Hamas War

Sunday, January 5, 2014

Why are We Still Waiting for Ariel Sharon to Die?

Everytime I turn on the computer or return to it, I check the news sites.
Is Ariel Sharon dead yet?
Am I the only one doing this?

The doctors were certain that he'd soon be dead eight years ago when he suffered serious strokes.  He was always a "big" man, and we're always told by the experts that those overweight have more health complications and a shorter lifespan than the slim ones.  That winter I was in the states a couple of times for smachot, joyous occasions, and people kept asking me, as if I had direct connections to his sickroom, what was happening with the big, controversial man, a giant in Israeli history and then current events.

Long endless comas, lasting years are much more common with young people.  And nowadays its pretty much the norm for those over a certain age to sign forms declining all sorts of dramatic, life-saving techniques and CPR when the expected result would be a "life not worth living," vegetative, coma, severely disabled and outrageously expensive.

Since last week, we've been getting news reports that Arik Sharon is close to death, but somehow, he hasn't yet died.
The eighth anniversary of the stroke that left former prime minister Ariel Sharon in a coma and ended his political career was marked on Saturday with his family at his side as he remained in critical condition.
According to the latest update from Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer, Sharon’s vital organs are slowly failing, his health continues deteriorating and his life is at risk.
Could it be that G-d still doesn't know what to do with Arik?  Should He put him in Hell as punishment for all of those well-known sins against the Holy Land and the Jewish People alive and dead?  Or should He reward Sharon for his greatness in defending the Jewish State, saving Jews and building for Jews in the Land of Israel?

There was no "in between," moderate Center in the living and functioning Ariel Sharon.  He was either a hero or evil.  "Ketzaleh" former MK Yaakov Katz explains this in his own personal story:
Ketzaleh: I Hate What Sharon Did but He Saved My Life; I Love Him
 No two politicians could have more of a love-hate relationship than Ariel Sharon and Yaakov Katz. Sharon is barely holding on to life, and Yaakov “Ketzaleh” Katz, whose life Sharon saved in war and who worked hand in hand with Sharon to bring Jews to Gaza, Judea and Samaria, recalls how Sharon jilted the nationalist movement, expelled Jews and destroyed their homes and synagogues.
Read more at: http://www.jewishpress.com/uncategorized/katzelah-i-hate-what-sharon-did-but-he-saved-my-life-i-love-him/2014/01/03/
On a personal note, my wonderful, beautiful Shiloh neighborhood is due entirely to Arik Sharon.

Southern end of Ramat Shmuel, Shiloh

Eastern end of Ramat Shmuel, Shiloh

Thirty-three years ago, when I came with my daughters to visit Shiloh the first time on TU B'Shvat we saw the area of the Biblical Tel Shiloh, the nearby caravans and cement prefabs which housed the community and the slope just above where the Shiloh chalutzim pioneers were building permanent homes. Within a few weeks, we came as a family with my husband for Shabbat and decided that Shiloh would be our new home. About a month later, after Purim, we got a phone call inviting us to come during Passover and tour the overlooking hilltop where we would live.

It was explained to us that Arik Sharon, then the Housing and Construction Minister, had visited Shiloh. The residents had proudly showed him that they were already building permanent homes. He looked around and asked why they had picked that slope when there was a much larger and suitable hill just above.

In the foreground is the Eli HaCohen neighborhood which has the first permanent homes in addition to recent construction.  In the background you can see the western end of the Ramat Shmuel neighborhood where I live.
My soon to be neighbors were disappointed that the legendary Arik Sharon wasn't enthusiastic about their building.  Sharon insisted that they had mad a mistake. The eastern hill which overlooks the east bank of the Jordan was a much better, more important and strategic place to develop than the area they had chosen. Putting facts on the ground was Sharon's specialty, and that's what he did.  He told them that as Minister of Housing he was going to order fifty quality prefabricated cement homes for his preferred hill, now called Ramat Shmuel, and that's what he did. Considering that there were just over thirty families living in Shiloh at the time, a neighborhood of fifty was life-changing for the small community.

When we visited the hilltop during Passover, we fell in love with it.  There were thousands and thousand of wildflowers covering the ground.  It had been a good wet winter, and since nobody had walked on the soil for a few thousand years, the delicate wildflowers grew profusely.

Sharon had a road bulldozed and the gorgeous hill was prepared for fifty homes.  In the end ten were allocated to Migdalim, and we got forty.  That first late summer and fall most were empty, so three were allocated to the new school which opened the day we arrived, September 1, 1981.  Within a short time, our neighborhood had more families than the veteran neighborhood had, especially after an even larger building project went up.

This Arik Sharon was the exact opposite of the Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who signed off on Disengagement which destroyed the lives of thousands of Jews, destroyed communities, businesses, schools and uprooted Jewish graves.

Chazal, our sages, say that sometimes when a Jew has lived a life with such contrasts, G-d wants to reward him in Olam haBa, the Next World, but first he must suffer sufficiently in This World to pay for his sins. Is that why Arik Sharon has been in such a coma all these years?

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

thanks for a wonderful background information of arik sharon. the last two years for reasons i myself dont understand he has been on my mind constantly, and i have been doing my best to light an olive light facing jerusalem for him, daily. and certain prayers have been dedicated for him. the internet came to where i live in the early 90's. where i live there is hardly any info on j matters. so the negative reports on tv was what i had, to go on with together with wrong xtian information, as i was a xtian for the first 40 years. even then for some reason he has been my hero from the time i was very young till now, and also among many non ysml friends i know. an icon of courage, which we did not have at all.
and when the net came i started keeping his pictures and his war ventures and statements of all those who really admired him. sincerely.
i have been reading some negative remarks which i find appalling. yes, i know the pain, the hurt and the agony of losing a home. and what happened with no preparations nor anything done for schools etc. i am not writing just for the moment of pain. this has been so for the last 22 years of my life. before i start my torah studies i always read about isr. in arutz sheva, matzav.com and such papers. i start my day focussed on isr and end it the same way.
all my rabbis over the years are orthodox, attached to breslov, chabad, aish.com, torah.org etc.
one of my rabbis who was attached to the yom kippur war, gave me some insight.
which i will send shortly. one thing always strikes me is prophet jonah.
if i am not mistaken niniveh was a gentile city and deserving of punishment from Hashem. in my lessons i have read there are some opinions that the king at that time was pharaoh who escaped somehow, and thats why he called on all his subjects and even the animals were included and they fasted and did teshuva. Hashem rescinded His punishment. since this happening is in the holy tanach, its obviously there as a lesson for the world. my rabbis taught me that one does not move the finger even, without Hashem's knowledge and approval. For some reason Hashem allowed this evacuation to go on, He may not have approved it. but It happened. He did not stop it.
its very typical gentile behaviour to curse people, run them down, back bite etc. everything that Jewish laws say not to do. yet when HaRav Ovadia left this world, there were jews who were very critical of him, when he was not there to defend himself. and now its arik sharon. its very sad.
if blame was placed on the non jewish nations, of which i happen to be amongst, i would not feel bad at all. its deserving. all the blame cannot be placed on leaders alone. if the people were united as one, their voices would have been the deciding factor.
May G-d bless arik sharon.

Anonymous said...

on 2 january my rabbi sent me this on arik sharon when i wrote to him why 10m dollers should be mentioned for a man who fought 4 wars for the nation:

Nonetheless, it is certainly true that most Israelis would not get the care given a retired IDF general and former prime minister, any more than most Americans get the care given to former presidents. This is simple reality.

I've never shared in the general opprobrium heaped on Mr Sharon by so many people who objected to his evacuation of Gaza. He was not a religious man, that could not be expected (I once read an interview with him, in which he described his "bar mitzva": On his 13th birthday, his father handed him an old horse pistol and told him that now he was a man, he could go out and guard the sheep from Arab marauders). as you say, he was a great hero of Israel who undoubtedly saved many Jewish lives, he was the prime architect of the policies of the Begin government in encouraging settlement of Yehuda and Shomron, and I think that, by his lights, he had little choice in the matter of the Gaza evacuation: He thought that it would prove what it has proved, namely, that the Arabs have no intention of running a reasonable state in any sort of peaceful relationship with Israel. He said publicly that if the Arabs tried to use Gaza as a launching pad for terrorist operations against Israel, he would immediately re-occupy it; he was prevented by the hand of Ha-Shem, through his stroke, from doing so. We really ought to contemplate why that was so, and do teshuva accordingly....

Anonymous said...

i received this from my rabbi, this morning.

First, it must be rememebred we are still in exile, no temple , no sanhedrin. We know and wait for the time of redemption when all the land promised will be returned to us by Hashem. Until then

(1) It is ALWAYS proper to sacrifice land for the real prospect of peace. However, the prospect must be real -- there must be an actual, credible counterpart who can be seen to be sincerely desirous of peace. That has probably not been true in the Middle East since the demise of the Mufti, Hay Aminu 'l-Husseini. It certainly has not been true between the UN partition vote in 1947 and Sadat's flight to Jerusalerm, and the prospect of peace faded after the death of King Hussein of Jordan (despite the clandestine co-operation of Jordan with Israel). Under the present political circumstances, therefore, there is no military nor political justification for the modern state of Israel to give up one square millimeter of the territory it currently controls.

(2) That said, Sharon's action must be viewed as a totality; the withdrawal was only part of the picture. At present, and certainly 8 years ago, Israel's economy is almost completely dependent on two entities, the United States and the European Union. That dependace is rendered even more serious in light of Israel's almost complete military dependance on the US, and very serious naval dependance on the EU (especially Germany). Sharon was under incredibly intense political pressure from both of those entities, as well as internally, from the Leftist parties, academics, and journalists.etc

With what he believed to be the tacit approval of the United States, Sharon proposed to withdraw from the least important of the three regions which had come under Israeli control as the result of the Six-Day War (the Golan had already been formally annexed to Israel under Begin, and Yehuda and Shomron are obviously vital). That was Gaza; it would also involve uprooting the smallest number of people. His declared intent was to allow the Arabs to demonstrate their bona fides by giving them the opportunity to administer a "state" in Gaza; if they showed actual peaceful purpose by steadily working to build up political instutions and a civil society whilst refraining from attacks on Israel, then perhaps further progress could be made.

But he explicitly stated -- and here is where he had American support from the Bush Administration -- that the first attempt by the Arabs to use the territory of Gaza as a springboard from which to attack Israel, he would immediately re-occupy the strip and that would be the end of the experiment.

The hand of G-d appears in that Sharon suffered a stroke before he could carry out the second part of what he said, and his successor, Ehud Olmert, chose to do nothing until far too much later, and that was a partial action and ineffectual.

The situation of the Jewish people now with regard to the exile is EXACTLY as it was 100 years ago, under the Ottoman Empire, when there was NO Jewish political sovereignty at all anywhere.

Anonymous said...

Very incitefull and elucidating Batya & 10Rainbow

Nourishing Israel said...

thank you. very elucidating and incitefull Batya and 10Rainbow

Batya said...

I have no doubt that so far in Israeli history there is none more controversial than Ariel Sharon.

Leah said...

Yes, Batya, I too have gone to the computer from time to time to "see if." I, too have wondered about the statement that was attributed to Rav Kaduri, although I do not know and cannot verify if it is true that when Ariel Sharon dies, it is an element of Moshiach's arrival etc....
I can say this...I, too, have looked to "see if."
There is so much that is with Ariel -Arik Sharon. When I think about it I think it is so obvious that it was worse than a mistake to disengage and etc...then along comes another opinion of things he has done that were good etc...
Then I try to separate the good and the negative and ultimately I am glad that I am not Hashem because I am so limited in knowledge on how to deal with what the correct ultimate answer really is and therefore cannot judge. I do not get upset at those who do judge because there is so much and so many Jews who were affected by the expulsion..... so, am left with more questions and yes, I, too look to see if he has passed and have been doing so for many years.....don't know if what was attributed to Rav Kaduri tz'l is true of Sharon's passing is an element of Moshiach's arrival....

Shy Guy said...

Ze'ev Galilee: Everything we already knew about Sharon but have chosen to forget (Hebrew)

ושם רשעים ירקב

Katzeleh & Co. should stop behaving like christians!

Leah said...

Hello Batya. Interesting Torah code on Sharon posted by Rabbi Glazerson. It puts (for me) a more definitive slant to things. Be well.

Hadassa said...

Shalom!
10rainbow, and everyone else, these two articles, in English, shed more than a bit of light on Ariel Sharon's actions, and not just his final action.
http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/hebron-will-not-miss-sharon/2014/01/06/2/

MK Hendel Has "Proof That Sharon is Using Gaza to Stop Investigation"
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/57526#.Usr2Z3kW2h8

Batya said...

B"H, there's G-d to judge him. We just must live with mistakes our politicians and voters make.

Teshuva!