19 Heshvan 5776
A reply to Stephen S. Wachtel, Ph.D., who authored the post The Orwellian Psychodrama in Israel for the Mystical Paths blog
I started to reply right on the blog, but realized that it was getting long enough to be a blogpost of my own, so here it is – instead of burdening Rav Akiva with it…and it does fit in with my current general direction. You may want to read Dr. Wachtel's piece first – linked above – and don’t forget to come back!
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Dr. Wachtel, overall quite a good piece. I can tell you love Israel very much. But, please, I beg you, don't assume all Israelis feel the same way about our situation and its solutions. I hope my comments below will help, even if only a little bit.
Israel inherited proprietorship of the West Bank after the 1967 War. Israelis would love to give it back to the Arabs...
What???!!! You might as well burn all copies of your Tana"ch (Jewish Bible) as to say this because the "West Bank" – Yehuda and the Shomron, or Judea and Samaria – is where a great deal of it takes place, and you better believe it belongs to us, and always has. Better yet, kindly take a hint from Rashi on Bereshith 1:1. To summarize: We are not thieves, nor did we inherit ownership as a result of war; HaQadosh Baruch Hu – G-d – gave it to us, as the Sovereign of Creation. See Bamidbar 34 for the initial borders. That’s not all, but it will do for starters. But the odious label of "occupation" properly belongs to the Muslims, and not to us.
And, as an Israeli, I will thank you in advance for not continuing to say things like this on my behalf. Many others believe as I do as well, especially those who live there (I have relatives and friends there too…). It will help us to do the right things to preserve our land and people. Consistency in message and action is important. Too much of what we say tends to put us at odds with our purpose for having returned to our land, making our actions send mixed messages at best. The same G-d, Who protects us at every turn and helps us win every war against our enemies, as you noted so well at length, expects better of us.
But Israel takes extraordinary measures to protect the holy sites of all religions -- Christian, Muslim, Druze, Bahai, Jewish. There is no plan to take over the Aqsa Mosque.
To be fair, you are far from the only person pointing this out. While it is true, must you restate it using their term, thus emphasizing it as though this is good? Am I the only one who sees that the weight placed on Israeli intentions not to destroy the mosque encourages the Arab Muslim hordes to attack and attempt genocide on us, death by a thousand cuts? Or a million?
Besides, to include Jewish sites as protected by the Israeli government is not quite the case either. See this. Never mind that the whole Temple Mount area is Jewish - those Muslim buildings on it are to prevent the Holy Temple from ever being rebuilt! May that plan soon be crushed, with the help of haShem!
Finally, your observation about our matzav being an “Orwellian psychodrama” (I love your phrase) is indeed astute, well-said, and absolutely spot-on. What most people miss is just how deep the drama goes because, as the word Orwellian indicates, it is all about the language being used to describe it. It takes a lot of long, hard prayer and thought to properly put into words, and while I'm still not sure I'm doing it right, I am giving it my best effort. To do otherwise is to feed, usually unintentionally, into the politically convenient (another phrase I recently encountered and love), poisonous atmosphere that could ultimately take us all down, has v’shalom, she’lo yihiyeh!
May Mashiach come soon and finish straightening out this mess!
I'm so glad you wrote "initial" borders for your link to the biblical text interpreted by Chabad. It seems there is not so much clarity on the "final" borders. tanach.org
ReplyDeleteAs typically Chava, we have a deep exposition in certain points of her post, about what someone else wrote offhand. She sees weakness and zeros in to clarify. The whole world is against us, as was prophesied, no matter what those brave courageous souls try to "correct" the "wrongs" being perpetrated against us. It won't help! But there is merit in the attempt.
The world is disintegrating, and even in Israel we see how evident it is that the government is an actor in this game of 'kill or be killed'. Our naive soldiers are cast as 'sitting ducks' for the Arab street theater. Collusion.
"Collusion in Law: a secret understanding between two or more persons to gain something illegally, to defraud another of his or her rights, or to appear as adversaries though in agreement" dictionary legal definition
A leftist journalist is beginning to see the truth at the end of the tunnel. He interviewed MK Yinon Magal who said:
ReplyDelete""Achieving calm is not a value. Victory is a value. We need to say the truth, we need to say what we really think, we need to say what the situation really is. People say, 'We have no war with the Palestinian nation; we have a war with the terror organizations.' What is this nonsense? When they murder two parents next to their children, and in all of the [Arab] villages, people hand out candies, what is that? What does it mean? Do we want to turn a blind eye to that?"
And, "If we are not strong, and if we do not make clear to them that they will pay a price for their violence, there will be a lot of blood here," he told the interviewer. "I think crazy stuff will happen here if this violence continues..." he estimated that 100,000 Arabs might be killed.
Well, what do you think of that?
Wow, listen to what he also said: ""Listen, I sit at the sessions of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee," he explained. "I hear what is going on in the Gaza Strip. We saw what happened during Operation Protective Edge. We are simply crazy! We are a nation of lunatics, if you look at what we did here in the last 20 years. We were dealing with rocks. Now there are missiles pointed at the state of Israel, all the way to Tel Aviv, and tunnels that pass under the border fence."
ReplyDeleteHe laughed: "It's funny, the Left says to us – 'so why don't you conquer Gaza? Why don't you take their weapons?' I mean really, come on. It was you who broke the jug, and now you want us to put it back to its former state?"
"I hear the footsteps of the Messiah," he said. "If you ask me if there will be a Temple – there will be."
Neshama,
ReplyDelete1) RE: Initial borders - I only stopped there because we haven't gotten true sovereignty over them yet. B'ezrath haShem we will, and all the rest too! We'd better get ready, and the world had better learn to accept it. How it will happen we don't know, but we must keep on keeping on.
2} I'm happy that a leftist journalist is seeing the light. I hope a lot of them, and their audience, do! I'm sure there aren't as many erev ravniks among them as we may think.
3) If the Left can demand that the Knesset FA & DC put Humpty Dumpty back together again (impossible of course) and the MK can say he hears the footsteps of the Mashiach, how far away can we be?
First, just wanted to add to your comments that there are plenty or enough of the erev rav; they're the ones who control, the others are usually just their followers(useful idiots). Because of those who control there is no victory in these little wars against our enemies because that's the way they want it. If real Jewish leadership were in control then in a blink of an eye there would be victory and we would have Moshiach at the door.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Anon, for your comment. As things go on the ground, I agree with you.
ReplyDeleteAs for the big picture, however, HQB"H is still "large and in charge" (infinite and always the Creator!). The erev rav (the mixed multitude, who intermarried among the Jewish People after the events in Shemoth - Exodus, where Moshe Rabbenu went against specific instructions NOT TO TAKE THEM WITH US OUT OF EGYPT) is part of His gymnasium, so to speak, that He provided for us for resistance training until the end. If we find ER tendencies inside us, we need to fight all the harder! This is a major spiritual battle, and each of us needs to clarify what our priorities are, for ourselves and as part of a great Nation.
Anon, you also said, "If real Jewish leadership were in control then in a blink of an eye there would be victory and we would have Moshiach at the door."
ReplyDeleteWell, how can we have real Jewish leadership, if we can't learn from history because it has been censored, and thus be in a position to demand it? What do you think of the Irgun, a pre-State organization, for instance? Do you think of them as terrorists, before the State of Israel was declared, for blowing up the King David Hotel, with the British inside because they couldn't be bothered to take orders from Jews, or do you understand that THE IRGUN WERE AT WAR with the British because "Perfidious Albion" forbade Jews from escaping the Holocaust to enter the Holy Land because they were busy building the ARAB state where the JEWISH state was promised in writing? The IRGUN were the only ones who SAVED JEWS' LIVES FROM HITLER, may his name and memory be erased, during that hellish period. Their reputation needs to be rehabilitated, IMHO.
And I recently found out from my rabbi that the State long ago banned the book that tells the story: Perfidy, by Ben Hecht.
Now, do you wonder why we don't have REAL Jewish leadership? And I believe that if the likes of Moshe Feiglin can't tell this story, then he isn't for real either; and what hope do we have on the ground? I don't know whether all Israelis actually know these things.