In 1948, miracles occurred. One of those was that of the unity amongst the Jewish People throughout the world. A result of that miracle was the rebirth of the Jewish homeland in the State of Israel. Against all odds and numbers and with the blessings from above, the Jewish People once again governed their own state. In the following years, our state was bombarded with numerous wars and constant attacks, yet we progressed as a country and a people beyond ours, and our enemy’s wildest dreams. Despite the massive acts of violence meant to destroy our country and throw our people out of our land, we continued to grow.
In 1967, another miracle occurred as we returned to the heartland of Israel, the cradle of our heritage and history as a nation. With our return to this heartland, our strength grew, as did our connection to Israel and one another. Once again Jews from all over the world could show their children the places that are mentioned throughout the Torah and our other Holy books. For the first time in over 2,000 years “seeing was believing”, and believing was real.
All to often we take the luxury of freedom for granted. Today in Israel, I can take my family to Hevron, Shilo, Kever Rachel, and in the past, to Kever Yosef to name just a few. I can take them to our eternal connection to the Holy Temple that once stood in Jerusalem and pray at the Kotel HaMa’aravi. I can say to them, see, they are real.
Our memories are too short, it wasn’t that long ago that we couldn’t do that. That simple luxury of showing our families our history and our connection to this land of Israel is on the chopping block now.
I am very ashamed of the Holocaust. How my people were taken, stripped, humiliated, tortured and led to their deaths - before the eyes of the joyous Poles, Ukrainians, French and other offspring of Christian enlightenment; how newborn babies were impaled on pitchforks on the way to the death pits; how millions were led to the factories of death, and suffocated and burned, fertilizing the fields of Poland and Europe with our people’s ashes - with almost no resistance.
I am very proud of the Holocaust. If the German Asmodeus - the most explicit essence of absolute evil ever revealed in history - sees me, the Jew, as its ultimate enemy, then that means that I am on the other end of the scale. In other words, there is something very good about my people. If the German Asmodeus represents absolute evil, then it is very afraid of the absolute good - G-d - that I represent.
There is no way to explain the Holocaust. I know survivors who are not on speaking terms with G-d. I know many who are the opposite. I have no right to go there – and I have neither the ability nor the desire to do so. But irrespective of the theological questions surrounding the Holocaust, one thing clearly occurred in its wake: Jewish history stopped being written in exile and started to be written in the Land of Israel.
Very soon, for the first time since the First Temple period (!), the majority of the Jewish People will be living in the Holy Land. This fact constitutes a spiritual critical mass. Jewish law changes in several realms by virtue of the demographic fact that “most of its sons are on [the land].” The absolute number that we are approaching in the Land of Israel is chilling. Six million.
G-d, Who chose us to be His eternal people and to attest to His existence, has made us a target for extermination by every evil in the world. It is certainly understandable why there are Jews who constantly try to escape this fate. As individuals, this may be possible – an individual may be able to assimilate and rid him/herself of this trouble. But as a people, we cannot escape our destiny. We cannot exist without it.
When the time of national awakening comes, when the gates of the Land open before us but we insist on remaining merely the bearers of religion in exile - the ground burns under our feet. And when we flee to the other extreme, create an alternative Israeli nationalism and shun Judaism and the Torah, then even if we have decided that we are no longer Jews, but only normal Israelis, even if we have established a modern state and hold 200 atom bombs in our nuclear arsenal - we are still six million Jews under the mounting danger of annihilation.
Jerusalem, like the Jewish people and the Jewish state, is the subject of vast and sweeping myths and legends that deeply color how people view it.
Many of the common myths about the Jewish people are monster stories (though some are "positive" myths about business acumen or high intelligence), and when you read opinion pieces, you can often see the myths poking up like rocks at low tide from the sea of opinion - if the opinion pieces are not simply parroting or inventing more lies. There are an awful lot of people out there who find it almost impossible to see us for who we really are; they see, instead, creatures composed of the myths they have learned and the fear, hatred or rivalry that they feel. They are so trapped in their prejudices that it is very difficult for them to escape. It takes a personal, conscious effort, and most people who have deeply bought into the myths have too much invested to make that effort.
Jerusalem, too, is shrouded in veils of mythology. Many people simply do not see it as a living place. They see it as a Beacon or a Cause or a Goal or - for many world leaders - a Problem - not as a place in the real world where 760000 people live their lives. In Jerusalem today, people were born. Kids went to school and played in the streets. People eat lunch together. People worked out. People blogged. They took showers. They met the love of their life. They got drunk and had a fight with their landlords. They proposed. They got divorced. They slept and will wake up in the morning with a hangover. They are raising kids. They will watch the sunset tomorrow. They will drop their laptop by accident this week. They are survivors of suicide bombings and survivors of Auschwitz and survivors of Israel's war of independence and survivors of stroke. They watch television, they paint pictures, they order pizzas, they fix the bathroom plumbing and ultimately, they die.
President Obama has consistently stated that the Jewish state should not expand the so-called settlements beyond the Green Line even for natural growth. Today is the second day of the Jewish month of Nissan -- in two weeks, the Jewish people will celebrate the holiday of Passover, commemorating the Exodus from Egypt, when God liberated the Israelites from slavery. Pharaoh had tried to end "natural growth" of the Children of Israel by killing all of the Jewish newborn boys, but Moses escaped to become God's vehicle for salvation. Two weeks ago, Jews celebrated Purim, the holiday that commemorates the Jewish people's salvation from Haman's attempts to annihilate them throughout the Persian Empire (today's Iran), by retelling the story of Queen Esther.
Throughout history, non-Jewish leaders have locked Jewish communities into ghettos in an attempt to limit natural growth through hardship and disease. Just seventy-five years ago, Hitler rounded up Jews, ghettoized them, and finally murdered six million of them in Europe in an attempt to destroy the entire people. Just a few days after the eight-day Passover holiday, the Jewish people will remember the Holocaust on Yom Ha-Shoah, a day when all Israeli citizens stand silent in memory of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. Throughout the world, Jewish communities gather to remember, recite the names of those murdered, and light candles in memory of those whose names we still do not know.
Jews are particularly sensitive to attempts to limit their "natural growth" and the area in which they can live. President Obama continues to hit that nerve -- whether it is intentional or not.
Moreover, there is the issue of Jerusalem. For over 3,000 years, Jerusalem has been both the political and spiritual capital of the Jewish people. There has never been another.
Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo Cardozo Academy 12 March '10 (1st Post, 30 April '09)
Throughout the many centuries, historians, philosophers and anthropologists have struggled with the notion called “Israel” more than with nearly any other topic. While trying hard to place Israel within the confines of conventional history they constantly experienced academic and philosophical frustration. Whatever definitions they suggested, they would always discover that these definitions would break down due to some serious inconsistencies. Was Israel a nation, a religion or an altogether mysterious entity which would forever stay unexplainable? Sometimes it was seen as less than a nation and more as a religion, only to be challenged by others who believed the reverse to be true. Again others claimed that it could not fit into any of these categories.
What was clear was that it was impossible to fit “Israel” into any specific definition or known scheme. It resisted all historical concepts and generalities. The uniqueness of Israel necessarily thwarted the people’s natural desire for an explanation since explanation always implies arrangement in categories. Anything which flies in the face of such an attempt is alarming and most disturbing. This fact became even more obvious once the Jew was forced out of his country by Titus the Roman and specifically after the collapse of the Bar Kochba rebellion. It was at that moment that the Jew was hurled into the abyss of the nations of the world. Since that day the Jew was confronted with a new condition: Ongoing insecurity. While mankind at large has always been confronted with moments of insecurity, it was the Jews to whom destiny has denied even the smallest share of a dubious security which others possess. Whether Jews were aware of it or not, this people always lived on ground that could at any moment give way beneath its feet.
Since 1948 Israel became once more a country. But many forgot that it also became a country. That it became again a country, but not only a country. All the other dimensions, such as nationhood, religion, mystery, the lack of definition and insecurity continued to exist. Today, the people of Israel does not find itself exclusively in the land of Israel and instead of one Israel, the world now has two. But the second new Israel has up till now been seen as responding to the demands of history, geography, politics and journalism. One knows where it can be found. At least one thinks that one knows where it is to be found. But it becomes clearer and clearer that the new and definable Israel is now seriously on the way to become as much a puzzle and mysterious entity as the old Israel always was. In fact it already is.
Throughout its short history, the State of Israel has gone through the most mysterious notions modern man has ever seen. After an exile of nearly two thousand years in which the old Israel was able to survive in contradiction to all historical criteria, it returned to its homeland. There it found itself surrounded by a massive Arab population which was and is incapable of mentally making peace with the idea that this small mysterious nation lives among them. After experiencing a Holocaust in which it lost six million of its members, it was not permitted to live a life of tranquility on a tiny piece of land. Once more the Jew was denied the right to feel at home in his own country. From the outset Israel was forced to fight its enemies on all fronts. It was attacked and condemned for fighting for its very existence and defending its population. Over the years it had to endure the policy of double standards employed by the international community.
How many times have you asserted that "everything is under control?" Is that really true? We live in a world that is time-oriented. Everything is scheduled and anticipated and as we perceive it - under control. But do we control our time or does time control us?
The Western approach that plans and controls everything finds its expression is its solar calendar. In the Western calendar, everything works on a precise schedule. Every month has a pre-determined amount of days, there is one day added to February every four years and the sun remains a source of constancy. It makes us feel in control and easy to forget about G-d, Who created the sun and all the rules of nature.
The Moslem calendar is lunar - shorter than the solar calendar. It does not use extra days to balance the seasons. Thus, it is a calendar that travels around the seasons; a Moslem holiday will occur in different seasons in different years. The Moslem calendar expresses a reality in which man is out of control, dependant on outside factors such as "fate."
The Jewish calendar, about which we read this Shabbat, (Parshat Hachodesh) creates the proper synthesis between a calendar that preserves the basis of the seasons like the solar calendar, while remaining in synch with the waxing and waning of the moon. It gives order to our lives, while reminding us that G-d controls the world.
Today, the Jewish calendar is in exile. It has been pre-determined and no longer depends upon the sighting of the new moon and the Sanhedrin's decree of the new month. As we emerge from our long exile and return to our Jewish heritage, we must also return to our Jewish calendar.
"This month is the head of all months for you. It is the first for you of the months of the year." (This week's Torah maftir reading, Exodus 12:2). G-d gives the Jewish People control over the year. It is their wise men who determine when the months will start and when to insert a leap year. The Jewish People control time; time does not control them.
It is time to begin our return to the Jewish calendar. The best place to start is the school system, which can easily schedule its summer vacation and return to school according to Jewish dates. If we would decide that the first day of school would coincide with the first day of the month of Elul, the two months of summer vacation would necessarily be the Hebrew months of Tamuz and Av. When the kids are on vacation, their parents prefer to be on vacation and slowly but surely, Israeli society will return to its Jewish calendar. This will be one more step in transforming Israel from the State of the Jews to a Jewish State that illuminates the world with its message of true freedom for all.
(Beautifully written, captures the feeling. Plus a bit of music for accompaniment. Y.)
Fifteen years ago this week, my wife and I, together with our young son, embarked on a fateful journey. Leaving behind friends and family in New York, we boarded a flight and fulfilled our dream, along with that of our ancestors, by making aliyah and settling in the Land of Israel.
I still remember the heady feeling that I had, walking through the streets of Jerusalem in the initial days after our arrival. As much as I had enjoyed visiting the country as a tourist over the years and seeing the sites, there was nothing quite like the emotion that gripped me as I took in my surroundings as a proud new resident of the reborn Jewish state.
From waking up to the sounds of Hebrew on the radio, to catching a glimpse of the walls of the Old City at sunset, I could sense my soul stir in a way I had never experienced before. Yes, I thought to myself, I have indeed truly come home.
Ricki Hollander CAMERA Media Analysis 30 December 09
The Invention of the Jewish People Shlomo Sand, Translated by Yael Lotan Verso, London New York, 2009
When it comes to undermining the legitimacy of the Jewish state, there is no thesis too absurd to be published. In fact, one can assume that any book attacking the idea of Jewish nationalism will gain a following (and even garner awards), regardless of how preposterous the underlying thesis.
Such is the case with "The Invention of the Jewish People" a book by Shlomo Sand who teaches French history at Tel Aviv University. The thesis: There is no such thing as a Jewish people; today's Jews have no connection to biblical Israelites or to Jews who inhabited Israel during the time of the Second Temple; rather, they are descended from disparate groups of people who converted to Judaism and had no ties to the land of Israel. Conversely, there was no exile of Jews from the land of Israel; most Jews remained in the land, converted to Islam and were the progenitors of present-day Palestinians.
Sand acknowledges his mission is to prove invalid the foundation of Zionism – the idea of a Jewish state built on a Jewish ancestral homeland -- and to promote instead the idea of a single non-Jewish state of Arabs and Jews. His qualifications for this project lie – not in Jewish history scholarship (his field is French nationalism and cinema), but – in his communist, anti-nationalist and anti-Zionist background and politics (which he proudly mentions in the book's preface). His thesis whereby Arabs – and not Jews– are the rightful inheritors of the land provides the support for his political argument.
What about the earlier historical writings that negate his theories? Sand discards them as the fabrications of 19th and 20th century Jewish historians who fabricated "myths" and constructed "memories" of Jewish nationhood. Moreover, he contends the invented version of events was kept alive in Jewish history departments throughout Israel, the U.S. and Europe by Zionists who "created an iron-jawed vise that prevented any deviation from the dominant narrative."
The author does not pretend to reveal any new primary source material. His conceit is that he is keener and more honest than the "authorized" experts in Jewish history whom he disparages, and that he, by contrast, is uncovering "surprising connections" and offering "unexpected insights."
Review by Simon Schama Financial Times 13 November 09
The Invention of the Jewish People By Shlomo Sand Translated by Yael Lotan
(This book is popping up in many places and should be addressed. While not agreeing with every point made by the reviewer, his critique is about as good as will be found in a major publication. Y.)
From its splashy title on, Shlomo Sand means his book to be provocative, which it certainly is, though possibly not in the way he intends. Its real challenge to the reader is separating the presentation of truisms as though they were revolutionary illuminations and the relentless beating on doors that have long been open, from passages of intellectual sharpness and learning.
Sand’s self-dramatising attack in The Invention of the Jewish People is directed against those who assume, uncritically, that all Jews are descended lineally from the single racial stock of ancient Hebrews – a position no one who has thought for a minute about the history of the Jews would dream of taking.
Sand’s sense of grievance against the myths on which the exclusively Jewish right to full Israeli immigration is grounded is one that many who want to see a more liberal and secular Israel wholeheartedly share. But his book prosecutes these aims through a sensationalist assertion that somehow, the truth about Jewish culture and history, especially the “exile which never happened”, has been suppressed in the interests of racially pure demands of Zionist orthodoxy. This, to put it mildly, is a stretch.
To take just one instance: the history of the Khazars, the central Asian kingdom which, around the 10th century, converted to Judaism and which Sand thinks has been excised from the master narrative because of the embarrassing implication that present day Jews might be descended from Turkic converts. But the Khazars were known by every Jewish girl and boy in my neck of Golders Greenery and further flung parts of the diaspora, and celebrated rather than evaded.
For Sand, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University, the antidote to a national identity based on what he argues are fables, is to shed the fancy that there is any such thing as a shared Jewish identity independent of religious practice.
By this narrow reckoning you are either devoutly orthodox or not Jewish at all if you imagine yourself to have any connection to Israel past or present. Sand confuses ethnicity – which, in the case of the Jews, is indeed impure, heterogeneous and much travelled – with an identity that evolves as the product of common historical experience. Rabbinical arguments may rest on an imaginary definition of ethnicity, but the legitimacy of a Jewish homeland does not. Ultimately, Israel’s case is the remedy for atrocity, about which Sand has nothing to say.
His book is a trip (and I use the word advisedly) through a landscape of illusions which Sand aims to explode, leaving the scenery freer for a Middle East built, as he supposes, from the hard bricks of truth. This turns out to require not just the abandonment of simplicities about race, but any shared sense of historical identity at all on the part of the Jews that might be taken as the basis of common allegiance, which is an another matter entirely. En route, he marches the reader through a mind-numbingly laborious examination of the construction of national identities from imagined rather than actual histories. A whole literature has been devoted to the assumption that nations are invariably built from such stories, in which, nonetheless, grains of historical truth are usually embedded. The important issue, however, is whether the meta-narrative that arises from those stories is inclusive enough to accommodate the tales of those whose experience is something other than racially and culturally homogeneous.
Yisrael Medad (My Right Word) Green-Lined/JPost Blog 22 November 09
A recent op-ed penned by Michael Freund promotes the idea of an immediate annexation of all the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria to Israel. His reason, and seemingly his sole reason, is that "these areas are ours by Divine right ... the Land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel because the G-d of Israel said so."
He further writes:
...annexation is justified for the simple reason that this land belongs to us, and to nobody else. The act of asserting Israeli sovereignty over the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria would mark the closing of an historical circle, reviving our formal dominion over these areas after an interlude of nearly 2,000 years ... Who knows - maybe if we finally stand on principle and start affirming our faith, then perhaps we will at last begin to earn the respect and support that we so rightly deserve."
I also consider a religious right a justification for claiming territorial rights (after all, the Temple Mount, once it becomes the Haram E-Sharif, is then Muslim property, right?) and I would never ignore the primary formative element of Jewish nationalism which, as Professor Harold Fisch discussed in chapter two of his The Zionist Revolution: A New Perspective, is the Covenant.
There is a contractual configuration between the Jewish people and the ideals which define them as a people, a community, a religio-ethnic group. "Israel's strange existence," writes Fisch, "is defined by the Covenant ... [it] is the central experience of Israel ... it became, for Israel, the key to the understanding of all reality: political, social, historical ... it endowed the whole people with a common task, a sense of unity and purpose ... [and it] has a bearing on the moral history of the world as a whole...."
A Jew's relationship to his homeland is different than any other community-nation-people and, in fact, Menachem Begin never employed the term "annexation" for, as he said, "how can one annex one's own country?." True, that relationship is intrinsically religious with commensurate ritual obligations, commandments and practices, some which are kept solely as a searing reminder even though their source no longer exists, as in the case with many of the Temple rites. Most of all, there is the most unique of all realities in the definition of the physicality of the land as a sacred and holy element.
It is still difficult to imagine that even though his passion remains within these words, he is no longer with us.
By Tsafrir Ronen z"l Written Thursday, May 22, 2008
The historic significance of the rise of settlements since the beginning of Zionism has been not just to restore the Jewish people to Eretz Yisrael, but chiefly to reinstate the Hebrew identify of Eretz Yisrael.
The pioneers who transformed Um Juni to Degania, the first kibbutz in the Holy Land (1910), restored its Hebrew identity. With that act, a parcel of our homeland was conquered. The work brigade that transformed “Ein Jalud” to Ein Harod (1921) restored the Biblical identity from Gidon’s days to the valley. The same goes for the transformation of the hills of “Abu Shusha” to Mishmar HaEmek, and the transformation of “Ja’uni” to “Gai-Oni” (Valley of My Strength), and then to Rosh Pina. Every settlement restored to every abandoned spot in the Land its Biblical, Hebrew identity.
The establishment of Elon Moreh renewed the Israeli identity of Elon Moreh.
The recent fight in Hebron over Jewish settlement in part of Hebron’s Jewish Quarter where Arab squatters had set up a marketplace was not just over the rights of two families. The pioneers of Jewish Hebron understand that this battle is over Hebron’s identity. If Hebron is populated by Jews, Hebron’s identity will be Jewish, and if there are only Arabs in Hebron, then even Hebron’s name will be abandoned in favor of “Al Halil,” the Arabic name. The Left wants an Arabic identity for Hebron. Their hatred for settlement is hatred for the idea of linking Eretz Yisrael and the Jewish people. That is the whole story.
Yet not just Hebron is involved. The Left also does not want any of Judea and Samaria to have a Jewish identity. Their friends in the media continue to label the heart of Eretz Yisrael by foreign names given to it by our people’s enemies, such as “Palestine,” the “West Bank,” the “territories,” and the “occupation.” They’ll call the land of the Bible by every possible name, just not the only name that restores a Jewish identity to our land – Judea and Samaria. The meaning of the name “Judea” is that this is the land of the Jews, and Eretz Yisrael means that this is the land of Yisrael – just as Eire-land is the land of the Eires, Eng-land is the land of the English, and Fin-land is the land of the Finns. They cannot be occupiers of a land named after them. A land’s identity is like the identity of the people inhabiting it. The people of Israel cannot be considered occupiers of the Land of Israel.
Had there been no renewed settlement in Shiloh, Beit El and Elon Moreh, these would have remained abstract Biblical names, in the realm of legend. Settlement created the Land’s identity anew. Settlement restored to these areas their true names, and removed from the Arabic conqueror the false Arabic names. Shiloh recreated Biblical Shiloh. If Judea and Samaria are ever abandoned, they won’t just be abandoned physically but in terms of their identity.
Once more, on all the world’s maps, Eretz Yisrael will no longer be called Eretz Yisrael or Israel, but something else. Surely, until 1967, Judea and Samaria were called “the West Bank of the Kingdom of Jordan.” Israel’s military victory over Jordan restored to them their true Biblical name. If Israel abandons them, the enemy will not call them by their Hebrew name, but by their counterfeit name, Palestine, a name artificially created by the Emperor Hadrian when he subdued the Bar Kochba revolt in his longing to destroy the Jewish identify of Judea.
Hadrian’s curse failed. The name Palestine was abandoned entirely over the years. Already the Crusaders called the land “the Kingdom of Jerusalem.” The Arabic conquest didn’t call the Land by any name whatsoever. It was just Southern Syria. For 1300 years the land lacked any identity, and lacked any people that identified with the Land – except for our people. The anti-Semitic British, halting aliyah and settlement by way of their White Paper, understood what the anti-Semites in our midst understand: settlement restores Jewish identity to the Land.
Every outpost carrying a Hebrew name transforms another section of the Land to Hebrew. The battle is not one of tanks or jets. The battle today is the most decisive battle ever. It is a battle over the identity of the Land. Will the Land carry a counterfeit Arabic or pagan identity, a forged name from the Emperor Hadrian? Or will it have an Israelite, Biblical identity – the true identity of the Land.
Only settlement will restore to the Land its Israeli identity. The Arabs demand that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert hand over to them the Land, empty of Jews. As long as there are Jews in Judea, it will be impossible to call it by its counterfeit propaganda name – Palestine. The only thing stopping this government from handing over Eretz Yisrael to the enemy is their inability to destroy Jewish settlement, which meanwhile is stopping the wheels of destruction in Judea. The construction of hundreds of new outposts is the only guarantee that the identity of Eretz Yisrael will be preserved.
The desire to destroy settlements is the desire to destroy the identity of Eretz Yisrael – the land of the people of Israel.
“I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”
(Robert A. Heinlein quotes)
The Land of Milk and Honey
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Até um dia Sefarad...
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From its splashy title on, Shlomo Sand means his book to be provocative, which it certainly is, though possibly not in the way he intends. Its real challenge to the reader is separating the presentation of truisms as though they were revolutionary illuminations and the relentless beating on doors that have long been open, from passages of intellectual sharpness and learning.
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