i dont normally post whole articles but this one is too good not to
Listen World, Listen Jew
Rabbi Meir Kahane 1978
Listen world, listen very carefully. I am a Jew, a Zionist. And it is time you understood,
clearly, what the State of Israel is and the meaning of the era in which we live.
Jewish tradition sees the redemption of the Jew as coming in one of two ways. If the Jew
merits his redemption through his return to G-d and a yearning to fulfill his role as a holy
people, the Chosen of the L-rd, then the redemption can come at any moment. But even if
there is no repentance and even if the Jew remains estranged from his Father in Heaven,
the redemption will come; it must come. Such are the mercies of a Father for a son, though
he angers Him and corrupts himself.
Out of the ashes of a Holocaust that seared the flesh of the nation and burned out of its
midst one in every three, from the trash heap of history, arose the Third Jewish
Commonwealth. Even as the gas chambers still gave off their terrible odors and the ovens
were yet warm and the living skeletons with the numbers tattooed on their arms gazed
numbly about them, the redemption was beginning: "Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people,"
says the prophet, and the rabbis place the word in the mouth of the Almighty and have Him
say: "Comfort Me, comfort Me, My people..." Comfort Me for having to watch as the
stubbornness and rebellion of My children must be punished, but comfort Me because from
the whip of chastisement will come the redemption. And so it has. We live in momentous
times, in an historical point that reaches out to us and offers us greatness. We no longer
stand on the threshold of the Messianic era, we have taken our first steps into it. Those who
disagree are not skeptics, they are blind; they are not scoffers, but foolishly ignorant
people.
The end of the great era of man's wandering and stumbling through life in search of meaning
and truth is drawing to a close and the drama of Jewish history with its crescendos of
persecution and heroism, its drama and pathos, its kaleidoscopic wandering and journeying,
is coming to an end. How can one not see that which confronts his very senses, which seizes
him and demands to be heard and understood?
The massive Holocaust that thundered down upon the Jewish people and which, within the
briefest of moments, undid the work and creation of centuries - carrying away the best and
the finest of our people - is hardly an accident of history.
The inexplicable return of a people from 2,000 years and a hundred nations of wandering
and bitter persecution; the revival of a language dead for longer than others, where revival
has been attempted and succeeded so that today children play in it and physicists create
upon it, is not really inexplicable.
The majestic and soaring rise of Jewish resistance and force of arms; the explosion of the
Jewish National Liberation Movement in the form of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the Fighters for
the Freedom of Israel and the Haganah; the shattering of the myth of the Jew as one whose
blood is cheap and whose life is the gentile's for the taking; the creation, from the ash heap
of history, of the Third Jewish Commonwealth, the State of Israel, is surely not a natural
occurrence.
The astounding and massive ingathering of the exiles from the North, South, East and West;
the return of the Children of Israel from the far reaches of Yemen and the laboratories of
London; the Second Exodus of the people of Israel from the Land of Muskovy - all part of the
Redemption that is ordained and in full force today.
The hysterical and historical, wildly wonderful and dreamy victory of six days in June; the
flight of the enemies of the Jew before the legions of the Hebrew people; the affirmation of
the biblical trumpet: "And thou shalt pursue thine enemy and they shall fall before your
sword. And five of you shall pursue one hundred and a hundred of you ten thousand
shall you pursue, and thine enemies shall fall before your sword..."; the return to
ancient Eretz Israel, the paratroopers who clutched with their fingernails, deeply, into the
Wall and the others who ran past the evil seventh barrier step into the Cave of Machpela
and those who prostrated themselves upon the grave of Rachel, our mother; the echo of the
One who pledged: "Every place that your heel shall tread I will give to you..."
Israel is not a state; it is a Decree. Israel is not a land; it is a concept. We have returned not
because of Socialism or pioneers or the army - though all these will gain their place in the
history of the people for their self-sacrifice and readiness to do what others were not
prepared to do. We have returned because the Almighty peered at the clock of history that
was being wound by the suffering of His children and decided: It is time.
It is time because the rise of the State of Israel - the rebirth of Zion - is the Sanctification of
the Name of the L-rd, G-d of Israel.
Topic: Listen World, Listen Jew (Read 6849 times)