Here Come the Dreamers

By Moshe Feiglin

And they said to each other: Here comes the dreamer. And now, let us kill him and we will throw him in one of the pits and we will say that an evil beast ate him and we will see what will be of his dreams. (From this week's Torah portion, Vayeshev, Genesis 37:19-20)

Here come those dreamers again. The people who insist on dreaming the dream that we thought we were rid of. Here they go, climbing up the hilltops and clinging to the Land of Israel, clinging to the dream. Here they come, stronger than us. Their ranks are growing. Soon they will overcome us and rule. We can't override them anymore with democratic tools; they are simply the majority. So we will transfer the authority from the Knesset to the High Court and the media – power hubs not elected by the people. There, on that safe playing field, we will attack them and bring about their destruction - from Gush Katif to the hills of Samaria. There, we will destroy them, we will destroy their legitimacy and we will portray them as violent and dangerous extremists. There we will throw them into a pit. We will deny our responsibility for all the disasters that we have brought upon Israel – from Oslo through the Expulsion. We will say that it is purely coincidental that they are shooting missiles at Ashkelon from the ruins of Neve Dekalim; it is just a strange twist of fate that the world doesn't recognize our right to exist. We will say that it was an evil beast that just happened to be passing by and ate them, those dreamers. Then we will see what will be of their dreams.

But the dream is getting stronger and stronger. We have a destiny in this Land; a destiny without which we could not have guarded our uniqueness for thousands of years. We need Jewish leadership that will fulfill this destiny as its vision; leadership that is connected by its root to Jewish destiny and from which it derives its existential power.

What is Jewish destiny? The Nation of Israel's purpose is to make G-d sovereign over His creations. Our purpose is to bring G-d's Divine Presence into the entire world. This is why we were created and why we have wondrously survived against all historical odds. This is the purpose of the Land of Israel and it is to this end that we received Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.

The Holy Temple is the royal palace. In order to make G-d sovereign, His chosen nation must be free and His royal palace must be sovereign. The fear in many Israeli circles of the Temple Mount and Jewish prayer there is the fear of fulfilling our destiny.

The Torah and sovereignty cannot exist without each other. The Torah cannot be completely fulfilled without complete Jewish sovereignty over the Land of Israel. And conversely, without the Torah and the destiny that it represents, the State is rapidly losing its sovereignty.

Shabbat Shalom