Today is a significant one in Jewish history. Sixteen years ago today, the President of Israel, Ezer Weizman, 71 years old, born in Tel Aviv, addressed a joint session of the German Bundestag and Bundesrat, the first such speech by an Israeli president and only the fourth by a foreign head of state in Germany.
He spoke in Hebrew. It is one of the most remarkable speeches ever given by a Jewish leader. Here is how it began:
It was fate that delivered me and my contemporaries into this great era, when the Jews returned to and re-established their homeland. I am no longer a wandering Jew who migrates from country to country, from exile to exile. But all Jews in every generation must regard themselves as if they had been there, in previous generations, places, and events. Therefore, I am still a wandering Jew, but not along the far-flung paths of the world. Now I migrate through the expanses of time, from generation to generation, down the paths of memory.
Memory shortens distances. Two hundred generations have passed since my people first
came into being, and to me they seem like a few days. Only two hundred generations have passed since a man named Abraham rose up and left his country and birthplace for the country that is today mine. Only two hundred generations have elapsed from the day Abraham purchased the Cave of Makhpela in the city of Hebron to the murderous conflicts that have taken place there in my generation.Only one hundred fifty generations have passed from the Pillar of Fire of the Exodus from Egypt to the pillars of smoke from the Holocaust. And I, a descendant of Abraham, born in Abraham's country, have witnessed them all.
I was a slave in Egypt. I received the Torah at Mount Sinai. Together with Joshua and Elijah, I crossed the Jordan River. I entered Jerusalem with David, was exiled from it with Zedekiah, and did not forget it by the rivers of Babylon. When the Lord returned the captives of Zion, I dreamed among the builders of its ramparts. I fought the Romans and was banished from Spain. I was bound to the stake in Mainz. I studied Torah in Yemen and lost my family in Kishinev. I was incinerated in Treblinka, rebelled in Warsaw, and emigrated to the Land of Israel, the country whence I had been exiled and where I had been born, from which I come and to which I return.
I am a wandering Jew who follows in the footsteps of his forebears, and just as I escorted them there and then, so do my forebears accompany me and stand here with me today.
Then he thanked everyone for the honor, noted how many familiar and friendly faces were before him, expressed gratitude for the friendship of Germany, and told his audience that it was not an easy visit — since only 50 years, “a mere moment in the lengthy history of my people,” had
passed since the end of World War II:
It is not easy for me to travel around this country and hear the memories and voices crying out to me from the ground. It is not easy for me to stand here and speak with you, my friends in this house. Jews have lived in Germany for a thousand years or more. German Jewry was the oldest Jewish community in Europe until the Nazis destroyed it. From the first traders who came here in the footsteps of the Romans to the scientists of the twentieth century, from Kalonymos to Mendelssohn, from the blood libel of Fulda to the horrors of Kristallnacht; from the badge of shame to the yellow patch; from Martin Luther's anti-Semitic missives to the Nuremberg Laws, from the commentaries of Rashi to the poems of Heinrich Heine; Rabbeinu Gershom, the Light of the Exile; Walther Rathenau; Martin Buber; Franz Rosenzweig; Albert Einstein — these are only some of the names that this country has known.
Among the millions of my people's children whom the Nazis led to their deaths, there were other names that we might have uttered here today with the same degree of esteem and admiration. But we do not know their names. How many unwritten books died with them? How many uncomposed symphonies suffocated in their throats? How many scientific discoveries did not mature in their intellects? Every one of them was killed twice: once as a child led by the Nazis to the camps, and again as the adult he or she might have been. The Nazis stole them not only from their families and their people, but from the whole of humankind. I, as President of the State of Israel, can grieve for them and commemorate them, but I cannot forgive in their name.
Then he turned to the present:
We did not return to our borders in warships; we did not march home waving spears. We returned in convoys of dreamers and in boats of oppressed refugees. We returned, and, like our forefather King David who purchased the Temple Mount, and our patriarch Abraham who bought the Cave of Makhpela, we bought land, we sowed fields, we planted vineyards, we built houses, and even before we achieved statehood, we were already bearing weapons to protect our lives.
Time and again we stretched out our hands, and time and again we were rejected. Time and again we went to war; time and again we killed and were killed. Time and again we left our homes, offices, universities, and orchards for the battlefields. Time and again we discovered that beyond even the greatest victories, only crises and losses lurked. …
In the last century, since we returned to our country, we have built more than villages and towns, factories and barns, shops and army bases. We have also installed democratic governance and built a massive cultural and educational system: schools, research institutes, libraries, museums, conservatories, and universities. But transcending all of these — which exist in any civilized state — we have wrought a unique cultural miracle: the revival of our language, the Hebrew language. It is the language in which I am speaking to you now, the language which, more than anything else, symbolizes and attests to our revival.
We and our language are alive. We who have arisen from the ashes, and the language that waited in the shrouds of Torah scrolls and between the pages of the prayerbooks, are alive. The language that was whispered in prayer only, that was read only in synagogues, that was sung only in liturgy, that was shrieked in the gas chambers — in the prayer "Shma Yisrael" — has been revived. I know that German is richer than Hebrew in many ways, but I do not lack the words to express my feelings, nor have Jews ever lacked words to express their faith, love, dreams, yearnings, and hopes.
We have developed a suitable vocabulary for our special needs. We await, we yearn, we desire, we anticipate, we long for, we hope, we thirst, we crave, we imagine…. I stop here in order to apologize to the interpreters in case they find it hard to select the right words. …
We still pray in Hebrew, but now we also use it to speak, to write, to work and study, to argue, to court each other, and to sing. And the miracle is all the greater because if Isaiah, Solomon, and Jesus were here today, they would understand what I am saying just as I and my daughter and grandchildren understand their words, spoken and written and preserved in the same language thousands of years ago. …
There was a lot more in the speech. But here was his final paragraph:
Ladies and gentlemen, we are a people of memory and prayer. We are a people of words and hope. We have neither established empires nor built castles and palaces. We have only placed words on top of each other. We have fashioned ideas; we have built memorials. We have dreamed towers of yearnings — of Jerusalem rebuilt, of Jerusalem united, of a peace that will be swiftly and speedily established in our days. Amen.