Last week was Yom HaAtzmaut, Israel Independence Day. It has been, and remains to be, one of the most controversial days in recent Jewish history. While some celebrate it, others fast on it. Some see it as a big step forward in the redemption process, and others see it as just the opposite. That’s the Jewish people for you, desperately in need of Moshiach to set all records straight.
If you’re religious, you HAVE to agree that getting the land “back” was Hashgochah Pratis—Divine Providence.
“But so was the Holocaust,” those AGAINST the modern state would argue.
“You want to compare the re-founding of the State of Israel to the extermination of 6,000,000 Jews by Nazis?!” those FOR the State would argue back. “At least we have our land back, and can live and AS Jews!”
“What are you talking about?!” they argue back. “It’s a secular government that promotes an anti-Torah lifestyle! What a chillul Hashem—profanation of God’s Name!”
“Yes, but it is also one that has allowed shuls and yeshivos to spring up all over the land. Torah is being learned and taught from north to south and east to west!”
And so the debate continues back and forth, sometimes calmly, oftentimes not so calmly.
The thing is this. The Lord works in mysterious ways, always has. The Talmud says so, Jewish history says so, even God HIMSELF says so. How many times has “up” looked like “down,” “good” looked like “bad,” until history later cleared things up. How many people, in the end, to borrow the language of the Talmud, had their faces become “as black as the bottom of a pot”?
And then there’s the politics. It would have been okay to say or do X had not been for the politics. Consequently, we have to say to do Y, and pretend it is the new X to be politically correct according to one belief system or another. Politics are real, but they can also be a royal pain in the neck of truth, causing people to cut their noses to spite their faces in the name of…politics?
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a dozen times. Amalek’s greatest weapon is distraction. His goal is the destruction of the Jewish people, and he accomplishes it through the distraction of the Jewish people, and Yom HaAtzmaut has to be one of his crowning achievements. We’re so busy fighting about its validity as a national holiday that we fail to use it as the opportunity it TRULY is.
You know, in the Holocaust, once Jews realized it was going to be their way of life for a while, they started looking for ways to rebuild what they lost, right from within the camps. Because they looked, they found ways to don tefillin, or to bake matzah, or to keep whatever aspect of Yiddishkeit they could with whatever the Nazis, ysv”z, threw at them.
Sometimes they succeeded in the most remarkable ways that would make our fulfillment of mitzvos seems like children playing in kindergarten. Most of the time they failed, a level of success that most of us should only merit to know at least once in our lives of religious freedom.
Those Jews had one goal in mind, to serve God on whatever level, in whatever way they could. Once that became their perspective, they looked at their torturous and miserable lives that way, and did the most incredible and heroic things to achieve even the smallest religious objective.
Have we learned anything from them? We should. Instead of trying to fight one another over the importance of the day, and more importantly, the event it celebrates, we should ask ourselves, “Are we REDEMPTION ORIENTED? Are we redemption oriented ENOUGH? How badly do we want to be redeemed? How can we improve our redemption orientation?”
Until a person yearns for redemption, they can’t possibly view Yom HaAtzmaut as God does. Undeniably He has given us the day. Undeniably, it is redemption-themed, either because it brings us closer or, as some still want to believe, it pushes us away from it. Undeniably, there is a lot of amazing Divine Providence involved in its origin.
Therefore, the only real question we need to answer for ourselves is, “How can I use the opportunity to FURTHER the cause of the Final Redemption, as God wants it?” I asked that question years ago, and it led me to incredible sources and life-altering ideas I never knew about before. Because, you can fool yourself some of the time, others most of the time, but God, none of the time. Eventually we all answer to Him for our views and perspectives, and they better be the result of an honest pursuit of truth.
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