Helen Thomas Should Get The ***** Out of *****
Rabbi Gary S. Creditor
June 11, 2010
Richmond, Virginia
The title of this piece should certainly catch your attention.
I really wonder about people sometimes. What were they thinking? What is really going in the back of their minds? What do they really believe, think and feel? We now know about Helen Thomas. I also wonder about people asking questions? What was my colleague looking for from an eighty-nine year old lady? Was Rabbi Nesenoff just baiting the hook seeking a tasty tidbit? He got a mouthful! Yet make no mistake. Helen Thomas hasn't said anything new. It has been said long before. It is said every day in the Arabic press. This has been an eternal issue for the rest of the world:
Where do the Jews belong?
Should they belong anywhere?
Should we exist at all?
Helen Thomas did not invent these questions or the responses. They have existed for two thousand years. And we as Jews might not like the answers. Then again, there are many parts of the world who won't like mine, including Helen Thomas. I intend to tell her where she can go.
We are very unique. We probably don't sufficiently appreciate our uniqueness.
We are the only people who have carried around a document – the Torah - for nearly three thousand unbroken years.
We are the only people who can scratch a piece of land and find what an ancestor wrote in the same language – Hebrew – that we use today.
We are the only people, whom one of our chief adversaries – Christianity – has their own book which is based on our book in which they claim to inherit who we were, which means that we were there – in the land of Israel, then, in the first decades of the first century.
We are the only people who have a second chief adversary – Islam – that claims to have a book based on our book which means that our book, which means us – we – came first, and their book talks about places were we were which means we were there first!
We are very unique!
Everyone one of our adversaries of the ages, Christianity and Islam, both testify by their own books that we lived in the land of Israel, PALESTINE, before either of them existed! Wow! We really were there, in the Land of Israel, Roman province of Palestine. About the only people who could claim prior residency are the Canaanites, and I don't hear anybody claiming to be their descendants. Essentially that means that we are the first and only people to have claim to this patch of earth, regardless of where any border line is drawn.
No body else claims to have built cities that we have through excavation, but us.
No body else claims to have built the roads and waterways that still exist, that we can trace from satellite pictures, but us.
No body has written love poetry about the land earlier than us.
And no body has vowed, pledged, sworn and promised to rebuild their autonomous existence on its soil, but us.
WE ARE NOT THE OCCUPIERS OF PALESTINE!
WE ARE THE ORIGINAL PALESTINIANS!
EVERYONE TESTIFIES THAT WE HAVE BEEN THERE FOR OVER THREE THOUSAND YEARS!
WHY SHOULD I GET OUT?
Some might want to say, even so, that when we left we relinquished our rights to it. WHO SAID WE EVER LEFT? This is also unique. It seems that everyone is always testifying that we are there.
The Greeks wrote about Alexander the Great meeting the Jews of Israel when he peacefully invaded.
The Romans wrote and left huge amounts of physical evidence that they fought two wars against us. And after the second, even though they expelled us from Jerusalem, continue writing about have to keep throwing us out. I guess we were still there.
When Christianity will rule the area, inheriting the Holy Roman Empire, they will continue to issue edicts throwing us out. I guess we were still there.
And when the Moslems wrest control from the Christians and when the Crusaders fight the Moslems both groups testify to horrors perpetrated against the Jews who are living there.
When the Turks and Ottomans control the area they take censuses of the population, and we are there. In fact, in many places, the majority of inhabitants are Jews.
When the British receive the Mandate from the League of Nations, we were there.
WE ARE NOT THE OCCUPIERS OF PALESTINE!
WE HAVE NEVER LEFT THIS HOLY SOIL.
WE NEVER RELINQUISED CONTROL, NOR GAVE UP OUR AUTONOMY –
It was taken from us through war, and perpetuated through persecution.
WHY SHOULD WE GIVE UP WHAT IS OURS?
The truth be told, the answer to my original question, where do we belong, for Helen Thomas and others like her is –nowhere. Until the recent decades official Christianity still believed in the dénouement of Judaism and Jews as they were the inheritors of the covenant and of the name Israel. Mohammed was mad at the Jews of his time for their not adopting Islam because, he claimed, we messed up the authentic traditions, now Islam had it right, and all should become Muslims. And they conquered a huge empire by the sword. Christian Europe did not cry when they burnt our bodies in the Holocaust, having perpetrated centuries of pogroms and persecutions. Moslem North Africa, Middle East did not protest that slaughter and trumpeted their own designs upon us in 1948, 1967 and 1973. It never was a war to regain land. It was wars to destroy the Jewish State.
When Helen Thomas said that we should go back to Poland or to Germany I know what she really meant. Even if it was "just" he subconscious speaking, she meant for us to go back to the slaughtering houses and the crematorium and disappear like smoke, so that she and the world don't have to hear from us, see us, know from us – ever again. I get it. I get it loud and clear.
I have one word and only one word for her: NEVER!!
Never will we disappear.
Never will we bow our head.
Never will we wander homeless in the world.
Never will we be defenseless.
NEVER!! EVER!!
So Helen Thomas shouldn't get the **** out of anywhere!
If she wants to play that game, she needs to trace her family's journey. And go back. Go back to wherever they came from. Her family didn't begin on this continent. Indeed nobody did. Even the Native American's didn't start here. They should go back to Asia over the land bridge. The English didn't begin in England. They were invaders. In fact, nobody began anywhere. Everyone moved into somewhere. So Helen Thomas can go wherever she wants. She can even stay here. And those of our people who so wish, will fulfill our destiny and live in an independent, democratic Jewish state of Israel in its ancestral land. The truth be told, at least according to the Bible, from the first man and woman, everyone began in the Garden of Eden, that singular place of peace and harmony. That's only the place to which to go back.
Shabbat Shalom.
