Changing the System - 1990

 “Beyond Words” is a newly-published seven volume collection of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s writings from 1960 – 1990 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  

Press CTRL and click link to open site
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Beyond+Words+Kahane

Beyond Words

Selected Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane,
1960-1990
Volume 7

CHANGING THE SYSTEM

Let it be clear as it could possibly be:  The main motivation behind the extraordinary, demonic drive for a change in the Israeli political system is the desire and passion to destroy the political power of the religious parties and community in Israel.

 Disgust with the present system of corruption and bribery and stealing from the public trough?  Indeed, there is that and more, but for thirty years as Mapai and Labor-Left and its Mapam and kibbutz allies ruled the country with all the arrogance and contempt of some Stalinist Boss Tweed, corruption ran rampant and bribery was the order of the day, and they stole shamelessly by the light of the day.  The Histadrut ran the country and ran the money and took the money and created a cadre wealthy arrogant political leftist labor leaders.  The kibbutzim received the best land in the country and fully 30% of the water despite the fact that they totaled three percent of the population, at best.  Parties decided how much money to take for their expenses and needs – at will.  Never in Israel’s history was there ever a single party able to form a government without a coalition, and how much political bribery was paid then!  Knesset members switched parties, and all that the liberals and leftists suddenly find disgusting began and flourished for decades under the liberals and leftist.  And no one shouted:

Change the system!

More, in those days they not only stole money, the stole people.  They not only killed democracy, they kidnapped children and destroyed souls.  The Sephardic immigrants who came to Israel were treated with contempt and with strong-arm tactics that were worthy of the Bolshevik Mafia that ran the country.  The earlocks that were ripped from Yemenite children’s heads went along with the forced irreligion that was thrust upon them in the Kibbutzim and Youth Aliyah institutions so proudly boasted of by the same Hadassah which, today, demands a change of the system.  Six hundred Yemenite children, kidnapped after being born, and given to elite members of the political Mafia establishment, are still missing, and the results of the deliberate destruction of Judaism within hundreds of thousands of Sephardic Jews by the left-liberal Mafia can be seen today in the crime, violence, pornography and general destruction of values of the grandchildren of the Jews of Spiritual genocide.  And no one shouted then: Change the system!

What was done to the religious Sephardic Jews then was deliberate, just as what is being done today is deliberate. Just as then the left-liberal Mafia feared the growth of the religious political power in the “democracy” that was Israel and so they went about destroying it, so, too, today the motivation behind the hypocritical call for change in the system in the name of “democracy” is an obscene fear that in a democracy the religious will win the day because of their population growth.

And so, the Nazi-like caricature that appear in the papers and the blatant incitement to hate against the religious.  And the outrage over ten of millions of shkalim to religious institutions when the kibbutzim just had debts of billions wiped away, and the Histadrut’s corrupt institutions are bailed out with hundreds of millions of shkalim from the Treasury, and the Likud – a partner in corruption ever since it got a taste of power – decides to raise the amount of money for the parties since it is deeply in debt.

 If all that was troubling the “moralists of democracy” was the power of small parties, there is a simple solution to it and that is to raise the percentage of votes needed for a Knesset seat from the present 1% to three or four or five.  That would eliminate all small parties and produce four major ones, as blocs are formed – right, left, cent and religious.  Ah, but that is the problem.  The religious would still be there and still be in a position to grow, through babies, and become more and more powerful and that is what disturbs all the “moralists” of the left.  If instead of the black-garbed Rabbi Shach and others, the small parties that held the government captive were those of Ratz and Mapam and Shinui – that would have never led to the hysterical demands of “Change they system!”  But it was the religious.  And that brought out all the hate and racism that the moralists so deplore when used against Arabs.

It is difficult to understand the sheer bile that possesses the left-liberal secularists when they discuss the religious.  It is an obsession with them.  It is a war – not of culture but of belief, of being.  Those who destroyed Jewish values and found themselves with a morally rotting state and children who are neither religious nor Zionist, but empty of all values except “Me,” can never admit their failure.  And so they hate the religious and they hate Judaism and they hate themselves. What did the Rabbis say (Psachim 49b)?  “Greater is the hatred of the ignoramus for the scholar than the of the gentile for the Jew.”  And we see it daily in Israel.

Are the religious parties corrupt?  Of course they are; shamefully so!  Are they a disgrace to Torah?  Of course they are, and in the words of the prophet Isaiah (1:6): “From the sole of the foot to the head, there is no soundness.” And let the wise man understand . . . . But Labor and Likud make them look like pikers in comparison.

Change the system?  And then things will be better?  Has not history proven a thousand times over that it is not the system but the people who bring evil and corruption into the world?  The same thieves and corrupt politicians with their money and power will create the same abomination in Israel under any system.

Do you know what they wish to do?  They wish to create districts from which individuals can be elected.  Districts that will guarantee that the religious, despite their larger population, will always be limited to 3-4 seats since they live together in 3-4 districts.  Districts that make the vote infinitely less democratic (if that is what bothers you) than the present system of proportional representation.  For under the present system, every vote counts.  Under district voting, all those who did not vote for the winner see their votes go down the drain.  Indeed, that is why in England today there is a great demand to change the system from district voting to proportional representation, as in Israel . . . . Democracy?  They are not interested in democracy except that it will help them keep or get power.

 And they tie all this to a demand for a constitution that de facto will turn Israel from a Jewish state into a Western democratic one in which Jewishness will not matter, and it will be “Israeliness” that will be the equal common denominator, with the non-Jewish Israeli equal common denominator, with the non-Jewish Israeli equal to the Jewish one and the very reason for a “Jewish” state destroyed.

When the All Mighty created the Torah He understood that it is not the “system” that makes things good or bad.  It is the people.  And that is why the same Torah that is so stringent concerning seemingly minor matters in a person’s life has no definitive system for political organization or economic structure.  For these things are not the important ones in building a society.  Times change and structures change, but good and evil in the world come from Man.  And the same corrupt, hypocritical thieves will continue their dirty business in any system.  For a cesspool by any name remains just that.

And one final word.
As I watch the enormous success of the liberal-left drive to change the system.  I will never forgive, until my dying day, those thousands and more “supporters” of mine who helped us lose Israel when we had a divine opportunity to save the land.

Watching the large rallies demanding a “change,” I know that it is Kach that could have had the crowds and the rallies and the momentum in a demand for a Referendum.  The disgust of the people with all the parties, our unbelievable popularity as the only clean and honest group – all this made for a golden opportunity to demand People Power, a Referendum!  But we did not have the money that the liberal-left has, and so we lost the opportunity and I doubt if it will ever come again.  And the reason we had no money was that the ones who cheer me and condemn the Left and the traitors and Peres and Likud, and thus get their pious preaching jollies so that they can feel pure and good and righteous, never made the sacrifices.  Never gave me the money at a time when I saw the events coming.  Again. Once again, the betrayal by the supporters and cheerers.

 The country is falling apart.  As small people haggle over seats and money and power, Iraq speaks of missiles and chemical warfare and Egypt nears a nuclear bomb and I sit in frustration knowing what might have been if my supporters and cheerers had cared enough to do more than gleefully condemn Peres.

And for that, for what they did to Israel, I will never forgive them.

Written:  May 1990

Anyone reading this Rav Kahane article and is not on my personal list to receive the weekly articles written by Rav Kahane and would like to be, please contact me at:

BarbaraAndChaim@gmail.com

To view previously e-mailed Rabbi Kahane articles go to:

www.barbaraginsberg-barbara.blogspot.com

 To view Member of Knesset Michael ben-Ari who was a student of Rav Kahane  go to: www.mkmichaelben-ari.blogspot.com

Ashamed of G-d 1990

“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

Beyond Words

Selected Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane,
1960-1990
Volume 7

Ashamed of G-d

“Our fathers trusted in You:  they trusted, and You did deliver them.  They cried to You, and were rescued; they trusted in You, and were not ashamed . . . "
(Psalms, 22:5-6) 
 

And the Rabbis comment: “They cried to You, and were rescued, as it says

(Exodus 14:30): ‘On that day, G-d saved Israel . . .’ And why? Because of the merit of trust in G-d.” (Yalkut, Tehillim 22, 685)

 At first glance – and, indeed, at second and third – the verse seems most inscrutable.  “They trusted in You, and were not ashamed.”  Of what did they have to be ashamed?  What is this praise of our fathers who trusted in G-d and were not “ashamed”?  Why should they have been ashamed?  And similarly, the complete meaning of the rabbinical comment concerning the reason for G-d having saved the Children of Israel at the Red Sea is: “All because of the merit of trust and for not being ashamed” (Midrash Tehillim, 22).  In a word, what place does shame have in this picture of trust and faith in G-d?

 

For those who lived and walked the earth until perhaps a century ago, the question would have certainly been a difficult one; but in these days when, for the first time in the history of man’s sojourn on earth, secularism rules the waves and land, heavens and the earth, the though is a very familiar one.

 

The truth is that, today, in the era of the dictatorship of the news media, the secular, liberal, arrogant, cynical, news media, it is embarrassing to bring G-d into anything that smacks of this world, of political events, of economic determinism, of social issues.  It is absolutely medieval and backward to speak of G-d as a meaningful factor, let along THE meaningful factor of life.  It is stark bumpkinism and Babbitism to mix G-d in the company of Gorbachev and Baker and Kohl; one simply does not invite Him to the same party.  And to state that our troubles stem from our sins and refusal to obey His law, to state a belief in the reality of Divine Providence and reward and punishment, is to bring down upon one the worst of epithets: Fanatic, Zealot, and the worst of the worst – Khomeini!

 

And that is enough to send people rushing into their shell of caution.  That is sufficient to shut mouths and minds.  For who wishes to be called Khomeini or fanatic or zealot?  Indeed, who wants to be called any kind of name, to be held up to the mocking and jeering of the intellectual and journalistic elite?  We are, quite frankly ashamed of being ridiculed, and so we do that which is best guaranteed to protect us from that shame:  We shut up and speak only those things that are acceptable in this bright, new secular-liberal-intellectual Kingdom of Man.

 

This fear of same and ridicule spreads throughout the land.  No longer does Gush Emunim or any of the “religious nationalists” base their claims to the Land of Israel, in public at least, on the reactionary, ridiculous, backward concepts of G-d and Divine law.  One can close his eyes and listen to them and then to the Gandhis and Sharons and Eytans and Geula Cohens and never know the difference.  The only ones who base their nationalism and their demands to annex the lands of Israel on G-d and Divine law are the last of the fanatics and zealots and Khomeinis – the followers of “Kahanism.”  The last of the Middle Agers.  And one understands clearly what the verse means:  “They trusted in You, and were not ashamed.”

And this did the Rama write (Code of Jewish Law, Orach Chaim 1:1) in the very first paragraph of the great Code:

 “And he should not be ashamed of people who mock him in the service of G-d.”  No shame. Trust in Him and be not ashamed.  Speak the truth and be not ashamed.  Fanatic? Khomeini? Kahanist?  If by that it is meant one who believes that only G-d and His Torah define and decree the path of Jews – then accept the “shame” with pride.  Does it mean that G-d is the One Who controls history and that that which will be, will be because of Divine reward and punishment?  Then, we accept the compliments with thanks.  Does it mean belief that G-d is stronger and more relevant than Bush and Gorbachev, and that He will save Jews and Israel with no allies if only Jews will obey Him?  If so, let us order another round of “humiliation”!

 

“And he should not be ashamed of people who mock him in the service of G-d.”  And more.  The source of the Rama’s words is the Tur who writes, in part: “For sometimes a person is ashamed before other people more than he is before G-d.  Therefore he is warned to harden his forehead against the mockers and not be ashamed.”  And concerning this the Beit Yosef (brought down in the Mishna Brura) states that nevertheless one should not quarrel with the mockers, since the trait of hardness is to be denigrated even in the service of G-d.  Which brings the following comment from the Chofetz Chaim in the Biur Halachic (Orach Chaim 1), a comment that should be instructive to all the righteous deplores of lashon hara and invective against the wicked:

 

“Know that the Beit Yosef only speaks of one who does a personal mitzvah and is mocked . . . but if he is in a place of apikorsim (scoffers or unbelievers) who rise up against Torah and wish to make changes in the community and lead people from the will of G-d, and he began peacefully and they did not listen – concerning that the Beit Yosef never spoke a syllable, and it is a mitzvah to hate them and to quarrel with them and foil their designs as much as possible.  And King David said (Psalms 139:21-22):  “Do I not hate, O L-rd those who hate you?  And do I not quarrel with those who rise up against You?  With the utmost hatred, I hate them; I regard them as my own enemies.”

Ashamed of those who mock the follower of G-d?  Quite the opposite.  Let them not arrogantly set the standards so that truth becomes a thing of mockery.  Rather stand up and decry them and call them the backward, fanatic zealots of empty secularism that they are.  Let them bear the shame of “values” that destroy the soul and the world itself.  Roll away shame and reply to those who mock and shame G-d and those who follow Him.  And in the words of King David (ibid., 119:22-42):

 

“Remove from upon me scorn and contempt, for I have kept Your testimonies . . . . And I will answer him who taunts me, for I trust in Your word . . . “

We shrink from being taunted and ridiculed.  We wish to be “accepted.”  We are ashamed of criticism.  That is the tragedy and that is the power of the left-liberal fanatic know-nothings.  Let David, King of Israel, be our model.  David who said (ibid.; 46):

 

“And I will speak of Your testimonies before kings and I will not be ashamed.”  And in the Talmud (Brachot 4):  “Thus did David say to the All Mighty:  Sovereign of the Universe! Am I not righteous?  All the kings of East and West sit in groups in honor and my hands are bloody as I rule on the laws that will permit a woman for her husband . . .  What is the verse concerning this?  And I will speak of Your testimonies before kings and I will not be ashamed . . . ‘”

Those who hate Torah mock those who practice it.  They know the truth and because, for some personal, psychological reason, they cannot or will not follow it – they hate those who do and attempt to destroy them and their way of life through ridicule.  As David said (Psalms 69:5,8)

“They who hate me without cause are more abundant than the hairs of my head.  Mighty are those who would cut me off, those who are unjustly my foes; what I never stole I must then restore.  Because for Your sake I have borne insult; humiliation covered my face.  They who sit in the gate talk about me, and I am the song of drunkards . . . “  And not for a moment did David retreat in shame.  For he was a “zealot” for G-d, a “Fanatic” for the creator, one who never cared what the loiterers and drinkers said.

Written May 25, 1990

 Anyone reading this Rav Kahane article and is not on my personal list to receive the weekly articles written by Rav Kahane and would like to be, please contact me at:

BarbaraAndChaim@gmail.com
 

To view previously e-mailed Rav Kahane articles go to:

www.barbaraginsberg-barbara.blogspot.com
 

To view MK Michael ben-Ari’s blog go to:

 www.mkmichaelben-ari.blogspot.com

But, Of Course -1990

 

 “Beyond Words” is a newly-published seven volume collection of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s writings from 1960 – 1990 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.

Beyond Words

Selected Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane,
1960-1990
Volume 7

BUT, OF COURSE

Written January 1990
 

And in connection with the spiritual destruction of the Jew in Israel, consider this.

Can any thinking Jew really be surprised?  Is there anyone with an honest and analytical mind who cannot see that this is but a logical, normal extension of history?

 On December 18, 1989, the 29^th soldier of the Israel Defense Forces – within the previous nine months – committed suicide.  Almost every week, another non-army teenager commits suicide.  And Yitzhak Navon, Minister of Education, and the Knesset and the news media and the artists and intellectuals of the Zionist state that is in a state of collapse climb into their tower of babbling to dissect and analyze and discover: What is wrong?

With the announcement of a projected large Soviet Jewish Aliyah (a thing which may or may not eventually be), a local Jerusalem neighborhood thug who is a Labor Party “neighborhood activist” immediately called the expected Aliyah “a punishment,” and demanded that the neighborhoods be given the money instead, and all the professional Zionists wrung their hands and held their heads and moaned: What is wrong?

The number of Israelis leaving the country climbs annually at a steady pace, and the number of those who would love to leave is many times greater.  The average Jewish youth in Israel is so devoid of Jewish knowledge as to challenge the “best” of the assimilated Jewish youth in the West.  The culture in the country is Western, rock and roll, hard rock, discos, drugs, drinking, sex before army service ( much before army service), and the main thing is that life should be a kef (roughly, “a ball”).

And the Navons and intellectuals and the writers and the politicians and the news media sit and stand and gather and grope and grasp and feel and reach out and search and puzzle and babble solutions to the problem: What is wrong?

 What is wrong?  Dear Jew, what is right?

 What is wrong?  The very basis of your state, your secular Zionist state, is wrong.

 For if the truth were known and if honesty ruled the mind waves, it would be clear that on the day that secular Zionism was born it began to die.  For anyone who believed that ripping Judaism from Zionism would leave a healthy secular nationalist was worse, than foolish.  Zionism without Judaism removes from itself the only positive reason for its raison d’etre.  For being Jewish without religion is nothing more than illogical and nothing less than tribal racism.  If the Czar would have been a kind and benevolent despot and if France would have been more kindly disposed to Dreyfus – would secular Zionism ever have succeeded?  If Christians in enlightened Europe would have gladly welcomed Jews into their ranks so that Herzl would have had no need to doubt that Jewish conversion to Christianity would have succeeded (thus allowing him to cheerfully advocate it), would there have been a Jewish state?

 It was negative forces, hatred of the Jews, not positive ones of healthy pride and certainty, that gave birth to secular Zionism.  Its father was pogroms and its mother Jew-hatred, and the illegitimate child came into the world by accident of history.

 Of course, the generation that suffered anti-Semitism was a passionately “Zionist” one.  Not only did they need a Jewish state to escape Jew-hatred, but despite their cutting off their bonds with Judaism, they were products of it.  The most atheistic of them had gone to cheder. The most agnostic had tasted Torah learning.  Of course they were “Zionists,” Judaism made them so.

 

But as they passed on and their children took over and then their children who knew not Judaism nor the goy, the sole basis for their being Jewish – hatred of the Jew – was no longer relevant.  The young Jew in Israel was no longer Jewish; he was now an “Israeli” (just like the Arab and Druse) and carried with him all the emptiness of a hybrid, Western Hellenized culture that carried nothing specifically Jewish about it. 

 And since his sole identity _Israeliness – was an accident of geography, and since that meant that he was doomed to live in a country with a perpetual draft and annual army reserve service and potential wars and high taxes, and he had relatives who lived in Los Angeles and Forest Hills who had none of that – the inevitable death of the doomed was merely hastened.

They are confused; they are lost, wandering souls.  They are victims of secular leaders who are as lost as they are.  Secular Zionism.

And so Amos Mansdorf Israel’s tennis idol, who makes the Hellenists who would not know a Rashi from a Vilna Gaon drool in pagan, gentilized delight, bristles at an anti-apartheid rally at his tennis match in New Zealand, and brays that sports and “politics” do not mix and that had he lived at the time, he would have played in Nazi Germany.  The sabra brayeth like the ox he is and in glorious realization of the verse, “And they exchanged their glory for the design of an ox that eateth grass” (Psalms 106:20).

And they condemn him!  Those who made the ox, the golden tennis calf, condemn him!  And was there ever greater arrogance and brazenness and more blatant blindness as to the real culprit?

 

Amos Mansdorf, the empty-headed sabra, is the direct result of the secular Zionist that has succeeded magnificently, stupendously, beyond its wildest nightmare-dreams.  And those who wished to free the Jew from his archaic and destructive religion; who wished to create “the last of the Jews and the first of the Hebrews”; who wished to be as all the nations – have their wish.  Amos Mansdorf  is not a criminal – he is the product of the secular Zionist Frankensteins who have made him.  He is their brilliant success.

Just outside the Jewish agency building in Jerusalem is a little triangle-square which was given an official name some time back.  It was named “The Zionist Movement Square.”  Fitting.  For streets and squares are inevitably named after dead people.

 Anyone reading this Rav Kahane article and is not on my personal list to receive the weekly articles written by Rav Kahane and would like to be, please contact me at:

BarbaraAndChaim@gmail.com

To view previously e-mailed Rav Kahane articles go to:

www.barbaraginsberg-barbara.blogspot.com

To view MK Michael Ben-Ari:  www.mkmichaelben-ari.blogspot.com