Avrohom paid Efron for the Cave of Machpela. Dovid paid for the Har Ha'Bayis. Yaakov paid for Sh'chem.
So what have we Jews done to ourselves?
We gave back the Temple Mt. to our enemies after we won it during the miraculous Six Day War.
We handed over Sh'chem to the Palestinian Authority and the kever of Yosef Ha'Tzaddik became a target for violent protests by Arabs against the Israeli government. Several Israeli soldiers were killed at the site and in 2000 the complex was ransacked by an Arab mob. Subsequently, the glorified State of Israel prohibited Jewish visits to the site (!) and the site gradually fell into disrepair. When Hillel Lieberman heard that the Arabs had trashed the kever, he went there to see if he could salvage the Sifrei Torah and siddurim and was murdered.
Netanyahu turned over 80 percent of Hebron in 1997 to the Palestinian Authority.
Yeshaya 49:17 "your destroyers and those who laid you waste go out from you" - what we do to ourselves is even more painful than what others do to us.
If you've got a positive note to end on - please share it with us!
To end of on a positive note on this topic is tough but lets see if I can give it a shot.
ReplyDeleteWhat always strikes me about Israel in general is the extremes. While sitting in tachanat Merkazit one time as a sem girl and watching Michael Jackson go nuts on a HUGE screen, another girl commented to me how when a yid falls low, he falls really low. (The whole concept of the lower you are the higher your source must be and all that).
Just after reading your piece I saw this video http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/international/2010/09/30/wus.secret.jew.bk.c.cnn.html?ref=nf. What struck me while watching it as how this guy in his former life beat people up, but in his present life is a shochet. Similar tendencies in a person can be used for different extremes, depending on which way you direct your life.
Moshiach is on our doorsteps, it's impossible to ignore the signs! As low as our glorified state of Israel gets and as stupid as they act the end result will be the opposite extreme in goodness!
just to explain what that sem girl meant, she wasn't referring to Michael Jackson (clearly not a yid even though he managed to accomplish being both a woman and a man and white and black) She was referring to the whole atmosphere in the Tachana and how Israelis at the time were crazy over Michael, more then places where we all came from.
ReplyDelete"As low as our glorified state of Israel gets and as stupid as they act the end result will be the opposite extreme in goodness!"
ReplyDeletecan't wait!