Father, Husband, Director of Educational Technology at Yeshivat Frisch

New Jersey
Joined March 2009
My soft cover authors copies have arrived! And they look beautiful and very human! a.co/d/01lwAbwn
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Rabbi Tzvi Pittinsky retweeted
“We are not all right.” I said those words in the days after October 7, 2023. Three years later, we are STILL not all right. We remember the children, parents and grandparents murdered by Hamas. The young people who went to a music festival and never came home. The families whose pain does not end when the anniversary passes. And we are not all right when antisemitism spreads like wildfire, too often fueled or excused by government officials who have a responsibility to confront it. We are not all right when Jewish families live in fear and those entrusted to protect them look the other way. It is more important than ever to stand up, speak out and fight this hatred. Silence cannot be our answer. To my Jewish brothers and sisters: Your fight is my fight. I am your brother. I stood beside you then. I stand beside you now. And I always will. May the memories of those we lost be a blessing.
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Rabbi Tzvi Pittinsky retweeted
Asaf Rejuwan, one of the Israeli survivors of flight 1073 wrote on Facebook: ״I don't usually post on social media, but today I felt something burning deep inside me that I simply had to share. Ever since the incident where the terrorist's attempt to hijack the Flydubai flight was thwarted, there has been a lot of coverage in the media, and I’ve been asked many times what factors I believe prevented the terrible disaster that could have befallen our people had that despicable terrorist succeeded in his plans. Today, I think I received a very special and interesting answer to that question. Naturally, after the incident ended and we landed safely on the Land of Israel, I felt the need to thank many people... the passengers who cooperated, my lioness of a wife and all the mothers and fathers who protected their loved ones, the children who stayed composed, and every Israeli passenger on that plane. Yesterday, I was part of a group of passengers interviewed for an international channel. As each passenger went into detail about how they experienced the flight, we realized something very important- something you only understand when the dust settles and you get into the small details during intimate conversations among yourselves. We realized that every single passenger on that flight had a role, every passenger on the flight had a role. One passenger was responsible for communicating with Israel's security services I discovered there was a passenger on board who provided a mobile hotspot and made sure to share it with others Another female passenger sat and recited Psalms A passenger made sure to pass along headphone cords to tie up the terrorist Passengers kept track of where we were going to land using GPS maps An Australian passenger was the only one on the plane who could make calls back to Israel from an enemy country (Saudi Arabia) And the list goes on... And, of course, the amazing Yaniv, the wonderful Tzvika and Tali, the hero Shota, the great man Or, and many other great friends who lent a hand. I had no doubt that after such a great miracle, I would be attending synagogue on Saturday morning to recite the Birkat HaGomel (the prayer of thanking the God of Israel after a lifesaving miracle) I am not a religious person. I believe in God in my own way, and I don't usually look for signs in everything. But today, something happened that completely astonished me. Completely by chance, today in the synagogue I read from Parashat Devarim (Deuteronomy 33:26): "There is no one like the God of Jeshurun, who rides the heavens to help you, and in His majesty rides the skies." אֵין כָּאֵל יְשֻׁרוּן רֹכֵב שָׁמַיִם בְּעֶזְרֶךָ וּבְגַאֲוָתוֹ שְׁחָקִים I read the verse, stopped, and got goosebumps, and so did all the other worshippers who knew the story and understood why I was there with them. After everything that happened on that flight, after the fear, after the storming of the terrorist, and after realizing how thin the line between life and death really was- finding myself facing those exact words, "rides the heavens to help you," was a moment I can hardly explain. I don't know if it was divine providence, a coincidence, or simply a moment that took on a profoundly deep meaning for me. But today, in the synagogue, as I recited Birkat HaGomel, I felt mainly one thing: Thank you. Thank you for life. Thank you for the miracle. And thank you for the privilege to stand here and tell the story. Am Yisrael Chai 🇮🇱״
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Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach to all!
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כשם שמברכים על הטוב כך מברכים על הרע
So I wrote a post claiming the storming of the Flydubai cockpit was a miracle and thanking God for His mercy. Almost immediately, a lot of people, including smart and decent and well-meaning people, raised an objection: If you're going to praise God for saving this plane, does that mean you should also praise Him for all the other victims that weren't saved? This, my commentators replied, was monstrous, and suggested either that I got faith all wrong or that I believed in a Supreme Being capable not only of miracles but also of atrocities. Now, X clearly isn't the place for complicated conversations about theodicy, but I'll say this. One of the most astonishing phrases in the Mishna teaches us that "one is obligated to recite a blessing for the bad that befalls him just as he recites a blessing for the good that befalls him" (Brachot 9:5). This, Rambam explains, is because we can never know the mind of God. Sometimes, things that strike us as catastrophic have an ultimate purpose or ending that's pure good, and sometimes things that appear wonderful are simply a pathway to ruination. The point is that our human minds, active and noble as they may be, could never grasp even a sliver of God's intentions. That's why Kierkegaard, to name but one famous example, stated that faith is greater than logic, because it grappled with uncertainty in ways reason could not even begin to handle. You're free to grapple with this view. You're free to dive deeper into the works of wise men and women who thought and wrote extensively on this matter. But when you write something like "Why would God choose to intervene here and not on October 7" or "If that's the God you believe in, then He's a psychopath," you're not being profound or edgy. You're revealing a mind scrubbed of curiosity, imagination, and any capacity for belief, which is to say a mind starved of any substance greater than what it could immediately grasp. Our greatest religious thinkers were always doubters. Doubt, as G.K. Chesterton observed, is primarily the domain of the believer -- the non-believer has no use for it. But doubt doesn't mean dismissing difficult notions in a crude fashion and feeling yourself smarter for it. It means taking the time to learn, question, and understand.
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Rabbi Tzvi Pittinsky retweeted
30 seconds. You aren't shocked enough. This is the data from the FlyDubai flight yesterday. According to a report the plane was 30 seconds from impact. If anyone had doubts at what an absolute miracle it was that the passengers overtook the controls & saved the flight, I don't think you can doubt it anymore.
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❤️💙🇮🇱💪
My Uncle Ari was killed on 9/11. After yesterday’s attempted hijacking of a plane headed to Israel, my Mom left this at his name at the 9/11 Memorial: “Hatred did not crash another plane today.” Am Yisrael Chai. 🇮🇱🇺🇸
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Rabbi Tzvi Pittinsky retweeted
At 35,000 feet, an entire cabin full of passengers was completely unaware that a nightmare was unfolding just inches away. ​Inside the locked cockpit, Captain Smit was fighting for his life, under violent attack by his co-pilot. No alarms sounded. No announcements were made. To everyone on board, it was just another quiet flight. ​Except for a little girl named Nina. ​On a routine walk to the lavatory, Nina caught what no one else did: muffled, desperate screams coming from behind the cockpit door. ​Most children would freeze. Most people would ignore it, thinking they imagined it. But Nina didn’t. ​She sprinted straight to her sleeping mother, refusing to give up until she woke her. Nina didn’t just say something was wrong—she urged her to go to that door right now. ​The moment her mother approached and heard the chaos, her scream shattered the silence: “He’s getting stabbed!” ​Three brave men charged forward, breached the door, and subdued the attacker—saving Captain Smit’s life and preventing an unthinkable tragedy for every single soul on board. ​Heroes don’t always wear capes, uniforms, or badges. Sometimes, they come in the form of a little girl whose sharp instincts, refusal to look away, and pure grit rewrote the fate of an entire airplane. ​Give Nina the recognition, the honor, and the award she truly deserves. 🥹🕊️🙏 ​. . . #TrueHero #UnsungHero #MiracleAt35000Feet #Bravery
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Know your real Avengers 🇮🇱💪
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Rabbi Tzvi Pittinsky retweeted
Fight, fight, fight! 🇺🇸🇮🇱 America and Israel, fighting to protect and save the free world.
NEW: One of the Israeli heroes who subdued the FlyDubai hijacker walked to the main cabin after the plane landed safely in Saudi Arabia, and he pumped his fist in the air as everyone chanted, "Am Yisroel Chai!"
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עוצו עצה ותופר דברו דבר ולא יקום כי עמנו אל
Let us consider for a moment that very likely world in which Capt. Smit Machchhar was slightly less heroic and could not overcome his stab wound to open the cockpit door. Or one in which passengers Yaniv Hayun, Tzvika Mans and Assaf Rajuan did not burst in in time. Or one in which Yaniv, a plumber by trade, had never watched a docuseries on plane crashes and did not know how to pull out of the dive. Or one in which there were no other pilots on board to land the plane safely. The terrorist crashes the plane into the ground, his motivations utterly inscrutable to international media and obvious to those with an ounce of thought. Today, if the crown prince allowed, Israelis would be on the ground picking through wreckage in search of 174 bodies, 27 of them children. Thanks for reading It's Noon In Israel! This post is public so feel free to share it. The central artery of the Abraham Accords, the 30-plane-a-day flight corridor, would be severed, and the steadily warming relations between the Emirates and Israel would freeze. The day would go down as the second-deadliest terror attack in the country’s history, with nearly five times the death toll of the third. Falling just days before the third Hebrew anniversary of the worst attack, it might have permanently cost the Sukkot festival its traditional name: “the time of our joy.” An outpouring of sympathy would be quickly followed by a return to normal. The world has never understood Israelis well enough to forgive their security, yet almost always understands terrorists well enough to forgive their violence. British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband and his ilk would announce further sanctions on violent Israelis, and the international media would rush to cite a myriad of possible motivations for the massacre. As it is, the terrorist can take comfort in knowing that the international media has not stripped him of his wings. He is still “the pilot,” and what he did is still an “incident,” to borrow Miliband’s label. Thankfully, we woke up in the other world: the one where the terrorist failed, the festival goes on, planes continue to fly, and Israel’s will to fight burns hotter than before. It is the world created by Yaniv Hayun, Tzvika Mans, Assaf Rajuan and Smit Machchhar, ordinary people who demonstrated extraordinary courage. To read the rest of today's newsletter click here amitsegal.substack.com/p/its…
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Even ChatGPT celebrates human connection. Maybe this brave new AI world is not as crazy as it seems.
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This 👇
A lot of people seem stunned by the resilience the Israelis on that plane showed after the co-pilot tried to bring it down. I’m not stunned at all. What exactly did you expect from Israelis? This is a country that takes some of the most advanced fighter jets in the world and improves them out of improvised offices on military bases. A country building cutting-edge AI companies out of apartments, basements, tiny offices, and whatever workspace happens to be available. What did you expect from people who, when the country is attacked, simply disappear from normal life and report for duty? Fathers of large families. Business owners. Engineers. Doctors. Accountants. Brothers, sisters, uncles, cousins. People with mortgages, payrolls, clients, children, deadlines, and businesses to run. Then suddenly the country is in trouble and all of that becomes secondary. They leave their jobs for weeks or months, put on a uniform, fight, come home, reopen the business, go back to work, and somehow keep the entire economy functioning at the same time. That mentality does something to a society. You become accustomed to responsibility. You become accustomed to chaos. You become accustomed to solving the problem in front of you instead of waiting for for someone else to do it. So you really thought a plane full of people from that society was going to sit quietly while some psychopath tried to bring their aircraft down? Hell no. He picked the wrong passengers. Wrong nationality. Wrong plane.
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Rabbi Tzvi Pittinsky retweeted
"There were amazing Israeli men and women on the flight and we survived because of them" Thank God for Israelis, true heroes.
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Rabbi Tzvi Pittinsky retweeted
Assaf, Yaniv, Shota and Zvika , the four heroes of the Flydubai flight who leapt at the terrorist with their bare hands and helped save around 180 Israelis. Absolute heroes🇮🇱 Credit : Nitzan Shapira
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Rabbi Tzvi Pittinsky retweeted
A short list of today's miracles: The pilot opened the cockpit door moments before collapsing The heroes, Yaniv, Assaf, and Tzvika, happened to be at the front of the plane. British pilots happened to be on the flight Yaniv had watched the “Air Crash Investigation” docuseries and pushed the controls forward. Without every single one of them, tonight we’d be searching for wreckage in the deserts of Saudi Arabia—and even that only if the prince allowed it.
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The Israeli hero who pulled up the plane saying he got his flying skills watching the documentary series Air Disasters is like me saying I learned to take out Hamas terrorists by watching Fauda. 🤔
From a military pilot on today’s attempted hijacking. I’ll sum it up for you: Hashem performed an unprecedented miracle today.
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This is like me saying I know how to neutralize terrorists since I watched Fauda.
The hero of the FlyDubai attack Yaniv said, "I pulled back on the controls and stopped the plane's dive. Good thing I watched 'Air Crash Investigation.'" Air Crash Investigation is the hit docuseries that breaks down real aviation disasters and emergency procedures.
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Feeling guilty about your biased reporting are you?
Our headlines and live coverage contain all the facts we're able to confirm as we confirm them. Unlike activists and partisans, we don't publish speculation or unverified information. Here's a Gift Link to follow along as we update our reporting: nytimes.com/live/2026/09/30/…
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Rabbi Tzvi Pittinsky retweeted
I may be talking to the echo chamber but, do you understand that whenever Israel is involved in a news story, newsrooms that are not conservative media totally fumble it? I really need you to look at this as a case study and understand if the media reported this hijacking this terribly when we know clearly what happened, what else do you think they might be misrepresenting regarding Israel?
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Rabbi Tzvi Pittinsky retweeted
Passengers of the FlyDubai flight on the way to Israel sing “And the main thing is—not to be afraid at all”: 180 people who came within a hair’s breadth of a terrible end.
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