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Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, one of Israel's best friends, is here visiting for a few days. One of the people how is part of his delegation is a rabbi named Daniel Korobkin. The National Council of Canadian Muslims - the Canadian branch of Hamas-affiliate CAIR - has demanded that Harper remove Rabbi Korbokin from his delegation. Pamela Geller explains why.
[T]he Rabbi attended and spoke briefly at my September talk in Canada.
Their letter charged that both Robert Spencer, who also spoke at that September event, and I “have a lengthy and clear record of promoting anti-Muslim sentiments and demonization.” In support of this, they listed a number of statements (wrenched from explanatory context, of course) that are demonstrably true and abundantly established by every day’s headlines. Do they think Harper, a strong defender of Israel, is so stupid as to be blind to the reality of Islamic jihad?
Whatever the nature of the things that I say, Rabbi Korobkin didn’t utter them and is not by any conceivable stretch of the imagination responsible for them. It is bitterly ironic that Islamic supremacist groups would label my efforts to defend the freedom of speech and equality of rights for all people before the law as “anti-Muslim.” That speaks volumes. However, whatever my work may be about, it is not Rabbi Korobkin’s work or his responsibility.
There is another strategy at play here: the message is being sent to every rabbi and clergyman, and everyone in the public square, that if you have anything to do in the public square with those fighting jihad and Sharia, they will come after you.
You don't think Canada's Muslims are trying to shut their opponents up, do you?
Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky argues that Jerusalem should be re-divided if it would further the cause of peace between Israel and her neighbors. We admire the rabbi as a spiritual leader and a colleague, but on this point, his argument is not only wrong but dangerously na?ve.
First, when Jerusalem was last divided, from 1948 to 1967, the city was a living hell for its Jewish residents. Jews were forced from Jewish neighborhoods in the Old City and were banned from Jewish holy sites, which were vandalized and destroyed. Access to Christian sites was also restricted.
The rest of the city was subject to routine sniper fire, mortar fire and other attacks. Jerusalem was hardly at peace; it was, in fact, on the front lines of a war of attrition.
There may be competing Jewish and Arab historical claims to Jerusalem, but on one point, there is no disagreement: Jerusalem has never been more prosperous, more welcoming to pilgrims of all religions and more free than it is today as a unified city under Israeli control. That is why so many Israeli Arabs choose to live there, rather than in Palestinian-controlled areas elsewhere.
Second, all available evidence suggests that Palestinian control over even a handful of Arab neighborhoods will result in those neighborhoods falling into economic and social anarchy, as was the case in Gaza after Israel's voluntary pullout, and will become a staging ground for terror attacks on the rest of the city. In the aftermath of Gaza, in which Israel faces continued terror and newly violent rocket attacks, anyone supporting shared sovereignty of any kind in Jerusalem is ignoring the facts.
Third, this is not a matter solely for the Israeli government to decide. Jerusalem is the physical heart of Judaism, we pray in its direction every day, we send our children there to study and we return there throughout our lives for spiritual sustenance.
Even if the Israeli government were to consider a re-division of the city, we would oppose such a move. And we would hardly be alone: Jews and Christians of every religious denomination and political stripe oppose such a re-division. So does the U.S. Congress.
Fourth, on the issue of "honesty" on Jerusalem's history: No one denies that Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem has been legally questioned from day one. There have always been two distinct ways, the Arab way and the Israeli way, to interpret a whole litany of historical events and documents.
To date, Israel and much of the international community have deemed the annexation legal. To suggest that Israel should sacrifice its security and real lives because of dubious questions of "honesty" is at best false piety.
Finally, Rabbi Kanefsky believes that "there will be peace the day after there is truth." We disagree. There will be peace the day after everyone wants peace.
Only when both sides are truly committed to living peacefully, instead of destroying the "enemy," will there be peace. We look forward to such a day and are eager to be a part of that peace.
1. My first reflection is that many scholars have challenged certain historical accounts in Tanakh based on the fact that they can’t find any corroborating evidence in the secular chronicles of that culture’s history outside of Tanakh. For example, they say, there never was a story of a Queen Esther who saved the Jews from destruction in the Persian empire since there’s no record of it anywhere.
2. To that I would respond: look at the headlines this past week. There was a major tsunami that was the obsession of the entire world media. But there was another tsunami, one that rocked the Jewish world with a greater shock on our Richter Scale than the 9.0 tsunami in Japan, the murders of three children and the Fogel parents, hy”d. You’d be lucky if you found the news on page 5 of the newspaper. Yes, it was reported, but always with qualifying language ("intruders" attacking "settlers", etc.), so that their blood for whatever reason isn’t perceived as red as everyone else’s.
3. While it’s true that for the Jewish people, another Jew’s death is more painful, because it’s mishpacha, the opposite is also true for the rest of the world, that our blood isn’t as tragic, since we’re Israelis, or we’re Jews, so we’ve probably done something anyway to bring it upon ourselves.
4. Don’t be surprised, therefore, if you can’t find any confirmation of the Purim story in ancient Persian history. Our blood wasn’t so red back then, either, so we’d have been lucky if our story was in the back of the Persian newspapers. That’s the message of the miracle that takes place when Achashverosh can’t sleep and they remind him that a Jew, Mordechai, had saved his life. It’s no coincidence that Mordechai hadn’t been rewarded; his Jewishness no doubt contributed to his being overlooked by a king who was too busy to bother himself to extend his thanks to a Jew, no matter how indebted he was to him.
5. My second observation is that which I discussed with our children in school before Shabbos : The role of Amalek is “אשר קרך בדרך” – "they made you feel a sense of happenstance on the road," they made you think that everything that happens in the world is happenstance, coincidence, purely random and by chance.
6. Someone asked me how we can come to terms with a natural disaster of such proportions, where 30,000 people are wiped out in mere minutes by an earthquake and tsunami. They told me that they found this more difficult to reconcile than when evil people murder innocents, since that, after all, is human action, not Divine action.
7. This point is a valid one and is discussed by sociologists of religion. Peter Berger wrote The Sacred Canopy and observes that theodicy – the religious doctrine of why G-d allows evil to occur – is what eventually began to unravel religion in modern civilization. For example, he writes that “in 1755, an earthquake destroyed most of the city of Lisbon and killed a considerable part of its population. This event, slight as it may seem in comparison with the mass horrors of our own time, was an important event for 18th-century thought. It violently raised the problem of theodicy and the validity of the Christian solution in some of the best minds of the period, among them Pope, Voltaire, Goethe, and Kant…” But “the immeasurably greater horrors of WWII did not have a similar result,” because people were able to appreciate that there’s a difference between when G-d does something (theodicy) and when evil people do something (anthropodicy).[1]
8. I responded that while a tsunami was difficult to reconcile with a merciful G-d, I personally felt that this distinction between theodicy and anthropodicy was a false one. If anything, it was even harder to reconcile how G-d could allow evil people to exercise their free will and seemingly contravene G-d’s will, who seeks to protect good people, and allow them to be murdered mercilessly. In other words, what is more painful and difficult to reconcile – having someone die in a natural disaster or from an illness, or to be killed by Nazis or a drunk driver when the person is perfectly healthy? The distinction between theodicy and anthropodicy is somewhat empty when one realizes that HKB”H runs the whole world.
9. The strength of Amalek and their whole raison d’être was to try and demonstrate that their will could trump G-d’s will, that no matter how much the Jewish people thought that they were a protected class, they had more power than HKB”H.
10. So why, indeed, did Hashem allow Amalek to attack us? Why didn’t He protect us as we were leaving Egypt, just as he protected us from the elements by placing a cloud pillar around us? Furthermore, why didn’t Hashem drown the Amalekites afterward in some tsunami, just as he had done to the Egyptians who pursued us? Perhaps Hashem felt that He needed to teach us that if we were going to become the Chosen People, we were going to need to learn how to protect ourselves and how to fight for our survival. Perhaps we needed to learn that although we could achieve the manna and the cloud cover, it was far more difficult to protect ourselves from evil people in the world who had a powerful tzelem Elokim and free will; Hashem would more readily protect us from scorpions and other malevolent creatures than he would from the two-legged variety.
11. I think why the Fogel family’s murder is so painful is because it drudges up a perennial history of our people. It’s fairly obvious that more Jews throughout history have died prematurely at the hands of evil men than at the hands of natural disasters and cancer. I remember back in 2001, when there was a wedding in Israel and a dance floor collapsed and 23 people died. It was around the same time that there was an intifada going on and people were getting killed by terrorists. As tragic as the collapse of the dance floor was, it wasn’t nearly as tragic for us as when people were getting blown up by suicide bombers. We know instinctively that a ba’al bechirah’s (free-willed individual) direct acts of malice against us are that much more painful – the sting of someone’s hatred, a hatred that has no basis, is much harder to bear.
12. So how do we react to the terrorism, to the hate? We can only react by fighting Amalek once again, and acknowledging that there is no such thing as happenstance, there are no coincidences. That’s the message of Purim and that’s the message of a tsunami and an act of terrorism happening at the same time right before Purim. Both an earthquake in Lisbon and a terrorist’s bomb are under G-d’s providence, in some strange, mysterious way. How we react to these events is what defines us a people of faith. May we all be granted the blessing of emunah (faith) and bitachon (trust) in the days and weeks ahead. May that emunah make us worthy of such a powerful blessing that will protect us from both natural and unnatural disasters in the future, until the coming of the Redeemer, bb”a.
[1] Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), 78.
