Thread by @GREENESJ333

Roger Froikin @rlefraim wrote, “Knowing Who We Are

Golda Meir once said that those Jews who died in the gas chambers were the last ones to die without fighting back.
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She, hopefully, was right, but maybe not, but in any case I have an objection that needs to be made.

First, it seems she was wrong, as there are Jews in Israel today and around the world who would rather surrender to Hamas and Hezbollah and
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to the antisemites of the world by giving up rights and dignity than to fight.

I do not want Jews to be defined by Gentiles. I do not want Jews to be defined by persecution, by the Holocaust, by what others have done to us.
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And in spite of David Ben-Gurion’s statement that when he saw the first prostitute in Tel Aviv, he was not concerned to see us becoming a “normal people.” Wrong. Why should we define ourselves as normal by bad things?
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Why should we define ourselves as normal by noting that a Jewish state can be as filled with crime and corruption and stupidity as any country?

The cold, objective fact is that we Jews have defined ourselves by two things: persecution and Torah.
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So what happens when persecution is gone? What happens when Torah is ignored and put aside or segregated to one small portion of the community?

In the Diaspora, historically, assimilation (conversion) was motivated by wanting to avoid persecution or
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wanting material benefits the outside world offered, or both. Today, where persecution affects very few, those motives have been reduced, but the lack of importance placed on Jewish identity and the acceptance of those who have assimilated and
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intermarried or even converted to Christianity or Islam has spurred more assimilation and a loss to the Jewish people.

And in Israel, the absence of persecution has been replaced by the threat of war. But war may not be forever.
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And already, plenty of young people, without any specifically Jewish identity, raised in secular homes, have left Israel for Europe and the West, even for Germany, where more than 100,000 Israelis live today.
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And when war ends, what do you think will happen when young people look at the cost of living in Israel and have no real connection to Judaism?

The Jewish people simply have one thing in common: Torah, and we don’t use it all that well.
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Today, it is studied, read, repeated, quoted, and used as a part of ritual, but it almost never is used as a guide or understood as a guide to human behavior.
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And in a secular world, a world of various belief systems that are essentially veneers that have little to do with daily life other than for the superstitious and fearful, the Torah is not seen as relevant to many beyond ritual.
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But, frankly, that is a demonstration of our ignorance of its purpose and how it works.

And without Torah, the Jewish people are not a people with anything significant to hold them together and create a national identity.”
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