The "Knitted" Kippah

9 Kislev 5785

[All quotes are attributable to the book The Empty Wagon by Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro.]

"Since nationalist ideology is in the category of idol worship, the ideology of religious nationalism is in the category of idol worship combined [with Judaism] (b'shituf)."
- Rabbi Elchonon Wasserman

"... Zionism is heresy.  It strives to inform us that nationalism, instead of emunah and Torah, is the foundation . . and religious Zionists (Mizrachim) too, who take religious nationalism as a foundation ... by combining two foundations - as in "religious nationalism" - thereby demonstrate that there is an additional foundation to Jewishness, that even without emunah one can be a Jew, although there is an advantage if one is also religious.  This is an uprooting of the basis of Judaism.  And in certain ways, [the religious Zionists] are worse than the [secular] Zionists, because they (the religious Zionists) change the words of Hashem and are megaleh panim baTorah shelo k'halachah,* as opposed to the [secular] Zionists, who oppose the Torah but do  not change it.  And even if [religious Zionists] do good things as well, meaning they still do not uproot from themselves the Torah and emunah and they are half people of the Torah and half Zionists, the Zionism in them is still pure heresy."     - Rabbi Boruch Ber

"The Chazon Ish strongly opposed Zionism and Mizrachi ... When he saw a sign advertising the opening of a "Religious Zionist" (Dati Leumi) school in Vilna, he immediately ripped down the poster, tore it to shreds, and explained to his students:  'The very name 'Religious nationalist' expresses a need to add to religion and declares that the nationhood of the Jewish people is something other than their religion.  Thus it deviates from our emunah!'"

"... Religious Zionists ... have grafted the alien philosophy of nationalism onto their Judaism, in which a nation-state becomes central to a person's identity and validates the existence of the nation.  This belief, to varying extents, is the reason for the centrality of the medinah ....

This is the rule: Zionism is a shmad; religious Zionism is the result of the shmad.  Zionism wanted to replace Judaism with nationalism.  Their strategy was to confuse and conflate Judaic values with nationalist ones.  Religious Zionism is the illegitimate spawn of this confused coupling of religion and nationalism."

"Another example of nationalism polluting the Judaism of the religious Zionists is the Zionist idea of the holiness of their soldiers.  Religious Zionists are told not merely to appreciate and be grateful to their soldiers, but that they are imbued with holiness, by virtue of the very fact that they are soldiers for Israel.  In Judaism, even when the Jews went to war, the fact that someone was 'in the Jewish army' did not, in and of itself, make him holy.  Only Torah and mitzvos can make someone holy.  On the contrary - nobody was allowed into the army unless they were holy to begin with, because the soldiers needed holiness to protect them and their colleagues in battle.  But the reverse - that the very fact that someone is a soldier makes him holy - is alien to the Jewish religion.  But not to the Zionists."

Just a couple of days ago, there was an article about a "Black Hebrew" who died in service to the IDF.  As a result, his non-Jewish family was awarded the highest honor the Zionist entity can give - citizenship in the "Jewish" State.

The biggest problem today is that few in our present generation of Torah Jews have any idea how thoroughly indoctrinated and assimilated we have become due to the pervasive Zionist influence.  Heresy is viewed as normative Judaism.

We have to do something to turn this untenable situation around.
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* “megaleh panim ba’Torah she’lo ka’halacha” (literally, “revealing faces of the Torah that are not in accordance with halacha”