Perplexing Jewish Leadership

Well, folks I recently read the following, and it made so much sense to me that I felt I should share it with you all. I am sure some of you have read it before, while others may not. This is for those who haven't....

Perplexed Jewish Leadership Category: News and Politics

Perplexed Jewish Leadership - Purim and Pollard

When Jonathan Pollard was revealed by America as a spy for Israel, the affair became pregnant with hostility to Israel and anti-Semitism in general. The Pollard case initiated a hurried visit of the American Jewish Leaders to Israel on Purim, 1987. In a Knesset debate on the Pollard affair, Rabbi Kahane spoke harsh words to the American delegation:


"They arrived in Israel on the holiday of Purim, the Biblical festival commemorating the deliverance of the Jews of Persia from the hands of Haman who sought their destruction. They came to Israel – not on the wings of eagles, but on the chill wings of fear of anti-Semitism.

"They" are the American Jewish Leaders who make up the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations and their hurried trip to the Jewish State was the direct result of the Jewish Establishment's real terror over the Jonathan Pollard affair. And the connection between these American Jews who arrived on Purim 1987 and the original Purim Jews, of Shushan, capital of ancient Persia, is surely one that smacks of Divine direction. Consider."

"The Book of Esther tells of the meeting between Jew-hating Haman and the King, Ahasuerus, and the agreement to physically wipe out the Jewish people living within the Persian Empire. The decree is given out, the messengers go forth in haste to announce the edict, and the Jews of Shushan? 'But the city of Shushan was perplexed.' "Perplexed??" What an incredibly strange description of a people that has just heard a holocaust sentence passed on it. "Perplexed?" Say, "terrified"; "shocked." But perplexed?" What is there to be perplexed about? What is there not to understand when the decree is so clear? The answer, of course, explains the mentality, the psychology of the Jews of Shushan, Persia, as well as the Jewish leaders of New York, Beverly Hills, and Chicago."

"The Jews of Shushan lived in the capital of the Persian Empire. It is the cosmopolitan metropolis, the political and cultural and financial center of the world – say 'the Berlin of 1925 Germany or the New York of 1987 America.' The Jews of Shushan are wealthy, influential and above all supremely convinced that they are Persians, with all the rights and guarantees that this means. The possibility of anti-Jewish decrees is too absurd to even consider. They have been invited to participate in the magnificent royal feast, they participate in Persian life fully. Holocaust? Anti-Semitism? Only fools and madmen would consider this an even remote possibility. And then the "impossible" occurs.

"And letters were sent by posts into all the king's provinces, to destroy, to
slay and to cause to perish, all Jews, both young and old…"

"Perplexed." That is precisely the reaction! Stunned disbelief! Utter failure to comprehend. How is this possible? But we are Persians! Persians of the Mosaic persuasion! "But the city of Shushan was perplexed…" Exactly. "As was the city of Berlin in that Weimar Germany in which the Jew was more German than the German, in which the Jew looked upon his East European counterpart with disdain, if not loathing, for being so embarrassingly Jewish, whereas he, the German Jew, had assimilated into the world of Goethe and Kant and the Teutons, He was a German and part of the woop and warf of Germany. Nothing could ever shake his world! But something did and when the Nazi avalanche struck, the German Jew was not so much frightened or shocked, as "perplexed."

But I am a German! But I am a German of the Mosaic persuasion!

Alas, he was a Jew. And that incredible fact left him 'perplexed.' ""And now they flew into Israel on the wings of perplexity. The American Jewish leaders, those who supped so much from the Melting Pot, those who did so much to break down their unique and separatist religious commandments and injunctions so as to assure their being "American." Those who convinced themselves each and every day that America was the Promised Land and that they were Americans, of the Mosaic persuasion. Those who boasted each and every progress made in political, economic, and social life, frantically proving to themselves that Jewish Nirvana was the United States."

"And then one Pollard case, shakes their Castles in America, rips open their
facade, reveals all the hate just beneath the surface of an America whose
economic and social problems threaten to repeat, once again, the lesson of
Persia and Berlin."

'And the leaders of the America arrived in Israel, perplexed.'"Let them not be. In the end, the past is, indeed prologue. The names change but the lesson is the same. Shushan, Berlin, New York.

Jew, stop being permanently perplexed. Come home to Israel. "

-Rabbi Meir Kahane taken from "The Wit and Wisdom of Rabbi Meir Kahane writen by Lenny Goldberg".