The thoughts and writings of Prof. Eugene Narrett
Hebron: Bond to the Apple Orchard
The Jewish people of Hebron-Kiryat Arba keep the blessings of the world to come, of the eternal Eden open for the nourishment of humankind. Hebron is the resting place of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah and, tradition teaches, of Adam and Eve as well. When Jews bring Torah scrolls to Hebron and pray, as they have in the face of Turkish, British, Arab and all great power opposition to this day the ancient ones awake, sit on their benches and entreat goodness on the world. They entreat that the fragrance of life and its blessings stream from the Eternal One to the Orchard and from there disperse in living streams of light to all humankind.
But the rulers of the world in this third and final phase of history do not want life. The neo-Malthusians of “the world collective” as H. G. Wells described it [1] are obsessed with control, destruction of all boundaries physical and ethical; with impoverishment and de-population. They are the antithesis of Torah, the ‘dark side’ of the double letters, the degraded potential of concealment and disclosure that turns wisdom to ignorance, wealth to poverty (for most of us), that desolates seed as a primary value turning life to death, honor to betrayal and disgrace, peace, of which they endlessly prate, to war and shadow wars, and now at the climax, turns the healing grace of the Menorah to the horror of a Hellenist world-state and its virtual reality warring on marriage, families, discrete nations above all, Israel.
Only rulers and civilizations bound to sterility and lies, to the arrogance of power, in modern terms, to racist Jew-hatred and ethnic cleansing would want to oppress, bar and even expel Jews from Hebron. Yet this has been the story of the world since the Arabic conquests and, under Western hegemony, with gathering strength from 1929 until today. The Jewish undertakers of the modern State mostly comply, except for a brief period under Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, — and even then grudgingly and only after murders of Jews — the governments of Israel do their worst to make life difficult, demeaning and dangerous for the heroic and decent Jews of Hebron. This has been the great refusal of the “subcontractors” since 1967, on a par with their alienation of the Temple Mount. If there was and when there will be constant Jewish prayer on the Creator’s holy hill there will be genuine peace and integrity (shlaimut) in the world with “deep counsel” (Genesis 37:14) for fraternal peace from the depth of Hebron.
Perennial threats of pogroms by the Arabs, the murder of suckling infants and aged Rabbis, chronic stabbings, desecration of graves and destruction of synagogues all are the lot of the Jews that most honor the Patriarchs by whose merit the eternal promise of the land is secured, as the great Rabbi Shlomo Yissachar Teichtal demonstrated, bringing many sources in his great book, Eim HaBanim Smeicha (”a Glad Mother of Children”) written during the shoah.
In recent weeks, the demonic hatred of the local elites, fronting for the EU-American diplomatic-intelligence echelons posing always as “Israel’s best and only friend” deny all photographic, video and audio evidence, title deeds, bills of sale and more in their effort to expel Jews from Beit HaShalom (”Peace House”) a large four-story building they purchased for $700,000. The oppression is so fierce and cruel that during their first winter of occupancy, the beautiful Jewish families living there were forbidden to put in glass windows and had to suffice with plastic sheeting. Yet they persist.
In October, the American and Israeli regimes combined, to the pleasure of Eurabia in deploying several hundred, American-trained Fatah “police” into the most ancient Jewish city (Genesis 23) and the first capital of David when he was King of Judah for seven years (2 Samuel 5:1-5). Also in that month, the Israeli government, jockeying to please its global masters sent dozens of black-uniformed police in the middle of the night to roust two Jewish families from their beds, beat them, arrest them and demolish their homes. They are rebuilding, a scene of persistence that plays out daily in many places throughout the heartland of Israel. Even one room, make-shift synagogues, places of prayer for the world, built near the site of murdered Jews are torn down repeatedly in the ancient game of “humiliate the Jew.” How sad and ironic in a world whose most enlightened regions profess a creed centering on those who mistake their redemption. The beam in their eye blinds them to the detriment of every one.
Why the rage of the mighty ones of earth and all their forces to humiliate and uproot the Jews from this spot?
Kiryat Arba (’town of the four”) is as noted for the patriarchs plus Adam and their spouses and is linked to Hebron and its “field of Mamre” from ancient times: “Sarah died in Kiryat-Arba which is Hebron, and Abraham came to eulogize Sarah” and there he acquired the entire place as an eternal estate. It is from here that the resurrection of all mankind will be triggered when the nation of Israel and its dead will arise and sing from the dust, first, the sages state, chanting psalm 98 [2]. The power of this holy place inheres also in that here, through his ancestral inheritance, committment and first reign, David was joined to the “chariot” of the patriarchs and the unique holiness of Moshe, Aharon and Miriam [3]. In the dramatic events narrated in Genesis 23, the sages explain that “Abraham recognized the Machpelah cave, for he had once [before] entered there and seen Adam and Eve…and a door opened onto the Garden of Eden. He saw moreover a shining light that illumined the cave and a lamp burning.” The cave is called “double” (Machpelah) for several reasons, chief among them being that it alludes to the letter of sanctification added by the Eternal to the names of Avraham and Sarah (Genesis 17), the letter that is doubled in the divine NAME. And this is the place, “in the plains of Mamre” where the Eternal One appeared to Avraham and yet the paragon of kindness rushed away to wait on the three travelers who soon, it became clear were angels, one of them to announce that in a year’s time Sarah would give birth (and the other two, Gabriel and Raphael to destroy Sdom and to save Lot, Genesis 18 ff).
The foundational holiness of this place which should be filled entirely with Torah study, Jewish dwellings and families is connected to the eternal promise of the land, the vector of the Highest Wisdom’s ordering of the world for joyous sanctity. Hashem said to Avraham after Lot had parted from him, ‘raise now your eyes and look out from where you are: northward, southward, eastward and westward. For all the land that you see to you I will give it and to your descendants forever… Arise, walk the land through its length and breadth for to you I will give it!’ And Avram moved his tent and came and dwelled in the plains of Mamre which are in Hebron, and he built there an altar to Hashem” (Genesis 13:14-18; cf. 15:18, the covenant of the land; 28:4-5, 10-13, renewing the covenant and promise through Isaac’s final blessing of Jacob and the Eternal One’s reiteration of the covenant to Jacob quoting his very words to Avraham, and again when he gave Jacob the title, Israel Genesis 35:9-15).
It is the sanctity, balance and order of providence and creation that is established in Hebron and on its line to the Holy Mount in Jerusalem, where Israel must tithe to H’ and to Beth El. It is this balance that the powers seek to displace, replace and seize with the result that they upset the entire world and its recuperative and regenerative powers, rooted in Jewish prayer, settlement and sovereignty. It is because “progress” seeks to displace providence and its memory with forgetting, its history with “new realities” that it is virtual, unstable, and despotic, in short a horror that eclipses Israel’s grace.
Visit www.hebron.org.il for an invaluable archive of history, with many videos and understand that in Hebron - Kiryat Arba a few thousand Jews establish a model of heroism, self-sacrifice and honor for all the peoples of the world. Learn about them and support them. They are the root connecting humankind to the Source of its humanity and to the memory, history and tradition that the postmodern world derides and degrades. But their games, theories, media spin and power politics are based on lies and insincerity; thus it cannot endure. But “the Eternity of Israel does not lie” for it is the basis of everything that is: ayn od milvado.
1. H.G. Wells, The New World Order (1940; re-print 2007); Wells repeatedly invokes the term “world collective founded on the triad of socialism, law and logic” [sic].
2, 3. Zohar on Genesis 122b-129a on parsha Chaye Sarah (”the life of Sarah” concerning the death of Sarah, Abraham’s acquiring of the “double cave” (Machpelah) and her interment with the original couple purifying them and the place fully from the serpent’s taint (supra). Zohar on Genesis 125a on “Hebron which is the same as Kiryat Arba where David joined the patriarchs.”
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