Whenever a passage in the Prophets begins with "on the day" or "in that day", we can know that this refers to some time in the future of the writer. The whole twelfth chapter concerns Jerusalem and what will happen before the coming of the Mashiach. This particular passage, however, refers to something specific-a period of mourning that parallels Biblical times. The Rashi explains these two period of mourning in Biblical days.

Hadadrimmon has no connection to the Valley of Megiddon. These are, rather, two cases of mourning. [The first is] like the mourning of Ahab the son of Omri, who was slain by Hadadrimmon the son of Tabrimmon in Ramoth Gilead, as it is stated (I Kings 22:36): "A cry passed through the camp." That is the mourning [of Ahab. The second case is] like the mourning of Josiah the son of Amon, who was slain by Pharoah the lame in the Valley of Megiddon, as it is stated (II Chron. 35:25): "And Jeremiah lamented for Josiah, and all the singing men and singing women spoke in their laments, etc."-[Rashi from Moed Katan 28b and Meg. 3a from Targum Jonathan]

These were funerals of two kings that were considered great-one secular and the other religious. In our time, since 1990, we have seen two great funerals that made the people of Jerusalem lament with great wailing-one of a secular leader and the other of a religious one. These were of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin and Rabbi Meir Kahane, who represented two opposite ends of the scale in modern Israel's society, just as did King Ahab and King Josiah. If we look closely, we can see that the parallels are phenomenal. Interestingly, too, the yartzeit of both Prime Minister Rabin and Rabbi Kahane fall a few days apart each year, so we tend to think of both at the same time every year.

Rabbi Kahane was shot in November of 1990. It was only later that the parallels with King Josiah became so clear. The death of both men marked a place in time. King Josiah came to the throne of Judah as a child, but his love of G-d was very strong even then and was the focus of his whole life. His entire reign was occupied with the task of purging the Land of idols and bringing the people back to the Torah. It is said of him that he caused all to serve G-d. So, too, Rabbi Kahane's main message was tshuvah (repentence). He called on people to return to the Torah, to the ways of G-d, and to observe the mitzvah of living in the Land.

Rabbi Kahane warned the people of Israel of the danger of disobeying the Torah, which also included living with our enemies. When the Temple of King Josiah's time was being renovated, the Book of the Law (Dvarim) was found. When it was read, it was obvious that the people had strayed very far. Huldah the Prophetess prophecied that the punishment for this was irreversible, but that it would not come until after King Josiah's death. Since Rabbi Kahane's death we have seen the very things he warned of become our reality. Reading his books, written years ago, are eerily like reading today's news. Yet this did not begin until after his death. Like King Josiah, it seems he merited being spared the misery of seeing the punishment fall during his lifetime. Indeed, the death of each marked a place in time.

King Josiah destroyed the high places of idol worship and burned the bones of their priests on their altars. Rabbi Kahane was very unpopular for attacking the leaders of assimilation and exposing their sinful parting from Torah. It is said that our sins are written on our bones. He also attacked the Russian government and brought the plight of the Soviet Jews to the forefront, as no one before him had ever done. This was all part of the same effort to bring the Jewish people back to the Land and the Torah.

King Josiah was shot and killed by the Pharaoh of Egypt-Neco. Rabbi Kahane was shot and killed by an Egyptian named Nosair.

The grief over King Josiah's death was so tremendous that Jeremiah wrote it into Lamentations. Each year on Tish b'Av (Av 9) Jews read Lamentations and remember the death of King Josiah, for it marked the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple by the Babylonians. Rabbi Kahane's funeral was also one of tremendous grieving and wailing. The feeling that a terrible thing had happened to the people of Israel was inescapable and was voiced at that funeral. The Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel called him a "prophet", which is a title not usually given in our time. His "prophecy" was one of judgement.

In November of 1995 Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin was shot and killed in Tel Aviv, on a moetzeh Shabbat, following a rally of the "peace camp". Like King Ahab, Rabin was considered a great secular leader and hero. King Ahab's family's greatness was in that they built Shomron (Samaria). Building the Land is considered such a mitzvah that his family merited having three generations on the throne of Israel. Rabin's party had a history of building the Land; many of the settlements, especially in the Golan and the Jordan Valley, were built by the Labor party.

King Ahab and his wife, Jezebel, introduced the worship of Baal into Israel. Their main opponent was Elijah the Prophet, whom they called: "troubler of Israel". Yitzchak Rabin was prime minister during the introduction of the "peace process". All those opposed to him, such as the settlers and the religious sector of the country, were called names and labeled "troublemakers". His wife, Leah, stated that she and her circle had more in common with the Arabs than with the religious Jews of Israel. Jezebel wanted to kill Elijah, and she did kill many of the other prophets. When Rabbi Kahane, who was called "prophet" by the Chief Rabbi of Israel, died, there was rejoicing in the secular camp. Many members of the Knesset refused to even stand for a moment of silence in the memory of this man who had once sat in their midst as one of them. Like the worship of Baal, the peace process is a departing from the teachings of the Torah and literally worshipping something else. The secular leaders in both times reacted angrily when told this, for it interfered with their chosen agendas.

I Kings 21 tells the story of the vineyard of Naboth, which Ahab coveted. This vineyard was beside his palace, so he wanted it for a garden. When he asked Naboth to sell it to him, he refused. There are several points of Torah law to remember in this story.

1. An Israelite was not to give up the inheritance of his forefathers (vs. 3), and the king had no right over land inherited from a man's forefathers. To Naboth the land of his forefather's was dear; not so to Ahab, who had abandoned the faith of his forefathers. Naboth knew that this land would be used by the king and queen as a garden to Baal and refused to allow this travesty.
2. Ahab was not a king of the line of Judah, so the laws entitling a king to take land did not apply to him at all.
3. Even if he had had the kingly right to take the land, he forfeited it when he offered to buy the vineyard. When Naboth refused to sell the land, Jezebel concocted a scheme to have him accused by false witnesses of cursing G-d and the king. This constituted the crimes of blasphemy and treason, whose punishment was stoning to death. This also caused his children to become ineligible to inherit, and thereby the land became property of the state.

When those opposed to the "peace process" have said they refuse to give up the Land, which is the Land inherited from their forefathers, these people have been branded disloyal-"obstacles to peace". The "peace camp" claims these people have no right to the Land-even if they have purchased it or inherited it. The Torah-based claims of the settlers have been distorted by the politically correct "peace camp" and the media to sound evil by being labeled: "extremist", "fanatical", and "radical". This, of course, demonizes them in the eyes of the world and even the eyes of their own people. So, of course, when they have been stoned, otherwise attacked, and even killed, it has been noted by the "peace camp" that they were where "they did not belong." In other words, they deserved it. In both the case of Ahab and our modern day, the Law concerning the Land has been disregarded. In Ahab's case it was for personal gain; in Rabin's case it was to gain favorable world opinion, but more specifically, that of the US and Bill Clinton.

In chapter 20 we read the story of Ben-Hadad (Hadadrimmon), king of Aram. He sent a message to Ahab telling him that all in Israel was his. Rather than rebuking him, Ahab answered him, "As you say, my master, the king, I am yours as well as all that is mine." (vs. 4) The elders cautioned him not to consent when Ben-Hadad's messengers' came to make the claim. Later there was a war with the Arameans, in which the Israelites were victorious. Ben-Hadad, saying the Israelites were kindly kings, pleaded for his life, and Ahab spared him, calling him "my brother". Ben-Hadad promised to return cities his father had taken from Israel, but he never did so. Verse 42 quotes the prophet to Ahab: "Thus said the L-rd, 'Because you have released the man whom I designated for destruction from your hand, it will be your life instead of his life and your people instead of his people.'" The parallel with our day is painfully obvious. Yassir Arafat, instead of being tried for crimes against humanity, was given a hero's welcome into the Land. Rather than being held up to the world as the terrorist and scourge he is, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, alongside Yitchak Rabin. Rabin made peace with the enemy, when he should never have done so. This emboldened this enemy to, like Ben-Hadad, claim that all that is Israel's, in truth, belongs to him. The weak position of the Israeli negotiations has only served to affirm this claim, just as Ahab verbally affirmed Ben-Hadad's. Could Arafat have been destined to meet his destruction at Rabin's hand? How different would Rabin's own life have been if he had taken the opportunity to arrest this man, whose face had come to symbolize terrorism throughout the world?!

When Ahab didn't like the word of the L-rd through Macaiah the Prophet, he commanded that he be imprisoned (22:26-27). During the term of Rabin, more Jews were placed in administrative detention then at any other time in the history of modern Israel. This was simply for disagreeing, for speaking out in opposition to the accepted opinion of the day.

In chapter 22 there is a conversation in heaven in which the L-rd asked who would lure Ahab to Ramoth Gilead, where he would be killed. One spirit volunteered, saying he would go out as a lying spirit in the mouths of all the prophets. Even though Ahab disguised himself, the arrow still found and killed him.There has been a conspiracy theory proposed in the case of Rabin's murder. If true, which I believe it is, it would mean that there was a plan to stage a murder in order to villainize the Right. This would also mean that Rabin was privy to, and had to approve, the plan of the General Security Services-a great deception, a lie to lure Rabin to his death. For the bullets were not, as the body guards first exclaimed, blanks, but rather very live ammunition. The staged murder became instead quite a real one. And, yes, the Right WERE blamed for it to boot. (This is not the place to delve into the particulars of this theory, but if you are interested, Barry Chamish has written an extensively researched book called: Who Murdered Rabin. My point is that there was a deception; again, a lying spirit went out to lure the king to his death. Even though Rabin thought to survive this plot and have his weapon against his enemies, the bullet found and killed him.)

The theory continues that the fatal shot severed Rabin's spinal cord. If this were so, how did he continue walking to the car? There was a video shot of the car before Rabin entered it, in which the passenger door on the opposite side closed by itself, which has been proven impossible on this model of Cadillac. The logical conclusion is that there must have been someone clandestinely waiting inside the car. The driver took an inexcusably long time driving to the hospital. All this is evidence that the fatal shot was fired inside the car enroute. Ahab was shot in his chariot. Just as the deadly blow penetrated the pieces of his armor, Rabin's "armor" of his security was penetrated. I Kings 22: 35 makes a point of the fact that his blood ran out into the chariot. We are further told of Ahab's blood being washed from his chariot and that the dogs lapped it. Chazal say Jezebel had had the images of two prostitutes engraved on the chariot. Rabin's blood ran out into his car and was washed from the Cadillac that was a gift from Bill Clinton-a gift for his own "prostitution", the selling of his country.

II Kings 9:30: ...she (Jezebel) painted her eyes with khol and adorned her head.... We know that every detail the Tanakh tells us is important and has a reason. Rashi says she wanted to impress Jehu with her beauty so he would marry her. Others render that it was so he would spare her life. Leah Rabin always appears in public with heavy, dark eye make-up and her hair dyed black. Her appearance is so extreme that it is impossible to not notice. She once called herself the "Jacqueline Onasis of the Middle East". What else could this be but an attempt to make an attractive impression?

Jezebel continued her life for many years following the Ahab's death. We read in II Kings 9 of her greeting an envoy of soldiers with: "Is it peace?" For her, the definition of peace was quite contrary to that of the Torah. Following the death of Rabin, his widow, Leah, continued to speak of peace, which, like Jezebel's version, is quite contrary to that of the Torah. Like Jezebel, Leah considers the adherents to Torah obstacles to peace. In her view, these people bring separation, which only antagonizes the world, rather than the harmony of assimilation that it takes to live with the world.

When Ahab was killed a great cry went up in the camp. The people feared and wailed over his loss. The army had no heart to continue and dispersed, each to his town and country. Rabin's death caused the nation to come to a standstill and many to talk about heshbon nefesh, taking an accounting of oneself. There was uncertainty and the accepted view was that the Right were to blame for all the ills of the society, including the death of Rabin. This attitude was so strong that it seemed to even sweep across that Right itself, causing a lot of wavering and disheartening.

These two funerals of our day, like those of Biblical times, were milestones in history and fulfilled the words of Zechariah the Prophet of the End Times (12:11). Each caused a great mourning in Jerusalem and marked a place in our journey to the time of the Mashiach. The lines in our society were drawn by these two men-religious and secular, tzaddik and rasha, G-dly and worldly--climaxing in their deaths. Through the 1990s and the years of the "peace process" these lines have deepened and the different camps have become more entrenched in their own opinions. There is a well known prophecy that in the time before the Mashiach there would be no gray areas, but only black and white, good and bad. No one would straddle the fence; all would be on one side or the other. Evil will no longer conceal itself, but will become bold and blatant. Good, however, will also become deeper and stronger, as people find the courage to stand for what they believe is right. Given this prophetic view of our time, are we amazed how these two men have come to symbolize the two attitudes of modern Israeli society? Rabin has been elevated to a position of such high honor that the adoration is almost worshipful. Rabbi Kahane, on the other hand, is considered representative of everything loathe to this society, which coined the term "Kahanist" to describe the "extreme" view they hate. Criticism of Rabin or praise of Kahane has become cause for disapproval strong enough to frame charges that can actually put people in jail. Obviously, the politically correct standard of the day is the secular humanism that Rabin represented, rather than the Torah that Rabbi Kahane called the people to observe. When we look back at King Ahab and King Josiah, no one misjudges their characters. One day this level of clear understanding will prevail concerning our time, as well.