Bibi, Kook And Amalek

An excerpt from, “Temple Mount Fanatics Foment a New Thirty Years’ War” By Salvatore Montagna, Jeffrey Steinberg, Michele Steinberg, Scott Thompson, and Anton Chaitkin, Executive Intelligence Review, November 3, 2000:

Rabbi David Samson, a student of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, is one of the leading biographers and promoters of the Cabbalistic teachings of Rabbi Kook the Elder. He confirmed to an interviewer that the Merkaz HaRav Yeshiva networks founded by the Kooks is at the heart of the Gush Emunim settlers movement and the Temple Mount Faithful. “The entire settlements of Judea and Samaria, and the Golan, is all Merkaz HaRav,” he said. “Rabbi Kook decided that `I am going to establish a settlement movement.’ Gush Emunim is Merkaz HaRav. And the leaders of Gush Emunim are all the students of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda, and whenever they would make a major policy decision, it would be in his dining room, sitting at his table.” He later added, “Definitely, Rabbi Kook’s students are again at the forefront.”

Rabbi Samson also confirmed that Sharon had developed a deep personal collaboration with Rabbi Kook, specifically around the launching of the illegal settlements in the West Bank and other parts of the territories occupied after the Six Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. “Immediately after the Yom Kippur War,” Samson said, “Sharon went, together with Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, to the first illegal settlement, that was meant as a demonstration against the Army.” He added, “His [Sharon's] connection with Merkaz HeRav was with Gush Emunim. . . . He was in the opposition together with Merkaz HaRav ideology.”

Rabbi Samson also confirmed that the Merkaz HaRav networks have heavily penetrated the Israeli Defense Forces, through the hesder yeshivas, which are, in effect, military training institutes that also teach the Kooks’ Cabbalistic fundamentalism. Students at the 22 hesder yeshivas, mostly in the occupied territories, spend their five years of study serving part-time in the Army, and spending the rest of their time in Cabbalistic studies. This apparatus has transformed the IDF into an evolving instrumentality for the Cabbalistic-fundamentalist holy war.

With Rabbi Kook the Younger’s death in 1982, the leadership of Gush Emunim and the Temple Mount Faithful has been picked up by a group of even more violent and radical protégés, including Rabbi Moshe Levinger and Rabbi Eleazer Waldman. Waldman has asserted that Kook demanded a holy war, as the only means of achieving the coming of the Messiah. “On the one hand,” Waldman wrote, “war is accompanied by destruction and death, on the other hand, it increases the power of the Messiah. . . . Unfortunately, it is still impossible to achieve the completion of Redemption by any means other than war.”

Rabbi Samson confided that former Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu “himself studies Rabbi Kook’s writings with some of the biggest rabbis in Merkaz HaRav, on a regular basis. . . . Bibi Netanyahu is very oriented this way. He was in Merkaz HaRav on Jerusalem Day [1996] and it seems that his relationship with Rabbi Kook is very serious. The Minister of Justice that he appointed, not because of any coalition agreement, just because he was the one he wanted the most, is a proponent of Rabbi Kook’s philosophy and is very well-versed in Rabbi Kook’s philosophy.” This, too, should come as no surprise, given that Netanyahu’s father was the personal secretary of Jabotinsky, the intimate collaborator of Rabbi Kook the Elder.

Wikipedia:

Zvi Kook, together with Harlap, was heir to a tradition of messianic demonizing thought going back at least to Judah Alkalai, in which the redemption of Jews in Israel was a premise for, and precursor to, the general uplifting of mankind. Whereas his father viewed Zionists as unwitting agents in the divine plan for redemption, – only a ‘slim membrane’ was all that separated antinomian messianism, of the type disastrously exemplified by Shabbatai Zevi, from authentic messianic redemption,- Zvi Kook went one step further. Believing that the secular state already embodied in nuce the hidden spark of the sacred, he argued that the messianic age of redemption had already arrived This task was to be furthered in the present age by extending Jewish rule over the land occupied by Israel in 1967, also by means of settlements. This redemptive process across generations would, he argued, involve three stages, the first of which had already been achieved: (a) the establishment of the State of Israel, a contemporary expression of the Davidic Kingdom; (b)the restoration of complete Jewish sovereignty against Amalek;[k] and, once these two preconditions were satisfied (c) the Third Temple would be established on the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Wikipedia:

Nur Masalha, Elliot Horowitz, and Josef Stern suggest that Amalekites have come to represent an “eternally irreconcilable enemy” that wants to murder Jews, that Jews in post-biblical times sometimes associate contemporary enemies with Haman or Amalekites, and that some Jews believe that pre-emptive violence is acceptable against such enemies. Groups identified with Amalek include the Romans, Nazis, Stalinists, ISIS, Palestinians and bellicose Iranian leaders such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. More metaphorically, to some Hasidic rabbis (particularly the Baal Shem Tov), Amalek represents atheism or the rejection of God.

During the Purim festival, the Book of Esther is read in the commemoration of the saving of the Jewish people from Haman who plotted to kill all Jews in Persian Empire. It is customary for the audience to make noise and shout whenever “Haman” is mentioned, in order to desecrate his name, based on Exodus 17:14. It is also customary to recite Deuteronomy 25:17–18 (see below) on the Shabbat before Purim. This was because Haman was considered to be an Amalekite although this label is more likely to be symbolic rather than literal.

Some commentators have discussed the ethical deficiency of the commandment to exterminate all the Amalekites, especially including the command to kill children, and the presumption of collective punishment. It has also been described as genocidal, according to genocide scholars like Norman Naimark.

Video Title: Understanding AMALEK: Israel’s Arch-Enemy – with Rabbi Michael Skobac. Source: Jews for Judaism. Date Published: July 21, 2022. Description:

There are numerous villains in the Bible, and Israel has many enemies. But among all of these, one nation stands out as Israel’s arch-enemy. This diabolical people, Amalek, has a monstrous obsession with obliterating the Jewish people. 

It began with Amalek launching a doomed suicide attack against the weak stragglers among the Israelites fleeing from Egypt after the Exodus. They didn’t care if they would face destruction in the process, but they were intent on challenging the seeming invincibility of Israel. 

In this lecture, Rabbi Michael Skobac explores the nature of Amalek’s deep hatred of Israel and why God demanded that their memory be erased.