On the Eve of the Jewish New Year, PM Netanyahu and his Wife Sara Host a
Meeting of the Tanakh Study Circle at the Prime Minister's Residence in
Jerusalem
(Communicated by the Prime Minister's Media Adviser)

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara, this evening (Thursday,
3 September), at the Prime Minister's Residence in Jerusalem, an additional
meeting – the seventh – of the Tanakh Study Circle in memory of the Prime
Minister's late father-in-law Shmuel Ben-Artzi.

Prime Minister Netanyahu: "I am pleased to see you all here, including the
President of the Supreme Court. Whoever participates, or has participated,
in this Circle on a regular basis knows that I once said that the Tanakh is
the rock of our existence. Simply put, there is no other significance to our
being here without our link to our land and to his book. I read it every
Shabbat, with my son if he is on vacation or without him if he is not. I
draw great inspiration from it. We are presently finishing the Book of
Deuteronomy. After it comes the Book of Joshua. The custom that I have with
Avner is that after we finish the weekly Torah and Haftara readings, we
simply read sections from the Tanakh. It always reflects on contemporary
events. It always touches on the present and on the eternal life of humanity
in general and our people in particular.

It is important to me that Israeli children read the Tanakh and establish
their knowledge of our culture and our heritage, which are the story of
faith, history and morality between man and man and between man and G-d,
morality for all humanity. This is first and foremost.

I say this at a time when there is a contrary trend among the nations of the
world, a trend that would continue to deny our rights and our link to this
land and indeed to life. The various boycott movements have struck at our
people for thousands of years. We are boycotted and denigrated and turned
into the focus of all evil. Of course, this is a little ridiculous when one
looks at the flood of millions of human beings who are fleeing the ravages
of extremist Islam in the Middle East and Africa. But of course there are
others who recognize the genius within our people. We develop this genius
into fantastic things. The people of the book are also the people of cyber,
apparently world leaders. We are breaking through to new continents and new
countries – China, India, Japan, Africa, Latin America and now Brazil. See
what is happening there regarding the book of books; they have a model of
the Temple, this is important.

There are two fundamentally opposing trends. One is the assault on our
people as we have known it, to my regret, for thousands of years. On the
other hand now the Jews have a state. Because we have a state we have the
ability to become strong, gather our courage and take action in ways that we
could not previously both to rebuff our enemies and to establish our policy.
There is no doubt that this effort will continue. From Joshua we mainly draw
the understanding that our enemies must be fought, if they want to destroy
us. This is the first thing."