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Sunday, January 12, 2014

Ariel Sharon's Legacy

Former Israeli PM Ariel Sharon has passed away on January 10th, 2014.  BD"H.

He suffered a stroke in the evening of January 4th, 2006, as CBSNews reported at the time:
Sharon fell ill at his ranch Wednesday evening and was rushed to Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, where he was diagnosed with a cerebral hemorrhage.
As the evening is the beginning of the following day in Jewish law, it is as if his illness began on January 5th, 2006, as both were the 5th of Tevet, 5766.  From January 5, 2006 until January 10th, 2014 is 2927 days.

There are exactly 2 verses in Tanach that have the gematria of 2927 (thanks to GezaGeza).  We'll start with the second one first.

Daniel 8:6:

וַיָּבֹא, עַד-הָאַיִל בַּעַל הַקְּרָנַיִם, אֲשֶׁר רָאִיתִי, עֹמֵד לִפְנֵי הָאֻבָל; וַיָּרָץ אֵלָיו, בַּחֲמַת כֹּחוֹ.
And he came to the ram that had the two horns, which I saw standing before the stream, and ran at him in the fury of his power.

As the commentators point out, this verse is referring to Alexander the Great, who defeated the Persian and Median Empires with the fury of his power.

Ariel Sharon was not called "Bulldozer" for nothing. His military genius was granted by HKB"H for a reason - to defeat the Arabs who threatened Eretz Yisrael and the Jews therein.  Just as HKB"H gave Alexander the Great the ability to bulldoze his way through every country he attempted to conquer, Sharon was granted that same ability to defend the Jewish people by bulldozing through Arab-led front lines.

And both the Tosefot Rid and the Maharal pretty much equate the kingdoms of Persia and Yishmael.  So, just as Alexander the Great defeated Persia, Ariel Sharon defeated Yishmael.

The first verse with the gematria of 2927 is from Parshat Vayigash:

Bereishit 47:13:

וְלֶחֶם אֵין בְּכָל-הָאָרֶץ, כִּי-כָבֵד הָרָעָב מְאֹד; וַתֵּלַהּ אֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם, וְאֶרֶץ כְּנַעַן, מִפְּנֵי, הָרָעָב.
And there was no bread in all the land; for the famine was very sore, so that the land of Egypt and the land of Canaan languished by reason of the famine.

Perhaps, we can homiletically consider the bread that is absent in the land as "words of Torah", as we find similarly in Eliyahu Rabba.  Due to the Disengagement, there is now no Torah to be found in the entire Gaza Strip as the Jews who would have studied it have been expelled.  There is therefore a "famine of Torah", causing problems for both Israel and neighboring Egypt.

But even on a simple level, this verse depicts a situation that is both bad for Egypt and Eretz Yisrael - namely, the famine.  What other kind of situation is bad for both Egypt and Israel?  A situation that puts a territory run by terrorists directly on the border of both nations.  That is what the Disengagement caused.  Besides all the Jews who had to leave their beautiful homes and properties, besides all the graves that needed to be uprooted, besides all the thriving businesses and agricultural land that the Jews owned that needed to be abandoned, besides all the synagogues and Yeshivot that were deserted and torn asunder by the monsters who are the current inhabitants - a terrorist territory was created by the Disengagement.  This territory was the source of numerous terrorist acts - including rocket attacks - against Israel - and the source of other terrorist acts against Egypt.  How did the brilliant military strategist Ariel Sharon not foresee this when he decided to expel Jews from their homes?  HKB"H hid that knowledge from him for unknown reasons.

These 2 verses, whose gematrias both equal the number of days that he was in a coma, encapsulate the up-and-down legacy of Ariel Sharon.  On the day when synagogues read אריק חרבי, he returned his soul to his Maker.  May his Maker have mercy on his soul.



See also Shirat Devorah and Tomer Devorah.

2 Comments:

At Sun Jan 12, 08:48:00 AM 2014, Anonymous Anonymous said...

thanks yy. i was especially happy to read the part "HKB"H hid that knowledge from him for unknown reasons." because this is what my rabbis whom i consulted told me and what i too believe.
when his condition deterioriated badly, my rabbi sent me these two correspondences.

1)
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....

you see yy, as you wrote, my r and other r's too wrote as Hashem's involvement as He Rules. we do have free choice but the Ultimate Decision Make is Him.

2) when i asked my r about those stating so definitely that he has received his deserving punishment my r replied:

Judging Ariel Sharon's "guilt" in this and all other matters is up to the Heavenly Court, not up to us.

Let me suggest my answer to this person's question (it's only a suggestion); perhaps the reason Mr Sharon has not yet died, is that his condition permits atonement in this world for whatever wrong he may have done, so that he will completely enjoy life in the world to come. Seen that way, this is an act of Divine mercy, because of Mr sharon's many merits in defending so many Jewish lives, as in Mr Katz's case. The fact that he was not religious was largely a matter of his upbringing, not so much a conscious choice.
Thank you again, for approaching this matter via the torah, which is ofcourse compassionate and humane.

 
At Wed Jan 15, 03:53:00 AM 2014, Blogger Dov Bar-Leib said...

There is a another curious fact on the very date of Sharon's death. Back in 5772 during the Noga (Venus) Transit on June 5-6 (15th or 16th Siwan 5772), 2012, Rav Fish and others including Rav David Katz noted that the Noga Transit at the time could indicate that Klipah Noga was going dark or was subsumed in the sunlight of Geulah. One revolution around the sun takes Venus 224.7 earth days, but the earth is moving too. Even though there was no "eclipse" of the sun this time, the very next time that Noga went dark after the Transit was on the 10th of Shevat 5774, the date of Sharon's death!

Inferior Conjunction of Klipah Noga

Here is the simple equation to see that this was the very next time of conjunction after the Noga Transit:

T = 224.7 (2 + x) = 365.25 (1 + x)

T is the interval of time between conjunctions
x is the fraction of a revolution after which Venus and the earth are again aligned with the sun.
Assume that Venus makes one more revolution than the earth does between conjunctions.
x = .5987 revolutions
T = 1 earth year + 218.7 days.
So 1 earth year + 218.7 days later was this past Shabbat!

 

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