Israel’s 60th Anniversary

How many would have believed in 1948 that, in another two decades this state would be a military titan bestriding the Middle East, its armies triumphantly camped from the outskirts of Cairo to those of Damascus?

How many would have believed in 1967 that another 40 years would pass with the titan still at war with its closest neighbours and unable to defend its population against small groups of guerrillas belonging to organizations pledged to destroy it?

How many would have believed that, in 2008, it would have become trendy to talk about its demise?

If you want to be pessimistic, you don’t have to look far for reasons. Israel is a tiny speck on the map, surrounded by a hostile Arab and Muslim world that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf and beyond; that is growing all the time in wealth, influence, population, military power, self-confidence and religious zealotry; and that continues to be convinced that a Jewish state in its midst is a historical anomaly and a moral injustice that must one day be wiped out. What rational gambler would bet on this state’s survival?

But one can argue the opposite side of it, too. Arab wealth and power will prove to be ephemeral products of an already doomed Age of Oil; so will radical Islam, which can never deliver on its political promises; in the long run, the Arab world will have to democratize, modernize and come to terms with Israel’s existence.
And meanwhile, Israel itself, far from a failure, has been an extraordinary success, a country that has gone in 60 years from being the poor, bankrupt, imperilled home of less than a million Jews to a militarily powerful, economically thriving, financially independent state of five-and-a-half million Jews who are among the world’s richest and most technologically advanced peoples. Already at peace with some of their Arab neighbours, they can hold out against the others until accepted by them as well.

History will decide — and its decision will almost surely not come in any of the ways we might expect it to. The only thing about history that is predictable is its unpredictability.

And yet as an Israeli — or, more precisely, as an American Jew who decided 38 years ago to make his life in Israel– there is a sense in which none of this matters to me.

I don’t wish to be misunderstood: The future of Israel is of enormous importance to me. The thought of Israel’s death is as saddening to me as the thought of my own.

But the thought of my death is not sufficient reason to make me wish I had never lived. On the contrary, it makes my life meaningful in a way it would not be had I been guaranteed immortality.

I feel the same about Israel. I did not choose to live in it because I was convinced it could not perish. I have always lived in it with the consciousness that it could. This is what makes it so precious to me.

I’ll go further. Were I prophetically to know that Israel would perish within the next 20 or 30 or 50 years, as many of its bon ton critics are now prognosticating, it would not make the slightest difference to me in terms of my own decisions. I would still feel happy that I chose to live here; would go on living here; would want my children to live here; would want them to raise my grandchildren here — until the last possible moment. Isn’t that the way we want to live our own personal lives, too: Until the last possible moment?

Happy — and proud. Because for all its shortcomings and mistakes, Israel is and will always be one of the most glorious historical adventures in the history of mankind. A 3,000-year-old people, the victim of the greatest act of mass murder ever committed on this planet, has the indomitable will to reconstitute itself in its ancient homeland, to revive its ancient language, to assert its right to live, to create new life, to nourish it and maintain it in defiance of all odds — there’s never been anything else like it before and never will be again.

I’m grateful that I’ve had the opportunity to be part of it. I would have felt envious had I been anywhere else.

One would not have thought such a question – 58 years after Israel’s restoration – would still be a question. The theme of the sermon was that nothing physical endures. Even empires do not last; entire civilizations come and go. . . .

The trick of life, Rabbi Wolpe argued, is to value something while you have it the way you will value it when it is gone. We frequently appreciate things only when we no longer have them – valuing them retroactively because we took them for granted while they were here.

So, the sermon concluded, we need to think about Israel, and what it means, and what we would do to have it if we did not already have it.