Who were the Erev Rav? (part 3 of 4)

God told Avrohom, "Through Yitzchok will pass your descendants". Yitzchok locked out Esav and passed on Avrohom's blessings to Yaakov. Yaakov, proud of all his righteous children, received the inheritance derived from Avrohom's blessings. During his lifetime, Moshe counted each tribe a few times and precisely recorded every paternal family's numbers. Before his passing, Moshe blessed each tribe separately. It was he whom God sent to the Jewish people. He spoke to the Jewish people. The prophets punished the Jewish people. King David in his Psalms speaks of the forefathers and refers to the Jewish people as "The Children of Israel", "The Tribes of Yeshurun", "The Tribes of Israel". Nowhere in Torah is even one word spoken of an alleged Gentile presence among the Erev Rav, whom some venture to say constituted more than half the Jewish population!

Among those who left Egypt, the Torah speaks of one solitary son of a Jewish mother and Egyptian father. Torah mentions both his lineage and his bitter end, because the man cursed Hashem. Torah says "And he was the son of an Egyptian among the Children of Israel"; One son of an Egyptian among all the Jewish people! How could Torah have said this had there been among the Jews, in fact, millions of Egyptians?

According to Torah, the Prophets, the Holy Books and the sages, the Erev Rav were a Jewish lot! This is why Moshe took them along - and suffered from them. This is also why they were able to raise trouble among other Jews, even to persuade the making of a Golden Calf; Because back in Egypt this bunch happened to be among the famous, assimilated and influential politicians.

Even though the Erev Rav were unworthy, many of their children became much better Jews, just as Korach had good children who remained alive and became important members of the Jewish nation.

Neither Yishmael's progeny nor that of Esav wanted to accept the Torah, even though they too descended from Shem and from our forefathers. Only the Jews proclaimed "We shall do and we shall understand!" (נעשה ונשמע). For this reason they became God's chosen people and merited all sorts of praise by the prophets and sages.

No reason in the world exists to think that particularly the children of Cham - Egyptians - took Torah upon themselves together with the children of Avrohom, Yitzchok and Yaakov - and even in greater numbers! The Prophets warned Jews of Egyptians; They described Egyptians as "flesh as the flesh of donkeys and their ejaculate quantity as that of horses!" Had Egyptians constituted the Erev Rav, why were Jews so proud of their forefathers if Cham's children outdid the Jews quantitatively for recognizing Hashem's unity and adopting the Torah of Moshe?!

"Erev Rav" means an excessive mixture, Jews who excessively mixed with the other nations, and excessively differed from each other. They were idealists, but with nothing that bonded them to the Jewish people. Not only did we have such a mishmash group in Egypt, but we have an exact copy of them here today in America! Take together all those various sorts of Jewish isms, all those who tore away from Judaism for one reason or another, from the wealthy assimilationist to the poor Yevsektsian, and you have no other name by which to call this bunch besides "Erev Rav" - a large mixture; Because they stand for hundreds of ideals as if they belonged to hundreds of different nations.

The kind of Erev Rav as we have today, we certainly had in Egypt, an age that preceded the giving of the Torah. They distance themselves from the authentic Jewish people - but Jewish they are! They join in with non-Jewish churches - but born as Gentiles they never were!

For some reasons, this segment of the Jewish nation finds itself with no sense for which most Jews had suffered for much of their lives, for which most Jews would sooner be burned alive than submit. This portion, in whom the core affiliation with Judaism is absent, is strongly assimilated, confused and mixes with many foreign ideologies and mannerisms, actually willing to sacrifice their own lives for the foreign ideologies and even for foreign nations. These are Jewish children who betray their own nation in the interests of modern Egypts! A few, like the wealthy assimilationists, think only for the benefit of the nations wherein they find themselves, while others, like the impoverished Communists, become obsessed with the like of a foreign "Red Russia". Only for their own Jewish people they possess no spark of love or consideration. Unfortunately, this Erev Rav in fact seeks a Jewish holocaust and would happily squander away the Jewish nation's existence!

These facts everybody knows. To understand such people for a few is near impossible. But we here will not touch the explanatory rationale of this bizarre phenomenon. We only want to mention the essential fact - that we presently also have such Judaism-hating elements today that tear from our flesh, spit us in the face, either from a religious or political perspective, or from a national one. This is our Erev Rav, who drag our children to all sorts of isms, to Godless grade schools, to all sorts of conversions, to spread enmity to Jewish Torah and its faith.

(Part 4 of 4: Here)