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August 29, 2024

True joy, not the Democrats’ AstroTurfed stuff, in pre-war Israel

By Andrea Widburg

My father always bemoaned the fact that homosexuals coopted the word “gay,” which used to be a word that described something that was bright and happy. Many now mourn how the non-standard sexuality crowd has coopted the rainbow, which stood both for God’s promise to mankind and for nature’s exquisite palette of colors. Now, leftists are stealing the word “joy.” A short pre-war video from Israel shows what that word means (and should still mean), as well as what true diversity looks like.

Dictionary.com defines “joy” as “the emotion of great delight or happiness caused by something exceptionally good or satisfying; keen pleasure; elation.” We all know that feeling. In normal people, joy comes from core human moments: a baby’s birth or laughter, a happy wedding, the delight an older person feels when the family comes over, the glowing pride one experiences with true accomplishment, whether our own or that of someone we love, seeing nature or a harmonious combination of nature and man’s hand in all their glory... All these things create genuine joy.

Today, though, Democrats are trying to tell us that joy is witnessing the media-fueled rise of a politician with a grating voice (Fran Drescher without the charm), a manic cackle unrelated to actual humor, a boatload of communist policies that she’s frantically trying to hide, years of low polls, no votes to justify her position as the Democrat candidate, and a hard-leftist sidekick who is a compulsive liar, throws around a manic grin, and is way too friendly with China. The only real joy involved is the manifest relief the Democrats feel at having jettisoned Joe so handily and fooled the public so easily.

Amid this deluge of AstroTurfed joy, I came across a lovely little video out of Israel. It was originally posted in August 2023, before the October 7 massacre that killed 1,200 Israelis and the subsequent war that has killed at least 1,500 more. The war has taken a terrible toll on Israelis. Every day, my Facebook feed shows pictures of young men and women who died on October 7 and those who continue to die doing battle against Hamas, which is Iran’s genocidal proxy.

But before the war, when Israelis were able to live their lives somewhat free from the shadow of jihad, someone filmed a video in Bnei Brak, a suburb of Jerusalem that has a majority “Haredi” population—that is, the residents are very conservative when it comes to following Jewish law and traditions.

A group of soldiers were out for their morning run in Bnei Brak when they came across a bride and groom taking their pre-wedding pictures. The soldiers charged. They didn’t charge to harass or attack the young people; they charged to celebrate—with genuine joy—one of life’s great miracles: The coming together of a young couple to create a new family. This is joy:

Another thing to note about the video is that we’re also seeing true diversity, not government-manufactured diversity. If you pay attention to the dancing soldiers, you’ll see that their rainbow palette ranges from European fair to African dark. In Israel, the common denominator is Judaism. The numerator of race matters much less. And because Israeli Jews believe that we’re all God’s children, there is room in their hearts to feel tremendous joy when a Muslim hostage is rescued from the dark tunnels below Gaza:

May Israel soon win her war against today’s Amalakites and live in joy again.

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