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Lessons For Living: Happy Birthday Dear Israel-With love...YOM HATZMAUT

A Great Love

The Jewish people have had a long love affair with Israel.

It’s probably one of the most extended loves for a land and for a place, bar our first people of Australia. It was there at our beginning; it has been there for us throughout the long ages in which we were exiled from it or made exiles and strangers in it. It has preoccupied our prayers, it has impassioned our poets, it has driven our dreams. Over the past 18 months, it has challenged and sharpened the identity of every caring and thoughtful Jew.

It was there at our beginnings as a people: the very first Jews, Abraham and Sarah, are called to leave their comfortable Babylonian Villa and set off to this place of promise.
The very first words to Abraham in the 12th chapter of the book of Genesis are- “God said to Avraham go, leave your birthplace and home and set off for the place that I will show you."

It is the place and destiny of hope for the newly freed Israelites as they depart from the land of the Nile towards the land of their ancestors. It is the fulfilment and culmination of their exodus journey.

It is the country that Moses, before his death, is given just a poignant glimpse of. It fills his heart and his soul before he dies.

And it becomes the place that Jews yearn for and dream about in the centuries of their dispersion across the world. It also becomes for many the place they wish to return to, even if only to be buried.

The ancient rabbis embodied the longing for Israel in all the basic prayers of the Jewish people. It is mentioned in the daily morning, afternoon and evening service –' May our eyes be privileged to witness the return to Zion with joy and compassion'. After every single meal, the Grace or blessing contains the words: Rebuild the holy city of Jerusalem. The great writer, King David, made the longing for the land of Israel the central part of his many beautiful pieces in the book of Psalms. “May God bless you from Zion, may you gaze upon the goodness of Jerusalem, all the days of your life. And may you see children born to your children, peace upon Israel! " (Psalm 128). As in these words, the blessing of a good life is inextricably connected to the good land. Medieval scholar  Judah HaLevi famously said -'I may live in the West, but my heart is always in the East. Israel is the direction Jews orient themselves toward when they pray and when they dream of redemption.

Israel’s great  modern poet, Yehuda Amichai , wrote countless and often complex poems about his inimitable relationship with the land: “ This is my homeland where I can dream without stumbling, Do bad deeds without being damned… Cry without shame, lie and betray without going to hell for it… This is the land we covered with field and forest… This is the land whose dead lie in the ground instead of coal and iron and gold: they are fuel for the coming of messiahs. And the door of my house stands open…”

This Yom Haatzmaut, as we celebrate Israel’s rebirth as modern state we will reflect on our long relationship with this land and how our love has been so sorely wounded by the savage attacks on it since October 7; how we ache when the object of our admiration is in such a pain and torn by  trauma.

Bewilderingly, we will contemplate how the very existence of our enduring connection to this land is questioned, dismissed and threatened again with extinction. How the very old and revered name Zion, is regarded as a scourge and object of derision. In Australia, we will lament how many we thought were friends of Israel and our community wish to separate us from our Zionist identity. We will also continue to struggle with our (mostly young?) Jewish neighbours who slander the land and deride their fellow Jews, and who seem to show more compassion for Israel’s critics and detractors than they do for their own family. 

Even if almost all of us Australian Jews love the promised land with a singular passion it doesn’t mean we can’t struggle with it and feel betrayed and bewildered by some of its politicians or policies, or what we may see as threats to its democracy or poor treatment of some its Arab citizens and some of those on the West Bank, or wrestle with the dreadful suffering of non -Hamas  Palestinians in Gaza even if caused by their own brutal leaders. Love doesn’t have to be blind, and it’s been said that a strong relationship requires choosing to love each other even in those moments when you struggle to like each other. Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it: “Once the realisation is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.”

This Yom Haatzmaut, we may feel like Jacob after his great wrestling match, limping but stronger, and paradoxically more whole, as he gets up from the ground with his new name, Israel, and makes it back to his old homeland, aka Israel!!

Happy birthday Israel; Yom Haatzmaut Sameach

Rabbi Ralph