From Barbara Ginsberg’s Desktop Beyond Words Selected Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane, 1960-1990 Volume 7 “Beyond Words” is a newly-published seven volume collection of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s writings that originally appeared in The Jewish Press, other serial publications, and his privately-published works. “Beyond Words” also includes a number of extra features: Chronology of Rabbi Kahane's life. Beyond Words now can be bought at Amazon.com Type, Beyond Words Kahane
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THE SOUL OF A JEW What causes the Jew in Israel, afflicted by daily murders, attacks, stoning, terror and deadly fear, to sit by passively, acquiescing in the process of his own gradual destruction? In China, where the citizens are not threatened daily by the enemy that wishes to destroy them, people rose up and demonstrated openly for democracy in the face of a totalitarian, brutal government. In Jordan, when gasoline prices were raised, people rioted and burned automobiles. President Marcos of the Philippines was forced out by a people’s upsurge in the streets, not because the people’s lives were in danger but because they were furious at corruption. The list is a long one and only sharpens the question: What is wrong with the Jew in Israel?What is it that paralyzes him and keeps him from taking to the streets in the hundreds of thousands and demanding fundamental change, a change in the government and system, both?
The Ibn Ezra, one of the greatest and deepest of the Biblical commentators, asked the same question in a different context and his answer remains a light unto our feet. Concerning the children of Israel who were standing at the Red sea and seeing the Egyptian army approaching, began to weep and wail hysterically, the Ibn Ezra asks:
“One must wonder. How can a large camp of 600,000 men fear because they are being pursued, and why did they not fight for their lives and their children? The answer is that the Egyptians were masters over Israel, and the generation that left Egypt learned from youth to suffer the yoke of Egypt, and its soul was degraded and how could it fight against its masters…”
A degraded soul. A soul that is low and humble, fearful and apprehensive. The soul of the Jewish slave who had just left the Exile of Egypt and the soul of the Jew of ghetto mentality who left the Exile of our time and took large parts of it with him (and how much easier is it for the Jew to leave the Exile than for the Exile to leave him!). The Jew of Israel, despite all the nonsense of “the soul of a Jew yearning,” and the “New Hebrew,” remains with the same soul of the slave, degraded and frightened, terrified of the gentile while bereft of any faith in G-d or belief in himself as the chosen People of that G-d. And so, there remains in him a slave mentality and soul of massive proportions that, on the one hand, sees himself fully cognizant of the reality of Arab savagery and intention to wipe out the Jewish state, while, at the same time, with a fear of rising up and acting in a way that will save him, his family, his people and state.
And the Ibn Ezra continues: “And the L-rd, who alone does great things and weighs events, caused it to come about that all the males who left Egypt died out, for they had no strength to fight the Canaanites. Until there arose a new generation of the desert, that had not seen the Exile and which had an elevated soul…”
The generation of Egypt, with its soul of degradation, was kept from entering the land. The generation of our times, with all its degrading lowness and complexes, succeeded in entering Eretz Yisrael. The generation that removed itself from the Exile must now complete the work by ripping the Exile from itself. We must free the Jew spiritually so that he rises up.
Printed in J.P., June 30, 1989 WHEN THE TIME COMES TO SEPARATE That unity is a thing which we devoutly hope and pray is axiomatic. The unity is not the supreme value is rather less understood. As with everything else, the authentic Jewish value clashes with liberal fluff and perversion.Unity is a positive Jewish value only when those who are being unified do not openly and arrogantly deny and reject authentic Jewish values and Torah commandments. There is not only no mitzvah to unify under Jewish leaders who are un-Jewish, anti-Jewish and despising of Jewish values, but there is rather a great mitzvah to disperse them, to break away from them.
“The coming together of the righteous is good for them and good for the world,” say the rabbis (Sanhedrin 71). “and the scattering of the wicked is good for them and good for the world.” To accept the leadership of Hellenists and rejecters of Jewish Law in the name of “unity” is to pervert Jewish values and G-d’s commandments. …I raise the issue because it is clearer and clearer to me, daily, that the greatest danger to the Jew, both in Israel and in the Exile, is the Jewish leader. The ones who make up the Jewish Establishment are the anti-Jewish spiritual dregs of the earth. Astoundingly ignorant of anything authentically Jewish, they are chose only for their money and power, and it is precisely those that create within them an arrogance and haughtiness that leads them to contemptuously declare war on Torah and true Jewish values. The words of Kind David in the Psalms (73) ring too true:
“Arrogance is their necklace . . . . Their eye bulge from fat, they have exceeded the fantasies of their heart. They consume, and speak evilly about oppression; they speak as if there were none on high. They have set their mouths against the heavens.”
Printed in J.P. November 17, 1989 Anyone reading this Rav Kahane article and is not on my personal list to receive the weekly articles written by Rav Kahane and would like to be, please contact me at:
To view previously sent Rabbi Kahane articles go to: www.barbaraginsberg-barbara.blogspot.com ============= |
Thursday, 28 July 2011
THE MIRACLE OF THE JEWISH SOUL
By Bernard J. Shapiro (1994)
I went to call on the L-rd in His house on the high hill, My head full of anxiety over five million Israeli Jews, having to grow up overnight. "If ever a people, Lord, needed a miracle!" The Lord He looked at me as a mountain might look at a molecule. "So you want a miracle, "said the L-rd. "My, my! You want a miracle." I suppose you mean that you want me to come sliding down a sunbeam and make five million egotists overnight into five million co-operative angels. "Brother, "said the L-rd, in a voice that shook the windows, "that isn't the sort of universe you're living in. And that isn't the sort of G-d I am."
The room was suddenly vast, with the stars set bright in the ceiling. "There is only one miracle," said the L-rd. "All else is cause and effect. All else is law." The thunder withdrew from the Voice, and the words came hushed and clear like the first stars in the twilight, each star a newborn glory. "There is only one miracle, and it is already accomplished. That miracle is the soul of the Jewish people.
The L-rd He lifted His head and the Milky Way was His hair. "The Jewish soul is like the atom," He said. "Wonderfully like the atom. Consider the atom. So minute, no lens you can make can enlarge it to a point where your eye can see it, yet there's a whole solar system inside it , whirling round a nucleus like the planets around the sun. So feeble in its unreleased state, yet actually the greatest force, save one, in creation. The greatest force in creation, save one."
The L-rd strode through His house so the timbers whispered to each other, "He's thinking of the soul tonight, of the Jewish soul, and the power asleep in the soul. He always shakes the house when He thinks of the power, the power asleep, asleep in the Jewish soul."
"I have given you a soul, "cried the L-rd, "and you ask me to come down and do a magician's trick! The people who smashed the atom didn’t beg Me to come with a thunderbolt and split the nucleus for them. They knew that there was power in the atom and they set to work to release it.
"There is power in the Jewish soul, When you break through and set it free, Like the power of the atom. More powerful than the atom, It can control the atom, One of the few things in the world that can. I told you that the atom is the greatest force in the world, save one. That one is the Jewish soul."
"But," said the L-rd--and the stars in the sky seemed to stand still and listen--"The power must be released, as the atom-smashers released the power of the atom. They had to get past the electrons to get at the energy packed in the nucleus. And I have to get past a great deal of ego to release the power that is packed in the Jewish soul. I keep shooting My rays toward the nucleus, And the charged field keeps fending then off. But now and then one gets by, The nucleus is split, the power is released and things begin to happen on a scale that makes men gasp and talk about miracles. The rebirth of Israel and the ingathering of the exiles is one such miracle. The spectacular victories of the Israeli army against overwhelming odds is another. But it isn't a miracle. It's just the soul of the Jew coming to its own. It's just the Jewish soul freed at last to be itself."
The L-rd He looked at me and His eyes pierced like hot wires. "Perhaps, there's something in you and numerous others that will have to be cracked open, if five million Israelis are going to grow up overnight. Something in you," said the Lord, "something, perhaps, in you."
That was a joke, and I laughed. But the L-rd wasn't laughing. I hastened to reassure Him. "There's nothing the matter with me. It's the other fellow that's the trouble, all five million of them."
"I know all about the other five million Israelis," said the L-rd, and I thought he seemed a little tired as he said it, "but I don't at the moment seem able to see anyone but YOU."
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This was first published under title THE ONE MIRACLE in the Jewish Herald-Voice on February 10, 1994. Subsequently published in dozens of newspapers and Internet web sites.
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