Israel, like the Jewish people, shouldn’t exist today.
For millennia, emperors and czars, kings and queens, pharaohs and sultans have sought our oppression, our destruction, and our annihilation. The easy explanation is that all of this is a miracle—“easy” because such a reason doesn’t require us to look deeper. The real explanation is that our survival and the blossoming of our people is a result of our power for creativity, community, and the perseverance of our ancestors to defy the will of tyrants who sought our destruction.
We could have been wiped out in Egypt by Pharoah and his evil decree.
We could have been destroyed by Amalek during the forty years of desert wandering.
When the Babylonians destroyed our Temple in Jerusalem, we built another.
When the Romans destroyed our Temple in Jerusalem again, we invented Rabbinic Judaism, a model of Judaism that could survive while the Jewish people lived in foreign lands.
We could have been destroyed by Philistines, Greeks, Persians, Crusaders, Ottomans, Nazis, Russians, Syrians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Libyans, Iranians, and this isn’t even an exhaustive list of each enemy who has sought our end.
Yet…Am Yisrael Chai, the People of Israel Live!
What’s different about today, that no other Jewish community has had for two thousand years, is the power to defend ourselves. The State of Israel is not perfect, neither are the Jewish people. But now we, the Jewish people, can stop running from one hostile country to another and find a safe haven in our land.
This past Wednesday night, when we celebrated Israel’s 74th birthday, we not only marked the reemergence of an independent Jewish state, but we celebrated seventy-four years of Jewish independence.
Join us this Friday night to celebrate Israel and the achievements of the Jewish people over these past seventy-four years.