June 29, 2001

"Israel's Morale - The Enemy Within"

Morale is the fiber of strength, and Israel has learned the importance of morale the hardest way possible.  Israel built one of the mightiest military forces in the world, but an army is only as strong as the character of its personnel.  And, in recent years, this country's social fabric has begun to tear as hedonism and emergent narcissism become national obsessions. 

We worry about Israel's borders, and rightfully so, but often ignore what happens within them.  The enemies within can be worse than those we face on the outside. . . the social fabric of a country born with the greatest ideals and missions having gone wild with cable television, promiscuous conduct, the abandonment of religious values and a universal lust for pleasure and things material. 

My heart, and I imagine most of yours, jumped with joy every time I heard about Israeli high-tech companies selling for billions.  Israel's meteoric rise to wealth comparable to that of long-established European countries should have been a blessing.  It made Israeli Jews believe that they were as good as their American cousins.  It manifested itself in the worst possible way.  Israel became America. . . often no different than the many American Jews apathetic to the suffering of their fellow Jews in Israel by the hands of murderous Palestinian gangs.  They let the "rock and roll" of pleasure take priority over the principal justification for Israel's very existence, Torah and Zionist ideology. 

Anything money can buy became the tools of Israel's celebration of a false peace during  the ill-fated period of the so-called peace process.  Modern Jewish history was revised, and Zionism was barely taught in Israel's public school system as post-Zionist heretics dominated the Ministry of Education.  Israeli advocates of historic revisionism traveled the world to portray the new Israel, one that publicly admits to the worst of lies: "Israel forced the Arabs from their land in 1948, its year of independence." 

If Israel's founding fathers were land thieves and its existence is based upon theft, then reason to fight and defend is lost.  If its citizens would rather be Israelis than Jews, then the very foundation upon which this land was built is gone.  If its young are taught to disco rather than pray, then who in the world will look up to these people and say that their cause is the moral one?

Several days after the unspeakable tragedy at Tel Aviv's Dolphinarium where twenty-one beautiful people were murdered and many more wounded by a suicide bomber, a respected Christian minister and a true friend of Israel called with a question as he tearfully grieved at this unconscionable act of terror.  He asked, "But what were these young people doing at a disco on the Jewish Sabbath?"  I defended them, telling him that most of them were recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union where religious practice and knowledge were denied. Though I admit his question was better than my answer, when truth is told, the victims were doing what most of their neighbors do.  They were acculturated to the wrong values.  On the very day of their arrival, it should have been made clear that Israel must never be Ukraine or Russia, and a free country in a Jewish state means freedom to be Jewish. . .to study, to learn and then our day of rest is Shabbos, not a nihilistic moment for narcissistic fulfillment in hedonistic indulgence.  By no means does this diminish the tragedy or justify it.  Please read me carefully–I place neither guilt or sin upon the shoulders of these genuine martyrs.  I simply say Israel's morale is at least as important to its defense and security as the F16's and Arrow Anti-Missiles.

Shabbat Shalom