We’ve witnessed the deaths and tragic folly of the Oslo Peace Plan, and the Wye Peace Plan, and the Saudi Peace Plan, and the Two-State Solution. It reminds me of one of the stories in my movie, “Stories of Rebbe Nachman,” about the peasant who discovers that the treasure was with him, right in his very own home, all along. It’s the very same thing with the Israeli-Arab conflict. The solution of the problem, and the one-and-only path to peace, has been with us all the time. It’s stated, clear and simple, in the beginning of this week’s Torah portion:
“If you walk in my statutes, and keep My commandments and do them, then I will give you rain in due season, and the Land shall yield its increase… and you shall eat your bread to the full, and dwell in your Land in safety. And I will give peace in the Land, and you shall lie down, and none shall make you afraid; and I will remove evil beasts out of the Land, and war shall not go through your Land. And you shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall by the sword before you….” (Vayikra, 26:2).
In other words, if we keep the Torah and its commandments, then there will be peace and prosperity in Israel. If not, G-d forbid, the Torah portion goes on to detail the horrors which will befall us, many of which we have already painfully endured.
This is the only “peace plan” that can work, because it is the peace plan which the Almighty has decreed for us from the beginnings of our Nation. Nothing else can ever work – neither negotiation, compromise, surrender of territory, two states, three states, or four states, or UN peacekeepers defending a dividing wall that reaches the sky. There will be peace when we listen to G-d and do want he tells us to do – all for our very own good.
Just like the peasant says in the movie “Stories of Rebbe Nachman”: “The treasure was with me all the time, and I didn’t even know it!”