The Threat Israel Cannot Defeat Alone

 

If Israel has a mortal weakness, it is that she cares too much for the protection of innocents even if those innocents are trying to destroy her. That is the most serious threat she currently refuses to face and which will do everything to destroy Israel if only to prove they are correct. The current cases are the numerous NGO’s and the Left wing American Jews who support these insidious organizations working to destroy Israel. The leftists within Israel are also contributing to this situation and the potential of ending the Jewish homelands. Part of the attack comes at the religious in Israel who are also the main answer to allowing Israel to defeat the demographic threats. One of the demands made by many on the left is that Israel must forsake Traditional Orthodox Judaism and instead become a purely secular democracy which favors no religion and allows that all peoples of all religions, and particularly no religion, to live within in harmony. The proof Israel can provide for accepting these demands are to first accept the Two State Solution giving over to the Palestinians all the lands beyond the Green Line and secondly permit those Palestinians in refugee camps permission to return to their homes even if those homes are theoretically within the Green Line and would lead to the Jews being outnumbered by Arab Muslims. When Israelis claim that would be the end of Israel, they are told that this is an unfair accusation as how can Israelis claim that this Arab population cannot also operate within a multicultural democracy if they have not given them any opportunity to do so? They do not accept Gaza as having been a fair example and demand Israel again make the sacrifices and accept their promises that the Arabs will work with the Jews in harmony. When asked what happens if this proves to not be the case, their response is that the Jews can come to the United States or they simply reprimand such as naysayers who have no faith in the powers of Democracy. This is especially true of those on the farthest leftist Jews, even more so those residing in the United States.

 

There are many things which separate the American leftist Jews and their brethren in Israel and much of that have led to numerous misunderstandings. The leftist Jews believe that because Israeli mainstream Judaism is a collection of different Traditional Orthodox forms of Judaism including many Haredi and Hasidic branches, Chabad, numerous Traditional Orthodox congregations and, this may shake any number of American Jews so we advise you be seated, numerous Conservative, Reform and other nonconventional congregations of Jews as well as a fair number of purely secular people of Jewish extraction. The main Rabbinate is selected from the majority and several forms of Orthodox Judaism. There is a reason behind having the Orthodoxy as the prevalent form of Judaism in Israel, and that is because it follows the traditional laws and all the Commandments of Torah, the exact ideas and ideals that even the socialist Zionist founders foresaw as the true future for the State of Israel mixed with Socialism. Israel, politically, still has too much socialism practiced by the government but that is slowly evolving to a more functioning entrepreneurial nation based on the start-up concept allowing for investments to spur the movement of capital and thus leading to a stronger economy and providing higher wages in the future. But the religious base will remain Traditional Orthodox while permitting every other form but retaining the controlling religious administration with the Traditional Orthodox. This is why all marriages and conversions are required to meet the strict Rabbinate restrictions. These religious restrictions are actually sensible in many ways which become more readily obvious once you come and actually live in Israel.

 

First off, a confession, at least one of us is a long time Zionist but spent much of their life completely divorced of any practicing of Judaism. Even when returning to Judaism after a tragedy in the family, still attempted first to join a Reform Synagogue but there were personality differences with the Rabbi so we tried the other Synagogue which was Conservative and that Rabbi was wonderful. What was curious was that the Conservative was very similar services wise to the Reform services remembered from childhood. If questions had been thrown at us back in the United States, we would have been just as confounded by the insistence on only the Orthodoxy having the main levers of power within Israel and been somewhat upset about many of these demands. So, the question is what do we now feel?

 

 

Since moving to our little corner in Israel we have found how much easier it is to be completely Jewish in Israel. Keeping Kosher is as easy as shopping at the food store and only a couple in town needs to be avoided. Many of the restaurants are certified Kosher. Services are easier to attend as there is almost a guarantee that you will discover one within four or five blocks, if not several. With this all taken care of, being Orthodox, Traditional Orthodox, becomes fairly simple requiring even less effort than being any kind of semi-observant Jews in the United States. Given another few generations and while Traditional and other forms of Orthodox Judaism will be prevalent in Israel, other than Orthodox Judaism, mostly Hasidic and Haredi, one will be hard pressed to find other congregations in the vast majority of the United States and all but gone from Europe. This will be due to the rampant intermarriage which will quicken the exodus of Jews from their religious upbringing, assuming they ever received a Jewish upbringing. One quick way of determining the accuracy of our dire prediction would be to simply ask the few Jews you may know who are not Orthodox whether they attended and partook of a Passover Seder and whether it was held in English or Hebrew. Do not be surprised if the answer shows a lack of Jewish participation. Then ask them what does Seder mean and pray they do not say dinner or story or other wrong answer. When they surrender, the actual translation of the Hebrew word Seder is Order, as in structured or delineated. The main defining part of the service is the reliving of the leading events to the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt and the initial part of the years in the wilderness.

 

Becoming a practicing Jew and following as much of the laws as possible, as we are still learning some of the rules as we go along, and some are likely obscure and will become obvious with time. One thing about Judaism is that everyone and everything is a work in progress, and some are going to take more time than others.

 

Finally, it is with sadness that we realize that once again so many of our brothers and sisters will become lost to us just as during the Exodus when it was claimed that a mere one-fourth, if that many, of the Jews from Egypt made the trip while the majority decided that they preferred remaining in relative safety and a life, though harsh, still did not require what the new life promised, challenges and the hard work of building a new land. Slavery was a hard life but the Egyptians provided for their food, shelter and other necessary needs. That is what life in the United States will promise, a land of plenty that is easy and there are very few threats in life while Israel is more of a challenge. Getting a job is more of a difficulty in Israel and as an American one need learn Hebrew, not the easiest language to learn. For the youth, there is IDF service which most American Jews would find as a threatening requirement. One of us did serve in the United States military in combat arms but very few of the Jewish kids we grew up with ever gave such the smallest consideration. Serve in the military, that was outside consideration and why so many Jews went to college. Yes, when drafted, they served and what is actually surprising is that Jews have almost always outperformed other peoples in their service in the military in the major wars in history. But the latest generation, such is not considered something a good Jewish boy or girl would want to do. So, having to move to Israel and face military service frightens many. Thankfully, and these youths are treasured and respected in Israel, there are Jewish kids from America who come to Israel with the intent of serving in the IDF and most desire to be placed into Combat Arms. These Zionist youths are a treasure.

 

Back to how to allow Israel to defeat their foes is easy. Step one; stop demanding that Israel surrender, conflicts are not won by the surrendering side. Israel must be permitted to be victorious and defeat every challenge and danger facing her and her people. Stop pretending that Israel need be more like the United States as Israel does not have Canada and Mexico as neighbors. Illegal immigrants in Israel are more likely to be terrorists aiming to murder Israelis than people seeking to make a better life and almost none are actual refugees. Step two; when Israel is forced to defend herself, kindly support her just as she supports the United States efforts in such conflicts. Finally, try to remember and understand that in Israel Judaism is not so much a religion as a way of life and Israel is the Jewish homelands where the religion, the people and society try to operate as one. Israel is also the only place where the Jewish people will be protected and cared for without question should any disaster or threat raise its ugly head threatening our fellow Jews. Israel is the Jewish safety fuse which will trip and give the Jewish People a home forever into the future. That should be sufficient reason for any Jew to do anything required to protect their safety valve. Lastly, whether they realize it or not, Israel is the homeland of the Jews and has been the Promised Land from over three-thousand years back and that only gets us back to King David, Abraham and Sarah were close to another thousand years further back. That is something which will never change.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

The Death of the Reformation and Spread of Islam

 

The reformation of Christianity broke Christian faith from its ties to a corrupt Vatican and Papal excesses. One of the main differences and unanswered complaints against Rome was the selling of absolution to wealthy aristocracy thus allowing the Church to gain material gain for forgiveness of the sins of the most wealthy while the poor were left facing condemnation despite their hard lives and desperate need for an understanding Church. This was to prove to be a strange affair when now many Protestant churches are forgiving sins as a last resort to gain membership, a move the most religious blame for the death of their denominations and the currently swelling ranks of Evangelical churches which preach a return to Scripture and taking a literal interpretation of faith. A large part of the decline of the old Churches has been their evolutionary drift away from their austere origins and seeking new interpretations which often twist doctrine to the breaking point and many even further until their doctrine bears little resemblance to the origins of Christianity.

 

Christianity is far from alone in this as Judaism has also had its reformation though we just refer to them as the Reform and Reconstructionist Movements. The Reconstructionist Movement has been true to its name and built a form of Judaism which is more form and less Judaism and allows virtually any doctrine to be accepted through democratic vote. They are more of a political leftist haven wishing to have a claim of affiliation with Judaism which may have once existed but died long ago and now exists largely in name only. The Reform branch of Judaism can be viewed as including the branch of Conservative Judaism as their movement to the left politically and more permissive form of Judaism at a slower rate, but was in all reality the same smorgasbord cafeteria Judaism where you went through the Halachic Laws and chose the ones with which one was comfortable and discarded those which were considered onerous or simply too difficult. The Reform Movement permitted women ordained as Rabbis, mixed marriage ceremonies even having a dual role of Priest or Minister and a Rabbi officiating, and eventually Gay unions. The Conservative movement has reached these concessions in most congregations currently. The intermarriage and eventual loss of connection with Judaism and complete assimilation has come close to fruition for Reform Jews so much so that some congregations have begun a return to traditions and a stricter interpretation of Torah. This last gasp attempt to retain a sufficient attachment to Judaism is guaranteed to fail and the death of these two movements will arrive when their members, who wish for an actual and lived faith, will simply return to the Orthodoxy and the rest will have absolutely no use for their faith at all. The final straw will be acceptance of complete Bar/Bet Mitzvah Ceremonies done completely in a language other than Hebrew and the use of scripture in books in lieu of Torah Scrolls as the Torah Scrolls will be seen as a revenue business rather than a strict actualizing of tradition and the steadfast holding to tradition which predates history.

 

Just as traditions, Halachic stringency, community, and a holding to the word and original interpretations and applications of the law and of Torah of the Orthodoxy, especially as it currently thrives in the majority of areas in Israel and in its strongholds in the United States and Europe will be the only form of Judaism practiced in the world, so will the traditionalist branches of Christianity which will survive and will slowly reconnect, independent of Europe and possibly even independent of Rome and the Vatican, as Europe is about to be subsumed by Islam and Christianity erased from the landscape of Europe completely. The influx of the Syrian refugees and the terrorists implanted will be the ones who finally get to dictate the future of what was once the stronghold and bastion of Christianity, the Church and the seeding of Christianity throughout the world. The battle for the heart of Europe is in its closing chapters and Christianity in the Middle East and North Africa will die alongside each other in the next half century. What remains to be seen is whether the conquest of Europe will cause a reformation within Islam as it spreads over all of Europe and begins its march into Asia.

 

This will not be Islam’s first foray into the Far East. Islam needed some fierce troops to act as their shock troops when attack and taking their nascent faith out of Mecca and Medina into the Middle East against the remnants of Persia, Alexander’s Greece, Rome (the Byzantines), the remainder of ancient Egypt from the Polemic Egypt and the rest of the tribes across Northern Africa and against the impervious walls of Constantinople whose wall withstood everything thrown at them for over two centuries. The Christian stronghold held behind its walls, its impressive and unprecedented walls with the possible exception of Troy, Jericho, Jerusalem and China, hunkered down and secure but the siege cannons (see below) employed by Mehmed II were a match for any wall ever built, breached the walls and Constantinople was named Istanbul to the shuddering horror of Christians throughout Europe as it spelled potential doom. Meanwhile Islam had torn across Northern Africa and onto Spain only to finally be halted at Tours, France by Charles the Hammer Martel who routed the Islamic juggernaut turning back into Spain where they were finally vanquished by the Spanish Inquisition instigated and plied by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. The needed shock troops for the Islamic forces were tempted to join the Islamic armies. These troops were found with the spread of Islam into Indonesia around 1200s and the Philippines in mid-1300s. This provided the additional forces and shock troops which propelled Islam into Spain along with Berber troops who provided the main force for Islam in Western Europe.

 

 

Great Turkish Bombard Siege Cannon
Utilized by Mehmed II in his Siege
and Breaking of the Impenetrable
Great Walls of Constantinople

 

 

After being blunted by Martel in France in Western Europe and at Vienna in Eastern Europe, Islam settled down and had its internal challenges. A war with the United States over the Barbary Pirates twice revealed that the young United States, even back in those early days, was fully capable of projecting power eventually settling as the Ottoman Empire. This final iteration ended during World War I when the Ottoman Empire chose to back the Austro-Hungarian Empire against the Allies resulting in the Allied European powers redrawing the borders and establishing new borders throughout Central and Western Europe, the Middle East and Northern Africa. There are constant denunciations of the European colonialism in the Middle East and Northern Africa while the world is totally ignoring the thousand years of colonial occupations by the Arab powers which exploded from the Arabian Peninsula around 700 AD. Islamic nations were released from their colonial occupations between the 1920s through the earliest 1950s making the longest of colonial occupations to under half a century, a negligible timeframe when compared to the Islamic occupation, which when one thinks about it, continues despite the European marshalling after World War I.

 

Islam is awakening and started their new rise smashing against the nascent state of Israel over 1948 through 1949 and renewed aggressions in 1967 and 1973 while instigating terrorism from the 1920s through and continuing to this very day. Islam is taught that their warriors are invincible and must never face defeat as Allah cannot be defeated and any defeat is a form of shame on Allah inflicted by his believers. This has been the root of the war against Israel and the reason that no peace can be attained not because the Jews are refusing to sacrifice but because the Arab Islamists refuse to accept anything short of the annihilation of Israel and the complete and total victory of Islam against the Jew. The other problem is rampant though unrecognized anti-Semitism in the halls of power added to the fear of a resurgent Islam cripples the west and the United Nations from being a fair or honest arbiter which is why the pressure is always placed on Israel to sacrifice and provide tempting morsels until there are no morsels short of surrender of Israel itself left to give; yet the demand made even this day by United States Vice President Joe Biden is for more flexibility by Israel in giving even more where there is nothing left to give. The Presidency of Barack Obama has granted Israel one favor by their complete and total aggressiveness against Israel in their dealings and complete refusal in recognizing any right of the Jews to their homeland has been their laying bare the unadulterated aggressiveness to force Israel without any trace of Arab acceptance of the right of Israel to exist in any border and their and the rest of the world’s complete acceptance of the sacrifice of Israel on the alter of Islamic appeasement as if such would even in the slightest appease and soothe the savage beast. The reality is this complete and unadulterated desire to sacrifice Israel before the alter of Allah, the modern alter of Baal and the Arabic Moon god, has empowered Islam to believe that Europe itself, the stronghold of Christianity for two-thousand years is as fragile and weakened with no real faith or force from above and all but devoid of the graces from Heaven is an empty trampling shell ready for the onslaught by Islam and the complete surrender without so much as a fight as they are willingly inviting Islam to take the leading role in their future as they desire no longer to control their own destiny. The European people no longer care about the future as they have few if any children and have already surrendered their future to Islam and hope only that the chains of their servitude weigh lightly on their posterity leaving that as their only legacy.

 

The question is no longer how far into Europe Islam will spread nor whether or not the Churches of Europe including the Vatican itself will survive; all are already surrendered to Islam and the toll in blood and treasure the sole remaining variable. The hope of the West and Christianity must be to save the treasures of the museums, art galleries and the Vatican vaults by removing them to safe keeping be that the United States, Canada, South America or wherever the society is still resilient and holding sufficient faith that they will not fold before Islam in quiet remission as Europe appears prepared to submit herself. The question to pose to Europe is whether they feel that their societal history and the greatness which went before is worth saving. If the Europeans believe that their history has any value today then they must necessarily be prepared to make not only a sacrifice to preserve it before the ravages of Islam as displayed so graphically by the Islamic State, but also find a belief around which to rally and find the means of restoring both a next generation and the desire for the continuing generations after that into the future or there will be no European museums of art, literature, sculpture and her grand cathedrals will be disembodied from all things Christian and Islam will literally paint the entire last twelve centuries of Christendom from the pages of history with a sweeping of the continent removing every last vestige of Christianism. The Reformation, which was designed to restore and defend Christianity from what they saw as the defaming of the religion of Christ which they accused the Pope and the Cardinals of the Catholic Church, will now end with the loss of unity of Christendom and be a contributing factor to the death of Christendom in Europe. There are those who complain that had only Christianity had not fragmented in the reformation, then Christianity would today remain unfragmented and stand a chance of withstanding the coming onslaught of Islam and perhaps may have preserved political core strength which would resist inviting masses of Islamic refugees within the halls and gates of Europe. Perhaps a unified Church might have held the societies within its halls and adapted such that retaining a Europe which retained sufficient pride, valuing and love of European history and the valuable contributions in art, music, literature and religious thought that they desired to continue the traditions to the next generations, something requiring a next generation.

 

The real crippling of Europe is that lack of a following generation of native Europeans which has left Europe in the start of a downward spiral where the next generation will have less population than the current generation and in all to many nations far less leading to an unrecoverable trend from which Europe, and any society, cannot recover without unparalleled leadership. Such leadership is not represented by the likes of Angela Merkel or unfortunately any of the current national leftist leaders. Can Europe be saved or has Europe fallen in silent surrender brought on by the current generations live for today, who cares about tomorrow selfish attitude. The question is bordering on asking how long will Europe survive before surrendering to Allah as has every Muslim since the Seventh Century, not whether Europe will fall. What a sad ending to such a noble past, the likes of Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, Nobel, Curies, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Chaucer and Bach amongst so many others from such a rich history and additionally those who excited the imaginations of the founding fathers of the American colonies when crafting a new nation of the United States, Locke, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Hume and Rousseau amongst others. For such a history to fall and be erased and vanquished forever will be a sin beyond compare throughout known history. The loss will be painful to watch but we may all live long enough to experience these horrific death throes of Europe and hopefully witness an epic struggle saving all that which can be readily moved to safer climes as less than an all-encompassing effort would be a crime laid atop that sin of the death of all Europe. This is one time we pray we are completely wrong and Europe awakens in time to save themselves, and this prayer had best be heeded by the United States and any other Western nation whose population currently relied too heavily on immigration, legal and otherwise.

 

Beyond the Cusp