A Place for Us
Sermon Israel Shabbat 77th Birthday of Israel, Tazria-Metzora
Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ
Shabbat Shalom, and, in a way, chag samei’ach! We celebrated Yom Ha’Atzma’ut, Israel’s 77th Independence Day, yesterday and it was a bit of a muted holiday, to be honest. First, by the fact that Israel remains at war in Gaza, as well as in a larger war against Iran and its terrorist proxies in Yemen, the Houthis, and with the greatly diminished but still dangerous Hezbollah terrorists, and remains engaged in Syria, as well. Second, by the fact that 59 hostages remain in captivity in Gaza, held by the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas who kidnapped them and stole them from their lives, and the current estimate is that 25 of those hostages remain alive after over 18 months of brutal captivity. Third, on Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzma’ut on Wednesday and Thursday there were wildfires all around Jerusalem that injured people—although, thank God, no one died—and that certainly impacted the celebrations of what is typically a major day of joy for Israel.
Those considerations, as serious as they are, should not diminish our appreciation of the miracle of Israel’s existence and resilience. It is important to remember that until the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, which came about through a vote of the United Nations, Jews had no guaranteed place of refuge when things went bad in the countries we lived in. That included the United States, which provided Jews virtually no refuge from the coming storm: while Jewish immigration to America was large in the period between 1880 and 1920, when trouble began in earnest in Germany and all over Europe in the 1930s, the United States was in one of its isolationist periods, and very anti-immigration. That should sound familiar, no?
Just as Hitler was fomenting the worst antisemitic pogroms in all history, which eventually turned into the Holocaust of European Jewry, Jews fleeing the Nazis had nowhere to go. Had Israel existed in the 1930s the authoritarian fascist perpetrators of the Shoah would not have been able to murder 6 million Jews, 2 million of them children.
So, at least, the very existence of a Jewish State that accepts immigrants if they are even ¼ Jewish without exception is a gigantic change for our people, and for the world. In the years following its founding in 1948, after victory in the hard-fought war of independence against many much larger Arab armies, Israel accepted and absorbed more immigrants than it had citizens, by a factor of 2 or 3:1. That is, the 800,000 original Israelis—about 650,000 of whom were Jewish, the rest predominantly Muslim and Christian Arabs—saw refugees fleeing persecution flood into Israel. Initially, there were the displaced Jews of Europe, Holocaust survivors the victorious Allies had herded into camps in places like Cyprus, and even in Germany. Then the Jewish refugees came from the Arab countries: Egypt and Morocco and Yemen and Syria and Lebanon and Jordan and Libya and Tunisia and Algeria and Iraq, and also from Iran and Afghanistan, places Jews had lived for many, many centuries, but now were forced out of, and typically robbed of any wealth they possessed by the governments of the countries they fled. These immigrants arrived in Israel with little but their clothes and their Zionist dreams of 1800 years’ duration. Soon, more refugees came to Israel, escaping Hungary and other Iron Curtain countries under the Soviet Union’s iron rule, before Russian control choked off all immigration to Israel for decades.
Somehow or other, the new Jewish nation, which was economically and natural-resource poor and had to dedicate a great deal of its limited budget to defending itself and developing infrastructure, still managed to integrate and include all the new arrivals into the nation, seeing them as positive resources and additions to the country, which they certainly proved to be. It was an amazing feat, and today we unfortunately take it for granted. As we said on Passover, if this was all that Israel accomplished by its existence, Dayeinu. But of course, that is far from all that Israel has accomplished.
By the way, if the many Arab countries surrounding Israel had done nearly as much—or anything—for the 250,000 or so Arab refugees of the War of Independence, they would have long ago been fully successfully integrated into the many Arab nations of the Middle East. The existence of the “Palestinian Problem” is the direct manufactured result of the conscious choices of many Arab leaders to keep those particular Arab refugees in poverty and misery so that they could be used as human weapons against Israel. Tragically, in addition to the suffering it caused the refugees themselves, it often resulted in terrible results for the countries that kept the Arab refugees in these camps—Jordan and Lebanon were convulsed by civil wars initiated by the now “Palestinian” Arabs, and in Lebanon’s case the country never fully recovered.
In addition to serving as a refuge for Jews fleeing persecution, Israel has done so much more: created amazing, modern cities; continually excavated and displayed its fantastic archeological heritage, pioneered desert agriculture and water use, become an international center of high tech and medical research and pharmaceutical and technological development, created symphonies, museums, and a vibrant and vital culture unique in the world; pioneered research in a wide variety of academic fields; and more. Of course, Israel also won a series of wars initiated by enemies who desired its destruction; it had to win, and it did.
Israelis created a fantastic country, filled with art, culture, incredible food, technology, music, development, sports, and of course history. Two examples: first, Israel is home to people who were born in 150 different nations, some of which no longer even exist; yet all the Israelis, whether their ancestors, or they, come from Ethiopia or Ukraine, from Argentina or Australia or Uzbekistan, India or Turkey or Russia, live together, in general, in harmony, serve in the same military, are part of a vibrant, vital democracy. A second example: In Israel, the most ultra-religious Jews coexist within blocks of the largest Pride Festival for LGBTQ+ people in the Middle East—OK, it’s the only one in the Middle East—but also one of the largest in the world in Tel Aviv. Israel is a diverse, dynamic, exciting, creative, fun, serious, nation, worthy of wonderful celebration any and every Yom Ha’Atzma’ut. No matter the current conditions, which are always variable… After all, this is by the far the most advanced country in the one of the most challenging regions in the world, the Middle East. As the old joke goes:
During the first days of creation, God turned to the angels and said: "I am now going to create a land called Israel. It will be a land of beautiful hills and mountains with snow, sparkly lakes, forests full of all kinds of trees, high cliffs overlooking sandy beaches with an abundance of sea life."
God continued, "I shall make the land rich so as to make the inhabitants prosper, a land that grows every kind of delicious fruit and vegetable on earth. I shall call these inhabitants Israelis, and they shall be known to the all the peoples of the earth."
"But Lord," asked the angels, "don't you think you are being too generous to these Israelis?"
"Not really," God replied, "wait and see the neighbors I am going to give them."
It’s a rough neighborhood, the Middle East. But the existence of this extraordinary nation, diverse to the point of absurdity, now approaching 10,000,000 citizens, is a great gift. May it continue to thrive and flourish, always.