BS"D
YESHIVAT HARA'AYON HAYEHUDI
Jerusalem, Israel
HaRav Yehuda Kroizer SHLIT"A, Rosh Yeshiva
PARSHAT MATOT-MASE'I
28 Tammuz 5767/13-14 July 2007
FACT: AND I WILL DO TO YOU WHAT I WANTED TO DO TO THEM
We like to think, as Rabbi Meir Kahane HY"D would sometimes say, that G-d is like a "Santa Claus": A big, loving man with a long white beard,going around and giving away presents. The truth is far from this, although G-d is full of mercy. Still, whoever says that G-d overlooks certain things and acts - his life is overlooked.
In our parsha, the Torah lays down the law, the only law that there is, and one from which there is no escape. "Speak to the Children of Israel and say to them: 'When you cross the Jordan to the land of Cana'an, you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the Land before you. And you shall destroy all their prostration stones, all their molten images shall you destroy, and all their high places shall you demolish. You shall posses the Land and you shall settle in it, for to you have I given the Land to possess it. But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the Land before you, those of themwhom you leave shall be pins in your eyes and a surrounding barrier of thorns in your sides, and they will harass you upon the Land in which you dwell'".
This, then, is the bottom line. Try as you might to hide from this fact of nature, but you can never run from it, for so has Hashem spoken. Rashi teaches us: "You shall take possession of the Land from its inhabitants and then you will be able to remain in it, and if not, you will not be able to remain in it." Plain and simple: If you take the Land and remove the inhabitants that live here, then you will be able to live here, and if not, you will not be able to survive in the Land.
In this fashion, the Talmud teaches us that, while still in the Jordon River, Joshua call upon the Jewish people with this message: If you destroy the inhabitants of the Land, fine, and if not, the waters of the Jordan will come and wash you and me away. Clear enough, there is no other option. At the end of the day, the Torah is telling us the law - it's either them or us; the inhabitants of the land and the Jewish people cannot live together!
The holy Or Hachayim takes it a step further and tells us that, even in your cities where the foreigners do not live, you will not be secure as long as the foreigners are living in any part of the Land of Israel. The Abarbanel adds that without a doubt, the inhabitants of the Land will always seek to harm you. When they have no power to do so, they will desist, but when they believe they can harm you, they will rise up and do it. All one has to do is to open up the Tanach to see that time after time, when the Children of Israel let the nations of the Land live among us, they quickly turned into acancer and rose up to destroy us.
How true are the words of our rabbis in our own day, but then, the Torah already lay down the law, a law that cannot be broken. Just this week on the Temple Mount, the holiest site in this world, Islamic digging goes on unabated. Without permits, the Wakf of the Temple Mount does whatever they want, without anyone stopping them. In fact, when two archaeologists tried to question them about the digging, they were detained by the Israeli police. Here, on our holiest site where we, the Jewish people, should be doing the digging to find out where the Altar stood, so we can bring sacrifices to the Most High, it is the arch-enemy of the Jews, the Wakf, who is in control of the Mount. "What I wanted to do to them I will do to you".
This past week, on bus route #1, which runs to the Kotel, three Arab youths started up with a Jewish girl. Only one fine man stood up for this girl and tried to stop them from "hitting upon her". The Arab youths on a Jewish bus going to the Kotel beat up this Jew, unabated. Imagine for a moment if it was the other way around and it would have been a Arab bus: Do you know what would have been left of the Jew? Not much!
I could go on and on and talk of the thousands of illegal buildings that the Arabs build in the Negev or the Galilee, which today has a majority of Arabs, and nothing is done to stop them, or how city after city is gaining an Arab majority, like Jaffa, Acco, Lod, Ramle, and Haifa. Still, the message of the Torah is clear: "What I wanted to do to them, I will do to you". As with all Torah laws, this one can also not be broken. It is the way it is, we must awaken to this reality and rise like a lion up to the only path that is open to us: To remove the enemies of the Jewish people from the Land.
With love of Israel,
Levi Chazen
