Rabbi Aharon of Karlin’s 80,000 refugee plan

In response to the proposed plan (God forbid) to flood the Land of Israel with 80,000 Arabs, I thought to begin charting out a plan of our own.

One of the most fundamental teachings of Chassidut is that a little bit of light dispels a whole lot of darkness. So instead of trying to bat away the darkness of the proposed plan with a stick, I thought to write a little bit about the holy side of the spectrum. As with any adversity, the true response is to awaken a renewed resolve to increase our efforts for the good.

Let’s begin with a quote from Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh’s Rectifying the State of Israel: A Political Platform Based on Kabbalah:

In Kabbalah, the first stage of rectification corresponds to the first of the emotive attributes of the soul, ‘loving-kindness’ (חֶסֶד). A pure, rectified heart loves everything that God creates, for He creates everything with love, and to truly love the Creator, is to love all that he loves.

 

Whoever truly loves the Jewish people and the Land of Israel, the Jewish homeland, seeks to pair these two loves—to join the nation to its land. In the Israel of today, national rectification must begin with a declaration of love for the people and the land, and an affirmation of the unequivocal bond of love between them. This implies that the taking of possession of any part of the Land of Israel by a foreigner is a betrayal of one’s beloved.

 

Thus, our first act of rectification must be to declare Jewish sovereignty over the entire Land of Israel, over all the territories of our promised homeland that are presently, by Divine Providence, in our hands.

In order to present the holy version of the proposed plan then, we first need to meditate some more on the unequivocal bond between the people of Israel and the land of Israel. As ours is also a peace plan, the first thing we need to be asking ourselves (as a result of the above) is how to go about uniting the people of Israel and the land of Israel in a peaceful way?

This is where the 80,000 comes in. While the rest of their political plan is not good, the number 80,000 is indeed a very good number. What does this number signify? It is the number of refugees or returnees to God and His Torah (ba’alei teshuvah) that Rabbi Aharon “the Great” of Karlin made. As a result of his successes, his teacher the Maggid of Mezritch, called Rabbi Aharon his “right hand.”

In Kabbalah, the right hand (and arm) correspond to the sefirah of loving-kindness mentioned above. As the sages say, “the right hand draws close.” So in his great love for his fellow Jews, Rabbi Aharon merited to “draw close” 80,000 Jewish souls to God and His Torah. We also learn from this number 80,000, that the greatest refugee return plan, is when the Jewish people return from the lands of their enemies with love, as in the words of Jeremiah (speaking about to Mother Rachel):

…There is hope for your destiny, says God, and children will return to their borders.

While the idea of 80,000 returning is conceptually very strong—so much so that the very same number was proposed in 2000—it is a concept best represented by Rabbi Aharon of Karlin and his 80,000 peace plan that expands to include the return of all of Mother Rachel’s Jewish children.

Those interested in a pamphlet published by the Derech Chaim movement (an organization headed by Rabbi Ginsburgh that aims to unite world Jewry in the establishment of a Jewish social order in the Land of Israel according to the Torah) can click HERE.

Photo Credit: “The Palmach, Immigration to Israel” (Photo Credit: CC-BY The Palmach Archive, PikiWiki – Israel free image collection project)