Sunday 28 August 2016

The Rebbe said to Benjamin Netanyahu: "Don’t Be Intimidated". 1984

  Newly elected Knesset Member Benjamin Netanyahu visits the Rebbe: The Rebbe said “I had much satisfaction from your first speech in the Knesset. Continue along this approach, for it is the best path to avoid war. You will have to struggle with 119 others in the Knesset, but surely you won’t be intimidated, because G-d is on this side”. 

MK Benjamin Netanyahu visits the Lubavitcher Rebbe 
“Let me tell you something,” said Netanyahu. “In 1984, after I came to the UN as Israel’s Ambassador, I met the Rebbe of Lubavitch. He began speaking to me – he spoke to me for 40 minutes.

“You know what he told me, back in 1984?” Netanyahu asked.

“He told me, ‘you are going to a place of deep darkness and lies, and if you will light one candle of truth, you will dispel the darkness. That is what I tried to do here – to present the truth clearly and with confidence.”

“You will go into a house of lies,” the Rebbe told him in that memorable meeting on Simchat Torah at Lubavitch Headquarters. “That’s how he called a particular institution ...”

The Rebbe said to him: “Remember that in a hall of perfect darkness, totally dark, if you light one small candle, its light will be seen from afar; its precious light will be seen by everyone.” The Prime Minister said that the Rebbe gave him the “mission to light a candle for truth and for the Jewish people.” 

In what appears to have been a profound moment in his life, the Prime Minister, speaking with emotion and admiration for the Rebbe, described in detail his impressions of that Simchat Torah in 770, when the Rebbe danced with the Torah, “bathed in light.” 

Netanyahu ended his speech reiterating the Rebbe’s message, and appealing to his audience to do likewise, and “light a candle for truth and justice for the Jewish people,” this Yom Kippur.