Well, I guess Friday night's terror attack was only a chance happening and the victims, merely poor sacrifices for peace. Try explaining that to Yael Orbach's fiance, who expected to marry his beloved in a few weeks. I guess he was lucky. He was only critically wounded. She was killed.



And when making the rounds, someone will have to explain to Itzik Buzaglo's nine-year-old and three-year-old why Daddy won't be coming home any more, and why Mommy will be in the hospital for a while.



Public Security Minister Gideon Ezra has a ready explanation: "Demonstrations by opponents to the government's disengagement program are hampering efforts to control terror because of the need to place security personnel at protests." The Israeli Right, protesting abandonment of Eretz Yisrael to terrorists - we are guilty, as always. A likely scapegoat. I cannot help but feel nauseous at such vile accusations, or perhaps better described as incitement. Gideon Ezra, once seen as a 'friend', has revealed his true colors - he is one of the major proponents of mass administrative detention to contain the 'extremist leadership' endangering the "piece process" and with it, the entire State of Israel.



Here in Hebron, peace is definitely taking hold. Shabbat afternoon, an Arab terrorist woman attempted to kill a border policeman adjacent to Ma'arat HaMachpela. Following repeated attempts to stab him, the woman was finally shot. This is the second time in two weeks that Arabs have tried to kill Israeli security forces in Hebron. This, too, I guess, is a sign of peace - only twice in two weeks.



At the same time, the IDF is continuing to try and renovate an Arab house perched atop the children's playground and courtyard in the Avraham Avinu neighborhood. The Arab family living there abandoned their home at IDF urging several years ago, due to security dangers. At one time, their son had jumped from the house into the Jewish neighborhood with a knife, looking for someone to slaughter. He was later released by Israeli security forces because he claimed that he wanted to kill "an Arab", not a Jew, thereby falling into a special category: Arabs attacking other Arabs are to be dealt with by the "palestinian security forces", not the Israelis. He was transferred to the appropriate Arab "police" and promptly released.



However, in the age of true peace, the family, including children, are no longer dangerous and can return to the house. This, not according to the army, rather, as ruled by the Supreme Court. The IDF opposed allowing the family back, but were overruled by the High Court. Hebron's wonderful children (also labeled 'fanatics', but in truth, much wiser than the judges in their big black robes) have been disrupting the work, much to the chagrin of the local IDF officers and soldiers, who try to convince the kids to change their ways via fists. To no avail. The wise children, knowing that their lives are at stake, prefer beatings and possible arrest to murderous neighbors. All, of course, in the name of peace.



And so, the fun continues.



This past Shabbat Torah portion dealt with the sin of the golden calf, when Jews in the desert, despite having received the ten commandants from G-d, created a golden calf idol. G-d ordered Moses, high up on Mt. Sinai, to leave the peak and return to the people. Reaching the bottom of the mountain, Moses was greatly angered; not so much because of the actual creation of the calf; rather, because people were joyous, singing and dancing around the idol. Moses was furious at the people's celebrations and, as a result, threw the tablets of the law on the ground, shattering them into pieces.



Sitting in Ma'arat HaMachpela, hearing this chanted from the Torah on Saturday morning, I could not help but envision the pictures of Ariel Sharon and his cronies in the Knesset, at the moment of 'victory', when Israel's parliament passed the 'pinui-pinzui' Disengagement legislation, officially recognizing the uprooting of between nine to ten thousand Israelis from their homes in Gush Katif and the northern Shomron. Such huge, gorgeous smiles adorned Sharon and Shimon Peres' faces. Such joy. The golden calf, all over again.



Of course, Sharon and Co. are hanging their legitimacy on law and democracy. Whatever the Knesset says, that's the way it is. Well, I used to be a democrat, accepting the rule of a parliamentary majority. But I've ceased to believe in such falsity. First of all, this administration's decisions have nothing to do with democracy. Sharon's election platform negated unilateral abandonment of Eretz Yisrael, specifically Gush Katif. (This, contrary to his opponent's position on the same issue.) Sharon also ignored two binding 'democratic' votes, rejecting his planned Katif expulsion plan.



Second, there are some issues not even a parliament can decide. Could a Knesset majority abolish Shabbat? Could a parliamentary majority decide that all first-born males be tossed into the sea? Can the Knesset legitimately decide that that Eretz Yisrael really isn't Eretz Yisrael?



Third, as I have previously written, democracy has turned into a deity, not a means to an end; it has become the goal in and of itself. Sharon, Peres and others are using democracy just as the Jews in the desert followed the golden calf, almost the worst of all transgressions It is ironic that the 'expulsion' is due to begin on the 17th or 18th day of Tammuz (the end of July), which is, according to the Hebrew calendar, the anniversary of the creation of the golden calf.



The expulsion is to continue during the 'three weeks', the days between the 17th of Tammuz and the ninth day of Av, when we mourn the destruction of the First and Second Temples. The ravaging of Eretz Yisrael is due to be implemented on the very days when the Jewish people in the desert also rejected Eretz Yisrael, crying, "we cannot live in the Land - a land of giants, and land which devours its residents, a land which is not good." Only two of the twelve men sent to spy out the land reacted otherwise, saying, "It is a very, very good land." They, too, weren't a majority; they were a tiny minority, two of twelve, but they were right and the others wrong. They were rewarded with life, the others, punished with death. Is this what we are returning to - the worst of all offences, rejecting the Land G-d gave us, his eternal gift to the Jewish people, a wrongdoing which led to Israel's being banished to the desert for forty years?



Clearly, the two most damaging acts ever performed by the Jewish people are playing themselves out again: bowing down to the golden calf and rejecting Eretz Yisrael. What will it take for us to learn?



On Shabbat, following completion of the Torah reading, we concluded with a passage from the book of Kings, describing how Eliyahu HaNavi, Elijah the prophet, proved the deceit of idol worship on Mount Carmel, beseeching the L-rd to send a flash of fire from the heavens to devour his sacrifice and not that of the 'majority' idol worshippers.



Perhaps, today too, we are in need of the hand of G-d, a bolt of lightening from the Heavens.



Ariel Sharon, together with Peres, Sha'ul Mofaz, Limor Livnat, Silvan Shalom, Gideon Ezra and others, have sold their people, their land and their Torah. They have betrayed the very fundamentals on which our nation was established. They have deceived their people and are deluding themselves. They have treasonously sold their very beings and the entirety of Jewish faith, and can only be labeled as the most infamous whores in over three thousand seven hundred years of Jewish history. But they are worse then regular prostitutes, because they have sold not only themselves, they have treacherously abandoned all of us today, as well as future generations of Jews, Eretz Yisrael and our Torah. They have forsaken G-d.



Selling out.