What We Saw In Israel

What We Saw In Israel
September 8th, 2006
Rabbi Gary S. Creditor

Whenever you fly over the Israeli coastline, whether they play any music or not, you feel this rush, this indescribable feeling of being in a very special place on earth. You see the gleaming city of Tel Aviv and its suburbs, the modern very tall buildings, then lush fields, and then the expanded Ben Gurion airport with the most modern Terminal 3 for arrivals and departures. When I returned in 2001 not being in Israel since 1974 and looked down over a clover leaf interchange for a six lane highway I was sure that the pilot had taken a wrong turn over the Mediterranean! Now they have Highway 6, a high speed toll road from north to south that is faster than Interstate 95! Israel is a modern, up-to-date country and while it also has the ills that beset any society, it is on the cutting edge of technology of the 21 st century.

This past July, Ruby and I led nineteen people from our community on a two week journey through central and northern Israel. The war in Lebanon broke out while we were on the Golan. We heard and felt the sounds of war and were on our way to Tel Aviv before it intensified. Ruby and I stayed for another ten days after the group returned, spending time in Emek Hefer, our partnership region, vacationing briefly in Netanya on the coast, spent Shabbat in Yerushalayim and then were with dear friends in Efrat. These remarks are brief reflections on our time in Israel.

I.

The group learned and felt the miracle of the birth of the State of Israel. Everyone my age and younger takes the existence of Medinat Yisrael for granted. It has always been there. After the fact, we know that it has won every war that it has fought including this one in Lebanon. We relish in its story of bringing and absorbing the refugees and survivors of the Shoah, the Jews persecuted in the Arab countries, Jews from Russia and Ethiopia. We remember their daring of the Entebbe Rescue. But all of this almost didn't happen .

We went to the recreated Herzl Museum on Har Herzl, the national cemetery in Yerushalayim. In a fascinating presentation we saw the anti-Semitism that provoked his dream and the opposition he faced. In the Yishuv Museum in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City we saw the simple way Jews lived in their small community. In Independence Hall in Tel Aviv we heard the story of how the modern city of Tel Aviv was founded by a handful of Jews. Nothing that we see in Israel day existed one hundred and twenty five years ago. The State was built, brick by brick, from the end of the 19 th century with little outside support for the Yishuv. The main focus in the 1880's through the turn of the 20 th century was the emigration from Europe to America. The Jews who went to the Turkish province of Palestine were few in number, with little resources and labored to redeem a barren land, infested with malaria and denuded of forestation and vegetation. Herzl's vision was not embraced by the Jewish masses. The Zionist movement faced great opposition and had to raise every penny to buy each wasted piece of sand. It was a tenuous experiment. We visited one of the early settlements in the northern Galilee, Rosh Pinah, which absorbed a brutal shelling last month. Far from the seacoast it was pivotal for establishing Jewish settlement in the Galilee. We saw the miracle of the creation of the State of Israel: the Jewish people, who had been "guests in everyone else's home" without our own corporate existence, dispersed in exile for two thousand years created a governing body – the Zionist Congress, a national Jewish bank – Keren HaYesod, and bought land - Keren Kayemet, as we call it JNF (Jewish National Fund) – all done seemingly out of thin air! This Nes Min Shamayim, a miracle from heaven we saw and felt this every moment.

II.

We saw that the State of Israel had to fight to be born and had to fight to stay alive. Its existence was tenuous, and we experienced personally that it remains under threat from the mad man in Teheran and the fanatics in Lebanon. We climbed the Castel, a height that dominates the road from the coast to Yerushalayim. Most tourists don't realize what is up above them on their way to the city. Here the Palestinian Arabs tried to choke Jewish Jerusalem into submission by cutting off all food, medicine and military supplies. It is a commanding height. They fought hand to hand combat to conquer the Castel and protect the road and the adjacent heights on the road to the city.

The main road from Jaffa/TelAviv runs past an old monastery called Latrun. We learned how they took immigrants off the boat, with virtually no military training and through them into battle to take the fortified monastery, with high casualties and no success. Perhaps you remember Kirk Douglas in the movie "Cast a Giant Shadow." He played Colonel Mickey Marcus, an American Jewish officer, who came to help Israel fight for its independence. He helped carve out a road to circumvent the one they couldn't open and nicknamed it "the Burma Road" after the famous one in Indo-China during World War II. We walked that road, up and down, and realized the great daring and imagination, the sacrifice and back breaking work necessary to relieve the siege of Yerushalayim.

We learned that how the British would take away the guns of the Yishuv, while allowing and even arming the Arabs. So we visited the recently opened Ayalon Institute, a great bullet making factory under the laundry area of a kibbutz which made most of the ammunition for the Haganah. Even after Israel was born, an embargo was imposed upon it, and this place continued to produce bullets of all calibers. This was an incredible place.

We learned what it meant to be a teen-ager, like Jordana our Bat Mitzvah, during these days. Dear, we saw you in the pedestrian mall in Yerushalayim, where you bought the beautiful Talit that you will wear tomorrow. But I went to the Palmach Museum and saw how young boys and girls like you were trained to become fighters in the advanced units that fought desperately to protect the Jewish settlements from the guerilla warfare before the State was declared and stand up to the Arab armies that subsequently invaded. In a different time and different place you would have been doing something quite different. We went up the Golan Heights to see the threat of the Syrian troops that Israel defeated in 1967 and even more arduously in 1973. And near the end of the trip we visited Yad Mordechai, a kibbutz facing the Gaza Strip, named after the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt that held off the Egyptian advance on Tel Aviv and saved Israel's coastline in 1948. It really didn't matter where we visited; we were surrounded by testimony at every turn that the Jewish people rose up to fight vigorously, heroically, unceasingly and successfully, time after time in place after place. And this summer was no different. The birth of Israel was a miracle and its continued existence is a miracle. Never may we take Israel's existence for granted.

III.

And we saw the hustle and bustle of the central market in Tel Aviv, the pedestrian malls in Tsfat and Yerushalayim, the small strip malls that dot the country side. And we felt the hospitality that we received, virtual strangers, but given freely like family. While we were in Emek Hefer, we stayed with a Yemenite family in a small town called Geulai Teiman, "The Redeemed from Yemen," for most of them had come from there in the early years of the State. Achinoam and Zecharya Aryeh didn't know us, but they gave us the key to their house and the run of the refrigerator. He even checked the food in it when he came home from work and scolded us that we hadn't eaten enough! In the bulletin I wrote about the man in the kibbutz cafeteria who just lovingly said "Welcome home," and so we were at every turn. Gadi our guide and Meir the bus driver became extended family. We had a dinner together that you would have thought we were family for decades. And we prayed Erev Shabbat on the seashore of Tel Aviv, with the setting sun before us, with the water lapping at the shore.And you knew that there was no place else like this on earth.

IV.

In Rabbinic literature the Rabbis gave us a nickname: rachmanim b'nai rachmanim – merciful ones, the children of merciful ones. Despite the katyusha and other missile attacks on northern Israel, devastating homes, towns, the Haifa railroad station, even as we watched the bombing of Beirut, Israelis took no pleasure! While other peoples dance in the streets when the "enemy" civilians are murdered, maimed and butchered, Israelis questioned themselves on the morality of the military operations because they looked beyond their own wounded and were concerned about the civilian populations in Lebanon, even as those in Lebanon wanted the Israelis dead and rejoiced over every missile attack, damage and death! This is a strange country, we Jews!

We saw strangers advertising to take in strangers so that the children would not have to live in bomb shelters with the accompanying psychological harm. We saw the Ethiopian children from Tsfat taken in by Emek Hefer to give them a "normal" and healthy environment. In a theme that I will elaborate on the Yom Tov, I am proud to be a Jew. Despite how difficult it was to be there at this time, Ruby and I were grateful for the opportunity to stand with our people and just be present.

We saw a beautiful, modern, technologically advanced, strong, resilient, sensitive, stoic, brave and courageous country. I am proud that, though I am born here and pledge allegiance to the United States, Israel is my homeland, democratic, free and heroic.

Conclusion

I pray that Israel will be blessed with lasting and durable peace, and that blessing should come to peoples of the region, and indeed the world.

I urge you, as did Jordana and her family, to come and visit Israel, learn of its history and place in the life of the Jewish people.

May the New Year, soon to come, see our prayers answered.

Amen.