The Jewish Journal has published my article entitled “The Second and Third Israeli Miracles," a reflection on the 70th Anniversary of the State of Israel.
Here are opening paragraphs:
Much of the commentary on the 70th anniversary of Israel’s founding has focused on the miraculous re-creation of the Jewish state after 1,878 years, on the same land where Jewish kingdoms had existed for centuries, with Jews speaking the same language in 1948 that they spoke in the first century, when the Romans exiled them from their land.
But there was another miracle in 1948. David Ben-Gurion described it in an essay he wrote in 1954, when Israel was six years old, entitled “The Eternity of Israel.”
The second miracle, Ben-Gurion wrote, was the extraordinary Jewish unity on May 14, 1948. Zionism had never been a single ideology. The movement included very disparate factions — Labor Zionists, Religious Zionists, Socialist Zionists, Revisionist Zionists, General Zionists, Cultural Zionists – and the conflicts among them had been fierce.
But every group signed Israel’s Declaration of Independence after resolving a final, seemingly intractable issue: some of the Zionists insisted that the document express thanks to God, while others were adamantly opposed, since they thought the Jewish state was solely the result of human effort, in a world where God was either indifferent or did not exist.
Ben-Gurion managed a compromise through the use of a skillful phrase. In its final form, the Declaration expressed the signatories’ faith in the “Rock of Israel.” It was a phrase that could be read as a reference to God – or rather as a metaphor for Jewish national strength.
The third Israeli miracle is almost the opposite of the second. Continue reading by clicking here.