## Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue

###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 1
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
***Epilogue***


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 2
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
There is a mystery at the heart of Jewish existence, and it is written into the first syllables of our recorded time.


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 3
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The first words of God to Abraham were: “Go out from your land, your birthplace, and your father’s house to the land which I will show you. And I will make you a great nation.…”


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 4
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Then Abraham receives another promise: “I will make your children like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust of the earth, then could your offspring be counted.”


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 5
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
There is yet another promise: “God took him outside and said, ‘Look up at the heavens and count the stars – if indeed you can count them.’ Then He said to him, ‘So shall your children be.’”


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 6
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Three escalating promises: Abraham would be the father of a great nation; he would be the father of as many children as the dust of the earth; he would be the father of as many children as the stars in heaven.


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 7
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
What, though, was the reality? Early on in the story, after his brief stay in Egypt, we read that Abraham was “very wealthy in livestock and in silver and gold.” He had everything except one thing: a child. Then God appears to Abraham and says, “Do not be afraid. I am your shield. Your reward will be very great.” Until this point, Abraham has been silent. Now, something within him breaks and he asks: “O Lord God, what will You give me if I remain childless?” *The first recorded words of man to God in the history of the covenant are a plea for there to be future generations.* The first Jew feared he would be the last.


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 8
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Then God gave Abraham a child, born to Sarah’s handmaid Hagar. His name was Ishmael which means “God will hear.” Evidently, Abraham believed that God had answered his prayer and given him a son. But in the very next chapter we learn that Ishmael was not destined to be a child of the covenant. He would be blessed. He would be fruitful. He would be the father of twelve princes. He would become a great nation. But he was not the child of Jewish destiny, and Abraham would one day have to part company with him.


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 9
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
This fact pains Abraham deeply. Twice, he registers his grief. When he first discovers his son’s fate, he pleads: “If only Ishmael might live under Your blessing.” Later, when Sarah drives Ishmael away, we read that “This troubled Abraham very much because it involved his son.” Nonetheless, God confirms Sarah’s decision. Abraham must lose his son.


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 10
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Now, another son is promised. His name will be Isaac and he will be born to Sarah. This is a biological impossibility. Sarah is already ninety and, as the Bible tells us, postmenopausal. Neither Abraham nor Sarah can believe it. Abraham “fell on his face and laughed. He said to himself: can a hundred-year-old man have children? Can Sarah, who is ninety, give birth?” Sarah “laughed to herself, saying: Now that I am worn out and my husband is old, shall I have this pleasure?” The sages found this disbelief difficult to comprehend, and in the case of Abraham they softened it. The Targum, the Aramaic translation of the Bible, turns Abraham’s laughter into celebration, but the plain sense of the verse is inescapable. Abraham laughed with incredulity.


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 11
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Against natural possibility, Isaac is born. Sarah says: “God has given me laughter.” The strange story seems to have reached a happy ending. It has taken time and much waiting and long-deferred hopes. A son has arrived at the last moment, or, as far as Sarah’s fertility is concerned, after the last moment. Throughout the narrative we have sensed in countless ways the strain which Abraham and Sarah have undergone. Their characters are sharply drawn and the portrayal remains vivid to this day. Finally, in Sarah’s laughter, we feel the tension ebb away. The couple relax. They have a child at last. They are fulfilled.


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 12
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
And then in the next chapter we read the words that in all the intervening years have not lost their power to shock:


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 13
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
After these events, God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” He replied, “Here I am.” Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, the one whom you love – Isaac – and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I will show you.


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 14
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Abraham gathers his son, travels for three days, climbs the mountain, prepares the wood, ties his son, takes the knife and raises his hand. Then a voice is heard from heaven: “Do not lay a hand on the boy.” The trial is over. Isaac lives.


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 15
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The enigma is almost overpowering. On the one hand there were the promises: a great nation, as many children as the dust, as many children as the stars. But set against them was the long drawn-out agony. The years of childlessness. Then the child who was sent away. Then the child who could not be born, but was. Then the decree of death against this one child, countermanded at the last moment. We cannot read this strange, tantalising sequence of events without asking: why?


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 16
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
**PRECIOUSNESS AND LOSS**
The story of Jewish continuity is a mystery. It is so today, as the century of the Holocaust and the rebirth of Israel draws to a close. It was so from the beginning, from the days of Abraham and Sarah.


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 17
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
According to the Bible, if nature had taken its course, Sarah would not have had a child and there would have been no Jewish people. If Abraham had had his way and been content with Ishmael, there would have been no Jewish people. If Isaac had been born but the word from heaven had been delayed, telling Abraham to stay his hand, Isaac would have died and there would have been no Jewish people. On such slender avoidance of the probable does Jewish continuity rest.


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 18
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Nor does the evidence derive from the Torah alone. I began this book with the first two recorded references to Israel outside the Bible. According to Merneptah in the thirteenth century BCE, Israel had been destroyed. According to Mesha, king of Moab, Israel had been destroyed. Such was the verdict of Israel’s enemies from Pharaoh to Haman to Hitler. Few, if any, other peoples have been the subject of so many decrees of genocide. Few could have read their own obituary more often. The binding of Isaac has been rehearsed not once but many times in our history. As a people, we are no strangers to the angel of death. But the Jewish people lives.


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 19
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
As we search these ancient texts, perhaps we begin to understand. It is as if a certain message was woven into our being from the very outset. To move from one generation of Jews to the next requires a miracle: a series of miracles. At every stage in the transition from Abraham and Sarah to Isaac, continuity seems to be impossible. Nature is against it. Prediction rules otherwise. At times, even Heaven itself seems to conspire against it. We are Jews today by virtue of miracles.


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 20
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Imagine trying to trace your family tree back beyond *booba* and *zeida* to their grandparents, and theirs. In the strange, tortuous, tangled chain which links Abraham and Sarah with us, is a succession of miracles which confound belief. Somehow, our ancestors survived the destructions and the exiles, the Crusades and the Blood Libels, the forced conversions and the Inquisitions, the persecutions and the pogroms; survived, by accident or destiny, the Final Solution and the gas chambers. Somehow, our parents and their parents and all the generations before them lived through the hopelessness and despair, the wanderings and sufferings, and against prediction and logic, brought new generations of Jewish children into the world. There has been nothing like it in the history of humanity. Can we, dare we, be the last generation?


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 21
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
*We cherish what we most risk losing.* Might it be that our history as a nation began with slavery in Egypt so that we would always know what it felt like to be slaves and thus become the people driven by a passion for freedom? Might it be that we were condemned to live most of our history in exile so that love of the land – above all, Jerusalem, home of the Divine presence – should be engraved upon our hearts? Might it be that we were forced so often to walk through the valley of the shadow of death in order to learn Judaism’s most fundamental ethical imperative: the unconditional sanctity of life. Might it be that, like Jonah and the gourd, we were taught to cherish what must be cherished by having it taken away from us?


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 22
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
With these questions we begin to fathom the mystery of Abraham and Sarah and of the next generation. The promises, the delay, the hope, the despair, the torments, the trials, the disappointed expectations could have no other effect than to create, at the very beginning of Jewish time, a focus bordering on an obsession with Jewish children. No other people has cared more for its children, invested more energy in them and shaped the whole of its religious life in order to hand on to them what it finds precious. *Abraham and Sarah had a child because they so nearly did not have a child.* Other cultures take children for granted. Judaism has never taken its children for granted, because Jews have known what it is like to be an Abraham or Sarah. So often were we in danger of losing our children, through persecution or assimilation, that they became our driving concern. We risked losing them. Therefore we cherished them.


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 23
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
**GIVING TO THE FUTURE AND TO THE PAST**
Today, we are losing our children. I have tried to explain why. For three generations we were preoccupied with other pressing, important concerns which touched on the very existence of the Jew in the modern world. We could be forgiven for neglecting the Jewishness of our children. There were other matters to attend to first. There was integration. There was survival. Not since the days of the destruction of the second Temple nineteen centuries ago has the Jewish people faced such dislocation, such collective trauma.


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 24
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
That crisis has now passed. Today we face a new situation in our 4,000-year history: the challenge of creating a Jewish life in conditions of freedom and equality in the diaspora and sovereignty in our own land, the land of Israel. That was always the ultimate challenge, and it reverberates throughout the lines of Jewish destiny. We survived slavery. Can we survive freedom? We survived suffering. Can we survive security? We survived exile. Can we survive homecoming?


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 25
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
We will do none of these things unless, at long last, we put our children and their Jewish needs first. The Bible provides us with the key to the ultimate question which has puzzled Jew and non-Jew alike. Why Abraham? Why Israel? Why the Jewish people? Abraham, says the Torah, was chosen “so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just.” Abraham was chosen not for himself but for his children and for what he would create in them: a way of life that they would value and continue and pass on. They would be a link in a chain of eternity.


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 26
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Not all of us can have children. But each of us can do something to ensure the continuity of the Jewish people. We can make it possible for every Jewish child to experience, learn about and live the heritage which earned the admiration, and changed the civilisation, of the world. We need now to relearn the oldest Jewish instinct of all: that precious values should live on through us into the next generation.


###### Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It, Chapter 10; Epilogue 27
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Let us not treat the future lightly. When God promised Abraham that his reward would be very great, he replied: “O Lord God, what will you give me if I remain childless?” That is the question eternity asks of us. What meaning will our lives and the lives of our ancestors have if they are not lent immortality by our continuity, by our bringing it about that we have Jewish grandchildren? If we would only remember the many miracles it took to bring us to this hour, we would willingly do our duty to ensure that the next generation stays Jewish, and the generation after that. Jewish continuity is the greatest gift we can bring to the future and the past.