YOM HAATZMA’UT Yom HaAtzma’ut, Israel’s Independence Day, 5th Iyar 5708, marks the moment when the Jewish people recovered their independence and sovereignty after a lapse of some two thousand years. The longest exile ever endured by a people was at an end. For the first time in two millennia Jews had a home in the sense given by the poet Robert Frost, a place that, “when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Jews had once again returned to the arena of history as a self-determining nation in the land to which Abraham journeyed in his day, and Moses and the Israelites in theirs. The significance of Israel to Judaism is more than geographical, historical and political. It is spiritual. Israel was and is the Holy Land to which Abraham and his descendants were summoned to create a new kind of society, based on the sanctity of human life and the equal dignity of all, where they would be subject to the sovereignty of God alone, constantly conscious of the Divine Presence while striving to be true to the covenant that charged them with being “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Nahmanides (commentary to Lev. 18:25) says that the primary fulfillment of all the commandments, not just those that relate to the land, occurs only “when living in the land of God.” Interpreted non-mystically, this means that the Torah represents the architecture of a society; it is not just a code for the salvation of the soul. The Torah includes laws relating to welfare, the environment, the administration of justice, employer-employee relationships, and many other matters not normally thought of as religious. It is less about the ascent of the soul to heaven, than about bringing heaven down to earth in the form of a just, gracious and compassionate social order. It is a code for “societal beatitude” (Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein), and is predicated on a free, self-governing nation in its own land. Though Jews, in the long centuries of their dispersion, were scattered over the face of the earth, only in Israel have they formed a majority and been able to rule and defend themselves. Only in Israel can a Jew speak a Jewish language, see a Jewish landscape, walk where our ancestors walked and continue the story they began. Only in Israel have Jews been able to live as a nation shaping its own destiny, constructing a society according to its own principles and laws. Jews were the first to see God in history, to see the unfolding of events as a meaningful narrative, the ongoing story of the covenant between God and His people. The celebration of Yom HaAtzma’ut as a religious festival is part of this faith. Never before had a people survived so long an exile, its identity intact. Never before had a nation that had not known sovereignty for two millennia recovered it again. Ravaged by the Holocaust a mere three years earlier, the declaration of Israel’s independence was a remarkable act of faith, an everlasting symbol of the victory of life over death, hope over despair. Some thirty-three centuries ago, Moses prophesied: “Even if you have been dispersed to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the LORD your God will gather you and bring you back” (Deut. 30:4), and so it happened. If, as we believe, there are events that bear the signature of Heaven, this surely was one. Therefore we give thanks to God for bringing the land back to the people, and the people back to the land – the land where our people was born in ancient times, and reborn in ours.