Tag: Samson

The world changed on October 7, and with it that IDF notion of itself as a force intended to block Jewish communities to allow a future Palestinian state.

The elite fighter pilots of the Israel Air Force fly the skies each year to dazzle the nation's residents on Independence Day.

Early in his life Reb Shraga Feivel decided he would devote himself to strengthening Orthodoxy in the face of the onslaughts of those who would undermine Torah Judaism.

Frankfort-on-the-Main was the city of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, inspired and inspiring leader in Israel, man of God if ever there was one.

A monumental synagogue building dating to the Late Roman period (ca. 4th-5th centuries C.E.) has been uncovered in archaeological excavations at the ancient Jewish village of Huqoq in Israel's Galilee.

What, then, might be most important to Israel's prospectively irrational enemies, potentially even more important than their own physical survival as a state? One possible answer is the avoidance of certain forms of shame and humiliation. Another would be avoidance of the potentially unendurable charge that they had somehow defiled their most sacred religious obligations. Still another would be leaders' preferred avoidance of their own violent deaths, deaths that could be attributable to Israeli strategies of targeted killing and/or regime-targeting.

Coin voted best among 95 coins.

What is Israel to do? Confronting a new enemy Arab state that could act collaboratively and capably (thanks, largely, to the U.S.) with other Arab states, or possibly even with non-Arab Iran, and also potentially serious synergies between the birth of Palestine, and renewed terrorism from Lebanon, Israel could feel itself compelled to bring hitherto clandestine elements of its "ambiguous" nuclear strategy into the light of day. Here, leaving the "bomb in the basement" would no longer make strategic sense.

German artist, Albrecht Dürer's woodcut "Samson Slaying the Lion" (1497-98) shows the warrior-prophet with the unkempt hair and beard of a Nazarite, sitting on the back of a lion, whose jaws he pulls apart.

Hair in Judaism carries multiple connotations. It is distracting and narcissistic, as when Joseph "plays with his hair" too much and finds his jail sentence under Potifar extended for his vanity.

Taken in isolation, the emerging Palestinian state - a state that is now being forged with the open support of U.S. President George W. Bush - will have no direct bearing on Israel's nuclear posture. Yet, although obviously non-nuclear itself, Palestine could substantially diminish Israel's capacity to wage certain forms of conventional war and could thereby enlarge the Jewish State's incentive to rely on unconventional weapons in particular circumstances.