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The addition to our prayers for the eight days of Chanukah is ??? ??????????, thanking G-d “for the miracles, and for the salvation, and for the mighty deeds, and for the redemption, and for the wars that You wrought for our ancestors in those days at this time”. After giving a potted history of the Maccabean revolt, the ??? ?????????? prayer recounts the miracles: “And You, in Your great mercy, stood by them in their time of distress; You fought their fight, You judged their cause, You avenged their vengeance; You delivered the mighty into the hands of the weak, and the many into the hands of the few, and the impure into the hands of the pure, and the evil into the hands of the righteous, and the deliberate sinners into the hands of those who labour in Your Torah. Thus You made a great and holy Name for Yourself in Your world....”. Yet there is a puzzling aspect to these words. “You delivered the mighty into the hands of the weak, and the many into the hands of the few” – it is clear why this constitutes a miracle. And indeed it is worth investing several paragraphs to explain just how “mighty” and how “many” the Greek forces really were. The Seleucid Empire under King Antiochus IV was one of the mightiest empires the world has ever seen. Based in Syria, the SeleucidEmpire at its peak stretched from Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) in the west to modern-day Pakistan in the east, including Babylon (modern-day Iraq), Persia (modern-day Iran), and modern-day Kuwait and Turkmenistan. Even Rome dared challenge the Seleucid Empire only when they had powerful military allies, and even then only on the very fringes of the Empire (such in Egypt). Hellenist culture dominated the world from Spain in the west to Persia in the east, from the Alps in Europe in the north to the Sahara Desert in Africa in the south.. And against this mighty empire and nigh-universal culture, Matityahu (Matthias) and his sons raised a guerrilla army – untrained, unarmed (at the beginning), unschooled in warfare. The previous time that any Jewish army had fought had been some 440 years earlier, when the Judean Army had confronted the Babylonian Army which invaded Judea. Hardly an inspiring historical memory – the Judean Army had been badly beaten, the Jewish Monarchy was defeated, and the Jews dragged off into Babylonian captivity. The previous time that a Jewish army had achieved any victory was the Judean Army under King Hizkiyahu (Hezekiah), more than a century earlier yet. And they won that war by a miracle, when all 185,000 Assyrian soldiers who were besieging Jerusalem died in a single night (2 Kings 18:13-19:35). So the previous time that any Jewish army had fought and won battles by regular strategy and tactics was maybe 700 years before the Maccabees. They had no one to study from, no previous battle experience to draw on, no West Point or Sandhurst graduates to train them, no martial traditions to guide them. Yet Yehudah theMaccabee invented guerrilla tactics, exploiting every conceivable advantage that a small and incredibly highly-motivated force could possibly use – ambushes, hit-and-run raids to requisition weapons from the Seleucid forces, reconnaissance missions under deep cover to gather intelligence on Seleucid dispositions, diversionary raids to lure Seleucid forced into wild-goose chases over desert and mountain, deception operations to mislead the Seleucids into expending their weapons by attacking where no Maccabean forces were – tactics which were a millennium ahead of their time. In 166 B.C.E. Maccabean forces won an astounding victory over Seleucid forces in the battle of Wadi Haramieh near Shiloh in Shomron (Samaria), where just 600 Maccabean soldiers, who had never fought a battle before in their lives, defeated 2,000highly-trained and experienced Seleucid soldiers, and requisitioned their weapons. The following year they repeated this in the battle of Beit Horon, 8 km (5 miles) south-east of Modi’in, where 800 Maccabean soldiers defeated 4,000 Seleucid soldiers. A few months later, when Antiochus ordered Lysias to defeat the Jews

(From the pre-election polls until the actual election, significant changes are possible. And under Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party has been steadily rising in the polls, despite all the reasons he poses a danger to Jews and the UK itself.) With all eyes the world over – and all the more so Jewish eyes – on the impending elections in the United Kingdom this coming Thursday (elections in the UK are traditionally held on Thursdays), with the massive worries that the Jewish community in Britain, indeed Jews the world over, have about a possible Labour Party victory, and Jeremy Corbyn subsequently becoming Prime Minister of the UK, a brief explanation of the British electoral system, and how Corbyn might – just might – become Prime Minister seems in order. The UK electoral system is a representative democracy and a constitutional monarchy. The country is currently divided into 650 constituencies (the exact number varies from time to time with population shifts), each with very roughly similar numbers of voters: the vast majority of these constituencies contain between 60,000 and 90,000 voters. Hence the geographical areas covered by these constituencies varies wildly: in the densely-populated areas of London, Manchester, and eastern Yorkshire (on England’s north-east coast), for example, the constituencies are geographically far smaller than in the sparsely-populated rural areas of Wales, northern England, and the highlands of Scotland. Each constituency elects one representative to the Parliament in Westminster. There is no fixed number, and no limit, to the number of candidates who stand in any given constituency. On Thursday, the Conservative Party will field candidates in 635 constituencies, Labour in 631, the Liberal Democrats in 610, and the Greens in 497. There are several small parties who only field candidates in only a few constituencies – the Animal Welfare Party, the English Democrats, the British National Party, the Justice & Anti-Corruption Party, and several others, who are highly unlikely to get any candidates into Parliament. And then there are regional parties: The Scottish National Party is contesting all 59 constituencies in Scotland. Plaid Cymru (Party of Wales) is contesting 36 out of 40 seats in Wales. The Democratic Unionist Party (Northern Ireland, broadly Protestant, pro-British, Right-wing) is contesting 17 out of 18 seats in Northern Ireland; Sinn Féin (also Northern Ireland, the political wing of the IRA, broadly Catholic, anti-British, Left-wing, arguably Marxist-Leninist) is contesting 15 seats. Of these regional parties, the SNP is a natural ally of Labour – somewhere between Left-wing and extreme Left, and viciously anti-Israel. The DUP is a natural ally of Tory – Right-wing and staunchly pro-Israel. Sinn Féin might be an interesting party to watch after the elections: in the past, their elected members have never taken their seats in Parliament, in protest against British rule over Northern Ireland. But Jeremy Corbyn has been consorting with IRA terrorists for decades; so in the event of a hung Parliament, in which Sinn Féin can swing the balance, it is just conceivable that they might break with tradition and take their seats, in order to get Corbyn into the Prime Minister’s office. Each voter votes for one candidate in his or her constituency. This means that someone living, for example, in a constituency in which the Conservatives are not fielding a candidate cannot vote for Conservative. The UK uses the first-past-the-post system; this means that whichever candidate receives the highest number of votes in any given constituency becomes that constituency’s representative to Parliament. The advantage to this system is that every single voter has his or her personal representative to Parliament, someone who is personally answerable to the individual voter, in the corridors of power. The disadvantage, of course, is that the British Parliament is far less a reflexion of the will of the people than the Israeli Knesset, which is pure proportional representation. In Israel, a party which receive

The year was 2171 (1589 B.C.E.), and the 63-year-old Jacob was fleeing from his parents’ house, his childhood home, everything that was comfortable and familiar, to escape his twin brother Esau’s murderous wrath. He planned to be away for no more than a matter of days: he took with him no more than the clothes he stood up in and a wooden staff. Little could he yet know that he would never see his mother again, that ahead of him lay fourteen years of study in the Academy of Shem and Ever (Megillah 17a, Bereishit Rabbah 68:5) followed by 20 years of labour and exploitation at the hands of his devious and mendacious uncle Lavan, after that a two-year journey home (including the time he tarried in Shechem), and that he would eventually return as a wealthy patriarch with two wives, two concubines, twelve sons and a daughter, hundreds of goats, sheep and camels, and servants and maidservants. But as our Parashah opens, Jacob was a destitute fugitive, looking for a place to rest his head for the night while on his lonely journey to Paddan Aram. On his way northwards from Beer Sheva, “he encountered the place” (Genesis 28:11), meaning the Place, the Place on which the Holy Temple would one day stand (see Sanhedrin 95b, Hullin 91b, et al.). The Talmud picks up on a seeming discrepancy in the text here: As Jacob lay down to sleep for the night, “he took from the stones [plural] of the place, and put them around his head” (Genesis 28:11). After dreaming his famous dream of the ladder linking earth with heaven and G-d’s promise to protect him, “he awoke from his sleep…and he took the stone [singular] which he had put around his head” (vs. 16-17). So did he use several stones or one single stone as his pillow? – “This teaches that all those stones were gathered into a single place, every single one saying: Let this Tzaddik rest his head upon me! As a Tanna taught, all the stones thereupon were merged into one” (Hullin 91b). “Jacob had taken twelve stones from the stones of the altar upon which Isaac his father had been bound, and he put them around his head in the same place, to symbolise that twelve tribes were destined to arise from him. And they all became one single stone, to symbolise that all were destined to become ‘a single nation in the Land’ (1 Chronicles 17:21)” (Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer 35; compare Bereishit Rabbah 68:11). The Targum Yonatan has a different view, and renders Genesis 28:11, “he took four of the stones of the holy place, and put them around his head”. The Midrash explains: “He said: Abraham married two wives, and begat two sons – one righteous and one evil. My father Isaac begat both a righteous son and an evil son from one wife. If I will marry four wives, how many sons will I beget? He took four stones, saying: If they unify with each other, then I am assured that my marital life will be perfect” (Yalkut Shimoni, Job 899). That is to say, according to this Midrash, the unification of the four stones indicated the unity of Jacobs four wives (actually his two wives and two concubines) – Leah, Zilpah, Rachel, and Bilhah, the four women who gave birth to the Twelve Tribes of Israel. In any event, the unification of the stones under Jacob’s head represented the destined unification of his future family. When he awoke and saw that the stones had become united into one, “he erected it as a pillar and he poured oil on its head” (Genesis 28:18). Now there is a peculiarity here in the text: the word ???????? (“he poured”) is spelled here without a dagesh (a dot which doubles or emphasizes the letter) in the letter tzaddik: ???????? instead of the grammatically-correct ?????????. A tiny point – but nothing in the Torah is trivial; not even a minuscule and abstruse detail of Hebrew grammar. Why the missing dagesh? I suggest two explanations: – The first explanation harks back to the opening sentence of Parashat Vayeitzei: “Jacob departed out from Beer Sheva, and went to Haran” (Genesis 28:10). Rashi, following the Midrash (Bereishit Rabbah 68:6 and Ruth Rabbah 2:12), asks why the Torah has to mention that “Jacob depar

How Jewish is Israel? – The Shabbat test, by Daniel Pinner Two events happened over Shabbat in Israel, two events which were diametrically opposite in every possible way. One in the greater Tel Aviv region, the foundation of modern secular political Zionism, the heart and the very epitome of secular left-wing progressive Israel; the other in Hebron, the oldest Jewish city in the world, the foundation of Judaism and Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel, the heart and very epitome of religious Jewish identity. Following the Mishnaic dictum that “we begin with the disgrace and conclude with the glory” (Pesachim 12:4), we begin with the recent innovation in Tel Aviv: The Tel Aviv municipality has recently decided to provide free public transportation on Shabbat. The status quo, going back to well before independence, to the days of British colonial rule, is that public transportation (busses and trains) does not operate on Shabbat. Taxis do operate: they are classified as private vehicles. And the Tel Aviv municipality has decided to challenge and eradicate that status quo.For legal reasons, the bus companies cannot operate services for a fee in predominantly Jewish cities in Israel. (Haifa is a glaring exception: due to its charismatic and almost violently anti-religious mayor Abba Khushi in the early years of independence, 1951-1969, Haifa’s busses have always operated on Shabbat. But I digress.) The Tel Aviv municipality found and successfully exploited a loophole in the legal status quo: no, they can’t operate fee-paying public transport on Shabbat. But they can – and did! – operate free busses on Shabbat. And so, this last Shabbat, free bus services operated in Tel Aviv and its satellite-towns of Ramat Gan, Ramat Ha-Sharon, Givatayyim, Holon, and Kiryat Ono. These free bus routes, covering some 300 km (185 miles), ran from 4:00 on Friday afternoon (the beginning of Shabbat) until 2:00 a.m. Shabbat morning, and again from 9:00 Shabbat morning until the end of Shabbat. Now a free public bus service should be immensely popular. And these free bus routes service some 1,000,000 people. One would expect, therefore, that these busses would effect a veritable revolution among the good folk of the greater Tel Aviv region. In fact, according to the Tel Aviv municipality, a mere 6,000 people rode on these free buses. Not all that popular, after all. And now for the glory: The same Shabbat, 70 km (44 miles) south-east of Tel Aviv, in the ancient Jewish city of Hebron, well over 40,000 Jews gathered. Jews of all ages, Jews from all over Israel (and no doubt beyond), Jews from every conceivable walk of life. The majority of them religious, but by no means all. It was Shabbat Chayyei Sarah, the Shabbat on which Jews the world over read the Torah-portion recording how our father Abraham purchased the Machpelah Cave in Hebron as the first-ever Jewish land-holding in the Land of Israel (Genesis Chapter 23). It is an indescribably inspiring and spiritually uplifting experience – hearing the Torah’s account of Abraham’s buying the field and the cave within it, while standing on the self-same spot, in the structure covering the very cave which Abraham bought as a burial-plot for his beloved wife Sarah. And so, myriads of Jews made the effort, expended their resources, in order to spend this specific Shabbat in Hebron. Unlike the free transport in Tel Aviv and surroundings, travelling to Hebron takes time, effort, and money. It’s an hour’s drive from Jerusalem, an hour’s drive from Beer Sheva, two hours from Tel Aviv, two-and-a-half hours from Netanya, and over three hours from Haifa. Many of those more-than-40,000 visitors stayed in neighbouring Kiryat Arba, at least 20 minutes’ walk, maybe half-an-hour’s walk, maybe an hour’s walk, from the Machpela where all the action was happening. Thousands of others spent the Shabbat in tents in Hebron, in the immediate environs of the Machpela. Hebron is high in the Judean Hills, some 930 metres (1,050 feet) above sea level; so even though it lies 30 km (19 miles) almost due south of Jerusalem, it

We have not defeated Islamic Jihad, we have simply taught the terrorist group a lesson. They will start launching rockets soon enough. Another round of firing has ceased. They launched – how many was it this time? – rockets at us from Gaza, we responded by bombing them. They fired at us indiscriminately, we launched surgically-precise strikes at them. They tried to inflict as much civilian damage on us as possible, we did all we could to inflict as little civilian damage on them as possible. Our Prime Minister and Defence Minister promised that we would cause such massive damage to the Islamic Jihad military infrastructure that they would guarantee Israelis in the south peace and quiet for a while - and most important, that we let them know that we can find their leaders anywhere.. The Islamic Jihad in Gaza responded by firing more missiles on Israel, and Israel destroyed more of their infrastructure. Hitting Tel Aviv, we all assumed, would be a red line which the terrorists had now crossed. Now, some Israelis hoped, the political echelons would release IDF's full might and fury. And so it escalated briefly: tanks on the border with Gaza, bomb-shelters in the South opened and stocked, the IAF raiding Gaza hour after gruelling hour…until the Arabs in Gaza decided they had had enough, and declared a ceasefire. Israel denied any knowledge of such a ceasefire. But the next morning, the ceasefire was unequivocally in place. Both sides stopped firing. Our Chief of Staff, our Prime Minister and Defence Minister, our Government spokespeople, our political analysts – all assured us that we won this round and had achieved all the goals the IDF had set for itself. After all, objectively we certainly inflicted far, far more damage on them than they did on us. In numbers of people killed and wounded on both sides and destruction of infrastructure, they certainly suffered way more than we did. …And yet we didn't really "win" more than this round. Not by a long chalk. The Hamas still reigns in Gaza; their political and military echelons are unscathed. They kept out of the fray. Yes, several Islmic Jihad commanders were killed; they can probably all be replaced before the end of next week. Israel's political and military leaders say that Islamic Jihad now knows we can get to them anywhere, bragged on radio, TV, and the print media how they have "restored Israel's deterrence". Nonsense. We have zeo deterrence. The Arabs in Gaza will start firing again the moment that they decide it's in their favour and their interests to do so. The Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, ISIS, Al-Aqsa Brigades – whichever terrorist gangs were running around before this latest flare-up are still running around there now. Their armouries have not been depleted, their weapons-caches remain intact, their command-structures have not suffered one iota, their training-bases are still in place. Yes, the dead will remain dead…and the terrorist commanders in Gaza, like the political bosses in Gaza, don't care a fig for the lives lost. After all, dead civilians make excellent anti-Israel propaganda, while dead terrorists – even the highest-ranking commanders – can and will be replaced by tomorrow. Let us not fool ourselves: With all the heroic-sounding veneer of bombast, with all the resounding rhetoric that no terrorist who raises his hand against us will survive – we didn't defeat the terrorists. We had specific goals against Islamic Jihad and we achieved them. We probably didn't deter Islamic Jihad terrorists from attacking us next time either. They decided to begin the conflict after we killed their main operations officer, they decided on the level of its intensity, they decided when and how it ended, they decided when the ceasefire would begin, and they decided on the conditions for the ceasefire. No Israeli in Sderot or Kfar Aza or Ofakim or Netivot or Ashkelon or Ashdod or Kiryat Malachi or Beer Sheva or anywhere else within 40 km (25 miles) of Gaza can now go back to normal stress-free life and relax. Because as much as the terrorists decided unilaterally when this cur