מָרְדֳּכַי אֲשֶׁר הַחִלּוֹתָ לִנְפֹּל לְפָנָיו לֹא-תוּכַל לו כִּי-נָפוֹל תִּפּוֹל, לְפָנָיו -- אסתר ו, יד If Mordecai, before whom you have begun to fall, is of Jewish descent, you will not prevail against him, but you will surely fall before him. (Megillas Esther 6:14)
Explaining why Megillas Esther uses a double expression for "descent" (ִ נְפּוֹל and תִּפּוֹל) the Gemara (Megillah 16a) says כשהן יורדין יורדין עד עפר וכשהן עולין עולין עד לכוכבים "When they (the Jews) descend they descend to the dust. When they ascend they ascend to the stars." What is dust? It is a lifeless substance. Dust is dead. The Navi says, "The righteous by their faith they shall live." (Habakuk 2:4) Faith gives us life. The faithless are like the walking dead. They are like the dust and live in the dust. Who else lives in the dust? The nachash. This was its punishment for tricking Chava into rebelling against Hashem. How is it a punishment? As the Sages explain, the nachash is able to find food readily, wherever it looks. To explain, R' Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld (1848–1932) brings the Gemara in Yevamos (64a) that says that the imahos were denied children at first because if forced them to daven, to look to Hashem. The nachash is put in the position of never needing to daven, to living without faith in Hashem. This is a curse.1 This amazingly is where Jews can go, to a place of no faith. Look at the Zionists, Ben Gurion: "Since I invoke Torah so often, let me state that I don't personally believe in the God it postulates ... I am not religious, nor were the majority of the early builders of Israel believers." Jabotinsky: "There is no justice, no law, and no God in heaven". These are arguably the two most notable founders of the Zionist state. Herzl who proposed converting all Jews to Catholicism was no better. As he wrote in his diary, "Approximately two years ago, I wanted to solve the Jewish problem, in Austria at any rate, with the aid of the Catholic leaders there. I sought an audience with the Pope in order to tell him: 'Help us against anti-Semitism, and I will generate a mass movement of Jews to convert to Christianity freely and proudly.'" Herzl's partner Max Nordau regarded the Bible as a book of superstition.2 We say the Shema multiple times a day. And what does it tell us, that everything Hashem does is just and for our good. It tells us that if we follow the higher path, follow the precepts, He will give us a home on the land and fill our baskets with bread. And it will be, if you will diligently obey My commandments which I enjoin upon you this day, to love the L-rd your G‑d and to serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul, I will give rain for your land at the proper time, the early rain and the late rain, and you will gather in your grain, your wine and your oil. (Devarim 11:13-14) But if we rebel, then we will be cast off of the land. Take care lest your heart be lured away, and you turn astray and worship alien gods and bow down to them. For then the L-rd's wrath will flare up against you, and He will close the heavens so that there will be no rain and the earth will not yield its produce, and you will swiftly perish from the good land which the L-rd gives you. (Devarim 11:16-17) R' Akiva said the Shema as he passed from the world al kiddush Hashem as he was being tortured by the Romans. When R. Akiba was taken out for execution, it was the hour for the recital of the Shema', and while they combed his flesh with iron combs, he was accepting upon himself the kingship of heaven.16 His disciples said to him: Our teacher, even to this point? He said to them: All my days I have been troubled by this verse, 'with all thy soul', [which I interpret,] 'even if He takes thy soul'. I said: When shall I have the opportunity of17 fulfilling this? Now that I have the opportunity shall I not fulfil it? He prolonged the word ehad18 until he expired while saying it. A bath kol19 went forth and proclaimed: Happy art thou, Akiba, that thy soul has departed with the word ehad! (Brachos 61a, Soncino Press) The Shema is the fundamental statement of Judaism. We embrace the way Hashem has set up life. We embrace the commandments. We embrace reward and punishment. It is all true, trustworthy, and good. And what do the Zionists say, they say they are going to end the golus. The fundamental declaration of Jewish faith says that Hashem will put us in golus if we don't live properly. The Zionists say they are going to reverse what Hashem has declared. They are going to put us back on the land period. Whether we keep the precepts or not is not a topic. The precepts don't exist for them. They are rebels against the fundamental declaration of our faith. Exile is one with utter dependence - in material things, in politics and culture, in ethics and intellect, and they must be dependent who are an alien minority, who have no Homeland and are separated from their origins, from the soil and labor, from economic creativity. So we must become the captains of our fortunes, we must become independent - not only in politics and economy but in spirit, feeling and will. (Ben-Gurion) Eliminate the Diaspora, or the Diaspora will surely eliminate you. (Jabotinsky) They didn't approve of Hashem's plan. It wasn't good for business. Let's do the math. It's been 3,829 years since the birth of Avraham. We have been in the Roman golus for 1,949 years, more than half of our national history. If you date our national history back to Sinai, we have been in the Roman golus for more than 60% of our history. Such is Hashem's will. But the Zionists don't like it. In their view, the problem wasn't our failure to keep the commandments or our lack of faith. The problem was our lack of military and political power. Riding high from the emancipation in modern Europe, they were going to restore the worldly power that was taken from us due to our sins even as they kept sinning. That's like a smoker saying he's going to eliminate his cough while he keeps smoking. For those who haven't seen the label on the box, smoking can cause cancer and/or emphysema. The cough is a warning about the danger of smoking. Is this why the Talmud warns us that if we force the end of the exile, our flesh will be served up like a gazelle to a carnivore? I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles, and by the hinds of the field, [that ye awaken not, nor stir up love, until it please] (Shir HaShirm 2:7) By the gazelles, and by the hinds of the field. R. Eleazar explained: The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Israel, 'If you will keep the adjuration, well and good; but if not, I will permit your flesh [to be a prey] like [that of] the gazelles and the hinds of the field'. (Kesubos 111a) All these years of bloodshed. We complain endlessly about the Arabs and the anti-Semites of the world. But the Talmud warned us, don't force the end of exile. It's a father telling a child who was caught smoking cigarettes, stay in your room until you learn your lesson. I'm trying to save your life. If you leave your room I'll have to give you a bigger punishment. The Zionists escaped out the window, climbed down the trestle, and lit another cigarette and then another. They want to finish the pack before they move on to another. They weren't going to listen to their father. They don't even believe that they have a father. Faithless, dead, dust. This, the Gemara is telling us, is the opposite of soaring to the stars. Zionism is the opposite of that, it is the lowest place a Jew can go, faithlessness. It is lower than where a goy can go because a goy can't go to the stars so he cannot reach its opposite. He doesn't possess a Jewish soul to transport him there. When a goy loves Ireland or Mother Russia, it's a foolishness, it's a materialism. When a Jew worships land or state it's an act of sick spirituality. It's idol worship done with gusto. It has nothing to do with concern for the Jewish people. That's just the veneer they put it on it. It's all self-love, delusion, self-indulgence. It's a lunacy. If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative. (Ben-Gurion) This is a lunatic fanaticism, a delusion, an ego trip, a cruelty, a substituting of self for the Divine, a cult, the lowest place a Jew can go. How low? In the words of R' Elchanan Wasserman: This is not building the Land of Israel but destroying it. 'These are not the guardians of the city but the destroyers of the city.' This is the worst destruction of the Land of Israel, much worse than past destructions [of the Temple]. (R' Elchanan Wasserman, 1874–1941, Ikvesa Demeshicha, paragraph 40) And the Satmar Rebbe: If we were to put all the sins of this generation and all the transgressions committed in the entire world on one side of a scale, and the Zionist state on the other side, it would outweigh everything, for it is the poisonous source of the worst defilement, the worst cause of damage in the entire world, and they are ones who defile the entire world. (Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, 1887–1979, Rebbe of Satmar, Vayoel Moshe, Introduction, p. 11) If these words sound extreme, try to understand them from a religious perspective. The Gemara at the end of Makkos says that 613 precepts were communicated to Moshe and then came Dovid ha-Melech who reduced them to eleven, then Isaiah to six, Michah to three, Isaiah to two, and then finally Habakkuk to one. What does this mean? It doesn't mean that we are not obligated in all the commandments. Rather, several explanations are offered. The Ramah explains that originally a person merited protection from the evil inclination as well as physical protection only via fulfillment of all the commandments. Dovid and the later prophets davened that Hashem should have mercy and grant the same protection to the person who does not fulfill them all.3 Perhaps this refers to a complete fulfillment including intent. The Sefer ha-Ikarim explains that the later prophets saw that it was too difficult for a person to concentrate on 613 individual commandments as he fulfilled each one. Thus, they categorized the commandments into groups, enabling a person to fulfill the entire Torah while concentrating only on a limited number of commandments or groups of commandments.4 And what was the single mitzvah or category that Habakkuk left us with: "The righteous by his faith shall live." The Insights into the Daily Daf explains: The Maharsha adds that in truth, all of the 613 Mitzvos are based on certain general categories, as the Aseres ha'Dibros allude to all 613 Mitzvos. Moreover, all of the Mitzvos can be narrowed down to one basic Mitzvah that encompasses all of the Mitzvos -- the Mitzvah of Emunah in Hash-m. This is the intention of David ha'Melech when he says, "Kol Mitzvosecha Emunah" -- "All of your Mitzvos are Emunah" (Tehilim 119:86). The Maharsha adds that this is necessarily so, since Hash-m is One, and thus His will must be one. This is why Hash-m Himself spoke to the Jewish people at Sinai and told them all of the Aseres ha'Dibros at once, and then He later began to repeat them separately so that the Jewish people could hear each one individually. This means that from Hashem's perspective, the Mitzvos are all one; they are all the unity of Hashem's will. However, man cannot understand all of the Mitzvos from that perspective, and therefore he needs them to be spelled out individually, into 613 Mitzvos. This is what the Gemara means when it introduces its discussion by saying that the Jewish people heard the Mitzvos of "Anochi" and "Lo Yiheyeh" directly from Hash-m. These two Mitzvos are the two parts of the Mitzvah of Emunah (to accept Hash-m and not to accept any other power), and this is the Mitzvah that the nation heard directly from Hash-m when He began to repeat each individual Mitzvah. It is this Mitzvah in particular that He expressed to the nation, because it is the Mitzvah of Emunah which encompasses all of the Mitzvos.5 From this Gemara and the commentary on it we can see how essential is faith. It's the pillar of right living. Faithlessness is the cause of wrong living. Zionism, which is a fundamental rebellion against Hashem, which is faithlessness by definition, is a major source of the problems of the world. It might be the major source of the problems because it is the source of faithlessness even among many of the allegedly religious. The Mizrachi are in many respects worse than the secular Zionists. One might say, but aren't they believers? Perhaps, to an extent, but they mix the avodah zarah of Zionism into it. They put land before Torah. They believe their protection comes from the army, the government, and the land and safety being a paramount issue in post-1948. This is not a small injection of idol worship. It's a very big one and Mizrachi and their descendants are some of the most fanatical worshippers of the State, more even than the chilonim. One is reminded of the ten tribes of the North Kingdom. They kept Shabbos but were scattered and forever lost due to their idol worship. Mizrachi has committed the unforgivable crime of making the state seem as if it has religious credentials. It would seem impossible for atheists like David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Yitzchak Rabin, and Moshe Dayan to convince the world that their state could be described as Jewish. Impossible on their own but the Mizrachi contributed mightily to erecting such a façade by working with the heretic founders of the State and making them seem as if there were religious overtones or undertones to their heresy. Relying on highly imaginative readings of Torah literature, they fool the unlearned whose faith in Hashem has been transferred over the decades to the State. They claim, for example, that immigration to the State constitutes a gradual redemption. As the Brisker Rav noted, many immigrants came to Israel only to be killed and the Mizrachi have the audacity to claim there's an ingathering of exiles. Since the foundation of the State, tens of thousands of Jews have been killed in Eretz Yisroel, many times more than in all of chutzeh l'aretz combined. Similarly, I ask you, can we say that we are witnessing an ingathering of the exiles when a very high percentage of those exiles threw off religious observance through their immigration? The ingathering is supposed to represent a return to Hashem not the assembly of economic assets and military might. Is this for what our holy ancestors hoped over the centuries – immigration for the cause of irreligiosity? It's impossible. Shlomo ha-Melech wrote in the final line of Koheles, "The sum of the matter is to fear Hashem and to keep His commandments." This is exactly what the Zionists don't do and never intended to do. How could their state possibly bear any connection to the redemption? The redemption is supposed to glorify Hashem. However, the State today has produced likely the biggest chillul Hashem in the history of the world. As Yitzchak Shamir phrased it, "Our image has undergone change from David fighting Goliath to being Goliath." To a believing Jew that represents a transmogrification. We emulate David not Goliath. Even worse, much of the world has come to see Israel and the Jews who it claims to represent more through a comment of Prime Minister and General Ariel Sharon: "I vow that if I was just an Israeli civilian and I met a Palestinian I would burn him and I would make him suffer before killing him." Or this one from Moshe Dayan, "We have no solution... You [Palestinians] shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads." Without getting into a full political analysis of the background for this, I ask, was this any prophet's picture of the redemption? Chillul Hashem also includes the appearance of impropriety. The average Jew may not know it but the State's claim of complete innocence and righteousness with regard to the local Arabs is dubious. Israeli military expert Zev Meoz explains: The notion that Israel’s Wars were Wars of self-defense and that its limited military actions were primarily “retaliatory” in nature rests on shaky foundations. Many Israeli politicians and institutional historians have tried to sell the world and the Israeli public for decades the conception that Israel’s military actions were primarily actions of self-defense. ….most of Israel’s Wars were the result of deliberate aggressive designs or flawed conflict management strategies. At least one War (the Yom Kippur War) could have been avoided by judicious diplomacy. Israel’s War Experience is a story of folly, recklessness, and self-made traps. None of the Wars – with the possible exception of the 1948 War of Independence – was what Israelis call Milhemet Ein Brerah (“War of necessity”). They were all Wars of choice or Wars of folly.6 Meoz is the former head of the IDF MA program. He is not somebody who doesn't get it, who has no right to speak because he doesn't know the State of Israel and its unique situation. And then there's Israeli historian Benny Morris talking about one of his books7, all of which are well-regarded for their academic quality by people from across the political spectrum: It is based on many documents that were not available to me when I wrote the original book, most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives. What the new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought. To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape. In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor of the IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves.
Questioner: According to your new findings, how many cases of Israeli rape were there in 1948?
About a dozen. In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered her and her father. In Jaffa, soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped one girl and tried to rape several more. At Hunin, which is in the Galilee, two girls were raped and then murdered. There were one or two cases of rape at Tantura, south of Haifa. There was one case of rape at Qula, in the center of the country. At the village of Abu Shusha, near Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four female prisoners, one of whom was raped a number of times. And there were other cases. Usually more than one soldier was involved. Usually there were one or two Palestinian girls. In a large proportion of the cases the event ended with murder. Because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg. Questioner: According to your findings, how many acts of Israeli massacre were perpetrated in 1948? Twenty-four. In some cases four or five people were executed, in others the numbers were 70, 80, 100. There was also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men are spotted walking in a field - they are shot. A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shot. There are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which a column entered the village with all guns blazing and killed anything that moved.8 This is much more to say from a political angle. The key takeaway is that one has to have a wild imagination to say that the formation of the State has even the slightest resemblance to the redemption envisioned by the prophets. As the Mizrachi have morphed into the Data Leumi, their apostasy has swelled horribly. Consider the thought of the highly influential Eli Sadan. According to professor Alan Brill, Sadan is “the leading intellectual influence of the Religious Zionist world” and “the architect of the religious military preparatory programs, Bnai David, which in turn became a model for the others.” Says Brill, “the average school principal or teacher is a product of his worldview.” And what is his worldview? Brill summarizes: Sadan invests the government and the army with messianic import as the realistic arm by which God’s providence takes place, similar to the kings in the Bible. In his vision, there is never a heresy in the authority of the state. Religion and Torah scholars define democracy. Refusal of orders is not an option. He is against any form of minority rights, civil rights or liberal democratic principles. Additionally, since the government is like the kings of ancient Israel, he affirms Divine right of Prime Minister and he thinks the military police advance humanity. The message is that the current state is the Divine presence on earth.... Torah study, prayer, ethics, and mizvot take a back burner to realizing the millinarian vision. The building of the state is a mizvah of Torah. The centrality of inheriting the land is the pillar of the Torah. Statements in the Bible such as being a “nation of priests” or “one nation” and all other statements are about nation building. The whole Torah and its very essence is about state building. The State of Israel is God’s presence on earth. The Prime minister should be treated as an angel of God; he is like a king of ancient Israel given by God. There is a divine right of prime Ministers as God’s chosen leader.9 I would have to imagine that neither R' Isaac Herzog nor any other of the early Mizrachi rabbis would recognize this line of thought. Let me rephrase. They wouldn't recognize it as anything Jewish. But it might remind them of fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. He said, “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” and “The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative.” And perhaps most importantly, "Fascism is a religious concept." Given that Sadan is as Brill said the most influential voice in the Dati Leumi world, one can propose that the National Religious aren't religious at all. While the religious portion of world Jewry constitutes only 10% of the total, the Modern Orthodox and Data Leumi, both full blown Zionists, constitute likely more than half of that. The Haskalah and Zionism have reduced the faithful to a few, with the Haskalah removing many of the less faithful and Zionism many of the more faithful. They are faithful no more. As many Torah commentators have pointed out Esav dressed and comported himself much like Yaakov. His flaws were real but subtle and showed themselves fully in his descendants, one of which was Amalek. We must remember the words of the Gadolim who watched Zionism emerge in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They warned us about all Zionists, officially secular and effectively secular:
I have also read your words in connection with the sect of the Zionists who are now powerfully banded together. I do not blush to admit that I know not how to find paths, along which to go forth, against them. Seeing that these men are known as evil in their localities, and have already proclaimed their purpose, to be the uprooting of the fundamentals of the faith and, for this purpose, the conquest of all places in which Jews live, will be as an aid to the fulfilment of their aim. (R' Chaim Brisker, 1853–1918) The Zionists have done even more harm than the 'Society for the Spread of Enlightenment' (Maskilim). The Society gave the people something that was additional to the Torah by spreading their evil view that 'enlightenment' was necessary and obligatory....But the Zionists are far more cunning in their evil and they have made nationalism a substitute for Torah and commandments. (R' Shalom Dov Ber Schneerson, 1860–1920, the Fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe)10 The Brisker Rav was asked if we should daven for the Zionists. He said, we should say the bracha in the Amidah concerning the heretics.11 Certainly, we should stay clear of them. "The greatest rabbis should gather immediately and excommunicate the Zionists. They should exclude them from the Jewish people by forbidding their bread, their wine and intermarriage with them." (R' Yehoshua Leib Diskin, 1818–1898, Mara D‟ara Yisroel v. 2 p. 43) The Zionists have become known in the world, and they are considered like the lowest and the cheapest. Many of them are wicked men, without the yoke of Torah and fear of G-d, men who pursue reform. Many righteous men have already cried out, 'Separate from these men!' Whoever joins this group is considered a guilty soul in the eyes of the Torah. (Rabbi Yehuda Greenwald, 1845–1920, Rabbi of Satmar, Hungary, Tel Talpios, Av 5664) Faithless. They have gone to the dust.
מָרְדֳּכַי אֲשֶׁר הַחִלּוֹתָ לִנְפֹּל לְפָנָיו לֹא-תוּכַל לו כִּי-נָפוֹל תִּפּוֹל, לְפָנָיו -- אסתר ו, יד
If Mordecai, before whom you have begun to fall, is of Jewish descent, you will not prevail against him, but you will surely fall before him. (Megillas Esther 6:14)
Explaining why Megillas Esther uses a double expression for "descent" (ִ נְפּוֹל and תִּפּוֹל) the Gemara (Megillah 16a) says כשהן יורדין יורדין עד עפר וכשהן עולין עולין עד לכוכבים "When they (the Jews) descend they descend to the dust. When they ascend they ascend to the stars."
What is dust? It is a lifeless substance. Dust is dead. The Navi says, "The righteous by their faith they shall live." (Habakuk 2:4) Faith gives us life. The faithless are like the walking dead. They are like the dust and live in the dust.
Who else lives in the dust? The nachash. This was its punishment for tricking Chava into rebelling against Hashem. How is it a punishment? As the Sages explain, the nachash is able to find food readily, wherever it looks. To explain, R' Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld (1848–1932) brings the Gemara in Yevamos (64a) that says that the imahos were denied children at first because if forced them to daven, to look to Hashem. The nachash is put in the position of never needing to daven, to living without faith in Hashem. This is a curse.1
This amazingly is where Jews can go, to a place of no faith. Look at the Zionists, Ben Gurion: "Since I invoke Torah so often, let me state that I don't personally believe in the God it postulates ... I am not religious, nor were the majority of the early builders of Israel believers." Jabotinsky: "There is no justice, no law, and no God in heaven".
These are arguably the two most notable founders of the Zionist state. Herzl who proposed converting all Jews to Catholicism was no better. As he wrote in his diary, "Approximately two years ago, I wanted to solve the Jewish problem, in Austria at any rate, with the aid of the Catholic leaders there. I sought an audience with the Pope in order to tell him: 'Help us against anti-Semitism, and I will generate a mass movement of Jews to convert to Christianity freely and proudly.'" Herzl's partner Max Nordau regarded the Bible as a book of superstition.2
We say the Shema multiple times a day. And what does it tell us, that everything Hashem does is just and for our good. It tells us that if we follow the higher path, follow the precepts, He will give us a home on the land and fill our baskets with bread.
And it will be, if you will diligently obey My commandments which I enjoin upon you this day, to love the L-rd your G‑d and to serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul, I will give rain for your land at the proper time, the early rain and the late rain, and you will gather in your grain, your wine and your oil. (Devarim 11:13-14)
But if we rebel, then we will be cast off of the land.
Take care lest your heart be lured away, and you turn astray and worship alien gods and bow down to them. For then the L-rd's wrath will flare up against you, and He will close the heavens so that there will be no rain and the earth will not yield its produce, and you will swiftly perish from the good land which the L-rd gives you. (Devarim 11:16-17)
R' Akiva said the Shema as he passed from the world al kiddush Hashem as he was being tortured by the Romans.
When R. Akiba was taken out for execution, it was the hour for the recital of the Shema', and while they combed his flesh with iron combs, he was accepting upon himself the kingship of heaven.16 His disciples said to him: Our teacher, even to this point? He said to them: All my days I have been troubled by this verse, 'with all thy soul', [which I interpret,] 'even if He takes thy soul'. I said: When shall I have the opportunity of17 fulfilling this? Now that I have the opportunity shall I not fulfil it? He prolonged the word ehad18 until he expired while saying it. A bath kol19 went forth and proclaimed: Happy art thou, Akiba, that thy soul has departed with the word ehad! (Brachos 61a, Soncino Press)
The Shema is the fundamental statement of Judaism. We embrace the way Hashem has set up life. We embrace the commandments. We embrace reward and punishment. It is all true, trustworthy, and good.
And what do the Zionists say, they say they are going to end the golus. The fundamental declaration of Jewish faith says that Hashem will put us in golus if we don't live properly. The Zionists say they are going to reverse what Hashem has declared. They are going to put us back on the land period. Whether we keep the precepts or not is not a topic. The precepts don't exist for them. They are rebels against the fundamental declaration of our faith.
Exile is one with utter dependence - in material things, in politics and culture, in ethics and intellect, and they must be dependent who are an alien minority, who have no Homeland and are separated from their origins, from the soil and labor, from economic creativity. So we must become the captains of our fortunes, we must become independent - not only in politics and economy but in spirit, feeling and will. (Ben-Gurion)
Eliminate the Diaspora, or the Diaspora will surely eliminate you. (Jabotinsky)
They didn't approve of Hashem's plan. It wasn't good for business.
Let's do the math. It's been 3,829 years since the birth of Avraham. We have been in the Roman golus for 1,949 years, more than half of our national history. If you date our national history back to Sinai, we have been in the Roman golus for more than 60% of our history. Such is Hashem's will. But the Zionists don't like it. In their view, the problem wasn't our failure to keep the commandments or our lack of faith. The problem was our lack of military and political power. Riding high from the emancipation in modern Europe, they were going to restore the worldly power that was taken from us due to our sins even as they kept sinning. That's like a smoker saying he's going to eliminate his cough while he keeps smoking. For those who haven't seen the label on the box, smoking can cause cancer and/or emphysema. The cough is a warning about the danger of smoking.
Is this why the Talmud warns us that if we force the end of the exile, our flesh will be served up like a gazelle to a carnivore?
I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles, and by the hinds of the field, [that ye awaken not, nor stir up love, until it please] (Shir HaShirm 2:7)
By the gazelles, and by the hinds of the field. R. Eleazar explained: The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Israel, 'If you will keep the adjuration, well and good; but if not, I will permit your flesh [to be a prey] like [that of] the gazelles and the hinds of the field'. (Kesubos 111a)
All these years of bloodshed. We complain endlessly about the Arabs and the anti-Semites of the world. But the Talmud warned us, don't force the end of exile. It's a father telling a child who was caught smoking cigarettes, stay in your room until you learn your lesson. I'm trying to save your life. If you leave your room I'll have to give you a bigger punishment.
The Zionists escaped out the window, climbed down the trestle, and lit another cigarette and then another. They want to finish the pack before they move on to another. They weren't going to listen to their father. They don't even believe that they have a father.
Faithless, dead, dust. This, the Gemara is telling us, is the opposite of soaring to the stars. Zionism is the opposite of that, it is the lowest place a Jew can go, faithlessness.
It is lower than where a goy can go because a goy can't go to the stars so he cannot reach its opposite. He doesn't possess a Jewish soul to transport him there. When a goy loves Ireland or Mother Russia, it's a foolishness, it's a materialism. When a Jew worships land or state it's an act of sick spirituality. It's idol worship done with gusto. It has nothing to do with concern for the Jewish people. That's just the veneer they put it on it. It's all self-love, delusion, self-indulgence. It's a lunacy.
If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative. (Ben-Gurion)
This is a lunatic fanaticism, a delusion, an ego trip, a cruelty, a substituting of self for the Divine, a cult, the lowest place a Jew can go.
How low? In the words of R' Elchanan Wasserman:
This is not building the Land of Israel but destroying it. 'These are not the guardians of the city but the destroyers of the city.' This is the worst destruction of the Land of Israel, much worse than past destructions [of the Temple]. (R' Elchanan Wasserman, 1874–1941, Ikvesa Demeshicha, paragraph 40)
And the Satmar Rebbe:
If we were to put all the sins of this generation and all the transgressions committed in the entire world on one side of a scale, and the Zionist state on the other side, it would outweigh everything, for it is the poisonous source of the worst defilement, the worst cause of damage in the entire world, and they are ones who defile the entire world. (Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, 1887–1979, Rebbe of Satmar, Vayoel Moshe, Introduction, p. 11)
If these words sound extreme, try to understand them from a religious perspective. The Gemara at the end of Makkos says that 613 precepts were communicated to Moshe and then came Dovid ha-Melech who reduced them to eleven, then Isaiah to six, Michah to three, Isaiah to two, and then finally Habakkuk to one. What does this mean? It doesn't mean that we are not obligated in all the commandments. Rather, several explanations are offered. The Ramah explains that originally a person merited protection from the evil inclination as well as physical protection only via fulfillment of all the commandments. Dovid and the later prophets davened that Hashem should have mercy and grant the same protection to the person who does not fulfill them all.3 Perhaps this refers to a complete fulfillment including intent. The Sefer ha-Ikarim explains that the later prophets saw that it was too difficult for a person to concentrate on 613 individual commandments as he fulfilled each one. Thus, they categorized the commandments into groups, enabling a person to fulfill the entire Torah while concentrating only on a limited number of commandments or groups of commandments.4
And what was the single mitzvah or category that Habakkuk left us with: "The righteous by his faith shall live." The Insights into the Daily Daf explains:
The Maharsha adds that in truth, all of the 613 Mitzvos are based on certain general categories, as the Aseres ha'Dibros allude to all 613 Mitzvos. Moreover, all of the Mitzvos can be narrowed down to one basic Mitzvah that encompasses all of the Mitzvos -- the Mitzvah of Emunah in Hash-m. This is the intention of David ha'Melech when he says, "Kol Mitzvosecha Emunah" -- "All of your Mitzvos are Emunah" (Tehilim 119:86). The Maharsha adds that this is necessarily so, since Hash-m is One, and thus His will must be one. This is why Hash-m Himself spoke to the Jewish people at Sinai and told them all of the Aseres ha'Dibros at once, and then He later began to repeat them separately so that the Jewish people could hear each one individually. This means that from Hashem's perspective, the Mitzvos are all one; they are all the unity of Hashem's will. However, man cannot understand all of the Mitzvos from that perspective, and therefore he needs them to be spelled out individually, into 613 Mitzvos.
This is what the Gemara means when it introduces its discussion by saying that the Jewish people heard the Mitzvos of "Anochi" and "Lo Yiheyeh" directly from Hash-m. These two Mitzvos are the two parts of the Mitzvah of Emunah (to accept Hash-m and not to accept any other power), and this is the Mitzvah that the nation heard directly from Hash-m when He began to repeat each individual Mitzvah. It is this Mitzvah in particular that He expressed to the nation, because it is the Mitzvah of Emunah which encompasses all of the Mitzvos.5
From this Gemara and the commentary on it we can see how essential is faith. It's the pillar of right living. Faithlessness is the cause of wrong living. Zionism, which is a fundamental rebellion against Hashem, which is faithlessness by definition, is a major source of the problems of the world. It might be the major source of the problems because it is the source of faithlessness even among many of the allegedly religious.
The Mizrachi are in many respects worse than the secular Zionists. One might say, but aren't they believers? Perhaps, to an extent, but they mix the avodah zarah of Zionism into it. They put land before Torah. They believe their protection comes from the army, the government, and the land and safety being a paramount issue in post-1948. This is not a small injection of idol worship. It's a very big one and Mizrachi and their descendants are some of the most fanatical worshippers of the State, more even than the chilonim. One is reminded of the ten tribes of the North Kingdom. They kept Shabbos but were scattered and forever lost due to their idol worship.
Mizrachi has committed the unforgivable crime of making the state seem as if it has religious credentials. It would seem impossible for atheists like David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Yitzchak Rabin, and Moshe Dayan to convince the world that their state could be described as Jewish. Impossible on their own but the Mizrachi contributed mightily to erecting such a façade by working with the heretic founders of the State and making them seem as if there were religious overtones or undertones to their heresy.
Relying on highly imaginative readings of Torah literature, they fool the unlearned whose faith in Hashem has been transferred over the decades to the State. They claim, for example, that immigration to the State constitutes a gradual redemption. As the Brisker Rav noted, many immigrants came to Israel only to be killed and the Mizrachi have the audacity to claim there's an ingathering of exiles. Since the foundation of the State, tens of thousands of Jews have been killed in Eretz Yisroel, many times more than in all of chutzeh l'aretz combined.
Similarly, I ask you, can we say that we are witnessing an ingathering of the exiles when a very high percentage of those exiles threw off religious observance through their immigration? The ingathering is supposed to represent a return to Hashem not the assembly of economic assets and military might. Is this for what our holy ancestors hoped over the centuries – immigration for the cause of irreligiosity? It's impossible. Shlomo ha-Melech wrote in the final line of Koheles, "The sum of the matter is to fear Hashem and to keep His commandments." This is exactly what the Zionists don't do and never intended to do. How could their state possibly bear any connection to the redemption?
The redemption is supposed to glorify Hashem. However, the State today has produced likely the biggest chillul Hashem in the history of the world. As Yitzchak Shamir phrased it, "Our image has undergone change from David fighting Goliath to being Goliath." To a believing Jew that represents a transmogrification. We emulate David not Goliath. Even worse, much of the world has come to see Israel and the Jews who it claims to represent more through a comment of Prime Minister and General Ariel Sharon: "I vow that if I was just an Israeli civilian and I met a Palestinian I would burn him and I would make him suffer before killing him." Or this one from Moshe Dayan, "We have no solution... You [Palestinians] shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads." Without getting into a full political analysis of the background for this, I ask, was this any prophet's picture of the redemption? Chillul Hashem also includes the appearance of impropriety.
The average Jew may not know it but the State's claim of complete innocence and righteousness with regard to the local Arabs is dubious. Israeli military expert Zev Meoz explains:
The notion that Israel’s Wars were Wars of self-defense and that its limited military actions were primarily “retaliatory” in nature rests on shaky foundations. Many Israeli politicians and institutional historians have tried to sell the world and the Israeli public for decades the conception that Israel’s military actions were primarily actions of self-defense.
….most of Israel’s Wars were the result of deliberate aggressive designs or flawed conflict management strategies. At least one War (the Yom Kippur War) could have been avoided by judicious diplomacy. Israel’s War Experience is a story of folly, recklessness, and self-made traps. None of the Wars – with the possible exception of the 1948 War of Independence – was what Israelis call Milhemet Ein Brerah (“War of necessity”). They were all Wars of choice or Wars of folly.6
Meoz is the former head of the IDF MA program. He is not somebody who doesn't get it, who has no right to speak because he doesn't know the State of Israel and its unique situation.
And then there's Israeli historian Benny Morris talking about one of his books7, all of which are well-regarded for their academic quality by people from across the political spectrum:
It is based on many documents that were not available to me when I wrote the original book, most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives. What the new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought. To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape. In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor of the IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves.
Questioner: According to your new findings, how many cases of Israeli rape were there in 1948?
About a dozen. In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered her and her father. In Jaffa, soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped one girl and tried to rape several more. At Hunin, which is in the Galilee, two girls were raped and then murdered. There were one or two cases of rape at Tantura, south of Haifa. There was one case of rape at Qula, in the center of the country. At the village of Abu Shusha, near Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four female prisoners, one of whom was raped a number of times. And there were other cases. Usually more than one soldier was involved. Usually there were one or two Palestinian girls. In a large proportion of the cases the event ended with murder. Because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg.
Questioner: According to your findings, how many acts of Israeli massacre were perpetrated in 1948?
Twenty-four. In some cases four or five people were executed, in others the numbers were 70, 80, 100. There was also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men are spotted walking in a field - they are shot. A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shot. There are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which a column entered the village with all guns blazing and killed anything that moved.8
This is much more to say from a political angle. The key takeaway is that one has to have a wild imagination to say that the formation of the State has even the slightest resemblance to the redemption envisioned by the prophets.
As the Mizrachi have morphed into the Data Leumi, their apostasy has swelled horribly. Consider the thought of the highly influential Eli Sadan. According to professor Alan Brill, Sadan is “the leading intellectual influence of the Religious Zionist world” and “the architect of the religious military preparatory programs, Bnai David, which in turn became a model for the others.” Says Brill, “the average school principal or teacher is a product of his worldview.”
And what is his worldview? Brill summarizes:
Sadan invests the government and the army with messianic import as the realistic arm by which God’s providence takes place, similar to the kings in the Bible.
In his vision, there is never a heresy in the authority of the state. Religion and Torah scholars define democracy. Refusal of orders is not an option.
He is against any form of minority rights, civil rights or liberal democratic principles. Additionally, since the government is like the kings of ancient Israel, he affirms Divine right of Prime Minister and he thinks the military police advance humanity. The message is that the current state is the Divine presence on earth....
Torah study, prayer, ethics, and mizvot take a back burner to realizing the millinarian vision.
The building of the state is a mizvah of Torah. The centrality of inheriting the land is the pillar of the Torah. Statements in the Bible such as being a “nation of priests” or “one nation” and all other statements are about nation building. The whole Torah and its very essence is about state building. The State of Israel is God’s presence on earth.
The Prime minister should be treated as an angel of God; he is like a king of ancient Israel given by God. There is a divine right of prime Ministers as God’s chosen leader.9
I would have to imagine that neither R' Isaac Herzog nor any other of the early Mizrachi rabbis would recognize this line of thought. Let me rephrase. They wouldn't recognize it as anything Jewish. But it might remind them of fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. He said, “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” and “The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative.” And perhaps most importantly, "Fascism is a religious concept." Given that Sadan is as Brill said the most influential voice in the Dati Leumi world, one can propose that the National Religious aren't religious at all. While the religious portion of world Jewry constitutes only 10% of the total, the Modern Orthodox and Data Leumi, both full blown Zionists, constitute likely more than half of that. The Haskalah and Zionism have reduced the faithful to a few, with the Haskalah removing many of the less faithful and Zionism many of the more faithful. They are faithful no more. As many Torah commentators have pointed out Esav dressed and comported himself much like Yaakov. His flaws were real but subtle and showed themselves fully in his descendants, one of which was Amalek.
We must remember the words of the Gadolim who watched Zionism emerge in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They warned us about all Zionists, officially secular and effectively secular:
I have also read your words in connection with the sect of the Zionists who are now powerfully banded together. I do not blush to admit that I know not how to find paths, along which to go forth, against them. Seeing that these men are known as evil in their localities, and have already proclaimed their purpose, to be the uprooting of the fundamentals of the faith and, for this purpose, the conquest of all places in which Jews live, will be as an aid to the fulfilment of their aim. (R' Chaim Brisker, 1853–1918)
The Zionists have done even more harm than the 'Society for the Spread of Enlightenment' (Maskilim). The Society gave the people something that was additional to the Torah by spreading their evil view that 'enlightenment' was necessary and obligatory....But the Zionists are far more cunning in their evil and they have made nationalism a substitute for Torah and commandments. (R' Shalom Dov Ber Schneerson, 1860–1920, the Fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe)10
The Brisker Rav was asked if we should daven for the Zionists. He said, we should say the bracha in the Amidah concerning the heretics.11
Certainly, we should stay clear of them. "The greatest rabbis should gather immediately and excommunicate the Zionists. They should exclude them from the Jewish people by forbidding their bread, their wine and intermarriage with them." (R' Yehoshua Leib Diskin, 1818–1898, Mara D‟ara Yisroel v. 2 p. 43)
The Zionists have become known in the world, and they are considered like the lowest and the cheapest. Many of them are wicked men, without the yoke of Torah and fear of G-d, men who pursue reform. Many righteous men have already cried out, 'Separate from these men!' Whoever joins this group is considered a guilty soul in the eyes of the Torah. (Rabbi Yehuda Greenwald, 1845–1920, Rabbi of Satmar, Hungary, Tel Talpios, Av 5664)
Faithless. They have gone to the dust.
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