THE MIRACLE OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL

The creation of the State of Israel was fraught with difficulty. Despite the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which Britain, the new mandatory power in Palestine, promised Jews a national home, there was intense opposition – from the Arab world, from other international forces, from politicians in Britain, and at times from Jews themselves. For thirty years, various compromises were proposed, all accepted by Jews and rejected by their opponents. On the day the State of Israel was proclaimed, the country was attacked on all fronts by its neighbours. Since then, it has lived under constant threat of war, violence, terror, and delegitimisation. Yet Israel has achieved wondrous things.

Through it, Hebrew, the language of the Bible, was reborn as a living tongue. Jewish communities under threat have been rescued, including those like the Jews of Ethiopia who had little contact with other Jews for centuries. Jews have come to Israel from over a hundred countries, representing the entire lexicon of cultural diversity. A desolate landscape has bloomed again. Jerusalem has been rebuilt. The world of Torah scholarship, devastated by the Holocaust, has been revived and the sound of learning echoes throughout the land. Economically, politically, socially, and culturally, Israel’s achievements are unmatched by any country of its age and size. The Sages said that, at the crossing of the Red Sea, the simplest Jew saw miracles that the greatest of later prophets were not destined to see. That, surely, was the privilege of those who witnessed Israel’s rebirth and youth. The Messiah has not come. Israel is not yet at peace. The Temple has not been rebuilt. Our time is not yet redemption. Yet many of the prayers of two thousand years have been answered. No one, reviewing this singular history, can doubt that faith makes a difference, that a nation’s history is shaped by what it believes.

Many of the heroes and pioneers of the return to Zion were not “spiritual,” nor did they observe many of the commandments. But the vision of the prophets and the covenant of Jewish history flowed through their veins. God works through people; sometimes, so the prophets taught, without their conscious knowledge and consent. It is difficult to reflect deeply on the rebirth of Israel without sensing the touch of heaven in the minds of men and women, leading them to play their parts in a drama so much greater than any individual could have executed, even conceived.

Who, then, wrote the script of the Jewish drama? God or the Jewish people? Or was it, as the Sages taught, an inextricable combination of both: God as He was heard by the people, and the people as they responded to God? Isaac Bashevis Singer came close when he said, “God is a writer and we are both the heroes and the readers.”

The Jonathan Sacks Haggada, 66–68

WHY A LAND?

[Jewish] destiny was to create a society that would honour the proposition that we are all created in the image and likeness of God. It would be a place in which the freedom of some would not lead to the enslavement of others.

Judaism is the code of a self-governing society. We tend to forget this, since Jews have lived in dispersion for two thousand years, without the sovereign power to govern themselves, and because modern Israel is a secular state.

Because Judaism is the code of a society, it is also about the social virtues: righteousness (tzedek/tzedaka), justice (mishpat), loving-kindness (Ḥesed), and compassion (raḥamim). These structure the template of biblical law, which covers all aspects of the life of society, its economy, its welfare systems, its education, family life, employer-employee relations, the protection of the environment, and so on.

None of this is possible without a land. Judaism is the constitution of a self-governing nation, the architectonics of a society dedicated to the service of God in freedom and dignity. Without a land and state, Judaism is a shadow of itself. In exile, God might still live in the hearts of Jews but not in the public square, in the justice of the courts, the morality of the economy, and the humanitarianism of everyday life.

Jews have lived in almost every country under the sun. In four thousand years, only in Israel have they been a free, self-governing people. Only in Israel are they able, if they so choose, to construct an agriculture, a medical system, an economic infrastructure in the spirit of the Torah and its concern for freedom, justice, and the sanctity of life. Only in Israel can Jews today speak the Hebrew of the Bible as the language of everyday speech. Only in Israel can they live Jewish time within a calendar structured according to the rhythms of the Jewish year. Only in Israel can Jews live Judaism in anything other than an edited edition. In Israel, and only there, Jews can walk where the prophets walked, climb the mountains Avraham climbed, lift their eyes to the hills that David saw, and continue the story their ancestors began.

Future Tense, 135–136

☛ REFLECT Can God be found “in the public square, in the justice of the courts, the morality of the economy, and the humanitarianism of everyday life” in Israel today?

WHY THIS LAND?

Israel is not the Nile Delta or the Tigris-Euphrates valley. It is a land dependent on rain, and the rain in Israel is not predictable. But a message in Devarim (11:10–12) intimates a correlation between geography and spirituality. Israel is a place where people look up to heaven in search of rain, not down to earth and its natural water supply. It is a place where you have to pray, not one in which nature and its seasons are predictable.

That is part of a larger narrative. Because the terrain of Israel is such that it cannot become the base of an empire, it will constantly be at threat from larger and stronger neighbouring powers. Israel will always find itself outnumbered. It will need to rely on exceptional courage from its soldiers, and ingenuity in battle. That will take high national morale, which in turn will require from the people a sense of belonging to a just and inclusive society.

Commitment will be needed from every individual. They will need to feel that their cause is justified and that they are fighting for something worth preserving. So the entire configuration of the Torah’s social ethics, whose guardians were the prophets, is already implicit in the kind of geo-political entity Israel is and will be. It would always be a small and highly vulnerable country, set in a strategic location at the junction of three continents, Europe, Africa, and Asia. As with its agriculture, so with its battles: Israel is a people that must lift its eyes to heaven.

Future Tense, 139–140

☛ REFLECT Are the things described in this passage still true of the modern State of Israel?

THE LAND OF HOPE

Twenty-six centuries ago, in exile in Babylon, the prophet Yeḥezkel had the most haunting of all prophetic visions. He saw a valley of dry bones, a heap of skeletons. God asked him, “Son of man, can these bones live?” Yeḥezkel replied, “God, You alone know.” Then the bones came together, and grew flesh and skin, and began to breathe, and live again. Then God said: “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up; our hope is lost (avda tikvateinu).’ Therefore prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Lord God says: “My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel”’” (Yeḥezkel 37:1–14).

It was this passage that Naftali Herz Imber was alluding to in 1877, when he wrote, in the song that became Israel’s national anthem, HaTikva, the phrase “Od lo avda tikvateinu,” “Our hope is not yet lost.” Little could he have known that seventy years later, one-third of the Jewish people would have become, in Auschwitz and Treblinka, a valley of dry bones. Who could have been blamed for saying “Our bones are dried up; our hope is lost”?

Yet, a mere three years after standing face-to-face with the angel of death, the Jewish people, by proclaiming the State of Israel, made a momentous affirmation of life, as if it had heard across the centuries the echo of God’s words to Yeḥezkel: “I will bring you back to the land of Israel.”

And a day will one day come when the story of Israel in modern times will speak not just to Jews, but to all who believe in the power of the human spirit as it reaches out to God, as an everlasting symbol of the victory of life over death, hope over despair. Israel has taken a barren land and made it bloom again. It has taken an ancient language, the Hebrew of the Bible, and made it speak again. It has taken the West’s oldest faith and made it young again. It has taken a shattered nation and made it live again. That remains the Jewish dream. Israel is the land of hope.

Future Tense, 152–153

REFLECT How do you think Israel has managed to stay hopeful in the face of so many seemingly insurmountable challenges in its short history?