BS’D
‘Kahanism’ and ‘Kahanist’ are terms that get batted about like a slo-pitch softball down at the Sinai Seniors Lodge in Ft. Myers.
That means they can mean just about anything to anyone—from being coterminous with terrorism, fascism, Islamophobia and racism to the other extreme of Jewish pride and power.
Well, having spent a lot of time around Kahane types, and considering ourselves to be shining examples of the patrician (and humble) Kahanist purebred (for no other reason than we’ve read widely from the man’s entire corpus, including his early Jewish Press reportage and editorializing up to and including nearly all of his books, the Perush HaMaccabi—a four volume work of stunning genius, if we may say so—and Ohr HaRaayon…) we feel duty-bound to offer a corrective.
So, let’s begin with the following…
During a Torah class in Tapuach some sixteen years back, a gentleman attending the shiur repeatedly referred to ‘Kahanists’ in the roundtable that followed, and did so as if everyone understood exactly to what he was referring. At one point, an elder statesman of the movement challenged him to define what he meant.
And his response—”A Kahanist is someone who believes in the Torah”.
And… we have to admit—that was pretty darn accurate.
But if we had to spice it up somewhat, and offer our own, more magnificently precise definition of the honorific, it would fall more along the lines of—”Someone who has an extraordinary sense of reality”.
…AN EXTRAORDINARY SENSE OF REALITY.
Of course, by ‘reality’, we don’t mean what Henry Kissinger might have intended by the term.
Rather, we aim at a definition that includes everything that obtains from a proper understanding of Torah truth and the worldview espoused by ChaZaL.
That’s a Kahanist.
So, for example…
He knows that Hashem runs the show.
He knows the critical role of the Jewish people in influencing Hashem, so to speak, toward either better or worse outcomes for his people AND the world.
He understands there’s an endgame to what we call ‘history’—and a set time frame.
He knows, more or less, the rough form that history will take until we arrive at its conclusion.
He knows the appropriate means of arriving there without undue suffering, both as a nation and personally—as a Jew who desires to live to see the face of the Righteous Messiah.
And that also means—
That he’s always acutely aware of what’s transpiring around him.
That he can’t be easily fooled.
That he holds no illusions.
That he sees deeply enough into the heart of every issue or problem he faces to be able to arrive at a realistic solution to it.
At least, if given enough time.
Not so with the rank and file Jew who aspires to Torah knowledge—or any other knowledge, for that matter.
In fact, history proves that a great many Jews have swung and missed when reality threw them a curve ball, regardless their aptitude or actual Torah learning. You might say that down in Ft. Myers—and many other locales across the Jewish world—they can only handle slo-pitch.
Kahanists are different. And by that we don’t mean all of them, of course. But Rabbi Kahane himself, and certainly his son, Binyamin HY”D, ZTZ”L, have to be considered archetypes in the field, insofar as their read of reality and their prescriptions to address it stand unmatched in the modern, post-Shoah period of Jewish history.
And it matters little that Kahane’s solutions were never endorsed or implemented by the pygmy Jewish mainstream-powers-that-be here in Israel.
Addaraba, they still remain the only answers to the most pressing questions we face today.
Including how to deal with Arabs, with captives, with enemies and ‘allies’, with internal traitors, and so on.
If one cannot grasp reality—the way ChaZaL teach it via the Torah—one will never adequately assess and respond properly to the challenges one personally faces as a Jew, nor will the nation of Israel ever succeed in responding properly to the broader crises that confront it.
The only solutions that succeed, in the end, are those espoused by individuals who understand reality-as-it-is.
Not as they hope it to be.
Rabbi Kahane was such a man.
As are his students.
One closing word regarding those jerk-urses who refer to themselves as “post-Kahanists”, who ramble on incoherently about forming national underground movements to overthrow the Israeli regime (where no one even knows if he’s part of the movement!), and establishing private military companies (a la the Wagner Group) to contract out security from the Erev Rav zionists (with the ShaBaK’s permission, of course)…
They only prove the point—
That any attempt to move beyond Kahanism—to a “post-reality” reality, as it were—inevitably leads one into a world of pure imagination.
May G-d help us.
Dean Maughvet
*archetypes
Caught it too late.