מועדים לשיחה; מהדורה משפחתית, יום העצמאות, מעשה שהיהCeremony and Celebration Family Edition, The Hagim, Yom HaAtzma'ut, It Once Happened
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1A personal retelling of the story of the State of Israel in the words of Rabbi Sacks:
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2In 1871, my great-grandfather, Rabbi Arye Leib Frumkin, left his home in Kelm, Lithuania, to go and live in Israel, following his father who had done so some twenty years earlier. One of his first acts was to begin writing a book, The History of the Sages of Jerusalem, a chronicle of the continuous Jewish presence in Jerusalem since Ramban arrived there in 1265 and began reconstructing the community that had been devastated during the Crusades.
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3In 1881, pogroms broke out in over a hundred towns in Russia. In 1882, the notorious anti-Semitic May Laws were enacted, sending millions of Jews into flight to the West. Something happened to my great-grandfather as a result of these experiences. Evidently, he realised that aliya, going to live in Israel, was no longer a matter of a pilgrimage of the few, but a vital necessity for the many. He moved to one of the first agricultural settlements in a new yishuv. It had been settled some three or four years earlier, but the original farmers had contracted malaria and left. Some were now prepared to go back to work the land, but not to live there. It was, they believed, simply too much of a hazard to health.
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4He led the return and built the first house there. When the settlers began to succeed in taming the land, they were attacked by local Arabs, and in 1894, he decided that it was simply too dangerous to stay, and he moved to London. Eventually he returned and was buried there. On his gravestone it records that he had built the very first house.
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5What fascinates me is the name the settlers gave to the village. I do not know why they decided on this particular name, but I have a guess. It was set in the Yarkon Valley, and when they discovered that it was a malarial swamp, it appeared to them as a valley of trouble. But they knew the Hebrew Bible, and they recalled a verse from the prophet Hoshea in which God promised to turn the “valley of trouble” into a “gateway of hope” (Hoshea 2:15). That is the name they gave the village, today the sixth largest town in Israel: Petach Tikva, the gateway of hope.
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6Since its establishment, Israel has done extraordinary things. It has absorbed immigrants from 103 countries, speaking 82 languages. It has turned a desolate landscape into a place of forests and fields. It has developed cutting-edge agricultural and medical techniques and created one of the world’s most advanced high-tech economies. It has produced great poets and novelists, artists and sculptors, symphony orchestras, universities, and research institutes. It has presided over the rebirth of the great talmudic academies destroyed in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust. Wherever in the world there is a humanitarian disaster, Israel, if permitted, is one of the first to send aid. It has shared its technologies with other developing countries. Under immense strain, it has sustained democracy, a free press, and an independent judiciary. Had my great-grandfather seen what it has achieved, he would hardly have believed it. In truth, I hardly believe it when I read Jewish history and begin to understand what Jewish life was like when there was no Israel.
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7For me, more than anything else, Israel is living testimony to the power of Moshe’s command, “Choose life.”
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8Future Tense, 131–132