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A Thought for Yom Ha-Atzmaut
Israel Independence Day
(Posted yesterday on social media and edited slightly here)
Today is Yom Ha-Atzmaut.
Israel's Independence Day.
It’s 76th year as the modern Jewish state.
If you want to argue with me on how Israel is conducting the war against Hamas; its mistreatment of Palestinians in the West Bank; illegal settlements and growing religious extremism.
Talk to me all you want.
But not on Yom Ha-Atzmaut.
And if you knew me or have read anything I have written or heard any sermon I have delivered, you would know how I feel about those issues. You would know that if you think you are outraged, you have no idea how this lifelong Zionist feels when Israel does not live up to the highest ideals of a Jewish democratic state.
And if the word Zionist in the paragraph above bothered you, then let me save you some precious time.
Scroll down to another Facebook post.
I will never apologize for being a Zionist nor feel the need to explain that the Jewish people have a right to self-determination in our ancestral and spiritual homeland.
My people deserve that like any other people.
And we exercised that right through the national movement known as Zionism.
And Israel was reborn.
We can debate the contours of that state and what a Palestinian state should look like, but Israel will be her Jewish neighbor.
In Israel, my long-suffering people have a haven and a homeland for the first time in almost 2000 years.
We still haven’t recovered from the Holocaust where two out of every three European Jews were killed by the Nazis.
That was a genocide.
And that happened to us far too often because we didn’t have a place to flee to when we were being murdered.
The arc of Jewish history has always bent toward injustice.
And crushed the bodies of Jews worldwide.
But not our spirit and no longer today.
Israel is my people’s eternal hope and our greatest dream fulfilled.
And on Yom HaAtzmaut, I am not going to debate her right to exist nor point the moral finger at her.
The former never and the latter in the days ahead.
Today, I will be grateful to G-d that we have a Jewish state.
A country that touches my soul despite its complexities and imperfections.
Inspires me despite its inequities and inequalities.
I am living as a Jew in a time where Israel is once again a state.
A modern Jewish miracle.
Days after Bergen-Belsen was liberated in 1945, BBC radio broadcasted the survivors of that concentration camp singing Hatikvah, the 1878 poem that would eventually become the Israeli national anthem.
It means "Hope".
A Jewish state for the first time in almost 2000 years still gives me chills.
And hope.
G-d bless the Jewish state of Israel.
-Rabbi Victor Urecki
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