THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

when he taught me God’s Torah and the People’s Commandments. My mother didnot raise us on these values from our infancy until her death. We were raised on aJudaism of love, founded on the verse “Love your fellow person as you loveyourself.” We were educated to oppose what was hateful to us as individuals and as apeople, and vowed irrevocably not to perpetuate those hateful deeds on others, notto individuals and not to a people, whatever the circumstances.Not all of Judaism and not all its followers are to my liking. Some of them are evenmy bitter enemies. I dedicate my confrontation with them to my love of the legacy ofour heritage’s firsts: To our first father Abraham, who did not restrain himself fromrebuking God, “Will the judge of all the people not do justice?” To the Jewry of theSchool of Hillel, and to the students of Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakai, who during theGreat Ruin of a.d. 70 preferred Yavne and its sages, its values and morality to thethen-corrupt Second Temple and the political, brutal and extremist Jerusalem. Thesewords are written for Israel’s greats, from Maimonides, who believed that the world’sredemption would come with the annulment of oppression and occupations, toMartin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and their colleagues, who believed andswore in the name of the religion of peace for the benefit of the entire world. Withtheir power I seek to uproot the evil growth that climbs like ivy on our tree of life andthreatens to asphyxiate it. Although many of those described below currently hold theJewish microphone, in my view they are the cruel abductors of this wonderful culture.They are not its authentic representatives.In the past few years, miracles have happened in Israel quite openly, as when thetombs of mythical figures are discovered. It is unlikely that the tombs really containthe remains of those figures, or that they even ever lived. In any case, their tombsbecome places of worship and pilgrimage. A few years ago, a yeshiva wasestablished at Joseph’s Tomb outside Shechem (today Nablus). At the outset, the actexpressed devotion and love of the land, but in fact it is paganism and Jewishidolatry, which goes against the original biblical prohibition. Unlike other patriarchs ofthe Israeli tribes, such as Reuben, Shimon, Judah, and the other founders of thenation, whose place of burial is unknown, Joseph’s bones were brought from Egyptand buried in the Land of Israel. Like his mother, Rachel, Joseph was buried outside