#100

#100, Jewish Misuse of the Bible after the Holocaust

We must face and accept each moment and learn from it whether it be good or bad. By doing this we grow spiritually, because like God we are working all things together for good that we may love God as he loves us. (Rom. 8:28). This is the supreme good. To successfully do this we must not judge the moment, for that wastes energy that we need to evolve spiritually and do good for ourselves and others.

Jesus taught us to live this way in the Sermon on the Mount. If we do not do it, then in the tragically bad moments we will not learn from them and build the wonderful good that we could. The Jewish Holocaust of WWII was a tragically bad time. But if one judges it instead of accepting it in unity and peace to further our spiritual evolution we regress and go deeper into our past traditions and become trapped by them and self destruct.

I believe this is the case with the ultra orthodox or fundamentalist Jews after the Holocaust. They have regressed stringently into their past traditions, at least some of them, and they are creating self destruction for themselves and for others.

In the early twentieth century, the original Zionists seeking to build a homeland for Jews in Palestine did so by diplomacy, working and improving the land and fighting when they needed to. They were secular Jews and they made good, gradual progress. They were bitterly opposed by the conservative Orthodox Jews who accused them of rebelling against Judaism and profaning the land of Israel.

But after the Holocaust, in the 1950s and 60s young Orthodox Israelis developed a religious Zionism based on a literal reading of the Bible. They said the Jews must have all the land that was originally promised to Abraham’s descendants. The secular Jews never claimed this. These Orthodox Zionists soon chose a very fundamentalist elderly Rabbi Kook as their leader. He was very radical.

Kook, like Fundamentalist Christians such as Jerry Farwell, taught that Jews must return to their homeland and settle land now inhabited by Arabs and then the final redemption and peace would come to the world. This influence has hardened much of Israel’s and some of America’s politics. There are now considerable numbers of some young Israelis who say they should just kill all the Palestinians and get it over with.

This kind of scripture interpretation has led to young men such as Baruch Goldstein to shoot 29 Palestinians worshipping in the Cave of the Patriarchs at Hebron on the Festival of Purim, February 25, 1994. Then Yigal Amir on November 4, 1995, assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin during a peace rally in Tel Aviv. He claimed he had to kill Rabin because he was seeking peace with the Palestinians and giving some of their land back to them.

When we do not accept the bad moments as well as the good, learn from them and build good from them, then destruction ensues. The Fundamentalist Orthodox Jews and hard line Jewish politicians, it seems to me, have not learned from the Holocaust what they should. All who do not learn to love those different from them and work with them for peace ultimately will stand alone in the destruction they cause and that is what the heart of the Bible clearly teaches above all else