Israel at 70: A miracle in disguise

A J Heschel

To mark the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the modern state of Israel, here are some of Heschel's thoughts on its establishment.

Unprecedented.  A people despised, persecuted and scattered to all corners of the earth, has the audacity to dream of regaining authenticity, of being free in the Holy Land.

For nearly 2,000 years and many times a day in joy and sorrow we pray for you, Jerusalem, and our prayers never turned pale.  What is it we implore the Lord every Sabbath as we are about to open the Ark to take out the Torah?

Merciful father,
Deal kindly with Zion,
Rebuild the walls of jerusalem,
Truly, in thee alone we trust
High and exalted king and god, eternal god.

Despoiled and dispersed, abased and harassed, we knew we were not estranged forever.  We mourned you, we never wept you away.  Hope was hatched in the nests of agony.

The love of this land was due to an imperative, not to an instinct, not to a sentiment.  There is a covenant, an engagement of the people to the land.  We live by covenants.  We could not betray our pledge or discard the promise.

When Israel was driven into exile, the pledge became a prayer; the prayer a dream; the dream a passion, a duty, a dedication.

Intimate attachment to the land, waiting for the renewal of Jewish life in the land of Israel, as part of our integrity, an existential fact.  Unique, sui generis, it lives in our hopes, it abides in our hearts.

It is a commitment we must not betray.  3,000 years of faithfulness cannot be wiped off.

To abandon the land would make a mockery to all our longings, prayers and commitments.  To abandon the land would be to repudiate the Bible.

Israel reborn represents a breakthrough into whole new areas of experience and understanding stop it defies conventional conceptions, ordinary expectations.  Its essence is a proclamation.

This is why the return to Zion is a source of embarrassment to so many of us who depend for intellectual efficacy upon conformity with mental habits.  In our scientific investigations, we use conceptual models in order to characterise an empirical situation under investigation; we are guided by the principle of generalisation, seeking to fit a particular object to a universal model.  The relation between model and things modelled is a relation of analogy.

In other words, our mental habit is to think in terms of sameness and to assume that things under consideration are mere copies, repetitions, and to disregard the unprecedented, distinctness, uniqueness.  We operate with established forms, with rubrics.

This is indeed the modern religious predicament.  The mysterious events so central to Judaism and Christianity seem so strange because they are unprecedented.

The return to Zion is an unprecedented drama, an event sui generis for which there is no model, no analogy.

The State of Israel is a surprise, yet the modern mind hates to be surprised.  Never before has a nation been restored to its ancient hearth after a lapse of 1,897 years.  This extraordinary aspect is bound to carry some shock to the conventional mind, to be a scandal to the mediocre mind and a foolishness to the positivists.  It requires reordering of some notions.

Here lies a lesson of importance.  It is the homogenisation of history that often deprives us of understanding.

Genuine history is not mere repetition, moving in a circle.  It is a fresh attempt, a new arrival.  The Bible begins with the words “At the beginning…” To Greek mythology, for example, where the assumption is that the world has always been in existence, the concept of beginning was inconceivable.  Jewish understanding further implies that also in history there can be novelty, beginning.

Israel is a miracle in disguise.  Things look natural and conceal what is a radical surprise.  Zion rebuilt becomes a harbinger of a new understanding, of how history is intertwined with the mystery.

Israel is the opposite of a commonplace, it is an extraordinary place, and it is on the verge of the extraordinary that we may encounter the marvel Israel as a novelty is not an absolutely new beginning, but a resurrection in Ezekiel’s sense.  It is in accord of a divine promise and a human achievement.

Source: Heschel, A J (1967).  Israel: An Echo of Eternity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  New York.  Pages 43-44; pages 49-51.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Abraham Joshua Heschel was a Polish-born American rabbi and one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century. Heschel, a professor of Jewish mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, authored a number of widely read books on Jewish philosophy and was active in the American civil rights movement.