Take a good look at the photographs of the suspects in the new Jewish underground being taken into custody. Look at them grinning with their unruly, never-shaven beards and payot flowing from under the soup-bowl kippot. Seriously, they’re rock stars, they don’t give a damn what anyone thinks and they’ll have a whale of a time in prison, emerging even bigger heroes. Once you’ve slipped the earthly bonds of mortal judgment, nothing can touch you.

They (allegedly) burned mosques and churches and a home with a sleeping family inside, killing an 18-month-old baby boy, and now just look at them, blissfully happy. I bet you saw those photographs and felt a burning shame; how could Jews do such a thing? Don’t they realize the harm they are doing all of us? The shanda, the hillul Hashem, desecration of God’s name? This is what True Jews look like – Jews who don’t care what you or anyone else thinks because they’re true Jews exercising Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish homeland. They’re keeping it real.

Look at the photos again

I suppose to feel a bit better with yourself, you had to go and read on one of the many websites, like this one, where bromides were offered by assorted rabbis explaining why these young hooligans are perverting Judaism and bringing our Torah, whose ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace, into disrepute. Only they’re not. Look at those photographs again. That’s what Jews who are not afraid or ashamed to go to prison for being faithful to the original unvarnished values of Torah look like. And once you’re done forcing yourself to look again at their faces, take a gander as well at Yishai Schlissel stabbing the marchers last Thursday at the Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade. You want to believe he’s mad, don’t you? He isn’t, he’s just the true embodiment of Jewish values. A lone, but brave and resolved kana’i, the zealot ridding the streets of God’s city from abomination.

It took nearly 2,000 years of exile and fear of the nations but finally, a generation of true Jews is once again rising. Don’t listen to the cowardly words of media-friendly rabbis, false prophets who haven’t got the guts to say that they wish the 22nd verse of the 18th chapter of Va’yikra (Leviticus) had never been written. Well, they’re not about to excise it and other unpalatable verses from their Torah scrolls, so they may as well own it. Yes, a man lying down with another man as if with a woman is an abomination. It says so in the book of life. Don’t try to pretend it’s not written there and fob us off with nice cuddly quotes of pleasantness and peace. Ours is not a religion of peace and our God demands vengeance and ethnic cleansing.

Lehava founder Bentzi Gopstein has every bit as much scripture to rely on as they do, when he says that we should be going out to destroy every church in the Holy Land. Or have they conveniently forgot Maimonides’ ninth principle of faith, that this Torah shall never be replaced? Of course, nice rabbis love quoting Maimonides, but just the more cosmopolitan bits, not those about the Messiah and wars and destroying all the houses of alien worship.

Face it, those bearded youths from the hilltops are more truly Jewish than you or I will ever be. Theirs is a true Torat Eretz Yisrael, unadulterated by goyishe crap. And who loves Jerusalem more than Schlissel? A man who was willing to go to prison in his quest to cleanse our city and upon release, accepted upon himself an inevitable second sentence to continue his mission? I like to present myself as the ultimate Jerusalemite but I can barely be bothered to pick up that cigarette butt.

Netanyahu should check out Kiryat Arba

Benjamin Netanyahu tried to salvage a bit of moral comfort on Sunday when he reminded us that while we unequivocally condemn our homegrown murderers, our neighbors name streets and squares after them. He should check out a Kiryat Arba street map. It’s just a matter of time. The way we’re going, the next generation of true Jews will stroll down Jerusalem’s Meir Ettinger Boulevard to Schlissel Plaza for a ritual stoning of heretics and perverts. You remember that scene with the blasphemer in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”? That was life in the good old Jewish Kingdom BCE and it could be our lives again if the true Jews have their way.

For all the protestations that Judaism is a religion of peace, there is absolutely no guarantee that our rabbis will be more successful in their crusade of moderation than their Muslim counterparts. They insisted for years that Islam is perfectly benign, only to be confronted now with ISIS and its true faith of beheadings and slavery. Netanyahu’s claim that we’re different from the rest of the region rings hollow when in the space of a few hours last week true Jews murdered both a Jewish girl and a Muslim toddler.

I honestly believe the Torah is the most wonderful book written by mankind. It’s the book of books I’d take to a desert island and a huge privilege to belong to the nation that carried it for all these centuries. But it was written more than 3,000 years ago and we’ve moved on a bit since. If the rabbis can’t bring themselves to admit that whole swaths of the Torah are simply not relevant today, and, more to the point, contain the antithesis of a functioning society, then they are abandoning us with their platitudes to the mercy of the true Jews.

Judaism did not survive by remaining true to its roots. It deliberately lost its authenticity and assimilated and adapted and evolved. The problematic bits of the Torah were explained away and put under a heavy pile of caveats precisely because they were inadequate and inappropriate for the changing times. Conversion of local spouses, friends and neighbors was allowed and for many generations encouraged, because racial purity was a self-defeating policy that would have led to extinction. Maimonides was a blessed hypocrite who with one stroke of his quill professed loyalty to the only immutable Torah, and with the next incorporated Aristotle into Jewish philosophy. We should recognize his brilliance in doing so.

It’s like Coca-Cola

The multiple obstacles the ultra-Orthodox rabbinate put today on conversion and interpretation, their unwillingness to change their “pure education,” are pushing the Haredi community out on an obscure limb of the evolutionary tree from where they can only plummet into the abyss. Luckily, most of their followers are too clever to fall for that trick, and they’re flocking to “alien” studies despite the rabbis’ admonishments. We should be pointing out that they aren’t even keeping true, instead of us trying to compete over whose Torah is the real thing. It’s like Coca-Cola: There is only one classic flavor, and it’s fattening and bad for your teeth.

True Judaism has only spelled disaster for Jews wherever and whenever it was practiced and forced upon us. We held on in spite of it all because we picked and chose the relevant and necessary parts of Torah and tradition and disregarded the rest. Our Torat Haim – code of life – was a bastardized hybrid of useful ancient traditions combined with whatever we could gather and adapt from our new surroundings and too-frequent travels. We learned to survive by abandoning any high-minded status of Hebrew thoroughbreds, becoming hardy Jewish mongrels instead. Analyze the culture of any Jewish community and its genetic makeup and you will find that it succeeded through mixing local cocktails, not by sticking to neat Jewishness.

We will never be pure enough for the true Jews and we should never try to be. The murderers of Shira Banki and Ali Dawabsheh will always win every contest for the real Judaism. You don’t care about alternatives and the disastrous results of your actions when you hold eternal truth. A truth that damns us all.