The Contagious Left: A Message to the Religious Community
Thirteen bloody years of experience with the pathological liars and serial killers of the Palestinian Authority have taught Israel’s Left nothing—and the mentality of Left has infected the nation, including the religious parties and the misnamed Right. Despite the fact that the PA is not only accumulating more and more missiles, but has also educated a generation of Arab children to emulate homicide bombers, hence, despite the transparency of their genocidal objectives, Israel behaves as if peace with these Jew-killers can be achieved by “disengagement.”
Although the present writer has shown that Israel is suffering from a mental disorder comparable to schizophrenia, a disorder widespread in democracies steeped in moral relativism (see Demophrenia: Israel and the Malaise of Democracy), also needed is a Jewish understanding of this malady.
Most germane are the insights of the great Ramchal, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto (1707-1746). From his Mesilat Yesharim, The Path of the Just we learn:
“If one is imprisoned by his evil inclination, his eyes cannot see the truth and he cannot recognize it. The evil inclination literally blinds his eyes and he becomes as one who walks in darkness.” He sees only this earthly, material world. The materialism of this world [which dominates today’s commercial and TV-saturated democracies] dulls or distorts people’s moral vision. This causes them to err in two ways. First, they ignore evil or fail so see how it will affect them.
“The second error, which is even worse than the first, stems from their distorted vision, so that they see evil as though it were good, and good as if it were evil, and, because of this, they cling to their evil ways.” [Think of how often Israel’s leaders have negotiated in vain with the terror masters of the Palestinian Authority, indeed, how they persist in making unilateral concessions.]
“It is not enough that they lack the ability to see the truth, the evil staring them in the face, but they also see fit to find … evidence supporting their evil theories and false ideas. This is the great evil which embraces them and brings them to the pit of destruction. As Scripture states (Isaiah 6:10), ‘The heart of this nation has become fatted, and its ears have become heavy, and its eyes have turned aside …’ All this because of their being influenced by the darkness [of materialism] and subject to the rule of their evil inclination.”
Let us probe even deeper. We are enjoined in the Shema: “Do not go astray after your hearts…” (Numbers 15:39). The Babylonian Talmud interprets “going astray after one’s heart” as referring to the pursuit of false ideologies or distorted beliefs concerning God (Berachot 12b). Rabbi Elchonon Wasserman, one of the great leaders of European Jewry in the generation leading up to the Holocaust, asked—and here I paraphrase: “Why does the Torah warn against false ideologies and distorted beliefs, and why does it speak of the heart and not the mind?” He answers: “False beliefs result not so much from a defective intelligence as from a perverted heart. The heart is the seat of our desires and will, and those desires are the source of all distorted thinking.”
What can be more distorted than the thinking of the Left, which has taught Israel to negotiate with and appease Arab Jew-killers, and with the compliance of the religious parties? We are not dealing with merely deluded or self-deluded Jews. Their delusion—their inability to see without distortion the implacable evil of Israel’s Arab enemies—is the consequence of their own evil inclination. They cloak their evil inclination in the garb of “democracy” or some other soporific like “peace” or “pekuach nefesh” (saving Jewish lives), a façade that deceives only the naive.
Undeterred by the ravages following one retreat or disengagement after another, Israel’s democratically elected leaders call to mind the Egyptian despot undeterred by one plague after another, which ravaged his people and his country.
There is no political remedy for Israel’s malaise, which is tantamount to saying there is no democratic remedy for this malaise, even though it could be mitigated by intelligent institutional reform. No, Israel today is a pathological society. Witness the religious parties, whose wheeling and dealing differs not at all from the shoddiness of their secular counterparts. They, too, have succumbed to the myopic tendencies and moral egalitarianism of decaying democracies. For transitory rewards, they collaborate with scorners of the Torah, with fools and scoundrels that hobnob with the enemies of the Jewish people.
Although the religious community may yet see the light, its political parties dwell in the darkness, tainted by the materialism and short-sighted pragmatism of democratic politics. To dispel the darkness enveloping Israel, the religious community must renounce democratic politics and become its profound critic by formulating, in philosophical and institutional terms, an alternative to the modern concept of the State.*
*This project, presently being pursued by the author, is demanded by the decadence of Israel’s system of governance and of political and religious Zionism. This twofold decadence was accentuated by Ariel Sharon when he, with the complicity of Zionist parties, adopted Labor’s “unilateral disengagement” plan and thereby nullified the January 2003 elections.
