Unity: Principles & Paths
A professional athlete says “it’s good to be a ‘glass is half full’ kind of person.” Since he’s very wealthy and lots of people see things this way, let’s agree too, even though the festivities planned for Israel’s sixtieth birthday bash are enough to pain anyone who cares (AP 4-09-08). When Barbra Streisand sings Avinu Malkeinu to Kings Shimon, Bush, and Princess Tony, what’s not to like? - American Bandstand goes global. Pop culture and post-modern reversions of history swallow the land of life. The Oligarchs, Jewish flacks in tow, give the lie to Scripture. Massada is designated Judaism’s holiest site. Is this defeat or will these end-game insults strengthen the flame?
Perhaps the Queen of Pop should sing “Sweet Surrender” stealing the eyes, mind and soul. After all, the entire land for pieces process to be celebrated “is a form of necromancy that not only ‘captures the eyes’ but “steals the minds of men; and the damage done is inestimable for they become habituated to accepting unreality as reality” [1]: virtual reality drives out life. Edom drives out Yisrael. The powers show that they arrange providence. Their regionalized world state is a terrorizing mockery of the world united in looking to Jerusalem for truths based on Torah.
But say the glass is half full: Israel’s still got an army, a Knesset, a Supreme Court and a President. What’s not to like? Alan Dershowitz is probably still in solidarity with Sderot though he wasn’t there long, and when Fuad Ben-Eliezer, Labor’s designated ‘hawk’ isn’t muttering about smiting Iran he’s urging that Marwan Barghouti use his ‘get out of jail free’ card. Labor stalwart Fuad also ratchets up terror on Jews by blabbing about hundreds of missiles hitting the center of the country: he’s a salesman for yeridah and one of those the meshua milchemet would have sent home for putting fear into the host. IF he cared, he would not talk but do: preempt. For his part Barghouti is sending love notes to Shalom Achshav (“Peace Now,” sic) for their assistance in breaking down Israel. They make good into evil, and evil good.
So the glass is half full, right? “What, me worry?” But getting the cup of David to run over is the better goal…
People on the right often say that Shimon Peres is an addle-pate, befuddled, or stupid. They could not be more wrong. Mr. Peres is a monomaniacal globalist who suavely beguiles youths by encouraging them to self-absorption: don’t listen to your parents or teachers, forget about history and “forget your forgetting”; follow your own dreams, live in a cyber world because boundaries make war. This, of course is not true: boundaries are established to make peace because in the absence of personal, communal, or national boundaries people fall into quarrels about what belongs to whom, about who can use what material or on whom laws can be imposed. Boundaries are the sine qua non of peace especially when they are based on history. The first chapter of Genesis teaches this. As for living in dreams, those who do become selfish lost and fearful, they thus become servile to those who told them to lose themselves in the first place.
Without knowledge of our national and personal past we become virtual people in a virtual reality, the shadow world that St. Shimon touts, the better to rule its lost slaves.
No, he’s not foolish or deluded: he’s consistently evil as his many remarks about Jews have shown for decades. He hasn’t changed: serving the evil spirit of Europe and its Greco-Roman drive to dominate the world [2], a kissing cousin to its enemy, Kedar has let him and the oligarchs for whom he speaks wrench Israel to their path.
This essay is about unity and the silver lining, so why criticize anyone. After all, like St. Shimon says, ‘can’t we all just get along?’ In fact he insists that we will, as long as all nations, Israel first, lays down its nationhood and merge into an enormous global family: “we are the world, we are the people.” Oops: wasn’t that sung by the nasty, confused fellow who also sang “kick me kike me; Jew me, screw me”?
Yes, upon one thing the powers of the world, whether in London, Berlin, Washington Riyadh or Moscow agree it’s that the Jews must go. Heck, even the Pope and Martin Luther agreed on that.
And so did the star-satyr of the first part of this encomium, President Peres. Soon after the June 1996 elections that he somehow lost he specified that “the Israelis” had lost and “the Jews” had won, “those who don’t have an Israeli consciousness,” those for whom memory, history, boundaries, integrity and sanity still matter. It is these self-styled “Israelis” who despoil the name they arrogate to themselves who have subjugated the nation to politics (“factionalism and schisms”) and cut the nation up into pieces, as was writ large in the areas A, B and C that Oslo made and in the expulsion of Gush Katif [3]. They have cut themselves off from Israel and divided it, the better to absorb the terrified fragments into a Greater Middle East that itself is subsumed into a “Mediterranean Peace and Prosperity Zone” that itself is part of the AU and EU that have manifold links with the emerging NAU, CIU [sic] and other regions in the global goop. The cutting up that precedes this regionalization, this loss of integrity and history is a kind of laceration in grief over what is not just dead but being murdered; thus the Hellenists transgress this lo ta’aseh at the same time that they transgress the prohibition (Reish Lakish) or negative exhortation and warning (Rambam) against lacerating the nation as well as the prohibition against allowing the land to be alienated or any Jewish captives to remain in bondage [4].
The failure and disinterest of the oligarchs in securing the release of Shalit, Regev, Goldwasser, Pollard and all the other captives or MIA’s for decades, the failure to redeem the land in 1967 when it became possible has cast a cloud over the land and people for more than forty years now and the cloud of consequences continues to expand and darken. The ‘quarrel’ of the elites on the truest of Jews, the settlers of the land continues and grows, from false arrests and incarceration to confiscation of weapons needed to save lives, to enticements (meisit, me’onen) to alienate the land and, eventually, blend into the peoples as the ‘insiders’ at the feast of Ahasuerus did and still do. They will be happy with the “orgy-porgy” at the “Solidarity Day Services,” replacement theology for Kiddush levana including in that it will run daily. At least, they hope it will.
Israel is about integrity, a specific moral, national and geographic integrity in which the descendants of a particular man and his wives “spread out mightily, north, south, east and west from Beit El to the apportioned boundaries. Real unity is the Avot supported by the merit of the Land that they were promised (Vayikra 26:42).
No, the glass is not half full; it is an hour glass that reflects our situation and most of the sands have run out. While the pied piper entices children to lose themselves in dreams without boundaries, declares that God is “crazy” while computers are reliable [!] and can do all your remembering for you life steadily becomes more “nasty, poor, brutish and short” [4b].
That is the future planned by those green-mongers and globalist oligarchs for whom “the President of Forgetting” is a useful idiot and fellow traveler [5]. When crop land is used to grow corn for ethanol, there is less wheat and corn for animals and people to eat; prices of all basic foods soar; people starve and war and the population controllers rejoice. Constantly their media teach, “have less children” and their dialectic attrition processes create killing fields, sites where the insane confound murder with marriage. The prime instance of this contrived dialectic is in the Promised Land where American oligarchs use General Keith Dayton to control both Fatah and the IDF’s rules of engagement.
Unity, that’s the watchword today; but which kind, imposed and artificial or organic and from the roots? Israel is the paradigm of the latter kind of unity, and so is its vision of the Creator and creation and that is why the powers unite in their desire to bury Israel, history, the habit of remembrance (not conditioning, not sound-bite platitudes) and the awe of One who reminds all people of their contingency, limits and boundaries. Mitzvah yichud [6] complements the mitzvah of yishuv ha’Aretz and implied prohibition against schisms, politics and allowing the land or people to be alienated and captives… For each one is a universe, not because it is alone with its dreams but because of the other people and relationships in space and time that give it a particular identity and a name. It has been their names and their clothes and observances, their times that the children of Israel have retained in the dark times of Hester Panim, the time of the evening prayer, of Israel, the Land: “and behold, Hashem was standing over him and He said, ‘I am the God of Avraham, your father, and God of Yitzhak, the Land’…”The bond between the patriarchs and the Land is so great that one must avoid disuniting them even verbally” [7]. “The Land is Mine and the people of Israel is Mine as it says, “the Children of Israel are servants to Me” and their should always be a marriage between them, “like a bridegroom rejoicing over his bride,” “a shidduch between them and Eretz Yisrael” [8]. That glass is not half full, it’s a cup that’s brimming over…glass is not half full, it’s a cup that’s brimming over…As more and more of those who love Israel, not least among the Children of Israel fall out and join the other side, swept in the delirious current of modernity and its glittering lies, its high tech savagery and society increasingly structured like a pyramid, infighting grows among the good and factions burgeon where they least should be. A distinguished writer and former MK from Kiryat Arba wrote a column attacking American Jews for not caring or doing enough about Israel. Well, okay, but he made clear he did not include those “major” organizations that care most about their place at the table and correct posture on American social issues but about the few who do care. The point this esteemed brother of Israel neglects is that the establishment groups and notables do not care about the injunction to brotherhood (cf. “do not stand idly by your brother’s blood”) and unity and neither do those who control the media (few of the major media are owned by Jews though they often feature Jewish reporters or anchors to make it seem like “the Jews run everything”). Without significant media outlets, and without the money that flows mainly to places of power, as money tends to – seeking out its own – there is not much Jews in the diaspora can do to change the dominant structure and tendencies of our time. Of course the mitzvah and joy of settling the land always pertains; but when the order of the day is for America and the Knesset to arm and train the Arabs and to disarm and expel the Jews, there are limits to what can be done here, too. Those who walk the land in many ways and who build there all kinds of ways do the greatest work; those who can possibly join them should. Those who can’t should assist them.
glass is not half full, it’s a cup that’s brimming over…As more and more of those who love Israel, not least among the Children of Israel fall out and join , swept in the delirious current of modernity and its glittering lies, its high tech savagery and society increasingly structured like a pyramid, infighting grows among the good and factions burgeon where they least should be. A distinguished writer and former MK from Kiryat Arba wrote a column attacking American Jews for not caring or doing enough about Israel. Well, okay, but he made clear he did not include those “major” organizations that care most about their place at the table and correct posture on American social issues but about the few who do care. The point this esteemed brother of Israel neglects is that the establishment groups and notables do care about the injunction to brotherhood (cf. “do not stand idly by your brother’s blood”) and unity and neither do those who control the media (few of the major media are owned by Jews though they often feature Jewish reporters or anchors to make it seem like “the Jews run everything”). , as money tends to – seeking out its own – there is not much Jews in the diaspora can do to change the dominant structure and tendencies of our time. Of course the mitzvah and joy of settling the land always pertains; but when the order of the day is for America and the Knesset to arm and train the Arabs and to disarm and expel the Jews, there are limits to what can be done here, too. Those who walk the land in many ways and who build there all kinds of ways do the greatest work; those who can possibly join them should. Those who can’t should assist them.Above all, those who prioritize the settlement and sovereignty of Jews on the land, whether they live in the Land or abroad should unite: the times and the Torah demand it. The broadest coalition around these principles should form and should be active in every arena, from the Knesset to daily events and media. A specific call: the National Union should join the Likud and so should members of Yisrael Beiteinu and Shas; so should citizen groups like HaTikva and others. If this moves the current Likud leaders to join Kadima or form another faction, so be it: it emphasizes what is important to them. Those to whom yishuv ha’Aretz and Malkhut Yisrael are core principles must stay together. The observant and hareidim will be cared for: they play a key role (including the study of war, as Rambam wrote) in Mitzvah yichud and the Kingdom of Heaven on earth (supra). This unity is integrity; it is the opposite of Greco-Roman factionalism and the despotic in-fighting of Kedar. Pressure indeed should put on Jewish organizations, individual kehillot and individuals to sponsor and promote those who teach and exhort the way of Judaism, the derekh Yehudi as distinct from the power plays of West and East.
To the extent that this mitzvah of unity is fulfilled, there will be media presence and growing power and resources and the ability to stand against the efforts to break Israel down and call it, with the typical big lie, “a birthday celebration” that is really a funeral.
Beware; awake; sound the shofar in Zion. Time grows short; shadows lengthen; one discerns the shkadim hastening in the mists. For true peace to reign, Israel must be shaleim as etymology informs. The glass is too empty for infighting; mitzvah yichud, Ahavat Yisrael, and mitzvah yishuv ha’Aretz are the order of the day, the way the cup can brim over. The very darkness and nearness of the end is the silver lining: “toward evening there will be light” if we choose to be integral on the basics of our being.
1. Rambam, Sefer HaMitzvoth II. 32, translated Rabbi S. Silverstein (Moznaim 1993); gonev ha da’at, “steals the minds so that they become habituated to accepting unreality as reality.”
2. See the oration for the first year’s war dead by the ‘great’ Pericles in the Peloponnesian Wars, Thucydides or the entire history of the Roman Empire, a ruined Republic and thuggish tyrant. Also see Will Durant Civilization, Volume III discussing the mores of Periclean Athens & ff. rather like our times.
3. Rambam, Sefer HaMitzvoth II.45
4. Rambam ibid. and II. 227, II.45 references Sanhedrin 110a2-3, “Moshe rose and went to Dathan and Abiran” [Numbers 16:25]. Reish Lakish said, ‘from here we learn that one should not persist in a quarrel. For Rav said ‘whoever persists in a quarrel violates a prohibition as it is stated, “he should not be like Korach and his assembly” [Numbers 17:5]. By chessed there must be unity to realize emet tiferet. As Edgar said, “pray that the right may thrive” (King Lear 5.2.2). There, after much error and suffering, the “right” was united. Hitgabrut ha Chessed one might say.
4b. See the 11 minute speech by Peres to students archived on the Tamar Yonah blog 4-06-08 at Israel national news.com The quote is from Thomas Hobbes
5. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978; revised English translation 1996), 6.2 ff; Kundera’s Gustav Husak is a crude prototype of the blandly eloquent and relentless Peres. The enticement to “forget your forgetting” also occurs in this book, 6.6 and its lethal consequences play out in a dream-like fashion that evokes the march to disappearance of Israel and the nations, their drowning in immaturity and grief and poverty of thought more than of materials. Husak’s favorite expression was like the leitmotif of Peres, “children, never look back!”
6. Rambam, Sefer HaMitzvoth I.2, also known as the Kingdom of Heaven that can be accomplished only by Jews here on earth. When and if the world awakes (and it is the purpose of Israel to teach this, “to publicize he true faith and to fear no one in doing so,” I.9, cf. II. 58, “for only in fearlessness can truth be fulfilled,” cf. Psalm 67) it will know and relent from its attempts at dismemberment and burial of integrity, shlaimut.
7. Rav Yisachar Shlomo Teichtal, Em HaBanim Smeichah (1943; English translation R. Moshe Lichtman; Moznaim 2000), 280-3, chapter 3 introduction, sections 25-6. The verse cited, Genesis 28:13 is the time that Ya’akov established the evening prayer associated with psalm 102. Rav Teichtal comments, “the Land is always mentioned with the patriarchs, alluding to the unification of Malkhut with them” and their main qualities, kindness, strength-in- delineation, and the glory of truth. Israel, an individual and nation unites all three in dominion and royalty. This is the antithesis of the goal of those effectively ruling Israel. On identity via bonds in time & space see also Ramchal on free will, providence and justice in Derekh Hashem 2.3.7
8. Ibid. sections 27-8; Rav Teichtal quotes the Maharal (Netzach Yisrael), Rambam, Letter to Yemen, Bemidbar Rabbah and other sources in this section of his discussion of unity and love between Jews. Rambam quotes, “the Children of Israel are servants to Me” and comments “we are commanded to take possession of the Land and not leave it in their [non-Jewish] hands. The Torah gives the same reason here as in regard to our bodies. He does not want to settle anyone there but us.” See lo ta’aseh, II.227, see also Kiddushin 26a and Rav D. Kalischer, Derishat Tzion, cited by Teichtal, op cit. 274