3 Tammuz 5780
A view of the Shomron (source)
Land concession is like wife sharing. That's how Rabbi Shlomo Aviner put it in a recent interview with Rabbi Mordechai Tzion regarding our side of the Peace and Prosperity Plan ("Deal of the Century") that the United States is proposing - not to mention all the proposals since 1948.
Here is what Rav Aviner said when asked whether Israel should agree with the deal, counting on the Arabs to refuse:
Q. Some say that politics is just talk anyway, and therefore we can agree to this deal, because for sure the Arabs will refuse, and then we'll come out the good guys and we'll reap the benefits.
A. Regarding the Land of Israel, even just talk of betrayal is a terrible sin. It would be like a man who says that he agrees to lend his wife to his neighbor a few days a week, in the knowledge that his neighbor won't agree; this is also betrayal.
We all remember the Rosh HaShanah story of Rav Amnon who, under pressure from the king to convert to Christianity, finally said that he would "think about it." When he realized the he had actually given the impression that he might consider converting, he had terrible regrets, repented of his sin – and died with great suffering.
Incidentally, there is no guarantee that the Arabs will not agree. There were cases in the past when they agreed. When it comes to our very existence and national soul, we don't gamble. After all, the ties between the Nation of Israel and the Land of Israel are not those of a peddler and his wares; they are rather like man and wife, a bond of life.
Read more from whence this passage was taken. This article was translated from Hebrew by Hillel Fendel.
I think that's at the heart of all the difficulties we have been having over our Land. Too many Jews here, especially the leadership of almost all the parties (Yamina being a notable exception), have had ambivalent feelings toward her at the very least. And the Arabs have always refused any deal with us until now.
Aretz/eretz ארץ is feminine, therefore the Land is feminine...so go ahead, call her Mother Eretz Israel. I suspect it's also where R' Aviner got his simile above.)
Surrounding these difficulties like a layer of heart tissue is the propaganda campaign initiated by the KGB and inculcated into Yasser Arafat to win the hearts of the world to his side, against us.
We can overcome this layer by examining the picture we each hold of the Land we love, and by increasing our love for her.
It isn't easy, as we saw recently in parashath Shelah Lekha שלח לך, Send for Yourselves. The people who lived on her at the time were intimidating. So are the people who lived here when we returned, some of whose descendants still live here now.
Lately, I've been reading over and over messages to the "settlers" of Yehuda and Shomron that they are interpreting the Plan wrong, and the maps as well. How many times over the last two-and-a-half decades have they been wrong? Actually, they have a better track record than the rest of the country. They also have the most "skin in the game."
They were correct to declare that we should never have abandoned Gush Katif and northern Shomron. We are still paying the price, fifteen years later; even as I type now, the denizens of Gaza have resumed their terror war against us (terror balloons, rockets, etc.(1): Our fellow citizens who live near the border fence can probably tell us it never stopped).
The Arabs do this because they have heard that we're offering them parts of our land, and they stand to benefit, if they pressure us enough!
They were correct to declare that we should not confine our borders as strictly as the Left would have us do today. Remember when Abba Eban called them "Auschwitz borders"? Even the Left knew better back in Abba Eban's day.
And the settlers are correct now, insisting that we should not give up the right to claim all, yes, ALL, of our territory and not leaving any of our towns and villages in enclaves where people who live there would have to abandon them or die, making things worse for ALL ISRAELIS. Let's not kid ourselves: The less we defend our rights to the whole Land (at least up to the Jordan River), the more the world will demand that we abandon ALL of it altogether, until there is NO MORE ISRAEL. How can any Jew anywhere in the world really stand that, after all we've been through in just the last century alone???!!!
And that's just the "derekh eretz" part of it, including simple logic and past experience. But we read a parasha every year, which we just read again last week, that spells out just how important our Creator thinks it is that we appreciate what He's given us here. The leadership that discouraged us was killed on the spot, and the rest of us had to spend nearly 40 years in the desert thinking about what we'd done wrong - which led to more wrong, as we'll see this week and the rest of the book of BaMidbar (Numbers).
Perhaps a lot of our troubles are still the part of the 40 years that we didn't spend in the actual desert, but are still suffering the loss? Are we still reaping the results of our lack of gratitude way back then, and since then?
And one more "derekh eretz" thought: Younger Jews, especially those who are not related to Holocaust survivors or those who perished, have not been bearing the loss of the Six Million (or more or less) as long as we older ones and are farther away from it, and so appear to be more vulnerable to suggestions that it wasn't as real as it actually was, and that it isn't as important now. It's something to think about, if for no other reason that after 72 years we still haven't recovered our numerical strength to where we were at the beginning of the Second World War, unlike the rest of the world, which has far outstripped us!
Eighteen million really isn't that large a number in the grand scheme of things, and we should have been there many years ago if we were like the other nations. This is what "assimilation" and "intermarriage" have done to us since the Holocaust.
In any case, all Israel (the people) is a family. At the very most, we divide ourselves by tribe, and not by race or other criterion. And we have a Land, much of which is still waiting for us to take it to our bosom with love.
Do we hear the land's melody within us? Rav Dovid Mark explains...there are no deals on Eretz Yisrael, you just won't hear the niggun. Land concession is like wife sharing. So, our "wife" will not share her songs with those who treat her like just any old dirt, to be bargained away to suit someone else's age-old agenda.
Also, remember when Jordan annexed the "West Bank"? They deny it now, but they did, to the disapproval of most of the world. Because it really did belong to someone else before, and that "someone else" is us.
The nations know it, or else they would have thrown out their Bibles long ago, or burned them in public as they did the Talmud in ages past. I dare them to try that again!
Here's what kind of enemy we're dealing with among us...https://youtu.be/xFJyptyJjrs - h/t to Avi Abelow from Israel Unwired, here. (Of course, Blogger wouldn't let me embed the video.)
Our Land should be free of people such as these; and we shouldn't be giving money to them!
And here are two very recent news posts, on Arutz 7: Dr. Hagai ben Artzi, world authority on the Tana"kh, declares that the Jordan Valley must be Israel's eastern border. And: a "black hole" has been embedded in the "Peace to Prosperity Plan." See the explanation by Orit Strook, former Member of Knesset.
As Dr. ben Artzi, PM Binyamin Netanyahu's brother-in-law, said to him:
"Bibi: Be courageous, move ahead. The Jordan Valley must be declared as
the eastern border of Israel, and this will be your heritage."
Of course, I think we need to extend sovereignty over all of Yehuda, Shomron and Emek haYarden (Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley). See the video below!
(I would have embedded this video too, but Blogger wouldn't let me, once again!)
One last thing: Every last one of us Jews in this country needs to stop debasing ourselves, our religion and our land! The Lubavitcher Rebbe (his 26th hillula is today) noted (with much pain, I'm sure) -- in 1976:
“Never before have Jews turned themselves into Canaanite slaves! Since the religious Knesset representative is ashamed to say outright that he is a Canaanite slave, he calls this a religious accomplishment!
“The situation has reached such a low that they have agreed to surrender to the Arabs any piece of land that they will demand with the sole stipulation that they will draw this out for an extended time in order to show outwardly that they are taking a strong stand of resistance. If they were doing this in the name of Karl Marx, it would be well understood, but why are they doing this in the name of Torah?”
Read the rest here. And please, stop appeasing the goyim, including and especially the Arabs! No matter over how little land we extend sovereignty now, we will still get the same war. We might as well give them something to really cry about, and exercise all self-defense measures and even offensive measures, no matter how much the rest of the world objects!
And, while we're at it, let's take back our heart, Har haBayit, and reunite Yerushalayim too!!!
You know that if the goyim really loved, and were really following, HQB"H, they would have stopped objecting to our taking our land back years ago. So, let's be strong and take courage!
Land concession is like wife sharing...especially in a time when we are looking forward to the complete redemption. It's a sin to even speak of betraying our Land; all the more so to actually hand her over to another, G-d forbid!
(I almost posted a map of an Arab's view of Yehuda and the Shomron, complete with a flag of "Palestine" stamped on the territory of Binyamin, where Har haBayit is located. I wonder how my readers would have reacted to that.)
(1) All the news sources I reviewed note 2020 attacks only in January and February. All noted "Palestinian" rocket attacks on Israel are here.
