The Friday night attacks

A friend recently showed me a story written in Yiddish about a shidduch that was made because of a talmid chacham's absoulte trust in Hashem. She told me it was a segulah for people looking for a shidduch to read it on Motzaei Shabbos. I found the story over here in English, for those who wish to read it.

On October 31st,  the Mirror reported, "A teenage Palestinian boy has been shot dead Israeli security forces shot after he ran at them with a knife in the occupied West Bank yesterday.

An Israeli police spokeswoman said that at a checkpoint in the northern West Bank an 18-year-old Palestinian holding a knife ran towards a security officer who called for him to stop." http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/teenage-palestinian-boy-shot-dead-6745349

The New York Times coverage of the Friday shooting attack on an Israeli family included, "Yehuda Glick, an official at Otniel, the settlement close to where the attack occurred, said witnesses had identified the slain men as a father and son, 45 and 18." http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/14/world/middleeast/israelis-are-killed-on-west-bank.html?_r=0

When a Palestinian 18-year-old is killed, he is identified as a teenager. When an Israeli 18-year-old is killed, he is identified as a man.

Michael Weiss was interviewed on CNN regarding the Friday night attacks in Paris. He spoke about ISIS's goal of killing the kufar. He mentioned that President Obama recently spoke about ISIS being contained. He opined that if this is what containment looks like, he wouldn't like to see what hemorrhaging looks like.

Air France flight GROUNDED at Amsterdam airport after social media threat to blow up the plane

Barack Obama: Let’s Increase Number of Syrian Refugees to US by 100,000 in Next 2 Yrs.

I am currently reading a book titled City on Fire which contains stories and Torah insights about the September 11th attacks. Sorah Shapiro compiled many articles by rabbis who wrote about what we had to learn from the tragedy. As I read the rabbis' words, I was struck by how little we applied their messages 14 years later and how the profound impact of the tragedy changed us for the better for only a short time.

Rabbi Ephraim Wachsman wrote in the Jewish Observer (October 2001).


If we do not have mesiras nefesh, the requisite dedication in our service to Hashem, then less deserving creatures - our adversaries - will assume mesiras nefesh and sacrifice their lives for ra....

The majority of the rabbis quoted the gemara about what a person should do to save himself from chevlo shel Mashiach. Rabbi Eliezer's response was, "Ya'asok baTorah u'vigemilus chassadim."