Tzvi Fishman, over at IsraelNationalNews, is a big Rabbi Kahane fan. I have read his columns for many years, and commented on his blog, and I always agree with him. He has attracted a lot of negative attention yet he always remains on top of it all, he is constantly chiding us in the galut to make aliyah, and he has very strong emunah that eventually we all will be with him in Israel.
Here is a very shocking, moving, and intriguing chapter from Rabbi Kahanes book "Listen World, Listen Jew".
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/4#4477
Kill You, or Kill You with LoveIt is known that “Jews For Jeeeezeus” headhunters take advantage of wintertime loneliness and the alluring hype of Xmas to snare unsuspecting Jews in their web. Here’s the full Chapter Three of Rabbi Kahane’s book, “Listen World, Listen Jew,” to remind people just how much they love us.
CHAPTER THREE
Listen world; I am a Jew, I am a Zionist.
The year was 135 and Zion lay prostrate before the Roman Empire, its people exhausted with their glorious struggle for Zionism, Jewish sovereignty in their own land. Hundreds of thousands lay dead on the battlefield; cities stood ruined and desolate; fields and vineyards were desolate and long lines of surviving Jews marched into Exile in chains to be sold as slaves in the marketplaces of Roman commerce; the rest were scattered into the long night of strange lands of the Diaspora. In the imperial city of Rome stood the arrogant Arch of Titus with figures depicting the beaten Jews carved into it, and Romans happily carried coins reading Ê”Judea Capta”Ê-ÊJudah is captured, destroyed, its people scattered, never to rise again.
And the Roman Emperor Hadrian, furious at the Jewish rebels and hating the stubborn children of Zion, moved to erase from memory the name Judea, as belonging to the Jews. Jerusalem was ploughed up with a yoke of oxen, its name changed to Aelia Capitolina. And Hadrian, in his determination to blot out the memory of Zion, changed the name Judea to Palestina.
Palestina. This is the origin of the country and people who don’t exist. This is the source of the fraud that would continue the imperialism and aggression of the Roman Hadrian. Palestine exists only when Judea is blotted out. But when Judea lives, Zion exists, and there is no Palestine.
The year was 135 and even as the cries of the tortured and martyred Jewish leaders-Rabbi Akiva combed to death with iron combs; Chanina Ben Tradyon wrapped in a Torah scroll and burned alive; Rabbi Gamliel beheaded-rang out, the long night of Exile began for the Jewish people. Little did they know that before they would come home, before Zionism would again be realized, nearly two millenia would pass.
Little did they realize that the next 1900 years would prove beyond a shadow of any doubt that Zionism - the need for a Jewish homeland where Jews would be free, safe from oppression, and masters of their own fate - was the sole solution for the Jewish people.
How can one begin to set down on paper the saga of the wandering Jews from the year 135. Scattered to the winds, they made their way to Spain, to France, to Germany, to the lands of the East, to the lands of Byzantium and Islam. Except for relatively brief periods of respite -illusions of safety and security - the scenario that unfolds is almost too incredible to comprehend. It is so filled with drama, tragedy, death, heroism and stubborn courage, that if a playwright were to dare present such a sketch today, its implausibility would be hooted down.
"I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of His wrath. Surely against me He turneth His hand again and again all the day" (Eichah, 3:1- 3).
As the Jew trod wearily into Christian Europe, the newly dominant faith took full vengeance on the people who had spurned her. Dominated by the need to break this stiff-necked people and to prove to itself that the sufferings of the Jews were punishment for their refusal to accept the true Christianity, the Church made life for the Jew a living hell.
Driven by the "holy urge" to free the holy places from Moslem rule, a motley crew of rabble and riffraff, spurred on by ignorant and fanatical Christian priests, called for a Crusade to the Holy Land. As the eleventh century drew to a close, mobs marched through France spreading terror throughout the Jewish communities. Onwards through to the Rhine Valley they marched as the Jews of Treves trembled, several killing themselves and their children, women and girls, weighing themselves down with stones and leaping into the Moselle River lest they be faced with the choice of conversion to Christianity on the one hand and death and rape on the other. On May 3, 1096, the Christian mobs reached the city of Speyer, murdering ten Jews in the church when they refused to convert. Fourteen days later the distinguished Jewish community of Worms was attacked by a howling, bloodthirsty band of Christians. Only a few submitted to baptism, the majority preferring to die with "Shema," the declaration of knowledge and recognition of the L-rd, as the true G-d, on their lips. Many committed suicide; women killed their own children. The wealthier Jews who had found refuge in the palace of Bishop Allebrandus, were suddenly told that they must choose baptism or be given over to the mob. Asking for time to consider the offer, the heroic Jews of Worms chose to take their own lives, and when the barbaric Crusaders burst into the palace to receive the Jewish answer, it was found in the blood of those who lay dead. No less than 1800 Jews fell victim to the Church in Worms.
Back to Speyer went the mob where the treacherous Archbishop Ruthar urged 1300 Jews to come with their wealth and hide in his palace. The Bishop's soldiers merely stood by as the Christian Crusaders, led by Count Emerich, kinsman of the archbishop, charged in, searching for victims. The scenes of Worms were repeated as 1300 martyrs fell with an oath of allegiance to the L-rd on their lips, murdered in the name of Yeshu (may his name and memory be erased) by the Christian Crusaders, or killed by their own loved ones.
A bitter kind of comfort ended the drama in Speyer. Two Jews named Isaac and Uriah broke down before the mob and had themselves and Isaac's two daughters baptized. Stricken with remorse, Isaac now slaughtered his children, set his house on fire, and went with Uriah to the synagogue, which they set aflame and threw themselves into the fire. The flames spread through the Christian town, reducing much of it to ashes.
On to Cologne marched the "soldiers of Christ" and on St. John's Day, June 24, 1096, they massacred the Jews there and in Neus. The incredible dedication and courage of the Jew to his G-d, and his faith, reached new heights here as Samuel ben Yechiel, a scholar and leader, slaughtered his only son, rather than have him fall to Christianity. With tears and a broken voice, he first recited over him the blessing: "Blessed art thou O L-rd, our G-d, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to sanctify His Name." The youth responded "Amen!" and the father took his life. Altogether 12,000 Jews perished in the Rhine Valley in a matter of two months.
The bearers of the cross spread to other lands. To Bohemia where the Jews of Prague drank deeply from the bitter cup. To France where on the Sabbath day of June 19, 1180, as the Jews assembled in their synagogues, King Philip Augustus ordered all the Jews of his domain imprisoned without specific charges. His purpose? To exhort a considerable ransom from the victims. Before the year had ended, all Christian debts to Jews were declared void. The King was not satisfied, and he now issued an edict that between April and June 24, 1181, all Jews must pick up the wanderer's staff and leave all their property behind.
Hatred of the Jews crossed the English Channel. In 1189 a mob massacred Jews in London, and the murders spread to Norwich and Lynn. Most tragic of all was the fate of the Jews of York where the community fled to a royal castle and was besieged there for six days. When the food ran out and capitulation seemed certain, the brave sons of the Holy Covenant chose death rather than baptism or humiliation. Josce, head of the community, slaughtered his beloved wife, Anna, and he in turn died at the hands of the famed French rabbinical scholar, Yom Tov of Joigny.
In Byzantine Greece, the hatred of Jews placed them outside the law. A Jew was not allowed to ride on a horse, oppressive taxes were levied on them, and they were fair game for any Greek Christian who wished to mistreat them.
And it grew worse. Under Pope Innocent III, a Lateran Council decreed that every Jew and Jewess from the age of 12 and upward must wear a Jewish badge of shame. This was to continue from the year 1215 for hundreds of years.
There were other highlights of the Middle Ages:
Jewish apostate named Donin accused the Talmud of being anti-Christian. On June 25, 1240, the Talmud was literally put on trial and despite the "defense" by Rabbi Yechiel of Paris, 24 cartloads of Talmuds and other holy Jewish texts were publicly burned in Paris.
The Crusade of the Shepherds led by Philip V may be a glorious event in Church history, but to the Jews who suffered from a mob of 40,000 ignorant, primitive shepherds led by a madman who claimed to have been spoken to by a white dove, who turned into a woman telling him to lead a Crusade to the Holy Land, it was an unspeakable nightmare. The rabble massacred all Jews they could find on the road from Azen to Toulouse, excluding only the 500 Jews who escaped to the fortress of Verdun and there took their own lives. All that remained were the children who were baptized by force for "the glory of Christ." More than 120 Jewish communities perished as the shepherds tramped through France, including the Jewish communities of Bordeaux, Gascony and Toulouse.
Kill the Jews!
Or consider the hideous events that led to the Martyrs of Chinon. A band of lepers, angry because they had not been given sufficient food by the authorities, poisoned the wells. Under torture, one of them blamed the Jews, claiming that they had suggested the act. In town after town, Jews were attacked. In Chinon, a deep pit was dug and a huge fire kindled. Into the flames were thrown 166 Jews, singing sacred Jewish hymns of faith. Mothers threw their children into the fires lest they be forcibly baptized. Throughout Christian France, some 3,000 Jews were burned alive.
And the band of boorish, backward peasants of Bavaria who called themselves the "Jew-Killers" and who followed two noblemen named Armleder. For two years (1336-7) the thousands of human beasts armed with axes and pitchforks marched through Alsace and the Rhineland killing thousands of Jews.
But all this paled into insignificance before the nightmare that burst upon the Jews in the wake of the Black Plague. In the middle of the fourteenth century, the Black Plague raged for four years, decimating fully one-fourth of the human race. The terrified and ignorant masses of Europe immediately discovered the cause of the disease: the Jews!
The Holocaust of the Middle Ages began. In southern France, Jews were burned alive as the mob roared approval. From there the hysteria spread to Catalonia and Aragon; in the area surrounding Lake Geneva all the Jews were condemned to death by fire as were the Jews of Berne in Switzerland. The Jews of Basle were driven to an island on the Rhine River, placed into a house and burned alive; the Jews of the Upper Rhine were ordered expelled, by grace of a conference having overruled Bishop Berthold of Strasburg who wanted them exterminated; the Jews of Strasburg proper were dragged to the cemetery where they were forced to mount a special scaffold while it was set afire; the Jews of Worms, Oppenheim and Frankfort on the Main burned their houses down over their heads rather than face torture and have their children baptized by force. No one will ever know how many Jews perished in the Holocaust of the Black Death.
And the humiliations, the great and the small. The humiliations of the ghettos where the Christian kept the contaminated Jew penned in lest he infect the followers of Christ. It was decreed at the Third Lateran Council (1179) that Jews were forbidden to live next to Christians. But it was only in 1516 that the first formal and permanent ghetto was established in the city of Venice. Pope Paul IV ordered ghettos to be established in Rome and the Papal States, and from there it spread to Germany and other areas. Crowded and unsanitary, the ghettos were sickly places where the first "high-rise" apartments were built because the cramped space forced the Jew to build in the only direction possible - upwards. Little sun ever burst through, and Jewish children never saw a tree or grass. Buildings were always in danger of collapse, and fire was a deadly enemy. Jews who had no business to transact outside the gates couldn’t leave, and those that were allowed to wore their Jewish badges and had to return by dusk.”
And Esav came out of the womb red and covered with fur.
[Should I let this great saga of Christianity’s love for the Jews continue? Why spoil the merry fun of Christmas for assimilated Jews? Why spoil the innocent chords of “Jingle Bells?” Why spit on the notion of “silent holy nights?” Why remind people that the bright red decorations of Xmas are reminders of Christian Esav, the ruddy one, “Rudolph,” and the oceans of Jewish blood that was spilled on their “holy” day, in the name of their messiah? Yes, I will let Rabbi Kahane tell the rest of the story, that the truth be known, lest you think, as loving Christians would tell you, that times have changed, and they truly love us now.]
In the twelfth century, the incredible madness of "blood libel" burst upon the beleaguered Jews and was to continue through to our times. In Norwich, England in the year 1144 the legend of the Christian boy William was born. It was alleged that the Jews had "bought a Christian child before Easter and tortured him with all the tortures wherewith our Christ was tortured, and on Long Friday hanged on a road in hatred of our messiah." In the case of little Hugh of Lincoln the bizarre story was spread that "the Child was first fattened for ten days with white bread and milk, and then the Jews of England were invited to the crucifixion."
Blood Libel
On the eve of the expulsion from Spain there occurred the blood libel case of the "Holy Child of LaGuardia," where Jews were horribly tortured and forced to falsely confess that they had gathered in a cave, crucified the child, cursed him and abused him. The blood libel spread like wildfire to every country in Europe, carrying in its wake the broken and murdered bodies of Jews. In Fulda (1235) Jews were said to need young Christian blood for medicinal purposes. In Tyrnau (1494) it was said that it was remedy to the wound of the circumcision, and as an aphrodisiac. But by far, the most terrible and widespread belief was that the Jews needed blood for wine and matzot on the Passover, which so terrorized the Jews that some rabbis insisted that they use only white wine on Passover.
If the blood libel was insanity, what can one say of the accusation that the Jews "desecrated the Host? The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 had laid down the doctrine of Transubstantiation whereby the wafer and wine of the Eucharist became the actual body and blood of Christ. It needed little for the mobs to soon emerge with the accusation that the Jews desecrated the Host by beating it, stabbing it or burning it, so that they might make Jesus suffer. In the fourteenth century the Jews of the town of Roettingan in Franconia were burned alive as a nobleman by the name of Rindfleisch accused them of precisely this deed. From there, a nightmarish flood of accusations moved through Franconia to Bavaria and on to Austria, destroying 140 communities and taking the lives of 100,000 Jews, including the famed scholar Mordechai Ben Hillel of Nuerzburg, his wife and five children. Similar accusations in Kronblauch, near Berlin (1510) led to 38 horrible executions and the expulsion of the Jews from Brandenberg, while in Segovia (1415) the synagogue was closed, the leading Jews were executed, and the event is still the occasion of the great local feast of Corpus Christi.
Celebrating the renegade's birthday.
Jews were not allowed to live in peace at any time during the Christian Church’s domination of Europe, but there were numerous instances when they were not allowed to live in the countries and cities of the Christians at all. The number of expulsions of Jews from local communities is enormous, but what is even worse is the fact that Jews were expelled en masse from entire states. In 1290 the Jews were expelled from England, not to return until 1650. Two general expulsions of Jews from France occurred, the first in 1306, and the second in 1394. Except for a few thousand, Jews were effectively barred from residence in France until the Revolution in 1789. The infamous expulsion of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal (1492-97), ousted hundreds of thousands of Jews from communities they had lived in for centuries. Indeed, at this point there were no Jews living legally on the Atlantic coast of Europe.
Consider the expulsion of the Jews of France, who had lived in the land from the days of the Romans, long even before the Franks had made their appearance. On the tragic Ninth of Av, Tisha B'Av, the fast commemorating the destruction of the Holy Temple, the Jews of France were informed that in 30 days they were to leave the land of their birth and take nothing with them. Entire wagon loads of Jewish property were carted off to the king. Synagogues, the famous schools of Rashi and the Tosafists in Paris, Troyes and Orleans, were sold to the highest bidder, and Phillip the Fair made a present of one synagogue to his coachman.
Kill the Jews!
If they can't kill you, they'll love you to death.
And, of course, the expulsion from Spain and Portugal. Spain, where the Jews had lived for centuries. Spain, where the Golden Era had produced Jews faithful to the land and who had given of their genius and talent to make it great and rich and powerful. Spain, that had produced Ibn Shaprut, Samuel Ibn Nagdela, Samuel Hanagid, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Bahya Ibn Pakuda, Yehuda Halevi, Abraham Ibn Ezra and Maimonides now saw the end approach. Led by the fanatical archdeacon and vicar of Seville, Ferran Martinez, mobs destroyed the once great community of 25,000, killing, raping and selling Jews as slaves to the Moslems. From Seville the hate moved to the mother community of Jewish Spain, Cordova, to Toledo, to Aragon and Valencia, to Barcelona, and all throughout Spain.
Tens of thousands perished, and thousands in fear pretended to embrace Christianity. A stunned Jewish community that had allowed itself the illusion of rest, security and comfort in the Exile of Spain, sat shocked and embittered. But it was the marriage of the Infanta Isabella of Spain to Don Ferdinand, Infant of Aragon, which proved to be the final end of the Golden Illusion. Under the hypnotic influence of the evil Thomas de Torquemada, an Inquisition of unbelievable cruelty and horror was established. Jews and Marranos, those Jews who out of fear had pretended to adopt Christianity, were searched out relentlessly with the terrifying Êauto-dafe, and death by burning at the stake, after the most horrible of tortures. On March 31, 1492 the evil that was the Church-Monarchy of Spain announced that in four months every Jew in Spain would have to leave on pain of death. For fifteen centuries the Jews had lived in Spain and helped make it great. The blow was shattering to a people who had convinced themselves that "Spain was different." The greatest of the Jews of Spain, Don Isaac Abrabanel, was a scholar, a deeply religious and humane person, and a financier of such immense skill that the Jew-hating Ferdinand and Isabella called upon him to save Spain from bankruptcy and placed the finances of the state in his hands. Abrabanel hastened to the court with a huge sum of money, hoping that it, along with his influence, might stay the decree. Ferdinand, greedy and in need of money, wavered. But as he did so, the evil Torquemada held a crucifix aloft and cried: "Judas Iscariot sold Christ for thirty pieces of silver; your majesties are prepared to sell him for three-hundred-thousand ducats. Here he is: sell him."
The Jews could win a reprieve of only two days, and as Divine decree would have it, the day of expulsion, August 2, 1492, fell on the national day of mourning of Tisha B'Av. Some 30,000 Jews bid farewell to the home they had known all their lives. Nearly 100,000 considered themselves fortunate that they were able to buy their way into neighboring Portugal, but illusion only breeds disillusion, and in 1496 the King of Portugal, Manoel, ordered their departure within a year, unless they agreed to become Christians. Few Jews accepted the offer and the angry Manoel ordered that all Jewish children be forcibly baptized on Easter Sunday, 1497. The scenes that followed were indescribably pathetic. Children clung to their parents weeping and calling out their names. Mothers screamed hysterically so that even Bishop Coutinno related the events with sadness: "I saw with my own eyes children dragged by their hair to the baptismal fonts; their fathers with covered heads and with cries of anguish accompanied their children and protested at the very altars at this cruel, forced conversion."
In 1497, 20,000 Jews gathered in Lisbon to leave Portugal. But Manoel herded them into a pen and gave them a choice of voluntary or forced baptism. For three days and nights no food or water were given the Jews and still the majority clung to their faith. Manoel ordered them dragged by their beards and their hair to the churches. Jews killed themselves in the church; one man wrapped himself and his children in a prayer shawl and killed his loved ones and then took his own life. Soon there were no acknowledged Jews on the Iberian Peninsula.
One of the ironies of history is that Poland was, at first, a haven for Jews fleeing from the nightmare of Êwestern Europe! When the Jews were banished from Bohemia the King of Poland, Sigismund I, welcomed them. Broad religious autonomy was given the Jews and Ê”kahals” were established which were nothing short of Jewish self-governing institutions. Great schools of learning sprang up, and Torah flourished in Poland and Lithuania as it has seldom done elsewhere since the days of Babylonia and the Jewish homeland. But Poland was no different from anywhere else and the foolish believers in the Exile proved to be wrong again. Under the evil influence of the Jesuits, the Polish population grew more and more hostile to the Jews, but the most terrible destruction came at the hands of the Ukrainian Cossack Bogdan Chmielnicki who, together with murderous bands known as Haidamaks, poured into Poland, killing all in their way - especially Jews. In the city of Tulczyn, 6,000 Poles and 2,000 Jews took refuge from the Cossacks and pledged to defend the fortress to the last man. The Cossacks thereupon offered the Poles their lives if they turned over the Jews. The treacherous Poles agreed and the Jews who refused baptism were massacred. Thereupon the Cossacks attacked the Poles and killed them.
Poland was falling apart and now Russians and Swedes joined the Cossacks in an assault on the dying kingdom. To the Jews there was no difference. All the allies killed Jews and a quarter-million Jews perished in the ten years of war (1648-58). The glory that was Polish Jewry was gone.
And a thought.
What an unfunny joke it is to watch the Jewish adherents of Jesus prancing about in their skullcaps and fringes, loyally claiming adherence to the commandments even as they sing the praises of the Nazarene whom they portray as a loyal son of those same commandments!
Loyal son of the commandments! Is this the Jesus we read of in the Gospels who allowed his disciples to desecrate the Sabbath by picking ears of wheat that were growing, answering the rabbis who censured them, "the son of man is master of the Sabbath?" And how much obedience to the Jewish Law was manifested by this Jesus when, failing to fast on a recognized Jewish fast day, he arrogantly replied: "New wine has to be put into fresh skins" (Mark 2). Clearly, to this renegade, the old Commandments had to be replaced by someone who knew better.
The brazen and open defiance of Torah law by Jesus is recorded over and over again, and is there for all his "Jews" to see, if only they would. Kosher food? An unequivocal rejection of it by Jesus was made as he declared: "It is not what goes into a man's mouth that pollutes him; it is what comes out of his mouth that pollutes a man" (Matthew 15).
Similarly, Jesus scorned the religious obligation to wash one's hands before eating bread (Luke 11), and the hallowed Jewish requirement to pray together with other Jews in a Êminyan, if at all possible (Matthew 6), and changed the Torah ruling allowing a man and wife to divorce under the proper or intolerable circumstances (Matthew 5).
Indeed, rather than ignorantly worship the man who took it upon himself to violate numerous basic Jewish laws, let every Jew for Jesus consider the words of the Torah that have such application in this instance:
"If there arise in thy midst a prophet or a dreamer of dreams and he give thee a sign or a wonder: and the sign or the wonder come to pass whereof he spoke unto thee-saying: `Let us go after other gods,’ thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet or unto that dreamer of dreams. After the L-rd your G-d shall ye walk and Him shall ye fear and His commandments shall ye keep" (Devarim, 13)
Jesus was a premeditated violator of Torah Law who did precisely what is done in the very same reform temples and by the very rabbis from whom so many of the sad young Jews for Jesus fled. Indeed, how sadly clear it is that the Allmighty repays us, measure for measure. The same Jewish parents who took it upon themselves to violate Torah law and "modify" it by cutting its cloth to suit their own fashion, are repaid by children who rush to follow a man who did the same. Aside from any claims of Divinity, how much different was the arrogant Jesus from the local temple rabbi?
Let the call go out to every Jew: Jesus was a breaker of tradition. Jesus was a trampler of Torah halachah. The kosher food and Sabbath that Hebrew-Christians supposedly cherish are not for Jesus. And neither are you, Jewish youth. And lest one be seduced by the Hebrew Christians' argument that the persecution and hatred of Jews were the exclusive handiwork of the Roman Catholic Church, consider the words of the founder of Protestantism, Martin Luther, whose treatise, Ê”On The Jews and Their Lies,” contains the following comments on the Jewish people:
"In fact, they hold us captive in our own country. They let us work in the sweat of our brow to earn money and property while they sit behind the stove, idle away the time, fart, and roast pears. They stuff themselves, guzzle, and live in luxury and ease from our hard-earned goods. With their accursed usury they hold us and our property captive. And by the way of reward and thanks, they curse our Lord and us! Should the devil not laugh and dance if he can enjoy such a fine paradise at the expense of us Christians?
“So we are even at fault in not avenging all this innocent blood of our Lord and of the Christians which they shed for three hundred years after the destruction of Jerusalem and the blood of the children they have shed since then. We are at fault in not slaying them."
And what does the founder of Protestantism and of all the groups who found and fund the pathetic Hebrew-Christians (sic!) and the "Jews for Jesus" have to suggest as his Final Solution? Martin Luther tells his flock:
“First of all, let their synagogues and shuls be set aflame and let whatever may not burn down be completely buried under earth, so that no one for all eternity may ever see a stone or cinder of it. Next, let their homes be similarly burned down and destroyed."
How many Jews met their death as the result of this incitement by the founder of the Protestant Church! And how instructive that the leaders of the ridiculously misnamed Hebrew-Christians and Jews for Jesus groups will never ever criticize Luther. And how important it is to know that the reason is that they are funded, hugely funded, by Protestant groups who would shut off the money faucet in a moment if they ever did.
The lost and confused Jewish youth who wander into the halls of these charlatans, raise their voices in praise of a Jesus in whose name their great grand-parents were burned alive and torn to pieces by the Crusading sword. They join in worship with a Luther who wished their people the most horrible of deaths. How sad for these lost young Jews and how those who twist them mock them even more.
In any event, this was the horror of the Middle Ages and the Exile. But in its horror, one clear lesson shone through. Zion. Only in Zion could the Jew live. The Exile for the Jew was a graveyard and though some days were sunny and pleasantly warm, the sun shone on eventual death.
The words of the Biblical admonition were realized for the Jew in Exile, every day of his life:
"But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the L-rd, thy G-d, that all these curses shall come upon thee and overtake thee. And the L-rd shall scatter thee among all the peoples, from the one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth, and among these nations thou shalt find no repose and there shall be no rest for the sole of thy foot. And thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear night and day, and shalt have no assurance of thy life" (Devarim, 28:15, 64-66)
And despite all, or perhaps because of all, the Jew rose from each blow and each destruction to say: “Listen world, I am a Jew, I am a Zionist.”
Topic: Rabbi Kahanes "Listen World, I am a Jew, I am a Zionist" Chapter 3 (Read 504 times)