A room full of Torah scrolls in Miami. Photo: Pini Dunner.
Baruch Hashem, this is the only pro-Israel argument that works:
There is a Creator
Who made the universe,
And gave a slice of it to the Children of Israel,
As an everlasting inheritance.
This is how every Jew should begin their conversations about Israel, because this is how Judaism’s most sacred text begins her magnum opus. (And check out the very first Rashi commentary on the very first verse of the very first chapter of the Five Books of Moses).
Indeed, it is specifically the Torah that records the name “Zion” 154 times, “Jerusalem” 669 times, and “Israel” 2,319 times. And it does so not with a pandering, insecure Zionism of recent man-made construction — but with an unstoppable, proud 4,000-year-old territorial right of an eternal people, gifted with an eternal land, by an Eternal G-d.
And yet our enemies — terrorists and terrorist sanitizers around the globe — all have the same criminal solution to the Jewish problem. To use politics, economics, and downright violence to steal an indigenous land from her indigenous people, Israel from the Children of Israel.
But there exists no one — not a single man nor a group of people — who has the right to trade, barter, occupy, or negotiate away a homeland that is the birthright of every single Jew — no matter who, no matter where, no matter when.
Paper mandates are worth less than the paper they were written on.
Ceasefires enable the fires of terrorism to never cease.
And dangerous idiots on college campuses, in the hallowed halls of government, and in anti-Jewish hate mobs everywhere refuse to answer one simple question: Where does the name “Jew” come from?
Once again, the answer comes from the Torah. From the “Kingdom of Judea” — the tribe of King David — the geographical origin point of all the Jews you know today.
As desperately as the propaganda pundits try to poison your brain, we are not “West Bankers” from the “West Bank.” We are Judeans from Judea and Samaria. Our indigenous right to our homeland is embedded in our very name itself. And no matter what lies the media tries to force down your brain, it’s impossible for us to “occupy” our own land.
It is the only land of the Jewish people.
Always has. Always will be.
And whoever gives up an inch of it is robbing the Jewish Nation.
And yet, since the destruction of our Holy Temple in Jerusalem over 2,000 years ago by the Roman Occupation of Israel, their subsequent iterations have raped, pillaged, murdered, pogromed, crusaded, inquisitioned, holocausted, and tried to wipe us off the face of the earth and make us forget our Judean identity.
But they have gloriously failed.
As Mark Twain declared in 1899, “The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”
The secret is simple.
It is the Torah.
The Torah is the secret to our immortality.
As the Talmud states, we are like fish in water. And no matter what the clever foxes of time whisper to us through their shiny teeth, our only way to survive is to stay in the “waters of Torah.” This is what Rabbi Akiva told Pappus Ben Judah in the time of the Roman Occupation of Israel. This is what our people’s leaders have told us throughout all the hard times since then. And this is what the Lubavitcher Rebbe has told us in our own time.
Torah isn’t just how we survive.
It’s how we thrive.
Why is this?
Because the Torah is not some history book or even a collection of religious rituals. It is a sacred book of Divine lessons, the ultimate frame-changer for all humanity. And it is exactly what we need more of right now.
So pick up a Torah book, download a Torah podcast, join a Torah class or simply call your rabbi.
The chapters of history don’t lie. We are the indigenous natives of Israel and we must always be proud of that immutable, immortal truth.
This is why the Shulchan Aruch opens her magnum opus of Jewish law with the teaching of the Talmudic scholar Yehudah ben Teima, who said, “Be as bold as a leopard … to do the will of your Father in Heaven.” The very first step of our legal system, of the pathway to justice and spiritual development, is the simple fact that it is only the proud Jew who studies Torah and cherishes her Mitzvot who passes on an unbreakable and undeniable Jewish identity to our children’s children’s children — and ensures we stand strong against all oppression and persecution, as demanded by our Torah.
Levi Y. Welton is a rabbi, stand-up comedian, and Lubavitcher Chossid. He can be reached at rabbiwelton@gmail.com
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