"The Soul Of A Jew" "When The Time Comes To Spearate" - 1989

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"

If interested in links to other places, please write to me and I will forward them.

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

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