A Growing-Up Country
Sermon Shabbat Tazria-Metzora, Israel’s 75th Birthday
Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ
This week we celebrate Israel’s 75th Anniversary, a big birthday for a still-young country. It’s probably only after a nation reaches 100 years old and still has the same system of government that you can truly stop talking about how young it is. There are certain things a nation needs to work out over time, and no matter how quickly it develops and advances—and Israel has made astonishing progress in this fairly short period of 75 years—it’s only after the passage of a couple of full generations that things truly settle in.
Israel has changed dramatically over the seven and half decades of its existence as a modern nation. The Israel of 1948 had about 600,000 residents. That is fewer people than live in three of Israel’s metropolitan areas now, and the population has grown to 9.7 million people, including 7.2 million Jews, roughly half the Jewish population of the entire world. The absorption of immigrant Jews from all over the world has been astonishing; in its three quarters of a century Israel has absorbed many more immigrants than it had as original citizens by a factor of 10. If America in the 75 years since World War II had successfully integrated 300 million immigrants instead of the 30 million who have actually arrived here it would approximate Israel’s ability to accept immigrants.
In 1948, the new nation of Israel was, frankly, a poor country, and it remained so throughout the 1950s, 60s, 70s and even 80s. It was a 2nd World kind of country well into the 1990s when the economy dramatically expanded, but today it is decidedly a first-world nation, similar to Italy or Spain in its living standards. Israel’s status as “Start-Up Nation” is well earned, as the Israeli high-tech sector is acknowledged throughout the world as a center of innovation and economic development. It is also on the leading edge of medical technologies and treatments, and Israel may be the world’s most advanced country in strategic and technological water resource use and development, as well as desert agriculture and solar power. Israel has become a regional economic powerhouse, on the level of highly developed European nations. It is the envy of its Middle Eastern neighbors.
Militarily, for three decades the nascent Jewish nation was under existential threat of destruction. That was true from 1947’s UN Partition Plan until the Camp David Accords in the late 1970s, which meant that until then any war could be one that led to Israel’s annihilation and the murder of all the Jews living there—and there were four such wars, each of which ended with Israel victorious but always at a high price. But with peace treaties with Egypt and eventually Jordan, and of course the incredible development of the Israeli military and intelligence organizations, as well as the various industries and government entities associated with them, Israel has never been more secure militarily that is now.
Diplomatically, Israel was incredibly isolated throughout most of its early history. The UN might have legally created the country—the first it ever voted to form, and still one of only a small handful that have been internationally invented by the UN—but Israel was a pawn in the Cold War battle between the US and Soviet Union for decades. From the 1940s to the 1970s and 80s the Arab League boycott of Israel was in force, and it only lost its economic teeth during the Oslo Process of the 1990s. Its disappearance certainly helped with the Israeli economic surge of the 1990s and 2000s, fueled by the new treaties with Arabs and the rapid pace of investment and development in Israel. With the Abraham Accords just a couple of years ago Israel’s integration into the international community has never been more developed. While far from completely welcomed diplomatically, Israel is more widely accepted and influential than it has ever been.
And one small fact that emerged from our Religious School learning about Israel: do you know how many Olympic Gold Medals Israelis have won? That number is 3—not a huge number, but not bad for a tiny country that forms 1/10 of 1% of the world’s population. But do you know how many Nobel Prizes Israelis have won? 13! Any country where there are 13 Nobel Laureates and only 3 Olympic gold medalists certainly has at least most of its values in the right places.
Politically, how is Israel doing? Isn’t it tearing itself apart over political and religious divisions now? Isn’t it on the verge of a widely predicted civil war?
Well, no, not at all. Israel is experiencing widespread peaceful protests over a key political issue, the independence of its judiciary and the limits on executive authority. Like open, liberal, orderly societies it has a vibrant free press and great tradition of vigorous public debate and protest, and these are being exercised every day. But it is nowhere near civil war, or anything like it. For a 75 years-young nation it is doing just what it should do, hashing out important issues publicly and peacefully—if loudly.
Are there problems in Israel? Sure. The Palestinian issue is not going away anytime soon, and after 55 years the West Bank is no more fully integrated into Israel than the Gaza Strip was before Israel walked away from it under Ariel Sharon. There is growing economic inequality in a nation that started out socialist and egalitarian. There is undoubtedly a religious-secular divide, and an ultra-Orthodox/Chareidi vs everyone else divide, too. There is some political corruption—imagine that; we would never see that in the United States!—the cost of living is very high, and my goodness they have a traffic problem in all major cities. Terrorism is always a disturbing threat, although it directly impacts very few people, and the level of stress in Israeli society is just as high as you would expect in a Jewish country. And Israeli politics is pretty crazy—which coming from an American in 2023 is saying something.
On balance? Israel is doing amazingly well and should absolutely be celebrated!
Look, before we reached a century our own United States fought a brutal Civil War that killed 15% of all the young men in the country. Brutal human slavery was legal, widespread and flourishing in America until we were nearly 90 years old. And of course, when America turned 75 years old women still couldn’t vote or own property or hold public office—that lasted another 70 years—and the original owners of the continent, Native Americans, were being herded like cattle onto “reservations” and hunted, starved, and massacred. As America turned 100 years old, Jim Crow laws were being established all across the South, turning Blacks into, at best, second-class citizens, while Chinese immigrants were ruthlessly exploited and brutalized. When we turned 125 years old, strike-breaking in America usually resulted in the massacre of many striking workers, child labor was ubiquitous, and American cities were almost literally cesspools of congestion, pollution and disease.
We grew up as a nation, and for all of our weirdness and social challenges, we fixed a lot of those horrible problems. Israel will fix its problems, too, as they are nowhere near as hard as the problems it has already overcome so magnificently.
It’s an amazing country, and Jews everywhere should be proud of it, especially this week. Frankly, all people today should be proud of it and aspire to achieve what Israel has created in just 75 years.
We are Jews; we will find things to both celebrate and criticize in everything, including Israel. That’s as it should be; no one, and nothing, is perfect, and that’s certainly true of nations. But this week, we should all take a moment to enjoy what the only Jewish nation on the planet has produced in just three-quarters of a century of extraordinary life: a positive gift to an often ungrateful world of a vibrant, super-energetic democracy, a scientific and creative arts center of vitality that continues to develop and mature. Mazal Tov to our own Jewish country; may it continue to mature and grow up, with our love and support.