Gary Cooperberg, January 14, 2008

In this coming week’s Torah portion, B’shalach, the great Torah sage and commentator, Rashi, makes an interesting point which is more than pertinent today. After Pharaoh lets the People of Israel leave Egypt, he suddenly has a change of heart. He summons his army to chase after the Israelites and bring them back to Egypt. Six hundred chariots are prepared and the chase begins.

To this Rashi asks the obvious question, "Where did Pharaoh get all those horses? Weren’t all Egyptian livestock destroyed in the violent hailstorm that G-d sent upon them?" The answer is that some of the Egyptians truly feared G-d. When they heard Moses warn of the hailstorm they believed him and brought their horses indoors. These were the "good" Egyptians who believed in G-d. Now these same Egyptians chose to use their horses to pursue Israel!

Rashi comments, "Even the best of snakes should have its brains smashed."

Today, Abu Mazen, the man who masterminded the Munich massacre of Israeli athletes and who wrote a thesis contending that the holocaust never happened, is one of our "best of snakes". He is considered a "moderate" with whom we can negotiate. And we are negotiating with him.

Rashi’s warning screams over the centuries yet we fail to hear it.

Rather than smashing his brains we offer him "confidence building measures" such as releasing murderers from our jails and giving away parts of our holy inheritance to him. Why can our leaders not see the reward we have already gotten from our agnanimous gesture of giving Gaza to the Arabs? We also know that freed terrorists usually return to their chosen profession and murder yet more Jews. Why then do we continue to set them free rather than smash out their brains?

Marwan Bargouti is an even bigger snake than Abu Mazen. Yet former defense minister, Benjamin ben Eliezer , is in favor of reducing his five lifetime plus an extra one hundred years sentence in order to make him the new leader of the Arabs with whom we can negotiate. Where do we get such geniuses for leaders?

We cannot smash the brains of our own leaders, because they don’t have any. But our enemies do have brains and are using them to talk us out of our only homeland, and of our very existence. No matter how nice they talk, they are our enemies until death. Until we smash their brains we will endure untold suffering. The sooner we wake up the sooner the suffering will stop and our Redemption become a glorious one.

Gary Cooperberg, a resident of the Jewish community in Hebron, Israel, is the founder and director of Project Shofar.

Copyright © 2008 Gary Cooperberg