Remember History

By Moshe Feiglin

Adar II, 5768
March 16, 08

This past Shabbat, Jews throughout the world read the Torah portion, Zachor, in which we are commanded to remember Amalek and his evil schemes to obliterate the Nation of Israel. But currently, Israel is in the throes of a desperate attempt to erase its history. In doing so, it has lost its internal reference point, leaving it completely dependant on its enemies. Without Judaism, we have no right to be here. We are nothing more than foreigners occupying the land of the Hamas, who are simply fighting a war of independence.

Those who had mistakenly assumed that Israels leadership was beginning to understand reality received a chilling wake-up call last week from Israels president. Why do we need to learn history? Shimon Peres stumped for Education Minister Yuli Tamirs educational methodology. Everything is in the computer, anyway.

I do not think that there is another leader in the world who would dare make such a foolish and dangerous remark. No nation, no matter how young and remote, would demonstrate such blatant scorn for the history of the world and its own, national history. But the king of the Jews - the president of the country that claims to represent the most ancient nation in the world - wants to stop our children from learning history. After all, everything is in the computer and can be easily accessed with the press of a button.

Technically, Peres is correct. The problem is that if history - the foundation on which our culture, heritage and justification for existing in the land rests - is in the computer and not in our heads and hearts, we will have no idea what we are doing here, why we should stay here and suffer, and certainly not why we should fight for this land.

I hate history, Peres explains, completely negating the Divine directive to remember history. Everything is in the computer. And anyway, he continues, we live in a world in which territory has no significance.

The entire post-modern ideology in which everything is virtual is personified by the president of the State of the Jews. Nothing is real anymore. The Land is virtual, the Kassams are nothing more than Shmasams as Peres called them and Israels policy is nothing more than a spin. In other words, reality is the amount of time that a given item stays in the headlines. Nothing else has any significance. Even pain is no longer real. Luckily for Israels leaders, the two soldiers who unnecessarily died in the IDFs meaningless venture in Gaza last week were killed and not captured. Otherwise, we would have been forced to remember them. Now that they have died, they are nothing more than their mothers problem.

Shimon Peres and the rest of the Oslo priests have enslaved us in a language and mentality that have made our reality meaningless. How can we stop the missiles from being fired on Israel when so many of its streets and structures are named after Rabin - the person who, more than anyone, symbolizes the process that has brought this catastrophe upon us?

Israel must free itself of the Oslo mentality. The key is to keep the memories in our heads and hearts - not in our computers.