One of my favorite things about Shabbat is I get to step off the world and spend time alone with my Creator, my family and my friends. Today, for just a few minutes I want to turn off the world as if they didn’t matter.

If one were to zoom out and truly take a moment to understand the current time and space the Jewish people are living in, as disturbing as it may be to some, it all makes sense. Unbeknownst to our enemies, everything is unfolding exactly as the Torah said it would. It doesn’t matter if you are a religious Jew or not, or for that matter whether you are even Jewish at all, what matters is what the Torah said and how the words of Hashem are coming to life on the world stage in clear view of anyone who is willing to take an honest look.

“…lo, it is a people that shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations.” (Numbers 23:9)

You do not have to be a nuclear scientist or brain surgeon to figure out how these words are as true today as the day they were relayed to Moshe, our teacher. More than that as if to reiterate the point, our prophets reminded us of a similar fate. It’s worth noting that they were called prophets because they had insight and information a regular person was not privy to. Their words speak to us still today.

“For, behold, I make thee small among the nations, and despised among men.” (Jeremiah 49:15)

“Behold, I make you small among the nations; you are to be very despised.” (Ovadiah 1:2)

In clear view of anyone who is willing to take in an honest look. If this didn’t get your attention as to the certainty of the words of the Torah, maybe this will:

“Then the L-RD your G-d will upend your captivity, and have compassion on you, and will return and gather you from all the peoples, where the L-RD thy G-d had scattered you. Even if you have been dispersed to the most distant lands under the heavens, from there will the L-RD your G-d will gather you, and bring you back.” (Deuteronomy 30:3-4)

Yesterday was Independence Day in Israel. It is the anniversary of the day the Jewish people officially took hold of their destiny as a sovereign entity in their own land. The Jews have returned home after 2,000 years just as G-d had promised our ancestors they would. It is the only time in recorded history a people had done this, and it was assured to us some thirty-three centuries earlier.

Take a moment and consider what this people, who make up but 0.2% of the world’s population, has accomplished by re-establishing their roots in the land of their fathers. When one calculates the odds the only conclusion which can be drawn is the Jewish people are a mathematical impossibility. Not improbability, impossibility. The numbers simply don’t add up. We are the fatal flaw of the evolutionary theory as it pertains to survival of the fittest.

How is it even possible we survived our various exiles, especially when you consider in none of them were we ever considered the fittest? On the contrary. It can be argued in each and every one, a good case could be made we were the weakest. Weakest in numbers, weakest in power, weakest in physical stature. Darwin missed the boat on the Jews. It’s not like we sat in the back of the room and hoped the teacher never called on us. We were not even allowed in the room and were subsequently blamed for what happened inside or out. The Czar, the King, the Queen, the church, the Prime Minister, the President, The Dictator, the Sheik not to mention their subjects and followers, all painted a permanent bullseye on the back of the Jew, and he survived it all.

Not improbability, impossibility.

We were and evidently still are everyone’s Super Bowl. We didn’t get some random nut job with their dad’s shotgun trying to kill a few of us. We were pursued by the full forces and powers of governments. Laws were created with the specific intent to destroy us. Armies were sent to annihilate us. Priests and bishops were sent out to convert us. Brown shirts pulled us from our homes to torture us or send us off to die. Government endorsed goon squads such as the KKK and other hate groups wreaked havoc upon us and were assembled specifically to terrorize us. Enormously high taxes were imposed on us for the privilege of breathing and existing. Confiscation, harassment, evictions, and murders are all a tiny slice of what we have had to endure. At one time or another, all of that conspired to destroy us, but yet, we survived.

“Why does no one find it remarkable that in most world cities today there are Jews, but no one single Hittite even though the Hittites had a great flourishing civilization while the Jews nearby were a weak and obscure people? When one meets a Jew in New York or New Orleans or Paris or Melbourne, it is remarkable that no one considers the event remarkable. What are they doing here? But it is even more remarkable to wonder, if there are Jews here, why are there not Hittites here? Where are the Hittites? Show me one Hittite in New York City.” (Walter Percy, novelist.)

Not improbability, impossibility.

The current rewriting of history would have you believe a small group of holocaust survivors were actually a massive colonialist army bulldozing its way to statehood. On May 15, 1948, the fourth day in the month of Iyar, Arab armies attacked the small state of 650,000 people. Israel had no tanks, nine planes, the majority of which were small ones used for reconnaissance, and a group of ragtag holocaust survivors who joined up with members of the Hagganah, Irgun, Lechi and the Palmach to become one unified fighting force. In what would soon become a recurring theme, Arab armies combined to attack the newly formed state with the explicit intent to drive the Jews into the sea. Divine providence had a different plan and we remember those events which began exactly 78 years ago, yesterday. Here is a sample of the prevailing Arab thought before their failed attempt:

King Abdullah of Transjordan (May 14, 1948): “He who will be killed will be a martyr; he who lives will be glad of fighting for Palestine… I remind you of the Jihad and of the martyrdom of your great-grandfathers”.

“We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down.” — Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said, 1948

And now you know why an Arab writer invented the word Nakba, which means catastrophe. He was embarrassed the Arabs were defeated in the war of independence especially after all the smack they talked beforehand. Now, of course, the world’s perpetual victims have reappropriated the word to mean something different. That is what they do; it’s the same playbook. Always. They don’t create anything on their own so they just take someone else’s and call it their own. Once we’re on the subject, I want to detour a moment to address the false accusation that it was the Jews who kicked Arabs out of their homes. The evidence of the day seems to argue against it.

“…the Jewish Hagana asked (using loudspeakers) Arabs to remain at their homes but most of the Arab population followed their leaders who asked them to leave the country.” The Times of London, April 22, 1948

“…every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe.” A British police report from Haifa, dated April 26, 1948

“The fact that there are these refugees is the direct consequence of the act of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state. The Arab states agreed upon this policy unanimously and they must share in the solution of the problem.” Emile Ghoury, secretary of the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee, in an interview with the Beirut (and also the London) Telegraph, September 6, 1948.

“The Arab states which had encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies, have failed to keep their promise to help these refugees.” The Jordanian daily newspaper Falastin, February 19, 1949.

Not improbability, impossibility.

In truth there are far too many to include here, but I will leave these for now and hopefully revisit this issue as a separate topic in the near future.

In my youth, Israel was not something we talked about in our home or the religious schools I attended. I think most of the reason was connected to the actions of the early movements in Israel trying to leave the Shtetl life behind and trying to persuade new immigrants of every age to follow suit. The diaspora religious were worried about the Jewish people forgetting the Jewish part of the newly formed nation state and to be fair, rightly so.

However, what was once a legitimate concern has given way to a country that has had, at times kicking and screaming, a reckoning with its Jewish core. The problem seems to be those same people are still fighting that same protagonist after its been dealt with by those who chose to act. By coming to the land and working to change the facts on the ground, Jews committed to making a difference instead of sitting it out and criticizing from afar. I don’t think it is unfair to wonder how many Jewish lives would have been saved had all the Jewish people gotten behind the redeeming of the land at the turn of the twentieth century regardless of who was spearheading it. In its place were Jews who made a commitment to actively preach negatively against it. We are still paying for the ten spies who spoke poorly about the land 3300 years ago. Conversely, much to the chagrin of many who led the rebirth of the land, the Jewish state has reclaimed its Jewish part and it is only becoming more pronounced with each passing year.

Man does not know the ways of Heaven. I’m reminded of the movie The Ten Commandments when Nefratiri calls for Moses to come to her home. Following a brief conversation, Moses says, “the fate of Israel is not in your hands, Nefratiri.”

“Or is it?” she says. “Who else can get Pharaoh to soften his heart, or harden it?”

Moses responds, “Yes, you may be the lovely dust for which G-d will work His purpose”.

The vehicles G-d chooses to do His work are beyond comprehension. Were anyone to suggest G-d would not use Mr. X or Mrs. Y to bring about a holy task, remind them that in the lineage of the Messiah, is a grandmother who slept with her father, a father-in-law who slept with his daughter-in-law, and a convert, not to mention King David and Batsheva. King Yeravum ben Yoash is truly considered one of the evil Kings in Jewish history and yet: “And the L-RD said that He would not blot out the name of Israel from under heaven; but He saved them by the hand of Jeroboam the son of Joash.” (Kings 2:27) Beware anyone who tells you with certainty he knows the ways of the Creator. We are all living in the land today because in the late 19th century religious Jews began to return and during the twentieth century non-religious Jews did the same. Their DNA was the one common denominator and they all were doing the work of Heaven whether they were aware of it or not. The fact that generations of Jews were told things and continue to be told things about the land and the Jewish people that are not in a positive light is something we are all going to have to answer for one day.

The late great Jewish leader Rabbi Jonathan Sacks who, much as I have tried, says it far better than I ever could. “Never before had a people survived so long an exile, its identity intact. Never before has a nation that had not known sovereignty for two millenia recovered it again. Ravaged by the holocaust a mere three years earlier, the declaration of independence was a remarkable act of faith, an everlasting symbol of the victory of life over death, hope over despair….if as we believe there are events that bear the signature of Heaven, the return of the Jews to their land was one.”

Not improbability, impossibility.

The confluence of events that led our people home, are similar to the echos around the globe that are trying to remove us from our home today. But the battle they are fighting is not against the Jews, it is against the G-d of the Jews, the G-d of history. Read the words for yourself. I didn’t write them, nor did I make them up. I am not reaching for some far off interpretation of my own. The words Moses spoke were talking about our generation. It is right there in the text. No explanation necessary. There had never been a time in history when Jews, who were scattered in the farthest places under the heavens, had come back to the land as we have done now. There was no Jew living in America following the destruction of the first temple or during the return of Ezra. I am unaware if any were living in Russia at the time, but if they were, they never made it back to the land. It seems like that return was centered on the Babylonia and Mesopotamia regions where most of us were dispersed to. But today, the land is being built and cultivated by Jews from all across the globe, “the most distant lands under the heavens.”

The powerful message delivered by Shai Agnon at his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1966 emphatically defines the world’s Jewish population. “As a result of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of the Exile. But always I regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem.”

I am in awe of the works of Hashem and grateful He has brought our people home exactly as He promised. “Who is like You, dressed with holiness,​ Awesome in splendor,​ doing wonders!” May it be His will to return each and every Jew to the true place of their birth, the holy land of Israel, and may He do so speedily in our days.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)