Neturei Karta cult members have always re-minded me of Christian missionaries who know very little about the Bible but make up for their igno-rance with their obsessive aggressiveness. The NK cultists recite a small number of sentences from the Bible and Talmud, and spin these to any anti-Semite willing to listen to them to serve as justification for their treasonous activities. Every anti-Semitic barbarian on earth then proclaims NK the exemplar of “true Judaism.”
Among the NK cultists’ favorite pocket phrases is one from Song of Songs, which they interpret as prohibiting settling in the Land of Israel until the Messiah comes. They also like to cite a phrase from the Talmud (Tractate Ketubot, 111a) which they take out of context and which they think means Jews should never use armed force to establish political sovereignty within Eretz Yisrael. Let us be very blunt about this (and Chanukah could not be a better time for clarifying the point): The Torah affirms the right of the Jewish people to control all of the Land of Israel. The only legitimate reasons not to exercise such sovereignty immediately would be the temporary weakness of the Jews or considerations of realpolitik and statecraft.
The Maccabees used force to reestablish Jewish sovereignty over Jewish land. They decidely did not wait for the Messiah, because there is no such religious obligation to do so. Had the Neturei Karta minim been around at the time, they would have been making pilgrimages to Antiochus and accepting cash handouts from the Seleucids. Their banner? “No force must be used to remove pigs and idols from the Temple until the Messiah comes!”
While later generations of sages and rabbis regarded some of the kings who descended from the Hasmoneans as evil, none regarded the political sovereignty established and maintained by such kings to be illegitimate. Indeed, even when an Edomite usurper, King Herod, seized the throne as a Roman satrap, the legitimacy of remaining political autonomy in Judea was never challenged by the sages.
Even after the destruction of the Second Temple, there were a series of attempts to reestablish Jewish sovereignty over the Land of Israel or parts thereof without waiting for any Messiah. Rabbi Akiva himself led one such movement, and he not only knew perfectly well the sentence in Song of Songs used by the NK to argue against use of arms, he himself made the ruling to include Song of Songs in the Jewish Bible.
We are used to thinking of our contemporary Hellenists as assimilationists, leftists and secular anti-Zionists. But modern paganism comes in many a disguise – even the disguise of an Orthodox Jew.