We frum American Jews had really better hurry up and give our support to our brethren in Eretz Yisrael now because time is rapidly running out. The clock is ticking and every day brings us closer to the end.

No not that end.

Tehran? The Eibeshter is quite capable of taking care of that on His own and our brethren in Eretz Yisrael don’t really need our support on that score other than in the form of course of our heartfelt tefillos.

I’m referring instead to a Globes poll taken back in October that showed that if elections were held today Yesh Atid — now there’s an ironic name for you! — would sink to 12 Knesset seats from its current 19. This could well mean that its campaign to undermine the foundations of Eretz Yisrael’s Torah community might be halted and its drastic cuts rescinded.

And so if we are to come through for our beleaguered bnei Torah by contributing generously to address the severe financial shortfall and deprivation they face we’d better do so now. After all the cuts are in place now but shortly that may no longer be the case and then we will be in trouble.

It may well be chalilah that the push to eradicate large-scale full-time Torah study in Eretz Yisrael has embedded itself so in Israeli society that the trend will continue whether or not Mr. Lapid is forced speedily in our days to return to the television studio whence he came. But if that’s not the case — if the anti-Torah animus he fomented was a blessedly passing blip on the radar screen of Israeli society and his party disappears into thin air very uncannily like his father’s Shinui did and all the funding denied to avreichim and their families is restored — then unless we act now courageously and generously and say “hineini!” to our brothers and sisters in Eretz Yisrael’s kollelim we will have missed an historic opportunity.

It is a priceless chance to gain merit of epic proportions one we desperately need in order to deal with a host of problems that besets us from within and without one that the Master of the World Himself may be trying to put into our hands for reasons known only to Him.

Everything I’ve written until this point is based on one fundamental understanding. It is a way of viewing the world that we so often miss when we try to comprehend events using our own limited and biased minds rather than the minds of those who’ve spent a lifetime exclusively absorbing the Torah’s wisdom and have a received tradition of how to lead Klal Yisrael.

It emerges from many sources in Torah but was taught to us perhaps most clearly by the Chofetz Chaim when a group of Russian Jewish philanthropists approached him with an offer to establish a fund that would cover the entire budget of all of the yeshivos of the time. The Chofetz Chaim turned the offer down citing three reasons: The merit of hachzakas Torah belongs to every single Jew not to a handful of wealthy individuals and it would be unfair indeed prohibited to deny them this great source of merit; the collectors who circulate on behalf of yeshivos serve as models of ehrliche Yidden that are seen all too rarely in some of the homes they visit and such a fund would render these collectors superfluous; and since the fortunes of the wealthy and any fund they create will inevitably rise and fall when the latter happens Jews who have shifted the responsibility to support Torah to this fund will not be easily reeducated to begin giving again.

It was precisely this mesorah from the Chofetz Chaim that Maran Harav Shach invoked in 1977 in spurning Menachem Begin’s generous offer for his government to underwrite the entirety of Israeli yeshivos’ budgetary needs. The essence of this principle — based on which the Chofetz Chaim and Rav Shach turned down millions of rubles and shekels respectively — is that G-d needs no help at all providing for the students of Torah and their families neither from a billionaires’ superfund nor from any government.

It is we rank-and-file members of Klal Yisrael who dearly need the merit of exercising our G-d-given bechirah to support Torah rather than leaving that incomparable zechus to a select group of affluent donors. And in line with the Chofetz Chaim’s reasoning perhaps we need too to be exposed to and influenced by the purity the love of Torah and the bitachon of the thousands of avreichei kollel and their families who are sacrificing everything for Torah.

I don’t need to reiterate here my non-prophet status; not a single reader is in danger of believing otherwise. Nevertheless as I observe the events unfolding over the last year in the Middle East I can’t help but sit back and muse: In one corner is Iran busy building a bomb to carry out its stated dream of obliterating Israel and in another corner is the United States doing its best “Neville Chamberlain in 1938” imitation. And in yet a third corner a party led by a “nobody” is catapulted into power threatening to end the Torah community of Eretz Yisrael as we know it by ripping the bread and milk out of innocent children’s little hands.

Could it be we’re being told something? Is the spiritual state of Eretz Yisrael today so wonderful that it’s beyond the realm of possibility for a nuclear gezeirah to be hanging over our heads and for the Eibishter to have sent us a messenger boy named Yair to literally hand us a limited-time offer of a spiritual Iron Dome of hachzakas haTorah should we choose to accept it?

The dozens of American kehillos that have already signed on with the incomparably magnificent Adopt-a-Kollel initiative have seen the window of opportunity of zechus open and are determined to grab it before it closes. Whatever are the rest of us waiting for?

SENT WITH LOVE

Last week I received photographs in the mail from my kids in Eretz Yisrael along with a “hope you enjoy these pictures of our vacation” note. That’s it.

It’s an experience that has been rendered unusual in our digital world and what an enjoyable one it was! I was able to hold in my hands a few photos that had traveled around the world which my kids had held in their hands and then wrapped in paper and placed in an envelope thinking as they did so This will make my parents happy. And it did it really did.

I’m not saying that when someone takes a digital photo or even a camera phone picture and sends it off via e-mail that they don’t do so and that the same aren’t received with feelings of affection. Surely they do and are.

But it’s not the same. It can’t be the same because as Rav Dessler ztz”l taught as much as love leads to giving of oneself giving of oneself to another fosters love. And so the very investment of effort itself creates a deeper feeling of love in the sender.

And when I receive that package it is meaningful because it stands for something — in this case the lifelong bonds of mutual love and appreciation we share. But the less time effort and thought were put into sending it the less it represents those bonds.

This is one of the less-noticed of the many losses that technology’s takeover of our lives has wrought. By making it possible to invest ever-less time effort and attention into our communications and other forms of interaction with others those communications and interactions come to mean less and less to us and to them.

An e-mail hastily conceived and composed sloppily written and effortlessly sent can’t possibly have for its recipient the meaning that a letter written and mailed would. And so too for a gift or set of photos sent. Eventually these moment-by-moment choices to take the road more traveled — i.e. the information superhighway — accumulate and the result is that our lives become thinner emotionally poorer. 

Some of us surely have noticed and been chagrined by this loss in our lives. But when it comes down to it e-mail and phone texts and online shopping and all the rest are just so much more convenient and instantaneous and our lives are so busy — paradoxically despite all of our time-and-effort-saving devices — that we surrender to the Big Easy and suffer the loss silently. But we don’t have to and we ought not to.

So why not try sending a letter or a photo this month to someone you love? Do it for old times’ sake.