On Faith and Redemption by Rabbi Meir Kahane

Author:Rabbi Meir Kahane [Kahane, Rabbi Meir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-02-18T07:00:00+00:00

or sinners? No, G-d forbid. They were talking about "reality," about "logic," and they enunciated the clear "facts," that a grasshopper cannot fight giants. What they were actually doing was ruling that "Pikuach nefesh overrides the Land of Canaan."

Yet that is wrong. Conquering and settling the Land are not overridden by pikuach nefesh. Quite the contrary, that is the only mitzvah in which a Jew is commanded to endanger himself, when the people are called upon to defend it. Without war, there is no Land of the Israel for the Jewish People, and there can be no Jewish state that is safe from enemies. The mitzvah of settling the Land naturally involves danger. Those spies who asked to return to Egypt instead of endangering themselves in battle, who sought to return to the exile and to create there a sort of "Jerusalem of Egypt," were mistaken. Known to us for thousands of years as "the Desert Generation," they were unfit to enter the Land of Israel, people of little faith condemned to die in the desert. And their children, who never asked about pikuach nefesh overriding the Land of Israel, were the ones who entered the Land, fought for it and inherited it. They were like Yiftach in his generation, who rejected returning any territory from the Land of Israel in exchange for Ammonite "peace." And just as the G-d of Israel punished the spies who honestly believed that moving to the Land of Israel, in the face of the giants they found therein, constituted suicide, so must we learn that conquering the Land and taking hold of it are irrevocably bound up with faith and trust in G-d, balanced against a potential for tragedy and sacrifice.

,Terri- And such is Rambam's intent in Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah (5:2-3):

tories" - The Foundation: Faith in G-d and Sanctifying His Name

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