A Trip to Israel — I

Enroute

It is a long way to Israel. 

Even broken into two flights — 10 hours from LAX to Frankfurt, four hours to Tel Aviv — it is a tiring trip.  The extensive security measures for international travel — arrival at the airport two and a half hours early, separate x-rays of computers and cameras, then coats, belts and shoes, random pat-downs of selected travelers, multiple passport checks, and long lines — add to the length of the trip.

But in historical terms, the trip is much, much longer.  President Kennedy liked to quote the Chinese proverb that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  It is impossible to imagine the innumerable steps that, over many years, have brought us to this moment.

The sheer improbability of Israel is staggering.  Writing last week, Rabbi David Wolpe captured the wonder of the Jewish state:

When the State of Israel was founded, its citizens came from authoritarian and totalitarian countries. They arrived in a region where all the surrounding countries were run by dictators.

They created a democracy.

When the State of Israel was founded, its citizens had never served in the armed forces. To be a soldier was not a cultural value in the diaspora . . . .

They created an army that won war after war against tremendous numerical superiority.

When the State of Israel was founded, the Jewish people did not have a common spoken language. . . . Hebrew was used for sacred texts, but it was sadly impoverished as a language for everyday life. . .

Within a generation, Israel had a Nobel Prize-winning author in the Hebrew language.

To speak of Israel as a nation that has defied the odds of history is to engage in gross understatement.  In a generation a nation was spun out of threads as ephemeral as hope, bluster and legend. All of it was propelled by a faith in the destiny of an everlasting people.

If Israel’s mere existence is wondrous, its continued existence is even more so:

Now in the midst of its seventh war in 57 years — or rather still engaged in its original War of Independence, now extending more than half a century — forced always to fight for — and justify — its existence, unable to achieve peace even by yielding 95% of what it won in a war it didn’t start, slandered by Orwellian U.N. proclamations, living in a small portion of the biblical land in an area less than five percent the size of Iraq, continuous target of an unrelenting barbaric terrorism, unable even to build a fence against it without international rebuke — Israel has been under physical and existential duress since the very minute of its creation.

But it not only exists, and continues to exist, but has — in the midst of multiple wars – made contributions few other nations can claim, as Akiva Eldar noted last week:

[B]esides killing, being killed and producing smart bombs, the tiny Jewish state also produces Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, life-saving medicines and cutting-edge optic fibers. . . .  Israel ranks second in terms of the number of non-U.S. companies traded on the Nasdaq and the number of start-ups it has. . . . Checkpoint started in the home of two young Israelis.

All this is the result of millions of people who struggled, held fast to their religion, survived discrimination, pogroms and a Holocaust, kept memories of the land alive through the centuries, while living in far-off places without a home, each year praying that — as difficult and improbable as it seemed — next year they would be in Jerusalem.

Yesterday we were in Los Angeles. Tomorrow we will be in Jerusalem.  It is a miracle.