Between Ben-Gurion and Bishop Benjamin |
My good friend, Bishop Leon Benjamin, organizes a remarkable daily prayer call under Global Leaders United. I have participated in the past and have always been impressed by the participation and dedication of scores or more people, committing the first hour of their day to prayer together. I refer to it as a big virtual congregation.
A few months ago, when he was scheduling speakers into the summer months, I immediately grabbed May 14 as my turn to share and pray. When I explained to him why I picked May 14, he immediately embraced it and promoted it widely.
As the call began, I felt the overwhelming sense of something very powerful taking place. Not just rhetorically, I was honored and blessed to be part of the virtual congregation, especially today. Honestly, it became very emotional.
I began by bringing greetings from the Judean mountains south of Jerusalem, and explained that I wanted to talk about a little bit of history, a little bit of scripture, and the modern intersection of the two.
The prophet Isaiah (66:8) asks rhetorically, “Who has heard such a thing? Who has seen such things? Shall a land be born in one day? Shall a nation be brought forth at once?”
Indeed, can a nation be born in a day? The short answer is yes, and that’s why May 14 is relevant. But I also explained that as a nation, the Jewish people were born in the desert, 3500 years ago. An auspicious setting indeed. Just out of slavery in Egypt, two million people were in the wilderness. Then, poof, we become a people.
But May 14, 1948, was different. It marked a formal milestone, a beginning of the end of our exile of nearly 2000 years (in addition to the first exile hundreds of years before that). It represented the prophetic fulfillment of the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, the third commonwealth.
It also came on the heels of a third of the Jewish people having been slaughtered in the Holocaust. To say that the room at the former Tel Aviv Museum was heavy with history would be an understatement.
That year, May 14 was a Friday, the eve of the........