One of the most well-known stories in the Talmud recalls the moment when Rabbi Akiva saw a hole in a rock made by a million seemingly insignificant drops of water that had fallen on it. It was not a dramatic event or a particularly exciting one, but it was his “light bulb” moment and it changed his life completely. A man who detested Torah and Torah Jews to the degree where the sight of one provoked him to thoughts of violence; became one.
He was forty when this event happened. In Avot it says that forty is when someone matures enough to attain binah, understanding.
I strive not to be too religious in this column but I hope you will allow me to suggest that it was not serendipity that the shepherd called Akiva arrived at that spot to witness that phenomenon at that precise time in his life. Hashem brought all three elements together at that specific moment to achieve the outcome He desired, allowing Akiva to become Rabbi Akiva. Before he was forty, he may have seen the same rock with the same hole, but simply not have achieved the depth to understand its significance or more importantly, its significance to him.
The choreography of history that brings various essential elements together at the right moment to provoke us to react and change, is one of the recurring themes of the story of the Jewish people. It happened when one old Cohen called Matisyahu took up arms against Greece. It happened when a young boy with his slingshot went out to fight a giant named Goliath.
It seems to me that precisely that choreography can be observed again now.
You will have to indulge me if I cite another religious reference to introduce it. At the Red Sea Moshe stated that Hashem is the G-d of war. He allows them to start and decides their outcomes.
I am writing this on a plane returning from a worried Europe where it seems very likely Russia will launch a war in Ukraine.
The UK’s lurid and much ridiculed tabloid “Sun” newspaper even quoted the Vilna Gaon. They spoke about a war like this being the herald of the Messiah. Then again they frequently report on flying saucers.
The West’s response to Russia’s aggression has been to threaten Putin with financial repercussions. Russia’s ambassador to the UK stated in the crudest language that President Putin couldn’t care less. The Kremlin knows that its great ally in Beijing will squash any western attempts to reprimand Russia at the UN and other international forums. In addition, China will happily buy Russia’s gas in the unlikely event that Western Europe actually carries through any of its threats.
There is another dancer holding hands with Russia and China and that is Iran. All three have conducted joint military exercises. They all “have each other’s back” and if the West’s response to Russia’s possible war in Ukraine has been pitiful, its response to Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, especially during the Obama and Biden Presidencies has been a joke.
All three nations sense in the West, to quote the British Secretary of Defense, “A whiff of “Munich” in the air,” referencing the cowardly kowtowing of British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain to Hitler. The Jewish people remember with awful clarity what it meant for us the last time the rotting stench of appeasement wafted across the world stage.
As these three dancers take up their positions on the world stage, the one of the three who does not have atomic weapons, is very likely to get them.
It’s not hard to understand the worrying significance of today’s ominous events to Am Yisrael.
And yet with a little of the wisdom that Rabbi Akiva achieved, history’s new dance just might provoke as dramatic a life changing transformation in the Jewish people and particularly those living in the State of Israel, as it did in him.
The original Zionists were as resolutely and bitterly opposed to everything the Torah and her adherents stood for as Akiva the shepherd was. Their philosophical descendants can be seen and heard loudly across the State of Israel and its government today. But Jews can evolve and change direction. The word for that is teshuvah and any Jew with even the slightest knowledge of Tanach, will know that is a process that Jews embraced at the national level repeatedly throughout our history.
I personally never believed, unlike Herzl and those early Zionists, that a Jewish state would be the answer to Klal Yisrael’s long and bloody exile…but I could believe that a Jewish state could evolve and change to become precisely that, as the Maharal of Prague writes.
In the Amidah, three times daily, we state fearlessly that Hashem will rebuild Yerushalayim. The words we use, “Boneh Yerushalayim” are in the present tense, is building Jerusalem, not “Yibaneh Yerushalayim” will build Jerusalem.
That project already began from the moment of its destruction. There was and is no serendipity to the events or choreography of history. They all lead to that conclusion.
I have a very wealthy friend who told me of a meeting he was invited to in Tel Aviv around fifteen years ago. He told me he could not discuss the details of the meeting with me but told me that afterwards he was talking to a group is Israeli generals who took part. These men were all career soldiers from the highest echelons of the IDF where religious observance is anathema. They all nodded their heads in agreement as one of them told my friend, “You have to believe in Hashem. We know precisely what the Iranians are planning. If you don’t believe in Him we have no chance.”
Perhaps, as we watch Iran’s powerful ally menacing Ukraine, Jews will experience another light bulb moment. We may understand that like Akiva, Hashem brought all these events together for us to transform ourselves as he did… and allow Him to complete the rebuilding of Yerushalayim.
