Right up front we feel it necessary to mention that most of our staff belong to Jewish Home and this writer is quite fond of Brigadier General (ret.) Rabbi Rafi Peretz. My support for Rabbi Peretz was greatly enhanced after meeting with him both before and after a Central Committee meeting where all told we probably spoke for at least thirty minutes. In the time I was able to watch him, he never rushed anyone and patiently spoke to all who wished his attention. Many of the other candidates on our Knesset list were far less approachable and most hurried from the meeting as if the building caught fire, exactly what we have come to expect from politicians who unfortunately believe they are more important than the rest of us. Perhaps this, in the end, served him well when he permitted Ayelet Shaked to take his spot at the head of the ticket seeing that polls depict her leading to greater acceptance and more mandates. It was quite interesting that the day after Ms. Shaked took the top spot, the poll showed her receiving four less mandates than predicted when she was not leading the ticket. The earlier polls, in our opinion, were designed to force Rabbi Peretz to step aside while knowing full well that the difference was a mere two to three seats between the two and we figure that it would make a negligible difference in the actual elections. Now, back to our regularly scheduled article.
Ehud Barak heads the Democratic Party and invested great efforts to find another party to ally with so as to assure his making the next Knesset should one ever be formed. The Blue White Party declined his requests, the Labor Party declined his offer, and he finally found one which agreed to accept a merger, and that party was Meretz. Together they will use the moniker of the Democratic Union. A spokesperson for the party released their statement stating, “The education minister this morning is moving a system meant to educate our system another step towards a system devoted to brainwashing,” So, what could possibly have been introduced by Education Minister Rabbi Rafi Peretz that brought such an extreme reaction from our friends at the far left? For that we will quote Rabbi Peretz, the Education Minister, directly. He explained, “The connection to our heritage and history is the bedrock of our existence and is the glue that connects us as a society. We have the duty of education to safeguard it.” Additionally, Minister Peretz added as he spoke to Galai Tzahal on Army Radio, “Judaism is an ocean of wisdom. Students will be exposed to many values, morals and love. These values will help us establish a more values and moral society here.” What could possibly be so sinister in such a curriculum as to be considered brainwashing?
The first item which has to be considered is that both parties in the Democratic Union are a fair distance from supporting the religious world. The majority of their members are either purely atheist or secular humanist with merely the slightest belief in Hashem. They view religion in general and Judaism particularly as threatening to their beliefs and supported lifestyles. Torah morality does not support the many diverse and often indistinguishable genders as proposed by the leftists. Their usual depiction that Torah is hateful is the ban on sodomy. Of course, they never couch what Torah states as considering sodomy as a sin but claim that Torah teaches hatred of all gay people. That is so far from the truth. Torah teaches us to love and accept all, particularly all Jews, and to accept and treat all strangers with respect and acceptance asking only that they obey the Noahic Code and live under our rule respectfully. The teaching that sodomy is a sin is not and never was targeting the gay community as it also applies to heterosexual couples, or simply put, it is indiscriminate to sexuality as it bans all forms of sodomy. There is no law or even commentary that we are aware of which teaches Jews to reject gay people and especially no call for their hatred. If only the far left were as kind to the religious our society would be far more homogeneous and caring for each other.
The Democratic Union also complained that Rafi Peretz is ignoring such problems as class size, improve the status of teachers and that Rafi Peretz “introduced the racist Nationality Law into the high school curriculum.” The Nationality Law was passed this last session by the Knesset and as such, the teaching of the law and what it contains and does not contain is of importance as it is amongst the Basic Laws which define Israeli society and governance. The Basic Laws which define Israel are hopefully all taught and discussed by our high school students. Or does the Democratic Union believe that the Basic Laws should be kept a secret. We are willing to bet that students are taught about the number of seats make up the Knesset; how a Prime Minister is chosen; the duties of the President, Prime Minister, Knesset Members and the Ministerial positions with their duties. Further, Torah and the Bible are histories of the Jewish People and their Nationhood. The remaining history of the Jewish People after the Roman dispersion is equally important and deserves a place in the classroom. This is the idea behind the Edmund Burke quote, “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” Perhaps the Democratic Union is in favor of making the same mistakes over and over again. Their insistence that the education of our children should be bereft of Torah and Bible which represent almost two thousand years of early Jewish history reaching back to Abraham, Isaak, and Jacob along with Moses the lawgiver and on to Kings Saul, David, Solomon and beyond, the Prophets and Judges and so much more as well as covering the Zionist Movement’s history from before the Balfour Declaration through the British Mandate to independence and the 1948 war to annihilate the Jews and their nascent state and everything since is as ridiculous as it sounds at face value. The Jewish People have near to four-thousand-years of history which would take more than one class to cover. Without the history and all the trial and tribulations we went through and the perils which have struck the Jewish People in the past, how can the next generation avoid these same mistakes without a solid understanding from whence our people came, how we were defined and what ideas and ideals we hold dear? The simple answer is that such would be impossible.
The Secular Humanist idea is to not teach history as it actually happened but to redefine events to fit closely with their brave new world. Their syllabus for most history classes is formulated to highlight minority contributions while ignoring much of the people who formed governments and principles in the lesson plans. I witnessed such with my children in school in the United States in a quite progressive (read far left) area where the Secular Humanist agenda was the mainstay of their curriculum. Her year of American history did not include a single lesson where George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin or any other Caucasian from American history other than Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and very little reference to the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers or anything written by Ben Franklin including Poor Richard’s Almanac. There was not a course in world history even offered. We will not even get into the mess which is the result of the newest math except to say that none of it made sense and I majored in math. They were told in algebra to guess until they found the answer, which works great if your answer is a whole number but not so well if the answer is the square root of -9 (which is 3i). Needless to say, we spent a fair amount of time teaching math and additional lessons in American and world history much to their chagrin. There is nothing wrong with teaching additional classes in the history of the Jewish People, both recent and Biblical and from all areas of the Diaspora with the greatest amount of straight honesty as possible (see maps of historic Israel below). This writer stands strongly against softening the history of our people for whatever reason is presented, be it to protect the student’s impressionable mind, to make everything less traumatic, or the real reason, to deny the students the standing to understand from whence they came and their long and impressive history so as to make the student more easily accepting to their newest ideas and concepts as well as believing that Secular Humanism is the most advanced societal philosophy and that Judaism, Torah and the Bible are nothing more than folk tales of little to no importance. Having seen how well such an approach to education in the United States and the products from their institutions of higher learning such as Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; we would prefer our youth have a better grasp on history and how to shape the future.
Never would we want to have any member of a ruling coalition putting forth the mistaken belief that Israel was a present given to the Jews by the European powers as an apology for the Holocaust when the reality is that it was part of the returning of lands to their indigenous peoples. Two of such promises caused the greatest amount of pushback from the Arab world; Israel and Kurdistan, both of which were also opposed by the British who were responsible for establishing both nations. Kurdistan fell when they discovered oil in Mosul and the Iraqi leader promised the British that J. Paul Getty could have the drilling rights. The British did much to mollify Arab opposition but Zionism won out and Israel did not suffer an identical result. Students need to know what lands were promised Israel which are the lands west of the Jordan River, what lands were promised us in the Bible, what lands we controlled at the various stages from the conquests under Joshua to the Greater Israel of Kings David and Solomon and that the term Greater Israel applies to that era of our history and has no meaning to modern Israel. These are some of the vital statistics and facts which our leaders of the future need to know in order to properly lead this precious nation. There are so many other facts which could be listed here, but they can also be found in numerous of our articles. We want future Israelis to have a solid knowledge of their roots both modern and Biblical and the philosophy of and what it means to be a Jew. Judaism is so much more than a religion as it is also a people and a family. Zionism is something to be proud about despite what many leftists claim as they do not believe in nationhood and desire a one world government under the auspices of such as the European Union or United Nations. They desire open borders and an end to the belief in Hashem and all religion for their concept of the perfect future. The future they envision has been attempted on a national scale before and has always resulted in a dictatorial governance and more often than not in mass killings to cull the populations and we will give you one guess who were considered unnecessary in such governance. Yes, we were most often amongst those targeted as it has always been easy to target the Jews as they were often few in number and never had political power under these systems. Atheism is the antipathy of Judaism and it is easy to tell those who believe in Hashem and those who believe that the human beings are the highest power in the universe (until the promised ET’s arrive) and we have seen these types before as they were the Hellenists from Greek culture during the times of Alexander the Great. They worshiped the human form and believed it to be supreme over all else while Judaism also values every human being but believe that every Jew can only be good if they practice being a good and religious people and act accordingly following Torah. We must also teach our children how Judaism and Torah formed much of the basis for civilization and the guiding principles of our Bible were the referenced liberally by Founding Fathers of the United States in the writing of the Declaration of Independence and numerous other principles incorporated in the founding of America. Why anyone would desire to have such knowledge denied to our children is confounding and implies some ulterior motive which often will end regrettably. Knowledge is the aim of education and our history and the founding writings of Torah, Bible, Talmud and the many other writings have a deep level of knowledge and provide a framework for making good and solid decisions. We ask again, why would we wish to deny such to our children?
Beyond the Cusp