In light of the rioting on Har HaBayit, in the Old City of Jerusalem and in various locations throughout Israel in recent days by Arabs and Israeli Arabs, this thought from Rav Binyamin Kahane, z”l is most timely.
“For not only one has risen to destroy us but rather in every single generation they arise to destroy us”
This is a famous verse in the Haggadah and makes a great song, too…. Listen to what Rav Binyamin Kahane writes about this in the Haggadah of the Jewish Idea:
“In every generation” – what a sweeping generalization! The question arises: Was there no generation in which they did not rise against us to destroy us? The answer is that there are different ways of destroying us. There are those who openly try to destroy us physically, like Haman and Hitler; and there are those who attempt to destroy us spiritually through assimilation… THE PROBLEM IS THAT IN EVERY SINGLE GENERATION, THERE ARE JEWS WHO THINK THAT THEIR GENERATION IS AN EXCEPTION and that this rule doesn’t hold true for them. That is to say, that same Jew will agree that in previous generations, they tried to destroy us, even when they were smiling at us… But he is unwilling to learn from history, and to understand that the smiles of today are identical to the smiles of previous generations – for “man is near unto himself” (Yebamot 25) – meaning that no one is objective concerning his own interests, and it is comfortable to live in the delusion that the Gentiles of OUR day are “progressive”, and “IT can not happen here…”