Letters To The Editor - September 18, 2026

During the New Year, How Do We Obtain Joy?

I enjoyed many of your Rosh Hashana columns and articles in the most recent issue of The Jewish Press. And I look forward to your next issue, before Yom Kippur.

Reading through the paper, I was struck by these thoughts:

True joy comes not by chasing happiness, but by giving ourselves to meaning, to service, and to those we love – in other words, by finding purpose.

What is the difference between happiness and meaning?

Happiness is about satisfying our needs and wants. Meaning is about finding purpose in everything we do and at all times.

Happiness is about taking. Meaning is about giving.

Viktor Frankl taught that the search for meaning begins not by asking, “What do I want from life?” but rather, “What does life want from me?”

Life is a mission. We are put here on earth for a purpose, and we are summoned to that mission by G-d.

As we enter the New Year, perhaps the path to true joy is not to ask what will make us happier, but to ask what we are here to give – and what G-d is calling upon us to do.

Rabbi Dr. Bernhard Rosenberg

The UN’s Vilification of Israel

Regarding “Second UN Secretary-General Straw Poll Set” (Aug. 18, www.JewishPress.com):

Ms. Rodrigues-Birkett, the current leading candidate for United Nations secretary-general, is full of invective. Speaking at the UN Security Council over the past few years, she repeatedly accused the Jewish state of “genocide” along with “colonialist aspirations, fueled by a racist and religious ideology of superiority.”

Perhaps most instructive is Rodrigues-Birkett’s September 2024 remark on the history of the Arab-Israel conflict. She began with the usual cliché to excuse Hamas: “The situation in Palestine today did not begin on 7 October 2023.” Instead, she continued, “We must cast our minds back to 1948 because it was in that year that Israel first violently rejected the two-state solution….”

In reality, the Jews of Palestine accepted the two-state UN Partition Plan, and the Arabs living in Palestine went to war to prevent it. Their aim was to extinguish any Jewish state, and their theme was extermination – only a few years after the Holocaust, which their leader had urged Hitler to bring to Palestine. They lost despite the help of five Arab armies, only to recast their defeat and suffering as Israeli aggression.

Fast forward 75 years – past multiple other Arab-initiated wars and rejections of two-state solutions – to Oct. 7, 2023, and the war of extermination and massacre Hamas initiated in its effort to galvanize Iran and its proxies to join a new final solution. A Palestinian state could have been created multiple times, over nearly a century, had the Arabs sought a second state instead of the destruction of Israel.

In 1948, Israel’s UN representative, Abba Eban, noted that, under the 1922 League of Nations Mandate and the 1947 UN resolution, two Arab states – Transjordan and Arab Palestine – were to be established on seven-eighths of the land originally set aside for the Jews under the Balfour Declaration. He asserted that “many a Palestine Arab may come to compare this prospect, which was peacefully available, with the results of the ‘holy war’” – and that those who in the future would help the Arabs recognize Israel’s permanence would be deemed “in the historic sense, a friend of the Arabs,” because it would free the Arabs to concentrate on their own welfare, rather than on a genocidal war.

These days, the UN regularly vilifies the state that supported its two-state resolution – and misstates the history of those who violently rejected it.

Hamas started the war by massacring Jews on Oct. 7, 2023, in a state of ecstasy, which the Palestinian masses shared as they celebrated the victory. But the initial ecstasy was memory-holed as soon as Israel fought back. Gazans suffered under bombardment as Hamas fought from and beneath Gaza’s cities instead of releasing the hostages. For Palestinians, UN-style humanitarians and most of the press, the war again became a tale of Israeli aggression and Palestinian victimization.

Brian Goldenfeld

Thousand Oaks, Calif.