Kahane on the Parsha
Parshat Noach
NO REST IN THE EXILE
"'And [Noah] sent forth a
dove...but the dove found no rest for the sole of its foot, and it returned to
him into the ark' (Genesis 8:8-9). Rabbi Shimon said: Had it found a resting
place it would not have returned. And similarly does it say: '[Israel] sat
among the nations and found no resting place' (Lamentations 1:3). Had they
found a resting place they would not have returned to Eretz Yisrael. And
similarly: 'And among those nations you shall find no peace, neither shall the
sole of your foot have rest' (Deuteronomy 28:65). Had they found a resting
place they would have never returned" (Bereishit Rabba 33:6).
The divine proclamation is clear:
There will be no rest for the Jew in the Exile because if there would be rest
and tranquility and comfort and ease, the Jew would NEVER return to Eretz
Yisrael. How well the Rabbis knew the Jews!!!
No amount of Halacha, no amount
of admonition, no amount of religious observance would ever convince the
overwhelming majority to leave an Exile in which they find ease and rest for
the soles of their feet. And that is why there is an iron law of Judaism that
decrees that the Exile shall never be anything but a place of terror and fear
and tragedy.
I wonder if the average Jew knows
how much he is hated in America. I wonder if the average Jew has the slightest
knowledge of the immense, deep, poisonous venom that is Jew-hatred in the
United States. I doubt it. We live in our ghettos, our increasingly golden
ghettos, and see and hear nothing, and we sit satisfied in our glatt isolation
that so enables us to escape from the reality of the vicious bile and venom. We
live in our worlds of dreams and illusions and know nothing.
Can we imagine what will be if,
G-d forbid, there is an economic collapse of massive proportions? Can we imagine
what will be if the American economy bursts- an economy that is one huge
balloon filled with the gas of huge debt, unbridled spending and borrowing,
trade deficit, a banking and savings and loan system that sits on the thin ice
of loans that can never be repaid, an economy that is one huge fraud as jobs
and products slip away into the Japanese-Asian orbit?
Can we imagine what will be when
the violent American who has been hopelessly spoiled by 40 years of
unprecedented prosperity and wallowing in the mud of materialism suddenly faces
economic ruin? Can we imagine what will happen when the life of three
automobiles to a family, VCRs, a TV in each room, vacations, fun, fun, fun -
suddenly comes to a screeching stop?
Such a person will become a wild
animal, literally incapable of accepting a life of sharp economic displacement.
He will follow anyone who promises to restore him to the days of beer and
daisies. And the scapegoat will be - the Jew.
And so, I do not even bother any
longer to persuade Jews of the halachic obligation to live in Eretz Yisrael, of
the positive reason for going there. They will not go. Together they sit in the
fleshpots, in a sensational display of Jewish unity against leaving the golden
land. Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, ultra-Orthodox, all bound in a pledge of
allegiance to the good life and all that for which it stands.
I can only warn them about the
ultimate Halachic scholar for the Jew in the Exile. Who is that? Why, surely,
the gentile.
The Jewish Press, 1989
Rabbi Meir Kahane hy"d
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