The greatness of a rabbi is not measured in his ability to answer questions that people ask, but in his insight of the real problem:
A woman once asked a rabbi whether she can use milk for the four cups of wine on Passover. Instead of answering, the Rabbi went to the kitchen, and brought her enough meat and wine to feed the poor woman and her family on Pesach.
Such was the greatness of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, zt?l. While all the Jewish world was debating whether it is permissible to give away our Land for peace, he understood that that was not the question. The "Land for peace" absurdity is born out of the spiritual poverty we are in, and the only answer is to strengthen our commitment to the Torah, and to realize that we are the rightful owners of the Land. Today we know how right he was.
One aspect of that commitment is the respect due to Shabbat by a Jewish government on the Jewish Land. Events that followed the fateful order by then-Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer to evacuate the Gil'ad Farm on Shabbat resulted in the fall of the government. This is not the first crisis in Israeli history caused by the government casually desecrating Shabbat in public. In an earlier event, in 1976, the first F-16 fighter jets purchased by Israel landed on Shabbat eve. Government officials didn't think much about having a press-attended welcoming ceremony right then, after Shabbat had already started, on the tarmac. As a result, the National Religious Party (NRP) left the government, paving the way for the first election of Likud and destroying Labor's monopoly on power. Menachem Begin, then head of Likud, is still the only Shabbat-observing Prime Minister in Israel history. More apocryphal, is the story I heard that then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was dining in a treif (non-kosher) restaurant on Yom Kippur when the Arab armies attacked in 1973. Connect the dots and find a pattern....
The reason for this interaction between observing esoteric Torah precepts and the effects this has on the physical world stem from the fact that the world is built on a precious balance of "matter" and "spirit". God wants us to populate and "conquer" this world, on the one hand, but he also wants us to make room for Him, to make this world a Godly place. Without God, technology and science (the "matter") is an empty shell, a shell without a soul. Even worse, without Godly morality to guide us, technology is destructive, as it was during the Holocaust. On the other extreme of the matter-spirit balance lies today's Islam. Just like the Communists a century ago, Islam blames the modern world for excesses of materialism and permissiveness, and capitalizes on the jealousy of those who fell behind in the technological race.
Yet, the hope of Islam is actually hopelessness: instead of combining "matter" (technology and sciences) with Godly "spirit", it rejects the "matter" entirely. Thus, "in the name of God the Merciful" it is intent in destroying the whole world.
However, this religious cloak is actually rationalization. For most of these murderers, Islam is only a pretext. Blood and domination is what they really desire. Just like the god-less totalitarian ideologies that rose and fell before them - Communism and Nazism. Both murdered millions using technology for God-less aims. Today it's Saddam and Islam. It is Eisav dressed-up as Ishmael - pious on the outside, but just as God-less on the inside.
The character of our enemies, however, is no guarantee of our virtue. We must not fall into the trap of losing sight of either side of the matter-spirit coin, because our claim and hold on the Land of Israel is not absolute. It is conditioned upon our acceptance as a nation of the fact that God is our King and Ruler. If we deny this, we have no claim. Even now, when our hold seems as secure as ever, we must be mindful of that.
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Lipa Roitman is the Editor of USA-Israel.com.
A woman once asked a rabbi whether she can use milk for the four cups of wine on Passover. Instead of answering, the Rabbi went to the kitchen, and brought her enough meat and wine to feed the poor woman and her family on Pesach.
Such was the greatness of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, zt?l. While all the Jewish world was debating whether it is permissible to give away our Land for peace, he understood that that was not the question. The "Land for peace" absurdity is born out of the spiritual poverty we are in, and the only answer is to strengthen our commitment to the Torah, and to realize that we are the rightful owners of the Land. Today we know how right he was.
One aspect of that commitment is the respect due to Shabbat by a Jewish government on the Jewish Land. Events that followed the fateful order by then-Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer to evacuate the Gil'ad Farm on Shabbat resulted in the fall of the government. This is not the first crisis in Israeli history caused by the government casually desecrating Shabbat in public. In an earlier event, in 1976, the first F-16 fighter jets purchased by Israel landed on Shabbat eve. Government officials didn't think much about having a press-attended welcoming ceremony right then, after Shabbat had already started, on the tarmac. As a result, the National Religious Party (NRP) left the government, paving the way for the first election of Likud and destroying Labor's monopoly on power. Menachem Begin, then head of Likud, is still the only Shabbat-observing Prime Minister in Israel history. More apocryphal, is the story I heard that then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was dining in a treif (non-kosher) restaurant on Yom Kippur when the Arab armies attacked in 1973. Connect the dots and find a pattern....
The reason for this interaction between observing esoteric Torah precepts and the effects this has on the physical world stem from the fact that the world is built on a precious balance of "matter" and "spirit". God wants us to populate and "conquer" this world, on the one hand, but he also wants us to make room for Him, to make this world a Godly place. Without God, technology and science (the "matter") is an empty shell, a shell without a soul. Even worse, without Godly morality to guide us, technology is destructive, as it was during the Holocaust. On the other extreme of the matter-spirit balance lies today's Islam. Just like the Communists a century ago, Islam blames the modern world for excesses of materialism and permissiveness, and capitalizes on the jealousy of those who fell behind in the technological race.
Yet, the hope of Islam is actually hopelessness: instead of combining "matter" (technology and sciences) with Godly "spirit", it rejects the "matter" entirely. Thus, "in the name of God the Merciful" it is intent in destroying the whole world.
However, this religious cloak is actually rationalization. For most of these murderers, Islam is only a pretext. Blood and domination is what they really desire. Just like the god-less totalitarian ideologies that rose and fell before them - Communism and Nazism. Both murdered millions using technology for God-less aims. Today it's Saddam and Islam. It is Eisav dressed-up as Ishmael - pious on the outside, but just as God-less on the inside.
The character of our enemies, however, is no guarantee of our virtue. We must not fall into the trap of losing sight of either side of the matter-spirit coin, because our claim and hold on the Land of Israel is not absolute. It is conditioned upon our acceptance as a nation of the fact that God is our King and Ruler. If we deny this, we have no claim. Even now, when our hold seems as secure as ever, we must be mindful of that.
--------------------------------------------------------
Lipa Roitman is the Editor of USA-Israel.com.