Even though my family moved to Nevada in 1967, the people here still consider us to be newcomers. It's that kind of place. Unless you have lived here since you were born, you are not really a Nevadan.



Mostly, the people here are very distrustful of strangers ? especially those who come from California. Old Nevada has become overwhelmed with Californians moving here for cheaper land, cheaper taxes, and wide open spaces.



The reason people here mistrust Californians is our experience with them. First, they are happy that we have so few regulations and they are free to do what they want, but then they start to complain. Many Californians will move into a neighborhood with horses and cattle and tractors, and then start a petition to get rid of the smell and the noise. They are happy to be free of taxes, but then complain that there aren't enough services. They claim to want free access to the thousands of acres of wildland, then they get upset when a coyote eats their favorite cat. It seems that before they are even settled properly in Nevada, they begin trying to turn Nevada into California.



"Why did you come here if you want to recreate what you left?" we ask them.



It is not really their fault, though. Those who have only known the world to be one way can never feel comfortable with something that is different and new. If someone wants to truly change their circumstances, they must either open their minds and their hearts to a new reality, or they will want to recreate the world they left. This is the problem ? they long for what they know, what they feel comfortable with.



As African-American author and critic Audre Lorde, in her famous piece, "Sister Outsider", said, "The master's tools will never destroy the master's house." One cannot use the old tools they acquired in a time of despotism and servitude to forge a new life of freedom. One must find new ways, new tools, and a new outlook in order to destroy the servitude of their past and build a new life. It takes much more than moving to a new place to change ? one must change one?s way of thinking and one?s way of living in order to change one?s life.



In Exodus, we learn that it was not the fact that the Jews were slaves, but that they forgot what it was to be free, that was the tragedy of their servitude in Egypt. When they were freed, many of those who left Egypt longed for the servitude of their past. The exodus of Jews from servitude in Egypt could never have succeeded if G-d had not given the Torah to the Jewish people and reminded them what it was to think independently of the world of men, to know there is a right and a wrong, which exist independently of human experience. Those who forget G-d cannot know freedom.



The problem of those who move without changing their attitude is just as significant in modern Israel. Instead of looking to Israel as an oasis of Jewish life and learning, and seeing Israel as a new place with new possibilities to live as Jews, there are those who want to return to the limited life they left behind. Namely, there are those who have left anti-Semitic, totalitarian countries for the freedom and hope of Israel, but who never changed their outlook and their lives. Men like Tommy Lapid, who continue to live secularly, who distrust independent, religious Jews, and who can never understand the concept of a free Jewish nation. Men like Lapid want to return to what Jews have known, totalitarian government that does not recognize religion or religious practice, and, in fact, declares religion and religious practice to be dangerous to the state.



A example of such sentiment was clearly displayed by Lapid when he went out of his way to declare war on the new synagogue in Tapuach West. It didn't matter that Kfar Tapuach and Tapuach West are authorized settlements. It didn't matter that a new road, having been approved by the government in the authorized settlement, had just been completed. What upset Lapid was that religious men and women who love the land of Israel were planning to dedicate a Torah scroll in the name of a great rabbi and open a center for Jewish life and learning.



Lapid, in his quest for a government free of the fetters of right-thinking, moral people, viewed the new center in Tapuach West in the same way that the old Soviet leaders would regard such a center ? as a dangerous threat to the government. He declared that the center would be teaching "fascist" ideas, and urged the government to tear down the center immediately.



Strangely enough, however, the center at Tapuach West is as far as one can get from fascism. Fascism removes all power from the people and puts that power into the hands of one leader. Those who follow Torah, including the late Rabbi Meir Kahane and his students, know that G-d, not men, control our destinies and our land. Those who study Torah know that no man can be relied upon, and that individual acts of morality are in the hands of every man, woman and child in the land of Israel. Religious Jews understand more clearly than anyone else what it means to be free and independent.



Lapid knows that the greatest threat to the way that he wants Israel to be run is an understanding that there is a G-d who is above the state. He fears, above all else, Jews who will not forget that there is a clear right and a clear wrong, and that it is not Lapid and his party who determines those values.



Fascism is what Lapid left behind, it is all he knows, and it is what he is most comfortable with. This is why he tries to recreate fascism in the land of Israel. Those who follow Torah have a different way, a different path, and a different idea of what Israel has been, is, and will be.



We know who is really in charge of Israel. Lapid is only a man. In living and learning as Jews, we are the most powerful and dangerous threat to fascism and totalitarianism that has ever existed, and only in our conscious and unending fight to maintain our level of learning, can we save the state of Israel from forgetting what it is to be free.