This was delivered as a Torah Tziburi on Nov 9, 2024 in Buchman’s Amphitheater Park
Audio Version
Transcript
I went to bed last night at close to three o’clock in the morning, just as the first images of the unfolding pogrom in Amsterdam were hitting X (and, yes, it was a pogrom. People were being targeted not based on the football clothes they were wearing, but based on whether they could speak Arabic or Dutch). I woke up this morning and opened the Wall Street Journal app. I saw reporting on the challenges of UNRWA being pushed aside. There was no mention of a pogrom. The AP wrote that “Maccabi Tel Aviv fans clash with reported pro-Palestinian protestors.” The New York Times reported: “Violence Tied to Soccer Game Prompts Dozens of Arrests in Amsterdam.”
There was no evidence of the crime that was committed. Of innocent people being beaten in the streets. Of random Ukrainian and Cypriots being forced to show their passports – and of being beaten if they did not comply. All of this was hidden from those who would deliver us truth. The only evidence that could be found was those undeniable videos taken and posted for those who cared to see. Those videos were a message that escaped from those that would hide or deny what had occurred.
As I considered this, I was reminded of the verse:
וַיָּבֹא, הַפָּלִיט, וַיַּגֵּד, לְאַבְרָם הָעִבְרִי… וַיִּשְׁמַע אַבְרָם, כִּי נִשְׁבָּה אָחִיו
And there came one that had escaped, and told Abram the Hebrew… And Avram heard, because his brother had been taken captive.
Those videos are the messages that have escaped. Others do not seem to grasp their meaning. Do not seem to understand what they represent. But when we are told of them, when we see them, we hear. We truly hear, as our hearts are ripped apart, that our brothers have been attacked.
This week’s Torah portion starts with Avram abandoning the world he had once occupied. We know that Avram grew up in a river culture. All the great civilizations were river cultures. The rivers brought regular waters, they brought irrigation, they brought trade. The rivers represented material strength. The rivers were civilization. The Tigris and Euphrates were great rivers. The Nile was a great river. And Lot, Avram’s nephew, saw the land of S’dom, the plain of the Jordan river, was “well-watered, everywhere. Like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt.”
Avram grew up in river culture. But when he left, he did not go to a river culture. He came to the hills of Canaan. A land populated not by the men of great empires, but by tribes and groups largely outside the structures of civilization. It was like he went from a world brought together by the rivers of data on the Internet and simply stepped away from the grid. It would seem that Avram stepped away from any sort of permanence, of connection to reality, of any source of strength and resilience.
The great contrast to Avram’s story is that of the war between the Four Kings and the Five Kings. The Four Kings were led by KedarLaOmer. If you look him up on Wikipedia, you will see that we cannot identify him. But in Hebrew, his name literally means ‘the one who encircles grain.’ Omer is not simply grain, though. We learn from the story of the Exodus that an omer is the amount of food necessary for one person to live for one day. KedarLaOmer restricts the necessary food for life. KedarLaOmer cornered the market on survival.
We might imagine such a thing to be impossible, but records from Ur, records that pre-date Avram, show that a mere 500 individuals are believed to have controlled 188 million liters of annual grain production. Concentration of great wealth was not foreign in that world. The concept of a grain monopoly was not beyond reason. This idea of economic warfare is enhanced when you consider that one of the cities that rebelled was Amora – a city named after this same quantity of grain. Amora was trying to break KedarLaOmer’s monopoly and make their fortunes along the way (I believe their secret was the very same fertilizers we pull from the Dead Sea today and their secret was so important that they distrusted any and all travelers. It was also explosive.)
Like KedarLaOmer, S’dom and Amora worshipped the material.
Given all of this, the war of the Four Kings and Five Kings was a war of monopoly.
KedarLaOmer came to eliminate the competition.
When the four kings came, Avram had no need to interact with them. They were of no concern to each other. It was only when Avram’s nephew was taken that he listened. A great deal can be said about Avram considering Lot his ‘brother’ in this instant of crisis. But the idea is so simple. Avram adopted Lot to preserve the legacy of his brother Haran. Avram was rescuing not the material reality of his nephew Lot, but the spiritual legacy of his brother.
Avram saw this legacy, and Avram knew what was truly important. It was spiritual legacy, more than anything else, that defined Avram.
The contrast between Avram and the Kings could hardly have been greater. It was only accentuated when Avram refused the payment of even a shoelace from those he had rescued.
The four Kings and the five Kings were leaders of materially powerful people; but these people no longer exist. Avram, who stepped away from the world of ephemeral materiality and power, is the one whose families has been made a part of forever.
Reading these stories all these years later, the scale of what occurred can escape us. We see Avram as the head of a small family. The Torah speaks of many animals in his herds, but who cares? He was a nomad with a decent sized flock. The Midrash talks about all of humankind coming to crown Avram as King, but Avram turned them away because that is not the road that would truly glorify G-d. The story is so fantastical as to be ridiculous. It seems entirely divorced from reality. But there is more truth to it than we might imagine at first.
I’ve long focused on KedarLaOmer’s name. But he was from a place. He was from Elam. Elam, which would become the heartland of Persia. The great city there was none other than Susa – or Shushan. It was on the river Shavur. Those who have tried to place the other kingdoms in this war can firmly identify one of them as being from the great Sumerian empire (Shinar or Sumer) that stands where Iraq is today. Another is from either Syria, Anatolia or perhaps even Cyprus. Their King is Arioch – which may well come from the word Ari, or Lion. Assad’s name means Lion.
The final King is simply the King of “Goyim.” There is no ancient Kingdom by that name. The term is actually applied even to the children of Avraham himself. It is a generic word, a word implying many nations. And the name of their King means nothing in Biblical Hebrew. However, it is a very clear word in modern English. It is ‘Tidal’. In this admittedly flexible analysis, it describes the ‘goyim’ being carried along by a wave – perhaps a wave of enthusiasm.
The picture drawn is of an alliance formed by KedarLaOmer. An alliance whose tentacles reached across the Middle East, and ultimately the world. He drew together Iraq, Syria, Iran and many others besides.
The image is one that is so very familiar to us today. Perhaps history does more than rhyme.
There is, however, a major difference between the story in this Torah portion and our reality today. KedarLaOmer didn’t care about Avram. KedarLaOmer was a material man. He cornered markets and starved people for his own power and his own wealth. His interest was in those who farmed outside of his control. He burned the farms of Amalek, on the other side of the Jordan River. But he did not attack Avram. Avram was irrelevant.
The two men lived in almost entirely different realities.
That is not our situation today. None can deny that the Ayatollahs of Iran and their patsies in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon are men of the spiritual world. In fact, there is more to it than even that.
They are the spiritual descendants of Avraham himself.
Today, one side of our war is led by the King of Elam buttressed by his clients in Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen. Today, one side of this war is led by the King of Elam, buttressed by his global ‘resistance’ movement. But he is not fighting for material domination. He is fighting for spiritual domination. For spiritual monopoly.
The resistance to the Ayatollahs is not S’dom and Amorah – the farmers in the well-watered valley that was like the Garden of G-d. No, his resistance is the people of Israel. Where S’dom and Amora perhaps tapped the fertilizers of the Dead Sea, we tap another source, a source of spiritual strength and of spiritual resistance. Our image of the Garden of G-d is quite different from theirs.
The Ayatollahs, in their mission to establish the Mahdi – the twelfth Imam who will impose Islam upon the entire world, cannot permit us to survive. Just as Elam struck many small peoples on their road to S’dom, the Ayatollahs have struck many others on their road to Israel. A million people have been killed in their wars, but their ambitions are far greater than that.
Today, we, the children of Avraham, fight the children of Avraham.
Nonetheless, even today, we can see that it is us, and not them, who are supported by the L-rd. Time and again, we have seen open miracles. 1000 homes in Hod Hasharon were damaged in the last Iranian missile barrage – not a single person was injured. 8,000 rockets – every one of them capable of killing dozens – have been fired into Israel by Hezbollah. Remarkably few people have been struck down. Cars and buildings are burned, the material is destroyed. But our people remain strong.
But to survive this war, to strike down the evil that faces us, we must do more than rely on the blessings that have been. We must tap into that which motivated Avram to secure the blessings to be.
Avram left the world he had occupied before – he stepped away from the reality of Elam and Shinar. Why? Because G-d promised him that he would serve as a blessing for the families of the world.
I believe it is this simple.
Even today, the leaders of Elam seek to conquer and control and subjugate. They seek submission to All-h – their vision of All-h. But we are not meant to conquer. If G-d wanted to bring humankind close to Him through conquest, then he would rule. Then Avraham would have been crowned King of the World.No, just as the Midrash suggests, ours is another path.
Today, the leaders of Elam have an arc of power that claims some 190 million subjects. This ignores their idiot followers who have infested the West, those who have been blinded by the monies of Qatar or those whose alliance of hatred prevents them from seeing a pogrom reported before their very eyes. But if G-d wanted the numerous to rule, then KedarLaOmer’s legacy would be the one that survived.
No, G-d chose us as His vanguard and our nation is – and always has been – tiny. We number but 16 million globally, perhaps only 8 million in Israel itself. While the world speaks of our military power, it is still not clear we can overcome Hamas’s fanatics and tunnels, Hezbollah’s hundreds of thousands of rockets or Iran’s hoped-for nuclear weapons. In every respect but that of ideas, we are outnumbered.
Our enemies have vast rivers of wealth bubbling out of the ground, rotting their societies, and supporting their evil enterprise. They seek to spread their glory and to dominant mankind while acting as if it is they who represent the divine. They celebrate when their sons sacrifice themselves as Shahids. They hide behind their women and children. They sacrifice the future in the name of glorying G-d.
They are worshipers of Molech; twisting the reality of our Melech – our King.
They are the opposite of Holy.
They are the great power, the booming voice, the innumerable mass.
And we? We are the thin, still, voice of G-d. We are the tiny nation that threatens their dark vision of spiritual monopoly. So long as we occupy this role, so long as we seek to be a blessing to the families of the world, we will be blessed.
Our true allies are those who recognize that nothing is more important than creating and sustaining the future and giving opportunities for the families of the world to do the same. Whether Christian, Muslim or ‘other’, so long as they stand with us, they too will be blessed.
When Avram heard that his brotherhad been attacked, Avram took 318 men, trained in his own house. They were raised up in his world, with his priorities and his goals. Those men defeated the combined armies of Iran, Iraq, Syria and their tidal wave of allies amongst the nations. Lest you think KaderLaOmer’s armies were tiny, consider those 188 million liters of annual grain.
KaderLaOmer’s was a great alliance with a great army.
Nonetheless, they fell in but one night before the forces of Avram.
They fell in but a single night to a man protecting the legacy of his brother.
When modern day Elam attacked us on Oct 7th, we heard.
When it attacked us on college campuses, we heard.
When it attacked us in Los Angeles, New York and Toronto, we heard.
When it attacked us in Amsterdam, we heard.
When its coreligionists carried out 201 different pogroms, massacres and expulsions between the founding of Islam and the founding of the modern state of Israel, we heard.
Every day it has held our people hostage, we have heard.
Today, Israel has 317 combat aircraft and tankers piloted by trained men and women raised up within our house. These are the vanguard that will support our strikes on modern-day Elam. When we strike, the Ayatollahs of Iran – no matter their power or their resources – will be struck down. Their allied nations of hundreds of millions of people will not be enough to protect them.
We will strike them down and like KedarLaOmer, their names will only be remembered as a footnote in our history.
We are the resistance, but it is they who shall fall before us.
Shabbat Shalom.
