Now, Greater Than Life : Meir Kahane: He was on the brink of becoming marginal. But with his murder, the legend of the martyr begins.

Rabbi Meir Kahane emerged from America’s political ferment in the 1960s.

In those days, if you had the spirit of a political activist, you marched for a cause: Vietnam, Kent State, lettuce, grapes, Wounded Knee. America was ripe with political radicals and ethnic militants like H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Abbie Hoffman, Huey Newton, Mark Rudd, Bobby Seale and Russell Means. Kahane provided the Jewish angle by catapulting the Soviet Jewry issue, which had lain dormant for half a century, into an international problem that had to be solved.

With 200,000 Jews entering Israel this year from the Soviet Union, it is hard to believe the hopelessness of their plight 20 years ago. He did not get them out, but he laid the groundwork on which other national Jewish leaders could build. When I speak to immigrants from the Soviet Union, most of them want to thank two people--the prime minister of Israel, whoever that may be at the time, and Kahane.

Still, his methods were highly controversial. Most Jews told him, “We agree with your goals, but we disagree with your methods.” Winking with a New Yorker’s cynical sense of humor, he often responded: “Yeah, and Abbie Hoffman told me during a TV debate that he agrees with my methods, but he disagrees with my goals.”

His campaign for Soviet Jews offered a wonderful outlet for my energies as an undergraduate at Columbia University. But I did not support the tenor of his more recent campaigns. So I went a different route. After working for a number of prominent American Jewish organizations, I ultimately became national director of a major American Zionist group. So Rabbi Kahane sent a group of Jewish Defense League members to stage a sit-in in my office. We were not close afterward.

Kahane was 58, and nearing the end of his political career. The Israelis had effectively blacklisted him from ever again serving in the Knesset. The United States had revoked his citizenship, and he was expected to lose his appeal next month. The loss of American citizenship would bar him from entering our country again, denying him access to the funds he needed for his programs. He was on the brink of becoming marginal.

But now he is a martyr. His burial in Israel will provide a first indication of the depth of his grass-roots support. Already, Jews on the street who disagreed with him are speaking in reverential terms. His photograph is going up in homes and offices throughout Israel and America.

Like his boyhood hero, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, whom David Ben-Gurion called “Vladimir Hitler” and whose bones were barred from Israel for a generation, Kahane did the dirty work, raising the questions and issues that others preferred to ignore. Despite the controversies surrounding his tactics, he was the rare Jewish leader who said: “We have been sitting in Judea and Samaria for 23 years now without deciding if we want to annex it or give it up. Let’s make up our minds already.”

He has become greater than life, a martyr. Like Spartacus and Rabbi Akiva and Malcolm X and the Kennedys, he is now a force in history. His was not the message of Lincoln and King and Gandhi, but martyrdom does interesting things in tandem with the processes of history.

Now Jewish children will learn about him in their history books--about the rabbi who freed the Jews from Russia like Moses; who moved to Israel like the Jewish philosopher and poet Rabbi Yehuda Halevy; who studied the Torah and fought Israel’s enemies like Judas Maccabaeus; who inspired a generation like Jabotinsky, and who was martyred as Rabbi Akiva was by the Romans.

History has a way of doing those things for martyrs. Thirty years from now he will be a symbol for Jews in the way that Cesar Augusto Sandino’s 1934 assassination inspired Nicaraguans two generations after Anastasio Somoza killed him. The assassinations of Benigno Aquino, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and hundreds like them came back to haunt their killers. Jabotinsky’s followers did not rest until he was reinterred in Jerusalem and his portrait outranked Ben-Gurion’s on the Israeli currency.

Kahane’s chapter in Jewish history was about to close, and he had lost his campaign to dominate the hearts and minds of Israel. Now, instead, a new chapter--the martyr’s legend--begins.