Elul 1977

 

 

Rabbi Meir Kahane

ON JEWS AND JUDAISM

2 Elul 5737 - September 2, 1977

Elul

The Jewish calendar is full of notations, red letter days that are meant to be both particular reminders as well as part of a uniform one:  time is passing; the sands of life have run out just a bit more; the beard is a little grayer and the limbs just a touch heavier.  Time.  The Jewish calendar is a watchman of time, ram’s horn that blows not once a year but every time that a new time cycle begins.

Every week is marked by a Sabbath that notes not only the end of the week passed but the beginning of a new one. It is both a reminder of seven full days passed out of our life – so soon! – as well as the opportunity to make the next period fuller, more meaningful, a reason for being.

Every month is marked by a Rosh Chodesh, the consecration of the new beginning of yet another lunar cycle.  The wheel of heaven has revolved yet another thirty days – so soon! – and we are that much older.  The L-rd now gives us another month to prove that we are also that much wiser.  It is not only another month, it is a new month.   Above all, it is called Rosh Chodesh, the “head” of the month.  Is there perhaps here a hint to see how much wisdom has filled our heads during the mistakes and sins of the past one…?

And every year has its Rosh Hashana, that peculiarly Jewish day in which there are no parties and drinking and abandonment of restraint; in which there is no hilarious laughter and noise that is a frantic and frenetic attempt to convince all (and oneself) that he is happy; there is no frantic clutching at pleasure before it escapes and – worse  - before I pass on; too soon, too soon.  There is Rosh Hashana, the time past.  Another year gone by – already?  So soon! – and it is a time to see what the gray hairs and the added wrinkles and the slower reflexes have taught us.  Rosh Hashana is one step closer to the gateway out of this world and into the next one.  It is a time to rehearse the speech that we will make – all of us – some day, before the Supremest of Courts, as we attempt to explain the meaning of our lives below.

Life is too short for fools.  It is too long for those who know it was not given for happiness (if that comes, how wonderful, but how often does it appear, only in insignificant measures and at rare times, as drops of rain that fall on a parched desert leaving no impact, changing nothing so that the traveler never knows it fell).  Life was given for holiness and sanctity, so that we might rise above ourselves; so that we might consecrate and hallow that animalism within us that threatens at every moment to escape and express itself in selfishness, ego and greed – sins that are themselves only the corridors to the crimes of cruelty and hurting others.  Life is not a happy thing – it is a beautiful thing, and when one becomes the artist and artisan of that beauty that is called holiness, when one practices the supreme holiness that comes of loving and giving of oneself.

“Ani  l’dodi  v’dodi li…”  “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine…”  the words of the greatest of love poems, Song of Songs; great because it is that purest of love, between the Almighty and the House of Israel.  Consider them, for do they not contain the essence and the secret of true love?  “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.”  When I am my beloved’s, when I give to her and give of myself and live to do for her and make her happy – then I am guaranteed that she is mine for she will, in turn, be doing the same for me.  The lovers who think of giving to each other must receive from each other.  This is love, this desire to give, this desire to sacrifice and do for the other.

Not for nothing was the Song of Songs called by the incomparable Rabbi Akiva, “the Holy of Holies” of all the books of the Bible.  For the kind of love expressed in it IS holiness.  Holiness is to escape from the selfishness and greed of the animal; it is to smash the passions and desires of the ego; it is to master the will that makes man seek only his own gratification.  And is not love just that, in practice?  Is not love exactly that, if it is true love?

And not for no reason did the rabbis see in the Hebrew letters of the month of Elul the first letters of  “Ani l’dodi v’dodi li – I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.”  Elul is the month of Tshuva, return and introspection.  It is the month of scraping away the ego that has settled and crusted on our hearts and souls.  If Passover calls for searching out he leaven in the home, Elul decrees removing it – the yeasty and bloated ego – from the soul.  It is a time to note the calendar, the graying and aging, and to realize: Not for nonsense was I born and not with nonsense must they bury me.

Be good.  Love.  Love selflessly; cease speaking evil, cease thinking evil; cease searching out evil in your fellow human beings.  Cease seeking to grow at the expense of others.  For one who climbs on top of the man he has just chopped down is not taller.  He is the same dwarf standing on his victim’s height.  Be wary lest you hurt the one you love.  Think before you act towards the other person.  Be good as a person, as an individual, and your part of the world will become holy.  Then, if others emulate you, the world will suddenly and automatically turn beautiful and hallowed.  It is Elul.  Think of your beloved – all the people of the earth – and think of your particular beloved.  Give of yourself and you will receive that which no amount of grasping and scheming can ever bring you: self-respect.  Love the other and you will learn to like yourself.  Be holy, for the One who made you is Holy and for this He placed you on this earth.  It is another Elul, yet another one.  How many more are left?

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On A Mountain, With A Trumpet - 1988

K A H A N E

The magazine of the authentic Jewish Idea

July –August 1988     Tamuz – Menachem Av 5748

On A Mountain, With A Trumpet (excerpts)

“But if the watchman see the sword come and blow not the trumpet and the people be not warned; if the sword cometh and take from them a soul…his blood will I require from the watchman”.  (Ezekiel 33)

I sit on the mountain with a trumpet in my hand.  We all sit on a mountain, each of us a watchman with a trumpet in hand.  Our mission is to sit and see the enemy.  Our mission is to see the danger, to search our own souls and to blow the trumpet and warn the rest – the rest of the Jewish people.

I sit on a mountain as the sands slip through, the clock ticks away and the Almighty watches from above to see whether the sleeping Jew will awake on top of the mountain to see the enemy and blow the trumpet and save himself and all the rest and reclaim his greatness and his destiny before there are no more years left.

We are all watchmen, we Jews.  We are commanded to know the danger, to see it approach, to blow the trumpet and save, both ourselves and our fellow Jews.

How possible to sit on a mountain and behave like valleys! How incredible that we sit on high, seeing all that is below, and sees nothing!  How awful that the watchman sleeps even as the enemy grows bolder and comes closer and the clock that ticks, rings its alarm, shrilly, without pause, and he hears nothing.  We are a nation of watchmen on a hill and we sleep the sleep of the mediocre fool.  “Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest; so shall thy poverty come as one who travels and they want as an armed man.” (Proverbs 6)         

I sit on the mountain and, behold, the enemy, the terrible dangers, are in full view.  There they are, there they approach, those who travel, as armed men.  Jew, can you not see them:

• A land of Israel that sees Arabs rioting without fear of an army hobbled by tragic orders of small men, fearful of the nations and what they will say; little men who never though for a moment of fear: What will G-d say?  A land in which soldiers and civilians – are stoned by howling Arabs whose self-confidence and certainty grow in proportion to the hesitation, uncertainty and loss of confidence on the part of Jews.  A land in which Arab citizens of Israel puncture the absurd myth of “loyalty” to the Jewish State by carrying the riots and hatred and the cries of  “We will free Palestine,” into the Jewish cities of Jaffa and Lydda and Acre.  A land of Israel which sees its Jewish citizens, frustrated and bitter at the impotence of the government, who are gripped by the terrible thought: Perhaps, G-d forbid, the State will not survive…
• A Land of Israel in which the “stranger”, so beloved by the guilt-ridden eyrev rav, mixed multitude, of our times, the “stranger”, the Arab, “rises above us higher and higher and we sink lower and lower.”
• A Land of Israel in which fear stalks the highway, and the inner psyche of the Jewish citizen, as soldiers and civilians are murdered regularly and the proud new Jew, the product of the Zionism of Herzl, and Borochov and Jabotinksy, the one who left Minsk and Pinsk and Fez and Sa’ana, who fled the fear and psyche of Minsk and Pinsk and Fez and Sa’ana and the psychological ghetto of the exile.  A land in which fear grips the Jew and Zionism dies a pathetic spiritual death.
• A land of Israel in which there are funerals each week, funerals of Jews who did not fall in battle but who were murdered in the streets and in the fields of Eretz Yisrael, and an impotent Jewish government “gropes at noonday as the blind gropeth in darkness,” and has no answer, even as it frees 1100 terrorists and jails Jewish heroes.  A land in which the glory of Samson is shorn from our heads by the Peresitic Delilahs and strength ebbs from the body Israel even as the Palestinian-Philistines pledge: “See wherein his great strength lieth and by what means we may prevail against him…. And we will give you every one of us eleven hundred pieces of silver.”
• A Land of Israel in which the army is slowly destroyed as a fighting force and the morale of its soldiers shattered by timid and frightened orders, conceived in gentilized concepts and born in fear of that gentile, not to strike with an all powerful hand at the enemy – lest women and children, who are an integral part of that enemy, be hurt.  A land that ties the hands of its soldiers and thus passes a death sentence on them, a land that sees more and more Jews fearful of army service and fearful of taking the action that will save their own lives.
• A Land of Israel that sees our enemy grow bolder, encouraged by the madness and gentilization of the Hellenists, the mixed multitude who destroy the Jewish state in stages even as they pretend to govern it.  A land that see Arab boldness and confidence increase in proportion to Jewish insecurity, guilt, weakness, confusion, stumbling and fear.  A land that sees a guarantee of worse, much worse, Arab action and slaughter of Jews, as the barrier of fear is swept away, a land that will make Northern Ireland appear idyllic, as the wild man who is Ishmael, emerges in all his barbarism and savagery.
• A Land of Israel that sees the Jewish character of the land disappear under the hobnailed boots of the storm troopers of the self-hating and fascist Left.  The ones who spiritually destroyed Sephardic Jews and who kidnapped young Yemenite Jewish infants even as they stripped Jewishness from the souls of their parents.  The ones who, driven by self-hate and with a Judaism that they see as hideous hump they cannot escape, attempt to destroy our children, our people, by ordering enforced gathering together of Arab and Jewish youngsters in Arab villages and Jewish towns, in weekends and dances and songs, sounds of music that are a funeral dirge for Jewish survival.  A land that opens the doors to the impurity and pollution of intermarriage and assimilation and calls them “good.”  A land that in the moves to increase the defilement of the Jewish seed and Jewish purity, that is seen already all too clearly in the Jewish women living in Arab villages, in the Jewish prostitutes and their Arab pimps, in the Jewish girls sitting and laughing with Arabs on the beaches and in the coffee houses.
• A Land of Israel in which the economy dies even as the men of fraud pretend that it improves; a land in which unemployment and disaster will unravel the social fabric leading to chaos and anarchy in the streets.  A land in which young Jews, released from the army, find themselves unemployed, as greedy Jewish employers prefer two Arabs for the price of a single Jewish worker.  A land in which cities see entire areas becoming Arab, as Ishmaelite arrives, cash dollars in hand, dollars that come across the Jordan bridges from the PLO coffers, and buys apartments, in neighborhoods and towns.
• A Land of Israel that sees a Knesset populated, not only by Arab enemies of the state, but by Jewish ones. Jews who are enveloped with blind, obsessive hate against religion, against Judaism.  Jews who cannot sleep without dreaming of ways to liquidate Judaism.  Who yearn to go to war against Judaism and erase it from the earth and who are so spiritually sick that they prepare to go to war and murder the Jews they so hate.
• A Land that sees the Arab, free of obligation to serve the country, free of paying his full share of taxes, multiplying at a rate that sees the Galilee and Wadi Ara and the Triangle, filled with a majority of Arabs, Arabs whose quantity is matched by a quality stemming from Jewish madness as the Hellenists in their guilt and self hate took an ignorant, illiterate peasant’s child and turned him into an educated intellectual who is the greatest danger to the survival of Israel, who is the future leader of the PLO.  A land that sees Jewish madmen subsidizing the Arab birthrate by paying checks each month for every child.
• A land that, through a perverted  “democracy” and “coexistence” calmly salutes national suicide as it allows the Arabs to grow swiftly and move towards a majority, a majority that will vote Israel out of existence on the way to slaughter that will be a thousand fold that which they commit against each other daily in Lebanon.
• A Land that sees immigration into the country dry up even as Israeli Jews seek to flee the country, their main obstacle being American and Western immigration quotas.  A land that is unhappy, that has lost confidence in itself, in the justice of its own cause and in the iron guarantee that “Israel can never go under.”  A land in the hands of the gentilized Hebrews, the hideous Hellenists, the mixed multitude.

The enemy comes nearer, the dangers are closer, and I sit on a mountain and blow

 the trumpet.  Arise, O slumbering Jews and save yourself, save your body, save your soul!

I sit and blow the trumpet and the Jew sleeps on, or reacts in vicious anger and shouts: Silence, we sleep!  I sit and blow the trumpet and plead with brothers and sisters to arouse themselves, their people – to bring the Messiah now.

Another year enters the volumes of time and the next takes its place in the march

 toward Jewish destiny.  The sands of the New Year are already running.  Running out.  The sands slip through, the clock ticks away and the Almighty waits to see whether the sleeping Jew will awaken from his slumber to reclaim his greatness and destiny before there are no more years left.

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The Real Lesson - Pollard - 1987

Beyond Words

Selected Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane,

1960-1990

Volume 5

“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.  On the search line, type…  Beyond Words Kahane.

The Real Lesson

Written March, 1987

The flood of articles and statements by various American Jews in the wake of the Pollard affair constitutes a morbidly fascinating exhibit of the deep insecurity afflicting a community that so publicly boasts of its feelings of political and civic security.  The unrestrained attacks by Jewish leaders and columnists on Pollard, the blistering criticism of Israel, the exaggerated charges and reactions that are so patently an effort to distance themselves from the Jewish state, all reveal the unpalatable reality of the Jewish Establishment that never could and never will overcome its basic fears of the ghosts of anti-Semitism past.  In the deepest recess of the consciousness, it suspects that “it” could happen in America too.

Surely the most complex and pitiful of the attempts to flee the Pollard-loosed perception of anti-Semitism is that of Jacob Neusner, a Conservative rabbi and Hillel director at Brown University, whose “Ode to America” in the Washington Post must surely rank as the best example of fearful protestation before the non-Jewish minority since similar lamentable efforts to prove “loyalty” on the part of pre-Hitler German Jewry

One can only shake his head sadly as he watches Neusner genuflect and slavishly exclaim that if ever there was a Promised Land the American Jew lives in it and that it is better to be a Jew in the United States than in Jerusalem.  Here is the very essence of the Jew of the Diaspora, so terrified of the gentile and so frantically seeking to prove that he is more American than the American, just as his Hebraic predecessor in Weimar labored to prove to the Aryan he was not so much a Jew as a “German of Mosaic persuasion.”  And here, of course, is the real lesson of the Pollard case.

The American Jew, as part of the neurotic need of a people, persecuted for centuries, to believe that, finally, they had found a gentile haven, created the self-deluding myth that “it” could never happen in America.  To bolster this castle in America, every possible statistic of economic and social progress is trotted out.  Every poll “proving” that the people asked claimed to be against anti-Semitism is happily waved on high.  Every Jewish appointment or election to office is headlined as proof that the Jew, as Neusner trumpets, has, indeed, reached the Promised Land.

How fragile the myth!  How vulnerable to the slightest shock and vibration of reality!  The self-proclaimed assurance is shaken to the core by every Ivan Boesky case, by every Kennedy-type assassination (when not more than five million American Jews turned privately pale and whispered: “let it not have been a Jew who did it . . . “).  The very structure totters as Pollard marches across the American living room as headline news.

The pathetic truth is that an overwhelming sector of the American Jewish community never really believed its own self-deception.  It is the insecurity of centuries that has become part of the Diaspora Jewish psyche, which leads people like Neusner to write patently exaggerated and embarrassing paeans of praise, not so much to America, but to the feared American gentile.  Neusner’s article is an almost humiliating form of  “Uriah Heepism,” a throwback to the French Jewish leader Lippman Cerf-Berr who, upon hearing that the French National Assembly had granted Jews citizenship, wept and exclaimed:  “G-d chose this noble French nation to bring us a new birth . . . This (French) nation asks no thanks except that we show ourselves worthy citizens.”

I do not believe that Neusner really believed the nonsense he wrote.  But if he really is part of that blissfully ignorant minority of American Jews that does, I suggest that he leave the Ivy-covered walls of Brown University for a few nights and get himself to a bar.  Not a trendy Ivy-League bar but a neighborhood one, where America really drinks, where he can hear the American singing.  Let him sit quietly and listen to the conversations as the schnapps goes in.  Let him hear what comes out.  The incredible jealousy.  The Jews who control America, the Jews, the Jews, the Jews . . .

It is a hatred that is real and almost palpable, a hatred that owes so much to the very thing that made the American Jew believe in the “Promised Land.”  Jewish progress.

The reality is that the most bitter winds of anti-Semitism are blowing today in America and only the past few decades of economic well-being have prevented them raging into a terrible conflagration.  But that is all ending.  The West and the United States face an all-too-real threat of economic crisis and collapse which will lead to the unraveling of the social fabric and the loosening of the wild beasts of Jew-hatred.

The real lesson of the Pollard affair is not to write painfully embarrassing articles of self-delusion and libations to the non-Jew.  The really lesson for the American Jew is that it is time to come home.  Home to Israel.

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Memoir to a Murderer - 1989

Beyond Words

Selected Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane,

1960-1990

Volume 6

 “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

On the search line, type…  Beyond Words Kahane.

Memoir to a Murderer

Who murdered them?  Who really murdered them?

There are 14 of them, as of this moment.  Fourteen murdered Jews and many others who will bear the scars of the horror on their bodies for life.  More Jewish victims of the Hillul Hashem, the desecration of the Name, that the State of Israel has become.  More Jewish victims within the State of Israel, who make a mockery of the lie and fraud emanating from the Ministry of tourism, travel bureaus and cynically deceitful Jewish leaders who babble about how much safer it is in Israel than in Harlem . . .

Jews murdered on a Jewish bus traveling the main Jewish highway between Tel

Aviv and Jerusalem.  Jews murdered by an Arab passenger who seized the wheel and drove the bus 90 feet down into a ravine.  Jews murdered in the state that promised them the opportunity “to be a free people in their own land . . .”

And the question of questions, the one that must thunder out and silence all the tiny dwarfs who regurgitate the nonsense of attacking the Arabs, and condemning the Arabs, and railing at the Arabs who have only done what only normal human being could expect of them, is:

Who really murdered the Jews on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road in the Jewish state?

Who murdered them?  Who are the partners, the accomplices in the murder of these Jews?  Whose hands are stained with their blood?  Whose souls will forever be marked with the guilt, the sin, the crime of the murder of Jews?

Why, surely as G-d is our witness, the very same whose hands are stained with the blood of each and every other Jew murdered in cold blood  within the Jewish state over the last 18 years, to whom I have been crying out my demand.  “Expel them!  Expel the Arabs! Expel them before they murder Jews!”

Who murders Jews in Israel?  I will tell you, so that you will know and cringe and be ashamed.  Who murders Jews in Israel?  I will tell you, so that Jews will weep with broken heart for their part in it and ask G-d forgiveness and plead for atonement with the souls of the murdered Jews whose blood they helped shed.

Who murders Jews in Israel?

·        Every Jew who worships at the altar of gentilized, Hellenized, foreign culture that stands as a monument to the pagan gods of false “morality” and “humanism” and “ethics.”  Every Jew who ever babbled about “racism” and “fascism” and who obscenely compared the call for the expulsion of Arabs who would murder, massacre and exterminate Jews to the acts of Nazis, of cursed memory.  Every Jew who ever called Kahane a “Nazi,” and who called out his solidarity with the Arabs in the name of a perverted and twisted “morality” and “humanism,” murdered the Jews of the bus and every other Jew who has been murdered because the Arabs were allowed to remain in the country, thanks to them . . .

·        The governments of Israel who refused to expel the Arabs, and who, instead, banned and arrested and persecuted Kach members, murdered those Jew.

·        The leftist-controlled Israeli news media that barred Meir Kahane and that launched a jihad against him and propagated the myth of Arab-Jewish coexistence, murdered those Jews.

·        The leftists and intellectuals and the kibbutzim and those who comprise the political parties of Israel that march and demonstrate and protest and write and screech about “democracy,” and  who swear to climb the barricades and to fight Kahanism as they swear fealty to their Arab cousins, murdered those Jews.

·        The Likud and Tchiya and Shamir and Sharon and Gush Emunim, the “right-wing” and the “nationalists” who joined in the condemnation of Kahane and expulsion of Arabs, and who spread the myth of Jewish-Arab living together, murdered those Jews.

·        The American Jewish Establishment, with its condemnation of Kahane and of my demand to expel the Arabs, murdered those Jews.

·        The American liberal and leftist Jews, suffering from the Michael Lerner disease, who attacked Jews as “fascists” and embraced Arab murderers, murdered those Jews.

·        The UJA Federations and Jewish Community Relations Councils and Jewish Community Centers that poisoned the minds of the Jews of their communities with lies and slander and libel against Meir Kahane, and which refused to allow me to speak even as they invited Arabs sworn to wipe out Israel, murdered those Jews.

·        The Temple rabbis who along with their Boards and directors, refused to allow Meir Kahane a platform, and instead condemned the plan to expel Arabs as “Nazi” and “un-Jewish,” murdered those Jews.

·        The religious Jews, of Beverly Hills and Manhattan and Boro Park and everywhere else, who refused Meir Kahane a platform and who, in sublime ignorance, babbled condemnation of my plan to expel the Arabs (“We dare not antagonize the nations”), murdered those Jews.

·        The Jews of the synagogues and temples and community centers, who sat by passively and allowed me to be barred and who refused to demand my right to be heard and to convince Jews, murdered those Jews.

·        The Jews of silence, the “good and simple ones” who “support Kahane,” quietly, timidly, fearfully – and who never gave of themselves for me, who never gave me the money or public support that would have allowed me to win and expel the Arabs and save Jewish lives, murdered those Jews.

And if you who read this are one of the above, know – you helped murder Jews.  And worse, you will murder more Jews in the future.

So be ashamed.  And stop condemning Arabs, lest the wrath of the All Mighty overflow against the hypocrisy of people whose hands are red with Jewish blood and who blame others for it.  Look in the mirror and think of the murdered Jews and cry out in anguish for forgiveness.  Because in that mirror you see the murderer.

Written – July 14, 1989

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