חודש: נובמבר 2024

The second edition of ממרא was published during the first half of October 2024. All content on the website has been updated to reflect this, including the downloadable versions and the links to purchase physical copies.

The following “Note to the Second Edition,” found on page viii of the book, explains why there is a second edition and what has been changed.

When this book was completed and published, I did not expect that I would ever need to return to it. Tam v’nishlam. But on Simhat Torah, 5784, our world changed in many ways. Most of them are outside the scope of this book, but some fall squarely within it. To pretend that these changes had not happened seemed to me out of the question, so I concluded, reluctantly, that there would have to be a second edition in which they are addressed. If you read the book in order from beginning to end, you will, in due course, come upon a page or two where I discuss them. I also took this opportunity to add one more end note (regarding a letter of Rav Kook that I only learned of after the book was published) and to correct one reference in a footnote.

Beginning in the 1960s, the UK moved away from a paternalistic regime of censorship and censoriousness. The British were proud of their new-found free speech, . . . But a triple whammy towards the end of the 20th century upended this: the arrival of fundamentalist Islam in the West, the rise of far-left critical theories of social justice and the advent of the internet as the public square. . . . Of course, some internet regulation is necessary . . . But conservatives underestimated how regulation could morph into a regime of surveillance and censorship. . . . The losers are the millions of people who believe the government exists to protect us from foreign enemies and criminals, not to prohibit ideas, words or images that might offend. The winners? That unholy alliance of Islamists and leftists who want to use the state to impose their dogmas on everyone else.

– Ayaan Hirsi Ali, writing in The Spectator, “The death of free speech in Britain“

Urgent though the problem of the Palestinians may be, if it were only of interest to the Jews in the Land of Israel, it might be solvable without the measures proposed here. But we must recognize that the Palestinians are, in the end, only the pawns of players in a larger game. This larger conflict pits an unholy alliance between Progressivism and Islamism on one side against another side sometimes referred to as the West or the Judeo-Christian tradition. This latter term is, of course, unacceptable to a Torah-true Jew, but it nevertheless describes an existing reality. I will refer to that reality instead as the Sinaitic tradition, meaning the strain of human history and culture that is morally guided, to a significant degree, by the text and traditions that were given at Sinai.

– ממרא, “The Larger Game”