Behind the surface that the tourists to Israel see, far from the sight of the American Jewish Congress climbers of Masada and the weepers and filmers at the Western Wall; out of mind of the happy neo-Zionists of Hadassah and the Long Island temple tour (with rabbi along for a free ride to tell them what he knows about Israel, one of the great fiction efforts of our time), is the reality of an Israel struggling for its soul, in a battle between Jews and Jews to decide what kind of state it shall be.
The Jews against the Hellenists, far more than the Jews against the Arabs, is the real struggle. |
A Jewish State - home of a Divine, chosen, special people, cloaked in holiness and wrapped in the mantle of difference? A people proud and confident, radiating in the joy of being G-d's special people, blessed with the Divine truth at Sinai that raised it above the common and profane, and divided from the nations who know not holiness and sanctity?
Or will it be the shabby imitation of cheap cultures that sully the greatness of Man; the disgusting limitations of all that is animal and degrading of the soul, leaving the youth of Israel as nothing more than Hebrew-speaking gentiles without the slightest logical reason to remain Jewish, and certainly not in the pressure cooker and potential danger that is Israel?
Will Israel be the dream of centuries or the nightmare of modern times? This is the meaning of the struggle today between the Jews of Jewishness and those of profane Hellenism and Gentilization.
The Jews against the Hellenists, far more than the Jews against the Arabs, is the real struggle. And the Hellenists, with their destructive anarchy of worthless values, have already created a spiritual holocaust within the Holy Land. A nation rejects its special distinctive holiness for the common, the universally profane.
The Sabbath mourns in humiliation, its Garment of Sanctification removed for the nakedness of desecration. Jewish mouths created to take in food sanctified by G-d and to give out words of purity and sanctity, instead hungrily swallow the "white steak" of the pig and the impurity of the shrimp even as they give forth profanity and filth.
The dessert they gorge themselves on is the cultural diet of pornography, violence and licence subtly and less subtly fed them by the cultural barons of communications.
The Jew who, but yesterday, watched his father sway in prayer, today rocks and rolls and shakes with the agitation of a need for drugs. Perversion and self-indulgence - the worship of self, of the great "I" - becomes the religion of a state infested by Hellenism.
"Go through the city ... and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and cry for all the abominations done in the midst thereof" (Ezekiel 9).
The external face of the nation becomes indistinguishable from that of any other people as the Hellenists - disturbed artists, intellectuals and writers, the barons of television and radio and theater, epitomizing all that is arrogance and ego, placing their own needs, desires and illnesses over that of the sacred yoke of Heaven - destroy a people and a state from within.
A people that was Chosen by G-d rejects with contempt its Divine blessing. "And Esau said ... Why do I need this birthright? ... So Esau despised his birthright" (Genesis 25). How hath Jacob become an Esau! Woe unto that which is gone ...
The external face is but the outer manifestation of the internal values. And the values of Judaism struggle to the death with the secular, gentilized, foreign, corrupt ones of the Hellenists.
If there are those who deplore the huge rise in foreign imports, let them know that more despicable than the foreign automobiles and luxury items are the foreign ideas, values, concepts. If we fear the importing of drugs from the outside, let us know that the worst of the opiates are the gentilized ideas that the intellectuals of Hellenism, the artists of gentilization, dance about as some Calf of Dross, shouting: "These are your gods, O Hellenes of Israel!"
This is the real struggle - the war of ideas, of values, of civilization. Will it be the victory of Judaism with its specific, separate, distinct views of holiness and purity, or the triumph of the Hebrew-speaking gentiles whose self-hate, a twisted product of cancerous ego, leads them to reject and stomp upon Judaism of discipline and embrace the malignancy of gentilization with its licence, total self-indulgence, and self-destruction?
"The wicked walk on every side when vileness is exalted among the sons of man" (Psalm 12).
The war is being fought over the soul and destiny of the people and state. And the destroyers from within do their job well, eating away at the morality and values of a people once chosen for purity and who today throw off the greatness of the yoke of Heaven - which alone guarantees true freedom - for the rotting incense of foreign altars and strange temples of the "I."
"Who have said: With our tongue we will prevail; our lives are with us; who is lord over us?" (Psalms 12).
The Hellenists rampage through the Temple of the L-rd scattering its sanctity, destroying its nations of priests. A people rejects its chosenness and specialness, its sanctity and elevation, its separation from the impurities of the nations, their profanations and abominations. It pants after the gentile, it seeks to be as all the nations.
"For My people have committed two evils; they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns - broken cisterns - that can hold no water" (Jeremiah 2).
The Jews against the Hellenists. The real struggle. The dream of materialism fills the streets of Israel and the acrid smell of yearning for pleasure assails the nostrils. In the parlor, on the bus, in the cafe, the talk is of money and what it can buy.
The gentile world of magical sensualism and gratification of desires fills the bowels with painful need and the holiness of Israel is exchanged for the dream of pagan America. The curse of drugs - as some locust plague borne by the Western winds - rages through society and the young Jew is destroyed, daily, by his search for pleasure and escape from the reality of life and the values and challenges of Judaism and holiness.
The Labor Party chairperson of the Knesset's Labor and Welfare Committee, Ora Namir, babbles that "there is no school in Israel in which there are no drugs," failing in her obtuseness to add that she and her ideological colleagues who destroyed Judaism and the Jewish child are directly responsible. And failing - deliberately - to add that the religious schools of Israel are noticeably free of the poison.
And in the alleyways of Tel Aviv and Haifa young Jews die in an agony of heroin - the children of Jews who once lived on the high of Judaism. And the reality is an alarming growth in emigration, yerida, as the Zionist dream falls beneath the American one. Los Angeles and New York and Toronto and London and Amsterdam and Hamburg become Blue-and-White as hundreds of thousands leave the Jewish State for the Exile that Herzl sought to end.
The Zionist dream falls victim to the bankrupt education and values of a state that is not Jewish but a Hebrew-speaking Portugal seeking to be a caricature of America.
"The more they were increased, the more they sinned against Me; I will change their glory into shame ... And they shall eat and not have enough, they shall commit harlotry and not increase" (Hosea 4).
For the cows of Dizengoff, there can never be enough of the silks and dresses and gold and silver and good life of the gentile west, of the nakedness of gentile culture, of the throwing off of holiness and modesty.
"Because the daughters of Zion are haughty and walk with stretched-forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go ... therefore the L-rd will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion and the L-rd will lay bare their secret parts" (Isiah 3).
The Jews against the Hellenists. The real struggle. The reality becomes a land whose music rocks to gentile beat and rolls to the depths of ugly violence. Values that raised the Jew to but a little lower than the angels are exchanged for those so base that he plunges lower than the beast. Judaism loses all meaning and Jewishness follows it into the junkheap of antiquity as Zionism becomes a word of mockery and cynicism.
It is a land that raises its eyes unto the gentile films and televised pornography and cheers its pagan heroes even as it worships at the feet of uncircumcized basketball players. Sinai is cast away for Times Square and the purity of the Chosen people is exchanged for the material vomit of Los Angeles.
The modesty of holiness is contemptuously abandoned and the nation wallows in the nakedness of gentile culture. The breakdown of holiness and sanctity; the fall from the mountain of discipline and heavenly yoke. The transformation of a people of G-d, yearning for the heavens, to a herd of men and women seeking the pleasures and aspirations of the beasts.
Worse than the Jews for Christianity or Jews for Gurus or Jews for Marx are the Jews for Nothing ... Absolutely nothing of any value. The Jews of emptiness and vanities and shallowness and grossness and ugliness and beastiality.
And all this in the Holy Land. And all this on the part of the sons and daughters of Jews who clung to greatness in the Exile. The Jews of Israel who have been destroyed by the Hellenists and the empty vessels of gentilization. They exist in a vacuum that is valueless, and live for transitory pleasure, regressing to the paganism from which their father, Abraham, climbed to the One G-d.
Who can save us from ourselves? And who can save our children from us, we who would pass them between the twin fires of Molech: those of the Auschwitzes of the Exile and those of the Ministry of Education of the state of gentilized Hebrews?
Yes, we reap the sterile seeds of secular Zionism, a dream of Jewish gentiles who sought to cut away Judaism from Jewish nationalism and who thus guaranteed the death of the latter.
Secular Zionism is bankrupt; see its epitaph on the streets of Dizengoff, in Hebrew Christians, in Jewish women with Arab men, in the Jews fleeing the Jewish State for the golden one of California.
On the day that Judaism was separated from Zionism, the latter became one more form of vapid, empty, meaningless, ugly, secular nationalism. It died the day it was born. And we see the resulting realities.
Rabbi Meir Kahane, Zt"l |
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