Q: How is it possible that there are neo-Nazi gangs in the State of Israel?
Over the past few months, the most raw and painful scar in recent Jewish history has been mercilessly thrust back into the Jewish collective consciousness. In Israel, Neo-Nazi gangs are being exposed at alarming rates as swastikas increasingly defile the walls of synagogues, schools, old age homes and cemeteries. Adding insult to injury, Holocaust denial is more prevalent than ever before. After convening an internationally inclusive Holocaust denial conference, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed the world from a stage on the campus in Columbia University cogently explaining why the veracity of the Holocaust should be reconsidered. Former congressman and well known Holocaust denier David Duke is convening a “No more wars for Israel conference” and David Irving, one of the worlds most prominent deniers is on a whirlwind speaking tour teaching the world that the Holocaust never happened. Why has the Holocaust all of a sudden become such a central element in international dialogue?
In the shadow of nuclear war, our world is littered with lies and confusion, atrocities and genocide. More than ever before the world needs the Jewish People to be a Light unto the Nations providing the world with clarity and truth. Before we are able to fulfill this divine role for which we were created, we must first find the truth and banish the lies within ourselves. Fortunately we have a creator who desires our success and guides us in this task. Much like a father who removes the training wheels from his sons bicycle because they are the primary impediment to his successfully learning how to ride, G-d educates us with the goal of successfully teaching us how to ride.
Rather than taking our usual reactionary role of symptomatically defending attacks of this nature from wherever they come, perhaps it is time to soberly reassess the root causes of these events. The time has come to remove the cynical secular glasses through which we insist on seeing the world and recognize the necessity of an omniscient creator in a world as miraculous as ours. If we would entertain for even one moment that world events are not random and disconnected, but orchestrated by the same power that created the world, parted the Red Sea, and brought the Jewish people back to their homeland after 2000 years – an event unparalleled in world history, then we may have a chance of making sense of our world in these critical times and discovering what exactly are our “training wheels”.
Shortly after its foundation, the State of Israel established the genealogical guidelines of who would be considered a Jew and granted Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. The newly established government determined that legal Jewish identity would be determined not by Jewish law (child of Jewish mother) or tradition but rather by the definition outlined in Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany (descendant of one Jewish grandparent). As compassionate and considerate as this law may have seemed to those persecuted in the Holocaust for being of Jewish decent, the Jewish state essentially and ironically granted Hitler creative control over Israel’s religious and political policies.
Among the first places in Israel that Israeli politicians bring foreign diplomats is Yad VaShem, the official Holocaust Museum of the State of Israel. They learn in the Childrens Memorial Hall of the million and a half children murdered in cold blood and are shown artifacts ranging from shoes and baby toys, to gold fillings and hair. The message is loud and clear: “When the Jewish People don’t have a state, this is what happens to us!” Since World War II, Jews have pointed to the Holocaust as proof to the world that the Jewish People have a right to the State of Israel. Yet now the world is responding louder than ever before “the Holocaust didn’t happen… now what’s your claim?!”
G-d is taking off the training wheels and it is scary. There is nothing more disconcerting than questioning ones fundamental self definition and that is exactly the process that the Jewish People are enduring. Israel is to be a Jewish State, not merely a state of Jews. We must recognize that our claim to Israel is based on the first Rashi commentary on the Torah which prophetically explains that the Bible started not with the first commandment but rather the creation of the world so when the nations question the right of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel we can respond and say “The whole earth belongs to the Holy One, blessed is he. He created it and he gave it to the one found proper in his eyes.” If we insist on leaning on the crutch of the Holocaust, G-d will take that from us in order to further refine our understanding of ourselves, our Land, and our relationship with Him. As Rabbi Moshe Meiselman insightfully observed “The moment we begin treating ourselves as just another nation, then we, like them, become subject to natural processes. We become governed by the natural laws of history, and according to the laws of history, the Jewish people simply should not exist.
We must recognize that our laws and policies are not to be determined by the UN, the EU, the Jordanians, the Turks, or Hitler himself but rather by the Torah he gave us to live by on Mount Sinai. When we allow Hitler to determine our foreign policies, attribute for attribute, G-d creats gangs of neo-Nazi’s in our midst. We as individual Jews and as the nation of Israel must have the courage, character, and faith to redefine ourselves to a higher level of refined truth and take off our training wheels once and for all.
