.-Israel relationship