Refusing to recognize that there is not a Jew in the world whose lot in life has radically changed because there is an independent state of Israel is senseless.
Worse, it transforms different groups into political enemies when they should not be. There are those who ask how God could have established a “secular, impure” country. The question and debate should not exist in a vacuum. The debate must factor in the reality that Israel has the greatest concentration of Jews in the world, the greatest number of Torah talmidim in the world, the greatest and largest yeshivas, chassidic communities reborn, the most prolific Torah works, and research in every facet of Torah scholarship.
Israel represents the rebirth and rejuvenation of every facet of Jewish life and lore that the Nazis sought to destroy in their crematoriums. Rav Avraham Pam, zt”l, renowned and beloved rosh yeshiva of Torah Vodaath, posited a cardinal rule of Jewish history: Following every period of suffering, God embraces His children with comfort and goodness, just like a father who hugs and consoles his son following a tragedy. God never allows His children to teeter in pain and agony.
Rav Pam highlighted four such historical periods. The fourth one, he noted, was the period following the worst tragedy ever to befall the Jewish people – the Holocaust. Soon after, God hugged and embraced us with hakamat Medinat Yisrael, the establishment of the state of Israel.
* * * *
Perhaps the sorriest aspect of the failure to acknowledge the miracle of Israel is the inability to see how important the Jewish state is to every Jew everywhere in the world and how every Jew must be ready to stand up to defend it.
As we prepare to celebrate Yom Ha’Atzmaut 5774, there is a black cloud above us. These past months have seen ugly arguments and accusations that threaten the always fragile relationship between haredim and the general Israeli public. The question of the draft and yeshiva students has roiled Israeli politics like no other issue.
The haredim accuse the government of being evil, of being a modern-day Amalek. The accusations are baseless, of course. But the ugliness underlying the accusations is real. I understand that after sixty-five years of military exemptions, change is wrenching – but were the exemptions ever justified?
The general Israeli public could not understand why it had to defend and secure the land, sacrificing all, while there were those who were unwilling to share that burden.
Haredim talk of the “sanctity of Torah study.” Certainly Israel is not a nation without Torah. We know that. Today’s Torah world is nourished from its source in Jerusalem. And so it will continue forever. For God has given us two gifts, Torah and Eretz Yisrael. Unlike previous generations who beseeched God daily to return to Jerusalem, we are the privileged ones. We have returned.
Many haredim deride those who seek to defend our Jewish state. And yet it is nearly impossible to find a precedent in all of Tanach or Talmud where Jews did not defend their country together – and impossible to find an exemption for a Jew not to fight alongside his brethren because he is learning Torah.
Joshua, Moshe’s successor and talmid par excellence, the spiritual leader and commander of the first Jewish army in the land of Israel, was commanded by God that the “Torah shall not depart from your mouth day and night…” and then for the remainder of the Book of Joshua, this great leader goes out to battle together with all of his people.
How ironic that those early pesukim in the first chapter of Joshua are primary text sources for the mitzvah to learn Torah.
