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Perspective Shift

You read this story from where you sit.
Want to read it from somewhere else?

We'll re-present the same story as a thoughtful proponent of the criminalizing jewish practice frame would. Not to convince you. To let you actually meet the argument.

Choose a vantage
Retold from the other vantage
Steelman · slot C
When Torah study becomes a war crime
A religious-liberty lawyer would argue —
Read the actual Canadian complaints. A synagogue is accused because congregants tied tzitzit for lone soldiers. A school is accused because it encourages students to continue Judaic studies in Israeli yeshivot. A congregation is accused because its memorial book includes a prayer for fallen soldiers recited on Yom Kippur and Shemini Atzeret. These are not military activities; they are the ordinary substance of observant Jewish life — prayer, religious education, memorializing the dead. Reclassifying them as "aiding and abetting" turns the tax code and the human-rights apparatus into instruments for policing Jewish ritual itself. Any legal regime in which reciting Yizkor or studying Talmud in Jerusalem is presumptive evidence of complicity in war crimes is, by definition, a regime that has criminalized the practice of Judaism.

If this read like a fair rendering of the argument — even when you disagree — it's doing its job. Steelmen aren't aimed at persuading you; they're aimed at what the other side actually believes when they're thinking clearly.