Dvar Torah by Rabbi Meir Kahane
Judaism is a religion of perception. Our Rabbis speak of two kinds of men, the wise (chacham) and the perceptive and understanding (navon)…. Judaism is a religion for the navon, the perceptive, the analytical, the drawers of lessons from other lessons….
… It reminds us of our origins, the children of a man named Abraham the Hebrew; Avraham Ha’Ivri, the man from the other side. The whole world stood on one side and he alone stood on the other and proclaimed the Truth. His alone was the truth, and the others screamed their fury and incantations at him. He was unmoved and never broke; unmoved by the anger of the majority and unbroken by the ordeal of standing alone. We are his children, a nation that chose its own way because it knew the truth and clung to that truth in the face of agonizing loneliness and efforts of the many to stamp out “the few.”
Shall we speak of true strength? Shall we discuss real greatness? Shall we speak of nations of power and empires? Then surely the Jewish people, with their raising high the banner of “the few,” must be reckoned among the strong and the great and powerful empire-builders. Men who defy the many because there is evil and falsehood; men who are not afraid of the vast numbers of opposition and of the loneliness and the ensuing persecution that is the fate of every group that refuses to conform; above all, men who are convinced that their idea will triumph – this is the history of “the few,” that is the Jew and “the few” within those few who insisted that this strength and greatness never be abdicated.
And perhaps it is this last, the self-confident belief in oneself and one’s beliefs, that leads to the conviction that one will triumph. There in never doubt in the mind of “the few” that only are they correct but that, in the end, they will win. Victory can never elude a people who are so convinced that it has the truth and is willing to defy a whole word that differs. They come about because “the few” ignore all the logic of numbers and power; they do not think like “normal” people that numbers and power are the ultimate factor that decides history. They come about because “the few” ignore the heartbreaks of temporary defeat and the crushing blows of setback. They rise above treachery and the dwindling away of even their own supporters. “The few” are men of such barzel – be theirs steel – that victory because they will it and drive themselves with total dedication to that victory. They must triumph because there is nothing more important to them than that triumph and all else pales into insignificance before it. They simply do not care about consequences, and their very lives are but weapons in the struggle for greatness. Such people cannot be defeated, and they never are.
And along with this ability to withstand the loneliness, to ignore the numbers and power of the adversary and to gird themselves with total confidence in their cause and its success, lies another prerequisite for greatness and membership in the ranks of “the few.” It is the ability to rise above pettiness and “smallness.” To be “many” is not necessarily to be great, and to be “few” in not to be small. To the contrary, it is “the few” who acquire greatness and “the many” who gravitate to smallness.
What is smallness of mind? It is the inability to grasp permanence and to understand what is truly important. It is the failure to see beyond the tangible and concrete. It is a breakdown in vision and prophecy, a tendency to look at a fact and not see the one beyond it and beyond that and beyond…. It is to have a sense of values that gives to the transitory the highest priority and that rejects the permanence of greatness because it cannot be touched and felt, or because it cannot be given a tangible or material rate of exchange, or because it calls for too much effort and sacrifice without the monetary or status return that are of immediate gratification.
Smallness is the attribute of the many. It belongs to those whose world is bounded by their mortgaged home and their need to achieve all the material objects of life that will give them the transitory pleasures of wealth, honor and comfort.
It is the province of the man who judges every action by the yardstick of what will the world think; what will it mean for my own status and personal existence; how much will it cost me.
Smallness is that which drives parents to shape their children’s lives along the path of comfort so that the value of a university degree transcends all else. It is the “klein keppel,” the small mind, that cannot understand the need of young people to sometimes sacrifice their careers and their opportunity for wealth for a cause and an ideal. It is the man who looks at life through the microscope.
Greatness is the ability to perceive what is important and what is not, what is eternal and what is temporary. Greatness yearns for mountains, not valleys, and understands how brief the candle of life is and how important it is to use it to light the world. Greatness is the possession of “the few” because it is acquired only through dedication, pain and sacrifice. It is understood by the navon and not by those who are merely wise. It is that which lifts man from the merely human to the heights of sublime near-divinity. It is understood by “the few” to whom we owe the very fact of Jewish existence and who have created history in their own lonely image.
January 7, 1972
Topic: What real greatness is (Read 749 times)