I Believe in Miracles - Yom Ha-Atzma'ut

"If you will it, it is no dream." - Herzl

Yom Ha-Atzma’ut:  I Believe in Miracles - “Bless you, and increase you, and bless what you and the land produce; that land which was your ancestors’ land, too” (from Deut. 7:13).  It is easy to under-appreciate, to miss the marvelous significance of words like these.  As part of the Jewish community today, it can seem a given that Israel exists or that the Bible talks about Israel a lot.

But when I read those words, which are part of the Torah reading commonly recited for today, Yom Ha-Atzma’ut, Israel Independence Day, I am chilled by the confrontation with what they are saying. 

It is easy, sure, and countless people and groups have done so, over history, declaring that this person today or that thing today is the fulfillment of what the Bible said so many years ago.  We Jews have fallen prey to such false self-fulfilling prophecies, such facetious reading of ourselves back into the text – as I say, that’s easy enough to do. 

But the miracle of modern Israel isn’t like this.  Those words above declare that a people, over two thousand years, countless generations, countless individuals in those years, spread around the world, that enough of them, at all times, kept reading those words as a promise, as a hope, as an instruction, a charge, that it could be so again, and seventy years ago, it did become reality.

That is a miracle.  A miracle that bolsters my faith today that God’s will can still come to pass even in the world in which I live.  And it clarifies as it reaffirms my faith in the miracles we read about in the past.  In their time, they probably looked much like the birth of the State of Israel looked, messy, chaotic, mundane and extraordinary all at once – it’s only after centuries that the ancient miracles have become what we more easily call “miraculous.” 

Let us then, remember how vital each and every member of our Jewish community is, for it was through the collective dedication to a dream that Jews were able to bring about God’s promise in our own times.  That should inspire us that we too can and must contribute to other miracles unfolding, perhaps slowly, even now, through our little efforts at nudging the holy and miraculous into our world.