If an unlearned person were to wander into an operating room while a surgical team was amputating a patient’s leg, he would be aghast. What cruelty! What horrible people these doctors are! If he wandered into an operating room where a patient’s ailing heart was being removed from his body, the bystander would be even more appalled. What savagery! What hateful creatures these doctors are! Of course, the opposite is the case. The doctors are good people, acting compassionately to save the patient’s life. Because the physicians are people too, with feelings like everyone else, taking these drastic surgical measures is upsetting for them also, but they proceed with their wok, precisely out of their feelings of care for the patient, knowing that the surgery is necessary for the patient’s ultimate good.
So too, when I point out the inherent illness of the Diaspora. For a Jew to live in the Diaspora is like a fish living out of water. The fish can flop around for a time, but eventually it will die. The Diaspora was never meant to last. It is a punishment that is meant to end with the return of the Jews to Israel. The Talmud describes the Diaspora as darkness. The Prophet, Ezekiel, describes it as a valley of dried bones. In the Diaspora, wherever it may be, the Jewish People are dry, scattered bones. We have no national Jewish body. Rather we get whatever nourishment we can from foreign countries, but we are always a minority in someone else’s land. The Jewish People only has real life, and can only exist as an independent NATION, when we are living in our own Jewish land, the Holy Land, and not in a gentile country.
Many people have a hard time understanding this because the focus of their lives is on their own private existence. Basically, they live for themselves. If things are going well with them they are happy. The fact that 70% of the Jews in America are assimilating doesn’t bother them. In their home, things are fine. They have money, freedom to do what they want, they send their children to top colleges, what could be better? It’s a little like a person with a silent cancer spreading through his whole body. As long as his brain is still working, he thinks everything is as good as can be. The disease is destroying his body, but he believes everything is great. In the Diaspora, in every Diaspora, even in America, Joe Cohen or Miriam Schwartz may be doing just dandy, but the Jewish People are dying as a whole.
So I try to open people’s eyes to the real situation. True, it is like getting the blind to see. People like to cling to their delusions. In Spain, the Jews were the top of society until the Inquisition reminded them that they weren’t wanted. The Jews of Germany rubbed elbows with the elite of the Republic until Hitler rose to power. Rabbi Kook and Zeev Jabotinsky warned of the storm that was approaching, but the Jews held fast to their illusions. “You’re exaggerating!” they replied. “Jews have never had it better!” Rabbi Kook wrote passionate letters to the heads of European Jewry, but they refused to listen. Even as they were marched off to the gas chamber, many Jews thought that things would be all right.
Unfortunately, the old adage is true. History repeats itself. People who think that it can’t happen in America are deluding themselves. There is already a silent Holocaust devastating 70% of American Jewry, leading the Jewish People into the gas chamber of intermarriage. The esteemed Torah giant, Rabbi Yaacov Emden wrote before the Holocaust:
“When it seems to us, in our present peaceful existence outside of the Land of Israel, that we have found another Eretz Yisrael and Jerusalem, this to me is the most poignant, deepest, most obvious and direct cause of all of the awful, frightening, monstrous, and unimaginable destructions that we have experienced in the Diaspora” (Siddur Beit Yaacov, Introduction, pg.13).
The universally revered Torah Sage, the “Ohr Samaoch,” Rabbi Meir Simcha HaKohen from Dvinsk, writes in his classic treatise, the “Meshech Chochmah,” that “if a Jew thinks that Berlin is Jerusalem, then a raging stormwind will uproot him by his trunk, a tempest will arise and spread its roaring waves and swallow and destroy, and rage forth without pity” (Meshech Chochmah, pg.191).
I love the Jewish People. That’s why I write what I write. It is the people who keep quiet and hide the truth who are the enemies of the Jews, not me. The leaders of the Jewish communities in the Diaspora who, being deluded themselves, close their eyes to the cancer of the Diaspora, enjoying their positions of leadership and honor, enjoying the moment, while ignoring the storm clouds ahead. Unfortunately, their vision is tragically shortsighted. History repeats itself. What happened in Spain and Germany will, in one way or another, transpire in America, and France, and England, as well. The exile isn’t meant to last forever. Why wait for its painful end? You can save yourselves now. At least for the sake of your children. If you truly love them, you can still rescue them now. Don’t wait until it’s too late. It is far wiser to learn from history then to deny and ignore it!
