Lord, save us from miracles.

Like compliments, we crave them, but when they do come our way, we don't always know how to respond. We are let out of Egypt with nothing less than a full parting of the Red Sea, and what thanks will God get? A rave in Sinai, to which He is uninvited, and blasphemy in the form of a golden calf.

Forty years ago this week, just when it seemed that it would take nothing short of a miracle for Israel to survive the coming war, the betting here was that the miracle bank had run dry. Amid the pre-emptive grave-digging and the fraught goodbyes, this was a constricted, panic-choked, border-phobic gas chamber of a country - literally, the ghetto to end all ghettos.

When the miracle came, few stopped to recall the real motto of this nation: Be careful what you pray for.

From this distance, one could conclude that while the Jewish state survived the war, Judaism as we knew it - Orthodox Judaism in particular - did not. Rabbinic Orthodoxy, the Jewish people's sworn bulwark against change, would never be the same.

1967 was the war that would persuade rabbis that they could be generals - even, or especially, if they lived in Brooklyn. The taste of power being what it is, many rabbis would soon conclude that government - and occupation - were much too important to be left to elected officials.

If absolute occupation corrupts absolutely, no group would be more corrupted by Israel's presence in the territories than rightist rabbis.

Of course, that's the last way they would see it. Cloaked in a shawl of ideological purity, spiritual erudition and lawyerly one-sidedness, right-wing rabbis went to work utterly convinced that they were the one last incorruptible group of Jewish leaders.

With Messianic zeal, they set to dictating new commandments and enunciating new prohibitions, revolutionizing Judaism by casting the settlements as the building blocks of a Third Temple - all the while turning the settlement enterprise and territories as a whole into a new Golden Calf, a god to which the people as a whole would be forced to sacrifice.

The change had been immediate, and shocking. The Temple Mount had only been in Israeli hands for a few hours before then-IDF chief rabbi Shlomo Goren pleaded with the general who had captured Jerusalem's Old City, to order that the magnificent gold-domed Mosque of Omar be blown to bits.

"I was alone for a moment, lost in thought, when Rabbi Goren approached me," Uzi Narkiss told Haaretz in an interview a few months before his death in 1997. "'Uzi,' Rabbi Goren said to me. 'Now is the time to put 100 kilograms of explosives into the Mosque of Omar so that we may rid ourselves of it once and for all.'

"I said to him, 'Rabbi, enough.'"

But Goren persisted. "'You don't grasp what tremendous significance this would have. This is an opportunity that can be taken advantage of now, at this moment. Tomorrow it will be too late.'

"I said, 'Rabbi, if you don't stop, I'll take you to jail.'"

Goren wasn't through. After the smoke had cleared, he addressed a military convention, calling it a "tragedy" that Israel had left the Temple Mount in control of Muslims: "I told this to the defense minister [Moshe Dayan] and he said, 'I understand what you are saying, but do you really think we should have blown up the mosque?' and I said, 'Certainly we should have blown it up.'"

"It is a tragedy for generations that we did not do so," Goren said. "I myself would have gone up there and wiped it off the ground completely so that there was no trace that there was ever a Mosque of Omar there."

A principle had been planted, one that would transform Orthodox Judaism even as it would permanently alter the relationship between most Orthodox Jews and the rest of the Jewish public.

Long dismissed as passive politically, militant religious Judaism came to set policy for the settlement movement as a whole, and, in effect, for the rest of us. Because we let them. We coddled the settlements with our tax revenues, we protected them with our army service, and knowingly, impotently, we tolerated their intolerance of Arabs.

If fundamentalist Muslim Palestinians taught their children that all of the Holy Land belonged to them alone, and that it was permissible that all of the Jews should be killed or expelled, entire Jewish organizations would make their livings detailing the baseness of the incitement.

But if fundamentalist rabbis in Israel taught Jewish children that all of the Holy Land belonged to them alone, and that it was permissible that all of the Palestinians should be killed or expelled, how did we respond?

We continued to pay their salaries as civil servants.

The most recent example: The Friday issue of Olam Katan [Small World], a weekly pamphlet handed out at Orthodox synagogues in Israel, contains a remarkable commentary by former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu. In fact, it is a declaration of war.

And not just any war. In the battle against Hamas and Qassam attacks, the rabbi said, the civilians of Gaza who fail to stop the attacks share responsibility for the actions of the militants, and must not be spared in operations directed at gunmen and terrorists.

Asked to expanding on his words, his son, Shmuel Eliyahu, the current chief rabbi of Safed, told the Jerusalem Post last week that his father, who opposes a ground offensive that would endanger IDF troops, advocates, in the Post's paraphrase, "carpet bombing the general area from which the Qassams were launched, regardless of the price in human life."

"If they don?t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand," Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu was quoted as saying.

"And if they do not stop after 1,000, then we must kill 10,000. If they still don't stop, we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop."

It may take us another 40 years before we realize that what will make both sides stop, is for fundamentalist holy men on both sides to stop lobbying for "warfare until victory" which is to say, permanent war - these same men who piously rule out and, in the end, stamp out, the possibility of a permanent peace.

Lord, save us from those who preach death in Your name.