> Rabbis Who Bring Shame to Judaism
> by Khaled Amayreh / August 6th, 2008
>
> Religious extremism is very dangerous. It means that every thinkable
> vice under the sun can be committed, "sanctioned" and "justified" in
> the name of the Almighty. In Israel, rabbis with hundreds of
> thousands of followers, many of whom serve in the Gestapo-like
> Israeli occupation army, openly teach that non-Jews are only human
> in form but animals in substance. These racist teachings can't be
> dismissed as "innocuous" or "esoteric." Very often, they constitute
> "a manual for action" for many Jewish settlers roaming the hills of
> the West Bank, searching for an Arab prey to kill, or attack or tie
> up to a power pole.
>
> The teachings also serve as a direct inspiration to numerous Israeli
> soldiers operating in the West Bank who, thanks to the racist
> indoctrination they receive from their rabbis, have come to view the
> estimated 3.7 million Palestinians living under Israel's military
> rule, not as real human beings, but rather as animals walking on two
> feet. The often barbaric treatment meted out to the Palestinians in
> the occupied territories testifies to the rampantly racist
> indoctrination soldiers and settlers receive at the hands of
> religious Zionist rabbis. Last year, a Jewish immigrant from France,
> who murdered an Arab taxi driver after luring him to his home north
> of Tel Aviv, told police interrogators that he didn't kill a human
> being; he only killed an animal.
>
> "Merkaz Harav"
> Merkaz Harav (the Rabbi's Center) is the ideological and theological
> central nervous system of religious Zionism in Israel. Established
> in honor of Rabbi Abraham Kook, Israel's first Chief Rabbi, the
> center, which is actually a religious college, teaches students that
> God Almighty created the entire universe for the sake of "the Jew,"
> and that all non-Jews ought to be slaves laboring for the "chosen
> people." As to the Palestinians, Merkaz Harav teaches that "non-Jews
> living under Jewish law in Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel) must
> either be enslaved as water carriers and wood hewers, or banished,
> or exterminated."
>
> Some rabbinic authorities associated with Merkaz Harav have been
> preaching the view that Palestinians are descendants of the Amalek,
> or Amalekites, whom the Bible says must be totally exterminated.
> Such hateful views are actually espoused by hundreds of thousands of
> Jewish settlers in the West Bank. This is the religious doctrine of
> religious Zionism. This is the theology taught in hundreds of
> Yeshivot (religious schools) throughout Israel and the occupied
> Palestinian territories. Settlers as well as the increasingly
> Settler-dominated Israeli army may very well act on these doctrines
> in a more wanton manner if the world goes into a slumber. They are
> only awaiting the opportune time to do it.
>
> According to Rabbi Kook, "The difference between a Jewish soul and
> souls of non-Jews-all of them in all different levels-is greater and
> deeper than the difference between a human soul and the soul of
> cattle." The late Israeli philosopher, Yisrael Shahak, pointed out
> that the teachings of Kook were based on the Lurianic Cabala, one of
> whose basic tenets is the absolute superiority of the Jewish soul
> and body over the non-Jewish soul and body "so much so that the
> world was created solely for the sake of Jews."
>
> In 2003, Rabbi Saadya Grama, an alumnus of Beth Medrash Govoha, the
> renowned Yeshiva in Lakewood, N.J., wrote a book titled Romemut
> Yisrael Ufarashat Hagalut, which can be translated as "the Majesty
> of Israel and the Question of the Diaspora," in which he argued that
> non-Jews were "completely evil" and that Jews constituted a
> separate, genetically superior species. The book was condemned by
> many reform and conservative rabbis in the US as manifestly racist
> and incompatible with normative Jewish religious thinking. However,
> major Jewish organizations in Israel and North America, such as
> Agudat Yisrael, refused to condemn the book.
>
> In Israel, numerous Orthodox Zionist rabbis, many of them graduates
> of and lecturers at Merkaz Harav, continue to teach the
> theologically dubious concept that the ten commandments don't apply
> to non-Jews and that, therefore, the Biblical commandments against
> committing murder, theft, and lying don't cover non-Jews. For
> example, Rabbi Dov Lior, Chairman of the Jewish Rabbinic Council,
> teaches that "there is no such thing as enemy civilians in war time"
> "The law of our Torah is to have mercy on our soldiers and to save
> them. This is the real moral behind Israel's Torah and we must not
> feel guilty due to foreign morals," he was quoted as saying by the
> Hebrew newspaper Ma'ariv in 2004.
>
> "A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew's fingernail."
> Lior is not a marginal figure in the Zionist religious
> establishment. I asked Rabbi Menachem Froman, who himself has taught
> at Merkaz Harav, about Lior's religious credentials and he told me
> that the man "is considered among the most learned sages of the
> Torah." Earlier this year, Rabbi David Batsri told followers that
> "it is impossible to mix the pure with the impure. They (the Arabs)
> are a blight, a devil, a disaster. The Arabs are donkeys, and we
> have to ask ourselves why God didn't create them to walk on all
> four. Well, the answer is that they are needed to build and clean.
> They don't have any place in our school."
>
> In May, 2007, Mordechai Elyahu, a former Chief Rabbi of Israel,
> issued an edict that would permit the Israeli army to murder
> hundreds of thousands of Palestinians . "If they don't stop after we
> kill 100, then we must kill a thousand. And if they don't stop after
> 1,000, then we must kill 10,000. If they still don't stop we must
> kill 100,000. Even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop."
>
> I don't believe that this repulsive extremism represents true
> Judaism, the Judaism that is based on the Ten Commandments. Jewish
> traditions relate the story of a heathen who came to Shammai with
> the request to be accepted as a convert on condition that he was
> taught the whole Torah while he stood on one foot. Shammai drove him
> away with the yard-stick he was holding. Then the man went to Hillel
> with the same request. Hillel told the man "what is hateful to
> yourself don't do to your fellow human being. That is the whole of
> the Torah and the rest is commentary."
>
> Unfortunately, the rabbis of religious Zionism, including the
> so-called Chabadim who have effectively replaced the Torah with a
> notoriously racist manual called "Hatanya," pay no attention to such
> traditions. And when they are reminded of them, they arrogantly
> claim that words such as "man" or "human being" refer solely and
> exclusively to the "Jew."
>
> Besides, it is obvious that these fanatics only select the most
> racist and most hateful texts from a huge body of scriptures,
> Biblical and Talmudic, while utterly ignoring and shunning authentic
> texts, including biblical texts, that urge Jews to treat kindly and
> justly non-Jews who live in their midst.
>
> In addition, one wonders if these so-called religious leaders and
> "holy men" understand what it means to rule that in wartime no holds
> are barred and there is no such a thing as enemy civilians.
>
> Well, Adolph Hitler could have made the same argument to justify his
> genocidal onslaught against Jews and non-Jews in Europe?
>
> Finally, I hope that moderate Jewish religious authorities will move
> to challenge these extremist rabbis who I am convinced misrepresent
> Judaism by presenting it as a religion of fire and blood and hate.
> God-fearing rabbis should make it abundantly clear to Jews in
> Israel-Palestine that harming innocent people is wrong.
>
> This is a paramount issue because if the ideology and theology of
> Merkaz Harav are allowed to prevail, then Judaism itself will suffer
> immensely.
>
> Khalid Amayreh is a journalist living in Palestine. Read other
> articles by Khaled.
>
>