The Rav’s writings

Dear World

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 16:49:05 +0200

Dear World,
It appears that you are hard to please. I understand that you are upset over us, here in Israel. Indeed, it appears that you are quite upset, even angry and outraged! Indeed, every few years you seem to become upset over us. Today, it is the brutal repression of the Palestinians; yesterday, it was Lebanon; before that it was the bombing of the nuclear reactor in Baghdad and the Yom Kippur War campaign.
It appears that Jews who triumph and who, therefore, live, upset you most extraordinarily. Of course, dear world, long before there was an Israel, we, the Jewish people - upset you.
We upset a German people who elected a Hitler and we upset an Austrian people who cheered his entry into Vienna and we upset a whole slew of Slavic nations - Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Hungarians, Romanians. And we go back a long, long way in the history of world upset.
We upset the Cossacks of Chmielnicki who massacred tens of thousands of us in 1648-49; we upset the Crusaders who, on their way to liberate the Holy Land, were so upset at Jews that they slaughtered untold numbers of us. We upset, for centuries, a Roman Catholic Church that did its best to define our relationship through Inquisitions. And we upset the arch-enemy of the Church, Martin Luther, who, in his call to burn the synagogues and the Jews within them, showed an admirable Christian ecumenical spirit.
It is because we became so upset over upsetting you, dear world, that we decided to leave you - in a manner of speaking - and establish a Jewish State. The reasoning was that living in close contact with you, as resident-strangers in the various countries that comprise you, we upset you, irritate you, disturb you.
What better notion, then, than to leave you and thus love you - and have you love us? And so we decided to come home - to the same homeland from which we were driven out 1,900 years earlier by a Roman world that, apparently, we also upset.
Alas, dear world, it appears that you are hard to please. Having left you and your Pogroms and Inquisitions and Crusades and Holocausts, having taken our leave of the general world to live alone in our own little state - we continue to upset you.
You are upset that we repress the poor Palestinians. You are deeply angered over the fact that we do not give up the lands of 1967, which are clearly the obstacle to peace in the Middle East.
Moscow is upset and Washington is upset.
The Arabs are upset and the gentle Egyptian moderates are upset. Well, dear world, consider the reaction of a normal Jew from Israel. In 1920, 1921 and 1929, there were no territories of 1967 to impede peace between Jews and Arabs.
Indeed, there was no Jewish State to upset anybody. Nevertheless, the same oppressed and repressed Palestinians slaughtered hundreds of Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Safed and Hebron. Indeed, 67 Jews were slaughtered one day in Hebron - in 1929.
Dear World, why did the Arabs - the Palestinians - massacre 67 Jews in one day in 1929? Could it have been their anger over Israeli aggression in 1967? And why were 510 Jewish men, women and children slaughtered in Arab riots in 1936-39? Was it because of Arab upset over 1967? And when you, World, proposed a U.N. Partition Plan in 1947 that would have created a Palestinian State alongside a tiny Israel and the Arabs cried and went to war and killed 6,000 Jews - was that upset stomach caused by the aggression of 1967? And, by the way, dear world, why did we not hear your cry of upset then?
The poor Palestinians who today kill Jews with explosives and firebombs and stones are part of the same people who - when they had all the territories they now demand be given them for their state - attempted to drive the Jewish State into the sea. The same twisted faces, the same hate, the same cry of "idbah-al-yahud" - "Slaughter the Jews!" that we hear and see today, were seen and heard then. The same people, the same dream - destroy Israel. What they failed to do yesterday, they dream of today - but we should not "repress" them.
Dear World, you stood by the Holocaust and you stood by in 1948 as seven states launched a war that the Arab League proudly compared to the Mongol massacres.
You stood by in 1967 as Nasser, wildly cheered by wild mobs in every Arab capital in the world, vowed to drive the Jews into the sea. And you would stand by tomorrow if Israel were facing extinction. And since we know that the Arabs-Palestinians daily dream of that extinction, we will do everything possible to remain alive in our own land. If that bothers you, dear world, well - think of how many times in the past you bothered us.
In any event, dear world, if you are bothered by us, here is one Jew in Israel who could not care less.

Fearing no one but G-d

Sun, 1 Nov 2009 22:13:15 +0200

Excerpt from Or Hara'ayon – The Jewish Idea:

G-d said to Jacob, “Esau was walking on his way, and you sent him a message, saying, “Your servant Yaakov says...”
G-d had promised Jacob that He would be with him, and had Jacob believed this and not feared Esau, Esau would have gone on his way. Through his fear, Jacob brought Esau upon himself by sending him messengers and by his servile use of, “Your servant Jacob.” Tanchuma Yashan (Vayishlach,4) teaches,
“Jacob sent [vayishlach] messengers...to his brother Esau” (Gen. 32:4): G-d lamented: “Alas [Vai!] Jacob was sending messengers to Esau!” Likewise, regarding the verse, “So shall you say to my Lord Esau” (32:5), our sages comment (Bereshit Rabbah 75:11), “G-d said to him, 'You degraded yourself and called Esau 'my lord' eight times. I swear that I shall make eight of his offspring precede yours as kings.”
To understand the pitfall of lack of bitachon (trust in G-d), we must ponder the following verse:

He selected a mincha for his brother Esau from what he had with him...These he gave to his servants...He said to his servants, “When my brother Esau encounters you, he will ask, 'To whom do you belong?'...You must reply, 'It belongs to your servant Jacob. It is a mincha to my master Esau'”...Jacob said to himself, “I will win him over with the mincha that is being sent ahead”... He sent the mincha ahead. (Gen. 32:4,17-19,21-22)

A mincha is a gift or present, but it is also the name of an offering or prayer. The offering whose specific name is mincha is brought from plants, either wheat or barley, and is called mincha because it is brought not only as a gift or present but also out of self-sacrifice and trust in G-d. Our sages said (Menachot 104b):

Why in the case of the mincha does it say נפש, “soul”? [“If an individual [נפש] presents a meal-offering to the L-rd” (Lev. 2:1), whereas regarding the olah, or burnt-offering, it says, “When one person [אדם] brings an offering to the L-rd” (Lev. 1:2).] G-d said, “Who normally brings the mincha? The poor man. I shall treat him as having sacrificed his life before Me.”

A poor man is unable to bring an animal, and even the flour he brings for his meal-offering involves self-sacrifice for him. Surely this is the true purpose of the korban, or sacrifice – that one sacrifice oneself and thereby bring oneself closer to G-d.
The poor man, although even the meal-offering is as hard for him as sacrificing his life, still brings it, trusting in G-d to worry for him about his livelihood. This offering is called mincha, from the word נח, “passed away”, as if the poor man bringing the mincha has died.

For that same reason, the prayer preceding evening is called mincha.[...] It is called this because when the sun is already turning westward to rest [lanuach], to set, this is the time of mincha and of trusting in G-d. The light is dimming, darkness is approaching, and a person trusts that after the darkness of night, the sun will rise again and there will be light. The time for mincha is when sunset and darkness are approaching. This is why it is called mincha. Every mincha is tied to trust in G-d, and to poverty and humility before the One Who is Master of all. G-d will bring light and day once again. He will bring a livelihood to the poor man who brought Him his fine flour. He will save Israel from all its mighty enemies (also see commentary regarding Haman and Mordechai and the mincha offering mentioned in Megillah 16a).
[...] Jacob took the mincha, our gift to G-d, representing man's lowliness before his Maker, and his faith and trust in Him, and he transferred these sentiments to Esau. This reflected great lack of bitachon (trust in G-d), as in Rashbam's explanation of why Jacob was smitten in hist struggle with the angelic prince of Esau (Gen. 39:29):
Jacob was smitten and ended up with a limp, because G-d made a promise to him while he was fleeing. Just so, all who refuse to take G-d's path, or who take an opposing path, are punished.
Rabbi Meir Kahane writes on the same topic in “Peirush HaMaccabee”:

There were two people to whom G-d made promises but were afraid…: One was the choicest of the Patriarchs – this is Jacob, as it says, For HASHEM chose Jacob to Himself (Psalms 135:4) [i.e. this verse testifies that Jacob was the chosen of the three Fathers]. And G-d said to him, And behold I am with you (Genesis 28:15) – and yet, eventually he was afraid, as it says, And Jacob was greatly afraid (ibid. 32:7).
And the other was the choicest of the prophets – this is Moses, as it says, He said He would destroy them [the Israelites], had Moses, His chosen one, not stood in the breach before Him (Psalms 106:23). And G-d said to him, Because I will be with you – and yet, eventually he was afraid [of Og, king of Bashan], as it says, And HASHEM said to Moses: Do not be afraid of him (Numbers 21:34); and one would only admonish “do not be afraid” to one who is afraid.
– Genesis Rabbah 76:1.

This commandment, do not be afraid, is a difficult one to obey, and a major commandment. But the person whom G-d has sent on His mission must stand firm in his trust in Him. And if he has committed sins, he must understand that even though sins can indeed annul G-d’s promises, this will not happen as long as he is fulfilling a defined mission, according to G-d’s specific decree. [...]
There is a moral here. Jacob feared Esau only because he was concerned that his own sins might have caused G-d to annul His promise to him: All these years, [Esau] was dwelling in the Land of Israel – meaning that he is coming against me with the power of having settled the Land of Israel… and meaning that he is coming against me with the power of having honoured his father and mother (Genesis Rabbah 76:2). Nevertheless, he was wrong to be afraid, and was punished for having feared Esau. G-d had, after all, given him an explicit command – which entailed precisely the attributes of faith and trust in G-d – to return to the Land of Israel; and He surely would not have commanded him to endanger himself by returning to Israel had his sins been liable to annul the promise. To the contrary: this command was designed to test his trust in G-d against Esau – but he was afraid, and was therefore punished.

As Rabbi Meir Kahane further explains in “The Jewish Idea”:
Faith and trust in G-d are no small matter. The Jewish People must prove their trust in G-d by difficult, frightening, and sometimes ostensibly dangerous acts, acts that demand of Israel courage, acts which by their very nature show disdain for the non-Jew, anger him and threaten to bring a confrontation between him and Israel, and all must be performed with complete faith and trust that if Israel do what is decreed upon them, then G-d, too, will fulfil what he promised His treasured nation.Precisely this proves one's true faith and trust, for it is impossible that one who fears mortal man really believes in G-d. Real trust in G-d requires the Jew both to trust in Him and cast off all fear of mortal man and reliance on human aid. [...]
Whoever accepts this principle of bitachon (trust in G-d) unreservedly, truly believes that G-d is the One Supreme Power, G-d of heaven and earth. Whoever hesitates, whoever fears the non-Jew, shows that he questions G-d's ability to help His people. It is doubtful, whether he completely believes in G-d as an Omnipotent Supreme Power.

An Israeli Tragedy

Fri, 3 Nov 1989 00:00:00 +0200

She was 18 years old when she died. She was 18 years old when she was murdered. She was 18 years old when she was murdered and her body burned to ashes. She was 18 years old when she was burned by the Arabs she had left her home to live with. But it was not only the Arabs who had murdered her.
She was 18 years old and her name was Ziva Goldovsky and she had been a member of the Mapam youth, the youth of the leftist, Marxist, Hellenist, anti-religious anti-nationalistic movement that symbolizes all the confusion and gentilization that drags the State of Israel into the depths of a tragedy that has already taken the life of an 18 year old, bewildered, confused, and troubled Jewish girl.
She was 18 years old and a member of the leftist youth group from which she went on to be destroyed as a Jew and eventually murdered, again, as a Jew. She was 18 years old, and like all secular Israeli youth, she was empty of Judaism, empty of specific Jewishness, empty of Jewish values and identity, empty of any reason to live in a land of military duty and wars and heavy burdens, and without the slightest reason to bear them. She was 18 and her mind and soul were captured by a secular Left in which she perished, spiritually and mentally as a Jew, before being murdered physically as a Jew.
She was 18 and empty and bewildered and they filled her empty and bewildered mind with the empty and mad slogans of Jewish-Arab brotherhood and Jewish-Arab love and Jewish-Arab coexistence, and she, unlike the ugly Hellenists who were her youth leaders, took all of it seriously, and literally.
If humanism and equality and universalism were the greatest of all values, then why babble about such reactionary concepts as "Jewish" and "Jewishness?" If brotherhood and love were truly values to be grasped to our bosom, why allow the barriers of religion and nationalism and culture to stand between Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians? She was 18 and believed all the nonsense she had been taught by a tired and disintegrating Mapam structure whose past is a remarkably consistent record of error and blindness.
She was 18 and a victim of a Mapam that had- like some eyeless one in Moscow- followed Joseph Stalin unquestioningly, even after he murdered, in cold blood, Jews- socialists and Communists, even when he had crushed the Zionist movement and outlawed and murdered its own Hashomer HaTzair comrades.
Nothing Stalin could do could move the pitiful secular idol worshippers at the armpit of Communism to rip themselves from their slavish prostration. "The Soviet Union is our second homeland," was the pitiful cry of those who paved the way for the murder of Ziva Goldovsky. "I will welcome the Red Army to Tel Aviv," cried their leader, Meir Ya'ari, in 1949. "The sun of the nations has set," read the headline in the party newspaper, Al Ha'Mishmar, reporting the death of Stalin, who left the world on the verge of mass deportation and genocide of Soviet Jewry.
This was the youth group to which and 18 year old confused and disturbed girl gravitated.
She was 18 and they began to pave the way for her death. Her empty, vapid, troubled mind was filled with hate of the Jewish "extremists" and Jewish "fascists" and "Kahanism" and "religious clericalism." She was 18 and taught to feel guilty over the "persecution of the poor Palestinians" and the brutal "occupation of their land." She was programmed to protest the "hard hand" of the Israeli army and the "beating and murder of innocent Palestinians."
She was 18, and in her emptiness and disturbed soul took it seriously, this member of the Mapam youth,whose kibbutzim refuse to take Arabs as members...
She was 18 and she heard about coexistence and love and living together, and so she decided to coexist with Arabs and love Arabs and live with Arabs. And so, she left her home and sought out poor, persecuted Arabs to love. And how quickly and readily she found them.
She was 18 and anxious to give of her love and herself to her brothers- the oppressed Palestinians. They took her love and they took her and when they finished with her love and with her, they brutally murdered her and burned her body to a crisp. She was 18 and the Arabs completed the murder of a Jewish girl that began when she fell into the hands of the leftists of Mapam.
She was 18 when she was murdered by Jewish-Arab cooperation and she- as an individual- symbolizes what the Arabs would do to the 40 year old Jewish state if we would allow the sick and blind Left to drag us down with their Hellenism and gentilized concepts.
Let every Jewish parent remember the tragedy of this 18 year old Jewish child and look to their own. Those who love their children- know what the Arabs would do to them! See what the Arabs did to Ziva Goldovsky and know that this is what awaits our own. And look what the Jewish Left did to an 18 year old child, and make an oath never to let it happen to our own. Mapam Youth, Hashomer HaTzair, Ratz Youth, Habonim, Dror. These are the youth groups of the Left that destroy the Jewish soul on their way to murdering the Jewish body.
Remember the names and let Jewish parents keep their children from them. Let the tortured soul of an 18 year old girl be a warning to all of us not to allow the Left to destroy the precious Jewish spirit of our children. And let the burned and roasted body of an 18 year old Jewish girl be reminder to us, always, of what the Arabs would do to our children and to all of us and how the Left [SHALOM ACHSHAV] brings that terrible day closer. The Arabs murder us, but these are the ones who pave the way.

Isolation

Thu, 1 Nov 1984 17:22:08 +0200

KAHANE Magazine (Brooklyn, New York)
Isolation. The Jew does not wish to be isolated. He fears being alone, without allies. He fears man, he trusts only in man and so - in the exquisitely Divine way of the Almighty - precisely that which he fears will be sent upon him. He fears to do that which the Almighty demands - to annex the territories and establish Jewish sovereignty over them, as part of the Holy Land of Israel. The Almighty repays him by turning them into burning caldrons of an intifada, with confused Israeli youth not knowing whether these Holy lands are indeed Jewish or "occupied". While a world that is normal and knows that if land belongs to you then you annex it, feels free to condemn a country that does not do so as an "occupier".
He fears to throw out the cancer raging in his midst - the Arab enemy - lest the world turn on him. He is repaid measure for measure by a grim Almighty as the world,! daily, condemns him for "oppression" of people that would not have been there had he had faith in G-d rather than fear of the Gentile.
In any event, the Jew will be isolated, and that is the greatest blessing imaginable. For so long as the Jew has even one ally, he will be convinced - in his smallness of mind - that his salvation came from that ally. It is only when he is alone - against all of his own efforts and frantic attempts - that he will, through no choice, be compelled to turn to G-d. And it is only when the Jew stands alone against a world unified in hatred against him, that the Almighty will turn, in His anger and wrath, against the nations that knew Him not, and His powerful arm that will bring salvation to the Jew will be the awesome proof to the nations that the Lord, G-d of Israel, is indeed One - the only One.
That is why isolation will be. That it is why it must be. It is the greatest of blessings, and the foolish Jew of little faith sees it only as a curse. Foolish Jew, Jew of Exile, whose soul and mind has been destroyed by that Exile, who has turned from a Jew of fa! ith into one of trembling before the man of dust
Unless. Unless we become the Jews we were meant to be. The Jews of chosenness. Of might and faith. Unless we ignore both the money and the honey of the United States and their empty threats and condemnation. Condemnation? It is dandruff to be brushed away before moving on to do the will of G-d. In any event, there is no choice. The United States will turn on Israel, slowly and subtly. The difference is that if we turn from the Gentile first, we will have the Almighty as the immediate staff and our comfort. If not, we will have neither the Gentile nor, for a terrible stage, the Almighty.

The Stranger in Thy midst

Thu, 1 Nov 1984 16:55:03 +0200

The future is now. With a vengeance. And the Divinely inevitable, the historically immutable, unfolds as some unstoppable Jewish tragedy. The winter is here and the sound of "Itbach-al-Yahud" is again heard in the Land. "Slaughter the Jew!" Thousands of young Arabs, educated to the limitations placed on Israeli soldiers, confront them with stones and curses and taunts and pledges of slaughter. Women face the soldiers and dare them to put them down. The winter of discontent, the promise of a spring of escalating violence and a summer of raging fury.
The Arab uprising in Eretz Israel compels even that most stiff-necked of people, sublimely obstinate in their unwillingness to see what is so stark and obvious and THERE, to open their eyes and shudder. The stranger in the midst of Israel, the stranger who was so insanely ALLOWED to remain in the midst of Israel, has (once again) mounted up and risen and becomes the head even as the Jew falls, comes down lower and lower, and becomes the tail. It says everything, the reactions of the tiny people who run the State of Israel. As suicide bombers terrorize our streets and kill our people; as days of violent clashes between Arabs and Israeli soldiers drag on; as stones and fire bombs are mixed with curses and taunts of Israeli soldiers by Arab youth and women who are so clearly not frightened, our leaders can do no more than request, AGAIN, that the PLO "do more" to "curb" terror
The beginning of Jewish wisdom, in this case, is to finally, in the name of G-d, admit to the truth even though that involves the painful admission of basic error, of a fundamental bankruptcy of ideology, of a lifetime of mistake. What has taken place in Eretz Israel and what will continue to take place but in more terrible ways, are not "disturbances" or "riots." There is WAR today in Eretz Israel, there is an uprising of the Arab stranger against the Jew in the Holy Land. The blind Jews of both Israel and the Exile, in their utterly mad refusal to want to admit the truth - due to their liberal, gentilized illusions and delusions - allowed the cancer to fester and grow both bigger and bolder, until today it shakes the very core of a State of Israel that stands confused and perplexed, with none but gentilized dwarfs to guide it.
We see the infamous "intifada," as the strangers in our midst exploded in hate and attacked Jews, their cars, their institutions, the police, soldiers. It was a war in the full sense of the word, and it continues. Indeed, the danger to Israel represented by this stranger in our midst, the Arab, is so clearly obvious and so obviously inevitable that one would weep for the pathetic leaders of Israel and the Exile if one did not understand that THEY are the problem. And the Arab rebellion, the war of the stranger in our midst, is in full swing and, in fact, was always inevitable for the awesomely simple reason that he is the stranger in a land that he considers to be his. IN ITS ENTIRETY. That is the problem and there is no solution save for removing the strangers from our midst. Those who oppose this normal, sane, logical response guarantee the wholesale slaughter of both Jews and Arabs, and the transformation of the State of Israel into a daily and nightly hell, a Rwanda in the Middle East, a repetition of all the places in the world where people had neither the courage nor the wisdom to understand that most fundamental law of political physics: Two nations, each claiming ownership, can never occupy the same space at the same time.
Remove the Arab stranger from the Land and let him live with his brothers and sisters in any of their 22 states. Anything short of that will see the horrors of today excalate a hundred-fold tomorrow. And, once and for all, let us not fear the world. Those who stood by during the Holocaust and when Israel faced destruction in 1948 and 1967 have nothing to tell us. Faith in the G-d of Israel and a powerful Jewish army are the ONLY guarantors of Jewish survival. Let us not fear the world. Far better a strong Jewish State that survives and is despised by the world than a continuance of the horrors that have really only just begun.