BHBE News

BHBE Virtual Shul

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Sunday night, June 28th, we will come together while apart.  We will Zoom together with the spirit that makes the BHBE community so unique.  Our creative, innovative, hard-working Gala team is putting together a program that will be fun and entertaining.  The Gala is a major fund raiser each year. For your safety we cancelled our previous Gala plans leaving us with a financial hole we need to fill.  We hope you will support our virtual Gala to the degree you are able.  Details and a whole lot of fun to come.

Dear BHBE Community:

Yesterday, I called my husband, Phillip, at "work" to ask him to come home for a few minutes to help me with an issue in the kitchen. Of course, when he picked up the phone from his "office" downstairs, I could hear him laughing. He then made me laugh when he said the commute up the stairs was taxing. Finding these moments now, and remembering these moments when the pandemic has passed, is what we will take away, hopefully, from 2020. I will also remember the Zoom drinks we have had with friends both here and in Minneapolis, the incredible and unexpected interactions I am witnessing between our kids, and my rediscovered love of making bread in our breadmaker (a wedding gift from 21 years ago)!

I hope you, too, are keeping track of the little moments that are getting us all through this. I invite you to share them with us by emailing stories, photos and videos to connecting@bhbe.org.  We are and remain a strong and vibrant community and will emerge even stronger...with amazing tales to tell! In addition to sharing your moments, we look forward to gathering again on Shabbat beginning this Saturday. Complete instructions were sent out earlier today - you can follow the link, above. 

I look forward to seeing all of you on Zoom, and in person, as soon as possible.

Wishing you all a wonderful Shabbat,

Keri Bahar
EVP

Thanks to the extraordinary efforts of the BHBE Volunteer Crew, we have assisted numerous congregants with shopping and other assistance. As a reminder, if you are in need of support, please email Karen Thirman at kthirman@gmail.com  or contact the BHBE office at 847-256-1213 and leave a message.  We will coordinate your needs with our list of amazing volunteers. 

LEAVE A LEGACY

How can you participate in our Legacy Program? The most common way is to make a Bequest in a Will or Trust. But did you know that you can also participate by making your gift as a direct Cash Payment? This is the most cost effective method for those who do not want to incur the costs involved with updating or changing their Will or Trust. This is also especially efficient for gifts in the 4-figure range that you intend to make now or in the next year or two. Please know that we appreciate any method you choose to make the gift. It’s your choice - we are here to assist you. For more information please contact Michael Kahn - michael.kahn@bhbe.org.

Meanwhile in Other News, Israel's Labor Party is Finished

The party of Ben-Gurion, Eshkol, Meir and Rabin led Israel for decades. Now it has fallen so low, become so discredited and irrelevant, that even its demise barely makes a headline. Under one name or other, Labor oversaw the founding of modern Israel and led it through its first three turbulent decades of statehood — somehow steering the nascent state through the unwinnable War of Independence to the astounding success of the Six Day War, and shaping the nation’s education and health systems, its infrastructure and economy, its foreign relations and its domestic priorities. It then entered what must now be recognized as a protracted but terminal decline with the shock of the Yom Kippur War.

What is striking about Labor’s demise is the speed of its final acceleration into the political grave. Having first lost power to Menachem Begin’s Likud in 1977, it was still strong enough to win back the national leadership under Yitzhak Rabin in 1992. Discredited by the Arafat-orchestrated suicide bombings of the Second Intifada, having legitimized the PLO leader with the Oslo Accords, and shattered by the assassination of Rabin, it nonetheless managed a final, brief spell at Israel’s helm under Ehud Barak in 1999-2001.

And as recently as the 2015 elections, under Isaac Herzog, it won 24 seats (under the Zionist Union rubric) to Likud’s 30, forcing Netanyahu to scramble to assemble a majority coalition. What a vote-winner the widely derided Herzog looks in hindsight, with Labor since reduced to six seats under Avi Gabbay a year ago, and then to five and finally three under Peretz in our last two elections.

The marginalization and now the subsumption of Labor is a function, first and foremost, of middle Israel’s lost faith in the possibility of an accommodation with the Palestinians — a conclusion unsurprisingly drawn from that strategic onslaught of suicide bombers twenty years ago.

Labor has mustered no credible alternative approach, and no articulate counter, to Netanyahu and his insistence that Israel has no partner with whom to negotiate. And thus the final, broken representatives of David Ben-Gurion’s pioneering party are now to find themselves part of a government committed to the unilateral annexation of the settlements and the Jordan Valley — expediting not only the demise of Labor, but also, quite possibly, of the two-state solution for which the party stood.

Labor’s passing was hastened by the arrival of Benny Gantz, who pulled away much of its electorate in building the most potent alternative to Netanyahu in years, an alliance dominated by ex-IDF chiefs that challenged the Likud leader’s Mr. Security credentials.

So farewell, then, to Labor. Farewell to the party of Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir, and those perennial rivals Rabin and Shimon Peres. Farewell to the party that founded and shaped modern Israel.

Excerpted by Chuck "Zvi" Tannenbaum from an April 27, 2020 article by David Horovitz in The Times of Israel