Darkness Cannot Prevail: Hear, Israel…
It’s a dark time of year and a dark period of history. Like an eagle that “sets its nest among the stars,” Edom has suffused the perennial regime in Washington DC and together they gather forces against Jerusalem. Arming, funding, and training those who murder Jews in Israel they bury the world in darkness, increasing violence and the lies and power lust from which these conditions extrude.
“All this, however has a fixed limit: darkness cannot prevail nor impurity sully the world completely and corrupt all mankind.” Still, “we live in a world where darkness and secular concepts prevail,” in which Israel, the people and land long have been degraded and with it the Creator and Master of all worlds. The nations, despising Israel, have made a covenant against the Eternal One. Yet “it is possible for man to bring spiritual light into creation”; indeed, “the world can be rectified only by man, not by itself,” not by the forces of nature or man’s own undirected passions [1].
Human beings can and must do the work of bringing the Creator’s light and presence fully into the world and the Children of Israel have the preeminent role and responsibility in doing this. The essence of their challenge and the medium of its fulfillment is the basic prayer of Judaism, “Hear, O Israel: the Eternal One, our God, the Eternal One is One” [2].
Early in December a young father of two, Iddo Zoldan was returning from a late night Torah class to his home in the western foothills of the Shomron. A pioneer involved in efforts for Jews to return to their lands from which they have been illegally and brutally removed he was admired by all who knew him. The car he was in was ambushed by members of Mahmoud Abu Mazen’s Fatah “police,” armed, funded and trained by American soldiers and contractors. Zoldan was murdered; his wife left a widow, his children fatherless and the Jews again were taught a lesson: stay out of your heartland; your Scriptures are a lie; America arms and empowers your murderers.
At about the same time, a public ceremony was held posthumously for IDF Colonel Ro’i Klein who saved his platoon by falling on a grenade during Hezbollah’s attack on Israel during summer 2006. As he jumped on the grenade, his comrades reported that he shouted, “Shema Yisrael…” “Hear, Israel,” the opening words of the Shema.
Its following verse is pertinent to his sacrifice, example of national, historical and fraternal love and saving of this generation. “You shall love Hashem your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might…” The Ramchal notes that “the forces of evil and corruption… dark and secular concepts” will be dispersed when it is “known that God is One, Alone and Unique, Echad, Yachid and Meyuchad” and that it is He who arranged for human beings to have free will with the abilities to obscure or reveal His Presence, Goodness and Unity” [dh 4.4.1]. Dark, secular concepts are the idiom of those that betray Israel to rape and pillage by the nations [3].
Although the perennial client regime that awarded his medal does not seek to honor the Creator or reveal His Unity in a sovereign Jewish State, Klein deserved and surely got the ultimate honor for any Jew for in manifold ways he fulfilled “his assigned task: to bear witness to God’s Unity in all its aspects.” He thereby played a leading role in inspiring and saving his nation and the world for “the basis for the annihilation and removal of evil as well as the perpetuation of good in all creation is the revelation of God’s Unity” (dh 4.4.1) [4]. The free self-sacrifice of many like Klein for millennia “moves creation closer to a perfect state of good, — the Creator’s goodness and power clarified by the free will choices of men (dh 4.4.3). For “when a person actually gives his life for God it results in a very great illumination that has a tremendous effect in rectifying all creation” spreading “sanctity and light throughout creation” (dh 4.4.5).
To the extent that people, especially those most nearly aggrieved can take comfort in the accomplishment and building implicit in such sanctification the Creator exults and human beings are elevated closer to his goodness and goal of the integrity and wholeness of the Jews, “one nation in the land upon that mountains of Israel” (Ezekiel 37:22).
Like the two hiking soldiers attacked by terrorists by Telem stream near Hebron whose vigorous defense saved the life of the young woman soldier hiking with them, the brave self-sacrifice and observance of “the primary assignment” by every Jew struggling for the Promised Land and therefore for the discovery of God’s Presence “is a great benefit for all creation… when reciting the Shema, each individual should be ready to give his life for the sake of God’s unity… Such resolve is counted as an actual deed” and one receives merit accordingly, becoming a “savior of his generation”; indeed they can “rectify the spiritual damage not only of their own generation but also all spiritual damage done since the beginning of time,” leading to the “perfected community” that is Israel’s goal, and the model it will present to all nations (dh 2.2.2,4,7; 2.3.8).
The material and rhetorical harassment of Jews in Israel today, the relentless attempts to abolish any expression of its sovereignty or the right, need and commandment of its people to settle throughout the Promised Land is an attack on the Creator, the Eternal One and thus on the lucidity and wonder of life. It is a suicidal madness by arrogant man-like beasts that maneuver vast institutions like machines that consume humane beings. Still, the dread and great darkness they stir up is vulnerable to the courage and truth embedded in the Hebrew Scriptures. As Ramchal writes, “the nature of each particular challenge is what the Highest Wisdom determines best for each individual” (2.3.3); so it is with nations and entire generations. “The distribution of challenges takes into account the true nature of all parties and circumstances involved.” The greater the odds, the greater the opportunity and possibility for dispelling secular darkness and evil concepts for “God created evil in order for man to banish it” (4.4.1).
For all nations, especially Israel this is a national challenge as well as a myriad of individual ones: every person and institution has a limit to the amount of light it can hold and to the amount of darkness it can consume. “Each created thing has its own limit, no more and no less.” Where secular concepts prevail in institutions, they must be changed by the purpose and practice of saying and living out the meaning of the Shema. This is the purpose of humanity in creation and the special assignment of Jews in the Land, to be whole as Jacob was when he merited the title, “Israel” (Genesis 33:18-35:14). Then “the forces of evil are humbled” as Moshe exhorted and prophesied in his very last words (dh 4.4.5; Deut. 33:25-9). That is the program of victory [5]: People, avenge your brother.
1. Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato, Derekh Hashem, 1740, (Feldheim, NY 1998, 6th revised edition), 4.4.4-5, “the Shema and its Blessings”; Derekh Hashem subsequently cited in text as dh
2. Deuteronomy 6:4-9, 11:13-21
3. Chief Editor David Landau of HaAretz, the Israeli “New York Times” at a September 10 meeting told Secretary of State Rice that “Israel wanted to be raped by the United States” and, to that end, asked for “more vigorous American intervention” to expel Jews from Judea and Samaria. Landau termed this his “wet dream” and said that several professors at the dinner congratulated him. The fifth-column of media and the academy was exposed by New York Jewish Week and others. Why? Because he made the elite’s hatred of Jews too obvious.
4. in supporting his comments, Ramchal quotes Deuteronomy 32:39 and Isaiah 43:10: “they must know and believe that before Me no god was formed and after Me there will be none.”
5. See also the first Halacha of Rambam’s Hilchot Melachim and all the following ones that pertain to the integrity, proactive defense and authority in the land, including Israel’s role from there as a light to the nations. They are as practical as they are self-respecting, a blend which is the implicit thrust of all the teachings in Derekh Hashem in discussing Providence, human freedom, the Creator and Judaism. The great darkness of Edom is approaching the limit of its opacity; it will break on the rock of Israel and be suffused with its light (Genesis 49:18, 24-6; psalm 118:22-3).