The Doctrine of Beitar

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If there, at the beginning of our existence, a peasant stood among us: a wild man for war, if not just some brute. Not so with us, the Jews, for behind each one of us stands a thicket of generations, who knew how to read and write, who learned and spoke about God and about history, about existence and kingdom, about episodes of outburst and decline and about the economies of humanity and the future. Every Jew in this thicket is a son of a king. And the bitterest joke that fate has played on us is that the Jew is considered in the eyes of all the nations, and even in our own eyes, as people who did not know what the path of the righteous is.

Only a blind person can insist and say that the question of dignity is merely a partial matter or an internal family affair. Each one of us knows that a person whose behavior is plain lacks the supreme impression of our cultural heritage, the long lineage of a nation in its entire essence: a son of a king. And even if he wears the clothes of a poor man and is a woodcutter in the forest. If all the Jews understood this, even here, in exile, then the antisemites would certainly still hate us, but it would have been a hatred mixed with respect. Our entire situation in the world would have been different then. And also in the fulfillment of our Zionist goal, this would have been of great help to us: a successful and persecuted multitude has no sense of order, it does not make the impression on humanity of a builder of a nation and a state. Whereas a group, in which each one overcomes his inclination and is restrained, and whose behavior is from a tradition of a long culture—this forces even the enemy to admit: Behold, this is a national people, behold, these are the people capable of creating a state.

Therefore, school discipline is one of the best tools for an educator. But this alone is not enough at all. Here each one is obligated to educate himself, to style and be precise in all his manners. Dignity is composed of a thousand seemingly trivial rules in all: cut your bread with a knife, eat all of it with a fork; do not fill your cup with coffee to the brim; do not smack your lips with a sound that is heard from afar; when you walk in the street with your friends, do not take over the whole sidewalk; when you go up the stairs of a house at night, do not make your steps noisy, and do not wake the neighbors; give way in the street to a woman, to an old man, to a small child, to every person in general—for is he not also a person? All this and an endless series of other laws create dignity.