haaretz | Among all the rabbinical racism that’s been surfacing, among all the
events of the national memorial days that made Israel look more like a
racially exclusive society than a state, even more telling than the
chilling preference for placing a flag only on the grave of a certified
kosher fallen soldier was an event of extreme significance that got
little public attention.
It was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s
announcement saluting a Torah giant, teacher and arbiter of Jewish law.
We’re talking about Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, who was arrested for giving a
letter of approbation to the work “The King’s Torah − Laws of Killing
Non-Jews.”
As a rabbi, Yosef contributed to and expanded the
body of racist halakha (Jewish religious law) against Arabs, “goyim”
and homosexuals until his recent death. But all this is dwarfed by the
simple and unnerving fact that the prime minister of Israel referred to
one of the people behind the “The Laws of Killing Non-Jews” as a posek gadol − a great halakhic arbiter.
No Western leader could be caught doing something
comparable, even if he’d wanted to. No one in the West publishes books
on “the laws of killing Jews,” or on “the laws of killing
non-Christians,” or on “the laws of killing non-whites.” They would be
marched straight to prison, and anyone saluting them as “great arbiters”
would be booted out of public service.
Even in the most extreme Islamic countries you won’t
find an exact parallel. There are no books there on “the laws of
killing Jews,” or even on “the laws of killing those not of the Islamic
race.” Yes, there have been religious rulings favoring suicide
terrorists and the killing of Zionists. But never a blanket permit for
racist murder.
Netanyahu’s declaration, which is much more serious
even than his whispered confidence to an old rabbi that “the left has
forgotten what it means to be a Jew,” was in essence the zenith, or
perhaps the basis, for what has become the long duration of
Holocaust-memorial-independence ceremonies, which do everything to
eradicate the most important half of our founding principle of “never
again.”
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