The other week in an article entitled: The United Nations, Iran and Israel, in reference to the 'Oleg Cartoons' commissioned by the Women in Green Organisation, I said that: "I frequently save these cartoons for future reference, providing as they do, visual reminders of previous statements and claims".
Today I was running through some of the 'older' postings on my website, and I came across one entitled: "Now this is Faith in the Almighty" which I published on 03/18/04 .
The article is a direct copy from the Women in Green Newsletter and was written by Gary Cooperberg, under the title "Plans and Plans".
As I re-read this article, I couldn't help but think how appropriate it is at this particular time, for all Jewish and non-Jewish people to pay attention to its' message.
So here it is:
Plans and Plans by Gary Cooperberg.
Clearly a great many people are very upset with Sharon's plan to uproot Jewish people from their homes. It is ironic that, from June of 1967 onward, nearly every Israeli government has sought to give away that which was miraculously handed to us by our
G-d. And, at long last, when we finally got a Prime Minister who was, deemed by most observers to be, the most right-wing militant leader we could hope for, he does an about face and suggests the most leftist policy ever dreamed up! No wonder many people are losing hope in our future.
Threats to our existence are nothing new to the Jewish people. What we must continue to keep, first and foremost, in our minds is the knowledge that Israel and the Jewish People are part of a Divine Plan which no human power can alter. Of course it would be a lot better if we, the Jewish People, could pull ourselves together and act with faith in G-d and true self-confidence in the certainty of our destiny. By failing to do this we are the prime cause of our own needless suffering.
While we can examine mistakes we have made over the centuries and identify how G-d has rescued us so many times, even though we may not have been worthy of His mercy, let us just take a brief look at recent Jewish history.
Theodore Herzl, the founding father of modern "secular Zionism", was certainly not a religious man. His dream of a Jewish State was not that of his fathers. As a result of the Dreyfus trial in France he came to the conclusion that the world hates Jews so much that it could easily destroy them physically. His concern was not to save Judaism, rather to save Jewish lives. He did not see the connection between antisemitism and Judaism. All he saw was irrational hatred of the Jew. Antisemitism did not discriminate between observant and non-observant Jews.
The fact is that all Jews have an equal obligation to serve our G-d and bring redemption to Mankind. That many Jews choose to ignore their obligation as Jews does not remove the fact that they still have that obligation.
The holocaust, which was probably the most brutal and horrible expression of antisemitism in history, clearly revealed that no Jew can escape from his destiny. Many thought that they could abandon Judaism and thus escape antisemitism only to find themselves hunted down equally with observant Jews.
The reason we Jews were not permanently accepted by any nation is because it was our destiny to remain a people apart from all the nations of the world. Had we been accepted and become a part of the nations of our exile we would have disappeared centuries ago.
Today, after thousands of years of wandering from nation to nation, in spite of our desire to become a part of those nations, it is nothing less than a miracle that we still are recognizable as a people! Yes, we have made plans to make new lives in so many different places, only to have those plans disintegrate before our eyes.
For two hundred years we lived in Spain and considered it home ... until the Spanish Inquisition forced us out. Jews living in Germany considered themselves Germans first and Jews second, failing to believe Hitler even when he clearly expressed his hatred for the Jews.
It was no coincidence that the reborn Jewish State came into existence right after the holocaust. Clearly the most horrible desecration of G-d, the wholesale murder of millions of His people, brought with it Divine reaction.
Were G-d not to intervene for the sake of His Holy Name, the nations would have destroyed the Jewish people completely. Thus Divine Redemption was pushed forward.
While Herzl would have settled for a state in far off Uganda, it was not Herzl's plan that was being implemented. He was merely an unwitting tool in the Divine Plan. His efforts set into motion the events which eventually led to the modern state of Israel.
It is also interesting to note that most of the leaders of the Jewish Agency were opposed to the concept of Jewish independence. They would have preferred to remain a protectorate of Great Britain for fear that a Jewish State would not have the ability to defend itself, and thus would be better off depending on a strong foreign power to protect it. Thus it was clearly another miracle that Ben Gurion had the courage to declare independence in the face of overwhelming odds, both from within and without, which threatened the viability of such a state.
We Jews have been trying to compromise with our enemies from the moment of our re-emergence as a sovereign entity. Consistently those efforts have brought nothing but war and strife. Never have we gained any advantage as a result of our attempts to appease our enemies.
The only times we had any respite from our enemies were in response to inflicting decisive victories against them. Yet, in spite of this observable fact, we have consistently undone those victories by voluntarily surrendering to the losers!
Sharon is correct in assuming that we have no partners with whom to make peace. We have only ourselves and thus must resort to making unilateral decisions for our future. How strange and incredible that he would think to make unilateral expressions of surrender rather than decisively destroy our enemies! Yet his thinking is consistent with that of most Jewish leaders of our recent past.
The one element which sets us apart from the nations and gives us our unique, unbeatable strength, is completely ignored! England was never our protector. The government to which Jewish leaders had wanted to trust our security turned out to be an enemy of the Jewish people! Had we trusted our future to the British the Jewish homeland would likely have become another Arab State.
Anyone who thinks that today our only hope for survival lies with the United States of America is making the same mistake.
America is not an evil country. It is not our enemy. But should we fail to recognize the reality that we are dependent only upon the Living G-d of Israel, and seek to exchange Him for a burnt out Bush, it may well be that the U.S.A. will become our enemy in order to force us to turn to the Fountain of Living Waters rather than depend upon more broken cisterns.
What we must all take to heart during these days of apparent despair and road maps to hell is that Jewish destiny will override both the plans of our enemies, and that of our own leaders.
Women For Israel's Tomorrow (Women in Green)
www.womeningreen.org
R.P.Bendedek
Email: rpbendedek@hotmail.com
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| I am that I am! |
R.P.BenDedek is the Author of 'The King's Calendar: The Secret of Qumran' and a guest columnist at Magic City Morning Star News.
"The King's Calendar" [ on sale - while the economic recession is on], is a chronological study of the historical books of the Bible (Kings and Chronicles), Josephus, Seder Olam Rabbah, and the (Essene) Damascus Document of The Dead Sea Scrolls. See Chapter Precis page.
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