No Jewish Holiday In Iyar? (I)
In his monthly column for Iyar, Shaya Winiarz wrote that unfortunately we have no holidays this month (Growth Through the Jewish Calendar, May 1).
He probably doesn’t realize that we in fact do have a very special holiday in Iyar. It is called Yom Ha’Atzmaut and it commemorates the day Hashem performed a tremendous miracle for us and gave us the independent State of Israel.
That which we had dreamed about for over 2,000 years became a reality on the fifth of Iyar. He performed another miracle for us 19 years later on the 28th of Iyar when we reclaimed all of Jerusalem and Yehuda and Shomron in the Six-Day War.
I fail to understand how so many of our Orthodox brethren cannot recognize a miracle when it is in front of their eyes. Can anyone imagine winning a war in six days against multitudes of armies on all sides? How about fighting a coalition of Arab countries with an army comprised of limited ammunition and a ragtag group of people, many of them survivors of the Holocaust, in 1948?
Does the sea really have to split before we can say, “This is my God and I exalt Him”?
By the way, the Atbash (a mneumonic for determining the days of the week that certain holidays fall out on) has the last day of Pesach corresponding to the ayin – the first letter – of Atzmaut.
Anna Weiss
(Via E-Mail)
No Jewish Holiday In Iyar? (II)
You published a letter of mine at this time last year on the miracle of Israel. In the wake of columnist Shaya Winiarz’s statement last week that there are no Jewish holidays in Iyar, I ask that you run the letter again:
The haredi position on Israel has always baffled me. If as believing Jews we hold that nothing happens by chance, and that history is molded by God’s Hand, how then can we say that the return of the Jewish people to their homeland after 2,000 years was mere happenstance, or even something that went against the wishes of the Creator?
If we believe the Jewish people were selected by God to bring the light of Torah to the world, and that our relationship with the Land of Israel plays a central role in our Covenant with Hashem and our standing in the eyes of the world (which mocked us with endless cries of “Where is your God?” through the long centuries of our exile), then surely the return to Zion is a landmark event in Jewish and world history. We disregard it or, worse, denigrate it at our great risk.
Haredim who dismiss the creation of Israel as just another historical event, or a sin against God by faithless Jews who had no patience with the Divine timetable, have to answer the question of why God would send such confusing signals by bringing about the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in Eretz Yisrael after millennia of Jewish homelessness.
They have to explain why, after centuries of dispersion and persecution and murder, a weak and defenseless Jewish people were suddenly able not only to bring a state into being, not only to fend off and defeat their enemies, but also to build that state into a scientific, technological and military powerhouse that at the same time funds more Torah learning and Torah institutions than we’ve ever seen anywhere before in history.
As a person of faith, I look at Israel and see a state that no rational person as recently as the 1930s and early 1940s would have believed possible.
Just imagine going back in time to a Russian village in 1893 or a Polish shtetl in 1923 or a Nazi death camp in 1943 and telling Jews there that within a few years a Jewish state would rise from the ash heap of history and its Jewish soldiers and scientists and doctors would astonish the world with their accomplishments.