Once Upon A Time - 1977

“K A H A N E”

The magazine of the authentic Jewish Idea

Nissan -5737   April-1977

 

ONCE UPON A TIME

Once upon a time a plague broke out in the forest and all the animals gathered to discuss what to do about it.  One wise old animal suggested that the plague was undoubtedly due to the sin of one of the community and it was agreed that each animal should confess his sins and it would be decided whose guilt had brought the plague.  The fox was the first to rise and he said:  “I was walking by the farmer’s chicken coops last week and I crept in, seized three chickens and ate them. But after all, it was not my fault; I was hungry!”  The animals considered the case and unanimously agreed that the fox was not to blame.  After all, he was hungry. 

The bear was the next to speak.  “I passed by a tree last week and saw honey flowing from where the bees had made it.  I took the honey from them and ate it.  But, after all, it was not my fault; I was hungry!”  Again the animals considered the case and agreed that the bear was blameless.  After all, he was hungry…

Finally it came the turn of the sheep, who said:  “It was a bitter, cold night and my little lams were freezing.  So I went into the barn and took some straw to keep my little lambs warm as they slept.”  No sooner did the sheep say these words, than the entire community of animals leaped to their feet and, pointing their paws, claws, and hoofs at the sheep, shouted: “There is the criminal!”

For two weeks the Arab mobs, thirsting for Jewish blood and Israel’s destruction, rampaged through the streets of Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem.  They stoned soldiers, attacked cars, burned tires, blocked roads.  And so the gentilized Jewish animals in Israel gathered to discuss whose sin had brought this upon our heads.  Who had caused the Arabs to riot?  There was all manner of evidence for the animals to consider.  For example: “We are opposed to occupation and we want to be free.” (Bethlehem Mayor Elias Freij, 3/18/76);  “It is the continued occupation to which I object.” (Shchem Mayor Haj Masri, 3/16/76); “Palestine is Arab” (banners carried by Arabs in a procession in the town of Abu Dis, March 23, 1976).

But this was hardly sufficient evidence for the Jewish animals.  Leaving the foxes, the bears and the rest – LEAVING THE ARABS – the animals sought the culprit amongst the Jews.  And so we had Knesset member Yitzhak Ben Aharon say: “ Jewish secular and religious nationalists provoked the unrest in great part.  Gush Emunim at Kadum, Betar on the Temple Mount and…our plans to step up settlements in the Galilee were all responsible. (March 22, 1967)  And, added Jerusalem’s Mayor Teddy Kollek: “The deeds and declarations of (Jewish minority extremists have provided ammunition to extremist elements in the Arab population.” (March 18, 1976)

The poor Arabs!  Unfairly blamed.  After all, we can understand why they riot and stone and attack.  They are hungry – hungry for Jewish flesh and blood.  Perfectly understandable.  But the culprit – the real culprit – is the Jew.  The Jewish militant, the Jewish extremist, the Jewish Rabbi Levinger who is going to a military trial while Hebron Mayor Ja’abri strolls free. The anti-Semites have always accused Jews of being to blame for everything.  They still do, but now the anti-Semites can be found in the Knesset, in the government, and in the state that we once hoped would be Jewish but which has become a poor caricature of every gentile culture that exists today.  We will yet pay – with Jewish blood – for this.

[Today August 18th, we paid once again will Jewish blood B.G.]

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Dayenu - 1962

Beyond Words

Selected Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane,

1960-1990

Volume 1

“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, including 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 to buy “Beyond Words”, please write to me and I will forward them.

Dayenu

As yet another Yom Ha’Atzmaut appears, the conviction grows that the feelings of

 exhilaration and exaltation that gripped us in the early years are no longer quite what they were then.  The spontaneous mood of joy, the instinctive pride in the rebirth of an independent Jewish state is a little less noticeable, a little more subdued.  The head is not quite as high and the carriage not quite as erect.  In short, as with so many other great events in our lives, habit has dulled the splendor, and repetition has muted the sounds of excitement.

And yet, it must be an axiom for us – a generation of spiritual poverty, barren of greatness and inadequate in wisdom – to remember and speak of and celebrate this day.   And though we were all-wise and all-understanding, all-hoary and learned in the Torah, here too would it be out duty to recount the story of this day.  For its story is the tale of the world, the reasons for its creation, the path along which it must walk.

Yom Ha’Atzmaut is an affirmation of Divine Will and Control of history and mankind.  It is the cry that “many are the schemes within the heart of man, but the plan of the L-rd – this will persevere”  (Proverbs 19:21).  It surveys the wreckage of mighty empires fallen from the heights and records the uplifting of the small, raised from the depths.  It is the graveyard of emperors and the throne of their victims.  It is the lifting – for a moment – of the veil of prophecy.  It is the promise which has stood by our fathers and us.

Do we truly comprehend the implications of this day?  If we did, we could not be still from excited wonder.  We would shout our joy from the rooftops.  Sing praises to our Maker each hour of each day.

For this is a day which transforms belief into knowledge, faith into assurance.  It proclaims the defeat of the mighty tyrant at the hands of the righteous and weak, it casts the wicked into the dung heap of history and rewards the patient innocents.  It proclaims the obvious, false, and the incredible, credible.

And if it is said: But there are many such days in the chronology of our people, let it be answered: But this we saw this was ours.  For no matter how great the faith of a people, no matter how much patience it possesses, it is good – indeed necessary – for such faith, even for a little, to receive assurances.  It is important for a wound to be soothed, if only a little, for tears to be wiped, if only for a time.

And so it is with us. Yom Ha/Atzmaut is our comfort.  It is the balm against the pain of a Hitler, the ointment for the wounds of twenty centuries of countless forces of murder and terror.  It is the solace of the All Mighty – His reassurance that the road to Auschwitz is not the final one.  His consolation that our faith in Him shall not be in vain.

And more important, this day is our solace in the days that lie ahead.  For though they loom black and foreboding, though they may appear unbearable and hopeless, this day is our sustenance.  For if we could walk the tortuous path of history, past the wolves that tore at our flesh, past the demons who tore at our soul; if we could survive the giants of the earth by being the titans of the universe; if we could live to see the day when a people without territory or king or army could return to its land and raise its bloodied brow, then surely the edicts of a boorish Eastern muzhik will no longer strike fear into our hearts, not will the shadow of a Bomb cause us to lose our faith.  And if this be all that Yom Ha’Atzmaut serves to teach us - Dayenu

Written May 11, 1962

Editor’s note: The word dayenu in Hebrew means “it is enough for us”  Yom Ha’Atzmaut is Israel’s Independence Day, 5 Iyar, 57-8 (May 14, 1948)

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"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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Dear World

Beyond Words

Selected Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane,

1960-1990

Volume 5

The first part of this article is Dear World’s exposure under a pseudonym name, because of the Israeli and world media ban on Rabbi Kahane whether verbal or written.   

"Dear World" was first printed in the Jewish Press on January 8, 1988. Then Rabbi Kahane sent it to various newspapers in the U.S. (opposed to his policies) under a pseudonym, Meyer Ben Abraham.

Among the newspapers it appeared in were the Miami Herald, on January 17,  one of the more viciously anti-Israeli papers around; the B'nai B'rith Messenger on March 4th, the Los Angeles Press-Telegram on January 29th, the Canadian Jewish News on February 18 and Ha'am (UCLA) May, 1988.

 According to “Outlook”: Canada’s Progressive Jewish Magazine, June/July 1988, it was read aloud from the Miami Herald at Beth Sholom synagogue in Toronto.

 In April 2002, it was widely circulated by e-mail lists on the internet, signed Anonymous.

 B'nai B'rith Messenger published a letter to the editor on March 25, 1988 from Cantor Michael Loring, Fresno, that says, “I, and others were very moved--some even to tears by the Open Letter to the World by Anonymous in the March 4 edition...It is possible to help our brethren in Israel to remain alive in a sovereign Jewish state and not feel guilty about doing so. Incidentally, the tone of the “open letter” is reminiscent of a “toned down” Rabbi Kahane. Is he the author, or are you sworn to secrecy?"

 B'nai B'rith Messenger, acknowledged his authorship in their April 15, 1988 issue, on their front page:

“A Note to Our Readers.   In the March 4 edition of the Messinger, we published a piece entitled “A Letter to the World.” That letter came to us from two separate sources. In both cases, the letter was signed “Anonymous”. Efforts on our part to locate the actual author were unsuccessful, but we decided to publish it anyway because we felt that it was timely and important. Since its publication, Rabbi Meir Kahane has written us to say that he is the author of that letter. We hope this sets the record straight."

 Ha'am carried an apology for not publishing it under the Rabbi's name in Oct, 1988.

The above information appears in “Beyond Words” and research by Libby Kahane.

Now for this classic article written by Rabbi Meir Kahane:

Dear World,

It appears that you are hard to please.  I understand that you are upset over us, here in Israel.  Indeed, it appears that you are quite upset, even angry.  (Outraged?)  Indeed, every few years you seem to become upset by us. Today, it is the "brutal repression of the Palestinians"; yesterday it was Lebanon; before that it was the bombing of the nuclear reactor in Baghdad and the Yom Kippur War and the Sinai campaign. It appears that Jews who triumph and who, therefore, live, upset you most extraordinarily.

Of course, dear world, long before there was an Israel, we - the Jewish people - upset you.

We upset a German people who elected Hitler and upset an Austrian people who cheered his entry into Vienna and we upset a whole slew of Slavic nations - Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Hungarians and Romanians. And we go back a long, long way in the history of world "upset." We upset the Cossacks of Chmielnicki who massacred tens of thousands of us in 1648-49; we upset the Crusaders who, on their way to liberate the Holy Land, were so upset at Jews that they slaughtered untold numbers of us. For centuries, we upset a Roman Catholic Church that did its best to define our relationship through inquisitions. And we upset the arch-enemy of the church, Martin Luther, who, in his call to burn the synagogues and the Jews within them, showed an admirable Christian ecumenical spirit.

And it is because we became so upset over upsetting you, dear world, that we decided to leave you - in a manner of speaking - and establish a Jewish state. The reasoning was that living in close contact with you, as resident-strangers in the various countries that comprise you, we upset you, irritate you and disturb you. What better notion, then, than to leave you and thus love you - and have you love us?  And so, we decided to come home - home to the same homeland we were driven out 1,900 years earlier by a Roman world that, apparently, we also upset.

Alas, dear world, it appears that you are hard to please. Having left you and your pogroms and inquisitions and crusades and holocausts, having taken our leave of the general world to live alone in our own little state - we continue to upset you. You are upset that we repress the poor Palestinians. You are deeply angered over the fact that we do not give up the lands of 1967, which are clearly the obstacle to peace in the Middle East.  Moscow is upset and Washington is upset. The "radical" Arabs are upset and the gentle Egyptian moderates are upset.  Europe is upset, as is Asia and, of course, Africa and Down Under and up there.

Well, dear world, consider the reaction of a normal Jew from Israel.

In 1920 and 1921 and 1929, there were no territories of 1967 to impede peace between Jews and Arabs. Indeed, there was no Jewish state to upset anybody. Nevertheless, the same oppressed and repressed Palestinians slaughtered tens of Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Safed and Hebron.  Indeed, 67 Jews were slaughtered one day in Hebron - in 1929.

Dear world, why did the Arabs - the Palestinians - massacre 67 Jews in one day in 1929? Could it have been their anger over Israeli aggression in 1967? And why were 510 Jewish men, women and children slaughtered in Arab riots between 1936-39? Was it because Arabs were upset over 1967?  And when you, world, proposed a UN Partition Plan in 1947 that would have created a "Palestinian state" alongside a tiny Israel and the Arabs cried "no" and went to war and killed 6,000 Jews - was that upset stomach caused by the aggression of 1967? And, by the way, dear world, why did we not hear your cry of "upset" then?

The poor Palestinians who today kill Jews with explosives and firebombs and stones are part of the same people who - when they had all the territories they now demand be given to them for their state -attempted to drive the Jewish state into the sea. The same twisted faces, the same hate, the same cry of "Itbach-al-Yahud" – “Slaughter the Jew!”- that we hear and see today, where seen and heard then. The same people, the same dream - destroy Israel. What they failed to do yesterday, they dream of today, but we should not "repress" them…

Dear world, you stood by during the Holocaust and you stood by in 1948 as seven states launched a war that the Arab League proudly compared to the Mongol massacres. You stood by in 1967 as Nasser, wildly cheered by wild mobs in every Arab capital, vowed to drive the Jews into the sea.  And you would stand by tomorrow if Israel were facing extinction.

 And since we know that the Arabs-Palestinians daily dream of that extinction, we will do everything possible to remain alive in our own land. If that bothers you, dear world, well - think of how many times in the past you bothered us.

In any event, dear world, if you are bothered by us, here is one Jew in Israel who could not care less.

January 8, 1988

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