The roar of the lion

Rav Kook in Oros Teshuva says that the people of the world, the peoples of the world are crying like a lioness giving birth, crying and screaming and roaring and trying to escape her cage. When Hashem created the world, that was the biggest death there ever was, says Rav Kook. Constricting "Elokus", the G-dly, infinite energy into "Olamiyus", the time and space limited "world". Rav Kook, writing in the 1st decade of the 20th century, said that the current of teshuva was gushing, the peoples more and more desiring something better, something holier, something more G-dly.

I think that the "goyim", the nations of the world, sense, as I have posted previously, that the Jews are interfering with this process. They may not realize that this is "metaphysical", that we, the Jews accepted a responsibility from Hashem at Mount Sinai that we struggle to fulfill and mostly fail to fulfill. They do realize subconsciously that the Jews are connected to what is "wrong" with the world. This causes them to roar and to cry and to scream.

Many times during the 20th century, the lion escaped from the cage and reaked havoc.

On Sunday, I attended a talk by Professor Yisroel Aumann, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2005 for his work on Game Theory. He explained Game Theory to us in the context of relations between nations. He said that according to Game Theory, nations have to create credible threats to get their opponents to cooperate. When a nation broadcasts that it doesn't want to play anymore, the opponent swoops in for the victory. As he put it, "the best way to make peace is to prepare for war. " One problem is that it is much easier for dictatorships to make credible threats than for democracies, where it is hard to get the supermajority needed to make the types of game-changing threats that are needed to bring the goals, whatever they are, to fulfillment.

When I look at what is going on with Israel and the USA, I wonder what Netanyahu is doing. I agree that he is "right" about the settlement issue, but I don't understand what his contingencies are. Is he prepared to unleash extreme responses to what may come at Israel? Does he think that the possiblity of what may come at Israel is not that serious? I see a fright train coming at us and I don't see us taking counter-actions that will be effective. And I hear the old Motown song from the 1960s in my ears, "Nowhere to run to baby, nowhere to hide". When the walls close in, we can only have faith in Hashem and in the ultimate outcome that we believe.