Compassion

“For my mother and father Judaism meant bearing witness, raging against injustice and refusing silence. It meant compassion, tolerance, and rescue. In the absence of these imperatives, they taught me, we cease to be Jews.” – Sara Roy

Thus writes Sara Roy on left-wing neo-Nazi magazine CounterPunch (the advert for “The Origins of the Israel Lobby”, which I quoted previously, is still there as of this writing), in a tearful article urging the Jews of Israel to cease their “brutality toward the Palestinians” so that they may rightly again consider themselves “sons of the Holocaust”.

I have already gone the route of showing how such thinking runs contrary to traditional Jewish understanding, how expressions like the famed “Light Unto Nations” mean something other than their usual [Marxist] interpretation, how G-d’s calls for compassion and treating the stranger well aren’t a suicide pact, and how Judaism isn’t any sort of “social gospel”, important though the social commandments of G-d are. But now I wish to tackle this issue from another angle, the angle of taking the social imperatives by the Marxists’ word and showing how Orthodox Judaism and Religious Zionism are true to them while the Marxists fall woefully off the mark.

Compassion is a Jewish value, a divinely commanded value. G-d says (Exodus 22:24–26):

If thou lend money to any of My people, even to the poor with thee, thou shalt not be to him as a creditor; neither shall ye lay upon him interest. If thou at all take thy neighbour’s garment to pledge, thou shalt restore it unto him by that the sun goeth down; for that is his only covering, it is his garment for his skin; wherein shall he sleep? and it shall come to pass, when he crieth unto Me, that I will hear; for I am gracious.

HaShem Himself makes here an appeal to human emotion. He enjoins the well-treatment of the stranger in the Land of Israel (which the “Palestinians” are not—the ger is a non-Jew who lives in the Land of Israel accepting that it belongs to the Jews, while the “Palestinians” live in it thinking it’s theirs). He commands to avoid making even animals suffer. In all His commandments is a deep compassion from within the heart of the Father of All His Creations.

But there is this truth about emotion, oft-ignored: it must be based on reason, on information, and foremostly on the truth, otherwise it can lead to the most atrocious cruelty. It is not good, the overreaction, the hypercorrection, of some people who say, “Emotion is trash, cold and hard reason and logic are the only way to go”. Both have their place in life, in the world. But the question is which rules which: when emotion leads reason, all kind of havoc can result. The entire way of the Torah, the raison d’être of its onerous array of mitzvot, is to make the brain the ruler of the heart—to tame the emotions so as to follow reason. Not to crush the emotions or the bodily desires as the monks do, but to raise them to divine heights through the tempering of the Torah.

Roy has compassion, but it is not based on the truth. It is the same sort of “compassion” that recoils in horror at punishing wayward children at home or in school, because of “the psychological damage it could wreak upon them”, ending up with a generation of school bullies and juvenile delinquents who really wreak psychological damage on the innocent kids. It is the “mercy” that expresses horror at sending criminals to jail, or assuages one’s guilt by making that jail a five-star hotel. And it is the same bleeding-heart sentiment that ignores such things as this:

Interviewer: Let’s talk with the two children of the jihad-fighting martyrdom-seeker Rim Al-Riyashi—Dhoha and Muhammad. Dhoha, you love mama, right? Where did mama go?

Dhoha: To Paradise.

Interviewer: What did mama do?

Dhoha: She committed martyrdom.

Interviewer: She killed Jews, right?

Interviewer: How many did she kill, Muhammad?

Muhammad: Huh?

Interviewer: How many Jews did mama kill?

Muhammad: This many…

Interviewer: How many is that?

Muhammad: Five.

That’s the transcript of an interview with the children of “Palestinian” suicide bomber Rim Al-Riyashi on Hamas TV, from MEMRI. Those two children, two among so many, are being raised to become “fire bombs” as we speak. Children being educated to see suicide-bombing, the murder of the “other” (nod to Edward Said), as the thing to look forward to when they grow up.

The regular Marxist “understanding the victim, giving credit to the weak” platitudes won’t help here; it is one thing to claim resistance here and now, but it is quite another to raise one’s children in such a way as to prevent any possibility of the cessation of hostilities until… the cessation of the existence of the other party (G-d forbid).

Sara Roy has it that the Jewish state is duty-bound to fulfill the demands of those people in order to placate them. Far beyond her is compassion to those two small children, and their numerous peers, who are being sacrificed to the Molech of Islamic suicide-bombing. Her “mercy”, her “compassion”, being uninformed of the facts, or worse, willfully ignorant of them, translates to cruelty and callousness in reality. The context-free onlooker, or the willfully truth-suppressing moonbat, will look at the father who spanks his child and say, “What a cruel man this is! How awfully he treats his own kids!” But the informed, reasoned observer knows that that father’s chastisement may well be the only thing separating the child from a future career in a criminal organization. K’rachem av al banim, says King David (Psalms 103:13)—“Like as a father hath compassion upon his children, so hath the LORD compassion upon them that fear Him”. One of the signs of G-d’s Fatherhood is chastisement of those He loves, because He loves them. Not like the hippified, psychobabble-mutated, emasculated fatherhood of today, in which the father is a milquetoast letting his children stray to any direction in a flurry of “egalitarianism”.

If you love those children, you will advocate taking them away from their parents to be raised on a life-enabling doctrine. If you see them as a reason why their parents must be placated, if you “understand” why this atrocious phenomenon has come to pass, then you have no more than the appearance of compassion. You are like the swine, in that you display your cloven hoofs to all, saying, “See, I am pure”, but the darkness of your heart is betrayed by your lack of rumination, by your inability, or outright unwillingness, to do an internal process of thinking about the whole matter.

“What are Jews now capable of resisting: tyranny? Oppression? Occupation? Injustice? We resist none of these things, no more.” – Sara Roy, from the same

No, resisting tyranny, oppression, occupation and injustice are not the be-all and end-all of Judaism, and yet, it is imperative that, in my response to such accusations as Sara Roy levels, I not overreact, that I not deny their important place in Judaism. So I respond thus: I resist all those things, much better than you Marxists do.

I resist the tyranny of Islamic shariah law.

I resist the oppression of Islamic dhimmi laws for all non-Muslims worldwide.

I resist the steady, creeping occupation of non-Muslim lands and states by global Islamic fascistic imperialism.

I resist the rank injustice of an apartheid system that consigns non-Muslims, women, and even Muslims if they are not Arabs (see: Darfur), to subclass status.

I resist all those, while the Marxists turn a blind eye toward them. Worse: while the Marxists ally themselves with Islam, aiding and abetting its takeover of the world. And I resist Marxism, which is a system of tyranny, oppression, occupation and injustice in its own right, boasting over a 100 million murders in its name.

Thus I have answered the criticism of those who are, according to their feelings, capable of putting a dentist in jail for “cruelly inflicting pain upon innocent people”, disregarding the whole context of the patient’s pain—to inflict some pain in order to prevent a lot of pain later. King David says (Psalms 3:8): “Thou hast broken the teeth of the wicked”. Amen, may it be so soon.