TomRoushOnline

The Jews are a people of ancient Israel who are still with us. Their holy book, the Hebrew Bible, has been confirmed in its authenticity in numerous ways, including the discovery of scrolls thousands of years old that record the Bible as we know it today. The people of Israel have a recorded history marked down by themselves, the ancient Egyptians, and their presence, difficultly, and dispersal was also noted by the Romans, who destroyed Jerusalem and leveled the Jewish Temple in 70 AD. Christianity flourished in Europe because the early Jewish Christians were pushed out of the Middle East when their homes was destroyed. Later, the Muslims build a Mosque on the ruins of the Jewish Temple, and it also is there today.

In the same way Christians have holy days such as Christmas and Easter, the Jews have two High Holy Days, which are Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kipper. Rosh Hashanah is a sort of Jewish New Year, marking the beginning of a new period with God, but Yom Kipper has a different history related the Moses and the original Jewish relationship with God.

In the Book of Exodus, the story begins with the Jews held as slaves in Egypt. Since Islam did not come into being until well after Judaism and Christianity, these Egyptians were not Muslims, as they are today. They worshiped their own king, the Pharaoh, and according to the Bible, the Jews had God on their side and so they were able to flee the Pharaoh and the king’s pursuing army was drown in the Red Sea. The Jews wandered in the desert for the next 40 years, and in this period, Moses went to the top of Mount Sinai to discuss the situation with God. It was then that God revealed the 10 Commandments the Jews were to live under, which was written on two flat stone tablets.

However, when Moses came down from the mountain, he found the Jews had lost faith in the God that had JUST delivered them from the Pharaoh, and instead, created their own god, a Golden Calf, which they were worshiping. In anger Moses destroyed the ten commandment tablets, but later, according to the Bible, God forgave the people of Israel, and Moses went back up the mountain, and God cut a second set of commandments. The day Moses came down with the second set of commandments was referred to as the Day of Atonement, which is translated as Yom Kippur. The Jews settled on a day to celebrate Yom Kipper in the same way the Christians set a date for Christmas and Easter. Yom Kippur is celebrated on the 10th day of Tishrei which is a month in the Hebrew calendar. It will always fall somewhere in the September/October time frame.

Cut forward thousands of years, and the Jews were still a people, but mostly dispersed out of the Holy Land since the Romans destroyed Jerusalem. From 1941 to 1945, 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. After the Holocaust, in which Europeans killed most of the Jews in the world, it was realized by Jews and non-Jews, that if the Jews were to survive in this world, they must have a safe retreat. Rather than pick some unwanted part of the Earth to create s safe zone for Jews, they were placed right back where they lived before the Romans dispersed them, right in the disputed Middle East, still seething with all the old hatreds. The Romans called this place Palestine. In 1948 the State of Israel was declared, and the United States was the first nation to recognize their legitimacy. Sadly, the nations adjacent to Israel did not recognize their legitimate right to exist and survive, and in most instances, they still do not.

Twice, the Arab countries that border Israel tried to overrun the Jews by combined military force. The first war was in 1967, and it is referred to as the ‘Six Days War,’ which indicates how it turned out. The Syrian, Jordanian, and Egyptian forces found out what the Pharaohs discerned; the Jews can be fierce as well as lucky. The Israeli Defense Forces defeated the combined armies of their adversaries, and they took new territory, including Jerusalem, which had been in the hands of the Arab Muslims since the time of the Crusades.

The Arab armies tried one more time to overrun the Jews in 1973, and this time, they waited until the Jews were celebrating one of their two High Holy Days, on Yom Kipper. The run up to the war was precipitated by American insistence that the Jews not strike preemptively, though the Israeli intelligence saw a build up in the works. The 1973 conflict also saw the Jordanians sit this one out as King Hussein of Jordan had finally made his peace with the Jews. The Egyptians forces, and those of Syria, however, launching a surprise attack on Yom Kipper and they had masses of Soviet weapons to counter the American tanks and planes the Jews had.

Much of the fighting was in the Sinai Peninsula, which was traditionally Egyptian territory but was taken by Israel in the 1967 war. The Egyptians passed troops over the Suez Canal and the fighting was intense but eventually, the Israeli’s countered. The Israeli army crossed the strategically critical Suez Canal themselves and came within 100 kilometers from Cairo with little to stop them. At that point, the Egyptians sued for peace and, like the Pharoah, let the Jews go.

Less than a decade later, the Egyptians and the Israelis signed a peace treaty that returned the Sinai to Egypt in exchange for solid guarantee of peace, a peace that has held to this day. The leader of the Egyptians, Anwar Sadat, signed off on the treaty, but sadly, signed his own death warrant at the same time. In 1981, at a parade that was to celebrate the Egyptian crossing of the Suez Canal in the 1973 war, elements of an Islamic terror organization that grew from the Egyptian military killed Sadat and several others in the reviewing stand. This event, along with many others, marked the end of the days of military strongman rule in many of the Arab countries and the beginning of the rule of terror-oriented and Islamic-inspired rule by chaos and murder. That is where we are now.

Yesterday, the newest agents of chaos, Hamas, launched a fresh attack on the Jews from the Gaza Strip, which is a territory adjacent to the Sinai Peninsula which Hamas controls. Hamas could have turned the Gaza Strip into an economic paradise, but they have allowed it to fester and breed a powerful hatred towards the Jews. They invaded on Yom Kipper, and the attacks were successful, if the goal is to kill Jews and bring misery to the Jewish people. Images of Arabs dragging the naked corpses of Jewish women through the streets of Gaza at available for anyone who can stomach it. Now, the Israeli’s are calculating how to respond, and it will be fierce, and hopefully permanent. Enough is enough when it comes to terror and military force applied to the Jews, and the Jews should know by now that in the end, no matter what they do, they will be hated by someone, and the next atrocity is always around the corner.

Yom Kipper marks many elements of Jewish life, but most recently, it marks the time when their neighbors try to kill them. Hopefully, they’ll be able to eliminate this threat once and for all.