Qohelet for Our Times

Ben Chorin, in his inimitable style, has issued a clarion warning as to the possible outcome of the present situation in Eretz Yisrael. Briefly stated, the fading Ashkenazic, Leftist elite is bent on Jewish and National self-destruction; ready and willing to sacrifice us all on the Moloch of their Peace fantasies. [How ironic that so many of us who want to be here have what these people want most? An American Passport.]

I share his angst. No matter what we seem to do; no matter how much we protest or vote, we can't seem to rid ourselves of this group of people who have a lock on academia, the media and the courts. They corrupt the democratic process. They have created an Orwellian world of disinformation, where Jews and Judaism, or Israel's very right to exist have a place. The public discourse is awash with self-incrimination and, yes, out and out antisemitism, masquerading as sophistication.

As we read last Shabbat, הבל הבלים אמר קוהלת הבל הבלים הכל הבל.

הבל, which is usually translated as vanity, really means something lacking in substance. The trouble is that הבל can appear quite real. It sucks you in and corrupts you. As the prophet Jeremiah observed (2, 5): 'Thus says the Lord: What wrong have your fathers found in Me, that they have gone so far from Me, and have followed הבל, and became הבל themselves?'

So it is with the arrogant intellectual and cultural narcissism of Israel's so-called leaders and elite. They follow הבל. They have become totally insubstantial. When the first wind comes, they buckle under and run. How very pathetic. How very tragic. How very deadly.

I am not a prophet, nor the son of a prophet. Like most people I know, who acknowledge the existence and power of God, I believe that He will show us the way to survive and to thrive in His Land. History, God's record of running the world, bears out this belief. No one, after all, ever thought that the great and powerful Soviet Union, the 'Evil Empire', would fall and that millions of Russian Jews would come to live here (or seek out their Yiddishkeit there). Who is A. B. Yehoshua and Gidon Levy, compared to Mikhail Suslov? Who is Ehud Olmert, or Tzippi Spitzer, compared to
Leonid Brezhnev? If the latter have been reduced to a footnote, so will the former.

Meanwhile,

סוֹף דָּבָר הַכֹּל נִשְׁמָע אֶת הָאֱלֹהִים יְרָא וְאֶת מִצְוֹתָיו שְׁמוֹר כִּי זֶה כָּל הָאָדָם:

The end of the matter, all having been heard: fear G-d, and keep His commandments; for this is the whole man. (Eccles. 12, 13)

A Gut Kvittel!