Posted on 03/07/2008 8:41:15 AM PST by ventanax5
There were days, and they were not that long ago, when Zionism was about something different. Days when Zionists could articulate what the purpose of Jewish Statehood was, days when Israelis understood that having a state was about changing the existential condition of the Jew. Not anymore.
Hayyim Nachman Bialik, writing in 1905 shortly after the slaughter in Kishinev, understood that the very essence of Jewish existence had to change. What else could he possibly have been saying in his epic poem, "The City of Slaughter" (scroll down to the two paragraphs that begin with the lines "Descend then, to the cellars of the town"), when he describes the mass rape scene in which Jewish women are helpless victims and Jewish men are powerless to intervene? In fact, for Bialik, the villains of the scene are not the Cossacks rape and murder are simply what Cossacks do. The problem with what happened in Kishinev, Bialik intimates with his bitter irony, rests with the Jewish men. It's bad enough that they were too weak to intervene, to defend their wives, their sisters, their mothers and their daughters, though that is clearly lamentable. But worse than that, they were too frightened to even try. And even worse than that, Bialik says, is that when the slaughter and the butchery were over, these men looked down at the broken bodies of the women that they had supposedly once loved, and instead of holding them, instead of telling them that they still loved them, instead of assuring them that they would take care of them no matter what, they gazed at these violated, half-dead women, and saw a halakhic question. "Is my wife," the Kohanim in Bialik's poem want to know, "still permitted to me?"
(Excerpt) Read more at danielgordis.org ...
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
“Know what you fight for and love what you know.”
—Oliver Cromwell to his troops before battle.
Wow, very powerful, thanks for posting.
Carolyn
Brings to mind one of my favorite Chesterton quotes:
"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."
Chaya(wild beast) must be fought with chaya. Marquis of Queensbury rules won’t cut it..
Carolyn
Thanks for posting. This is the ugly truth that has to be rubbed in every Israeli’s face until they get it. I’m so furious & disgusted, words cannot express.
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