I am writing these words in my home, Kiryat Arba-Hebron, Israel. Forty-seven years ago this week, Israel liberated all of Judea and Samaria, Israel’s biblical heartland, in six days. On 28 Iyar (June 7th that year), they liberated the Temple Mount, where the Temple will one day be rebuilt, and the next day they liberated Hebron, where the Patriarchs and Matriarchs of the Jewish People are buried. Ever since that year, many Jews in Israel have commemorated 28 Iyar each year, thanking G-d for the miracles of those times.
In Israel, before the Six Day War began, thousands of graves were prepared. It was feared that the Arab armies would overrun the Land and Jews would be massacred. Israel’s mood was black. As a boy in Baltimore, I remember during the war reciting responsively the “Lamenatzeyach” of Psalm 20 in our sixth grade class with Rebbe Yechezkel Flamm, a”h. I will never forget his thundering voice! The ultimate results astonished the entire world. It was the living fulfillment of Psalm 126: “Then shall they say among the nations, ‘The L-rd has done great things for them!’”
Let me share with you two brief vignettes from those times:
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Rav Shmuel Eliyahu, the Chief Rabbi of Tzefat, visited Kiryat Arba last week and told how the famous refusenik Natan Sharansky, today head of the Jewish Agency, described to him the Six Day War as experienced in Russia in 1967. Sharansky related that when the war ended, all of Moscow was permeated with a special feeling about Israel. He, personally, had until that moment barely known that he was Jewish, and knew nothing about the Shema prayer. Yet Israel’s victory filled him with Jewish sentiments he had not realized he possessed. He also said that, after the war, the Russian anti-Semites remained anti-Semites but that they were henceforth more respectful in their treatment of Jews.
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My downstairs neighbor, Giyora Gofer, is the town gardener. One time he described to me how he became religious. Giyora grew up on a leftist, socialist kibbutz. In 1967, he was one of the paratroopers who liberated the Temple Mount. When the soldiers had completed that task, many of them were overcome by emotion. They ran to the Kotel and wept and prayed. But Giyora just stood off to the side. He felt empty, at a loss. He didn’t understand what the big deal was about this wall. On the kibbutz where he had grown up, he had been educated to contribute to society with army service, but nobody had taught him anything about the spirit. That lack set him thinking, and when he completed his army service, he attended a new yeshiva for the newly religious, Machon Meir, founded by Rav Dov Begon, who had studied for many years at Yeshivat Mercaz HaRav.
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When we think about modern Israel, we have much to thank G-d for. The obviousness of that fact is astounding. Just think: During the Holocaust, 22,000 Jews were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz each day. That number is roughly equal to the number of Jews who have died in Israel’s wars and in terror attacks during the past 66 years!
The Six Day War is just one example of G-d’s mercy to the Jewish People in modern times. There are many more: Israel’s economy is booming, vast stores of natural gas have recently been discovered along its coast, and the government has overseen the development over the past 10 years of desalinization plants that lessen Israel’s dependence on the water of the Sea of Galilee.
Israel’s army is strong and intelligent. Without a doubt, Israel has the most intelligent army in the entire Middle East. Our enemies know that, and they have not dared to attack Israel physically in 41 years, since 1973. Of course, they sometimes bomb us, but they do that out of frustration, because they know it’s all they can do - and they have awful aim.
With the help of our artful prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, the Palestinian Authority has been maneuvered into a position in which they look like a bad joke. On Jerusalem Day, Netanyahu announced, “We intend to build everywhere in a united Jerusalem,” and yesterday, the PA, which had just signed an accord with Hamas, responded, “Netanyahu’s remarks will place obstacles before American efforts to revive the peace talks.”
Spiritually, observance and Torah learning are on the rise. In the country’s early years, the government actually made an effort to turn some portions of the immigrant population irreligious. In addition, for the first 25 years of Israel’s existence as an independent country, a large percentage of its religious youth became irreligious at the end of high school when they enlisted in the army.
By and large, that is no longer the case. Today, religious young men serve in the army and do not become irreligious. Quite the opposite, there is a move towards religion, towards Jewish religious values, and a long list can be made of prominent young secular musicians who have turned towards religion.
Likewise, the number of yeshiva students in Israel far surpasses the number of yeshiva students in pre-war Europe. Today, the Jerusalem Mir Yeshiva has 7,500 students, making it 30 times larger than it was in Europe. Thousands of Mir yeshiva students study in additional batei midrash near the main beit midrash. There is simply no room in the main beit midrash for everyone.
Does Israel owe the success of its army and economy to Israel’s yeshiva students? I believe it does. And do the yeshivot owe their existence and success to the State of Israel’s existence and to its army? I believe that as well. Rav Shlomo Aviner, Rosh Yeshiva of Ateret Kohanim in the Old City, whom I translate each week, has likened the State of Israel to a symphony orchestra, with each part of the orchestra doing its share, and irreplaceable.
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We are left with a question. Why did G-d take a secular, anti-religious Zionist movement that many rabbis initially rejected and refused to participate in and make that the vehicle of something that today seems increasingly holy?
During Pesach I saw an amazing idea in Rav Moshe Alshich’s commentary on Parashat Bo. There he wonders why G-d chose the lamb as a symbol of redemption, the animal to be slaughtered on the 14th of Nissan for the pascal offering, when that very animal was a symbol of idolatry, being an animal that the Egyptians worshipped. Wouldn’t that animal have been too impure to serve as a vehicle of redemption?
His answer is, and I quote directly: “G-d wished to transform the lamb of idolatry into a “lamb of holiness.”
We know that the future Redemption is supposed to be modeled on the redemption from Egypt. Let us pray that the “lamb of idolatry” will continue turning into a “lamb of holiness,” and that the State of Israel will ultimately become what Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook, zt”l, hoped for it to become: “The foundation of G-d’s throne on earth, whose entire purpose is to render G-d One and His Name One” (Orot HaTorah 9:1).
Raphael Blumberg, the author of a book about Rabbi Boruch Milikowsky, has lived in Kiryat Arba, Israel for 30 years. He translates books there from Hebrew to English, and can be contacted at rdb1000@actcom.net.il.
