Israel, the impossible miracle – Infobae

Dr. Chaim Weizmann is the chemist who became the first president of the state of Israel in 1948. Tells the story of the time when he was in front of British politicians in order to To obtain their support for the dream of the Zionist movement. to have, after centuries of waiting, a house in a Jewish state. A member of the House of Lords asked him: "Why, Jews, do you insist on Palestine while there are so many underdeveloped countries where they can settle more easily?" Weizmann then replied: "It's like I'm asking you why you traveled more than 20 kilometers by car to visit your mother last Sunday, so there are so many older women living alone in your own neighborhood. "

In the first century of this era, after 12 centuries of Jewish life in the Holy Land, this country called Judea has disappeared. The Romans destroyed Jerusalem, its capital, exiled the Jewish people during centuries of pilgrimage around the world, and transformed the name of the region into Palestine., in the honor of a people long gone, called the Philistines, over a thousand years ago. From the pain of the lost and the terror aroused by the uncertainty of centuries, the love story between this nation and this earth has become eternal.

There was not a prayer where you would not want to pray by looking from the ends of the world to this earth. One party, where we do not miss the return. A single day where the song will not be turned into a promise: "Next year, in Jerusalem".

A thousand years after this exile and a thousand years before his return, the Spanish poet Iehuda Levi shouted from Spain, heartbroken, the distance in his body: "Libi, Libi b. Mizraj, Vaanoji b & # 39; sof maharav "my heart is in the east, but I am in the west).

Remember Weizmann in his autobiography Trial and error At the moment when he asked the British Foreign Minister, Arthur Balfour: "Mr. Balfour, suppose I offer you Paris instead of London, do you take it?" He stopped, looked at me and said, "But Weizmann, we already have London!". "It's true," I say, "but we had Jerusalem when London was only a swamp."

The Balfour Declaration, dated November 2, 1917, arrived eleven years after this meeting. This statement was an official demonstration of the British government during the First World War to announce its support for the creation of a "national home for the Jewish people" in the region of Palestine, which was at that time part of the Ottoman Empire.

A people without land, without any place in the world

In Eastern Europe, they were kept as scapegoats in order to divert the peasants from a severe and corrupt regime and an endless famine. Attacked by local preachers with cries of "murderers of Christ" and with the cooperation of the police, crowds of peasants regularly attacked their villages and towns by murdering, raping and looting.

In the West, a much more subtle game was played. A door called Emancipation was opened, inviting them to participate on an equal footing with the liberal society. But as soon as they tried, a second invisible door, called anti-Semitism, slapped them in the face. At a time of fiery nationalism, it did not even help those who tried to convert to Christianity. If it was not French, German, Austrian, there was no place. "To be elsewhere," wrote Catholic scholar Charles Peguy, "is the great vice, the great secret virtue and the great calling of this people". What does it mean to live in the world "in another place", without place in the world? What does he do for the soul, what does he do for a culture, to be constantly excluded, prejudiced, punished, scapegoat, accused, demonized?

Said Chaim Weizmann, in the year 1936: "For the Jews, the world is divided into places where they can not live and where they are not allowed to enter."

The dream of coming back so close was interrupted by the worst nightmare. The horror of the Holocaust has erased one-third of the Jewish population in the gas chambers. But he never managed to extinguish the flame of the eternal message of hope and renewal.

Those who believe that the creation of the state of Israel is due to the Holocaust are wrong. We could never give such a price to Hitler. Israel does not exist thanks to the Holocaust, but despite the Holocaust. The promises of the prophets, the psalms of King David, the centuries-old poems and prayers, and the tireless work of the founders of the Zionist movement came despite the duty to recall and transcend the six million people murdered.

"We are here to lay the foundation stone of the house that will be the refuge of the Jewish nation." These are the opening words of Theodore Herzl at the first Zionist Congress on August 29, 1897, in Basel, Switzerland.

Four days after the Congress, Herzl wrote in his diary: "If I had to summarize the Congress in one sentence – which I would do well not to publish – it would be the following:" In Basle, I founded the Congress. Jewish state. "That out loud today, I would laugh at a universal laugh, in maybe five years, but surely in 50 years, everyone will be able to perceive it." On May 15, 1948, 50 years and 9 months after writing that, the Jewish state of Israel was a fact.

Admiring the impossible miracle of explaining that it is Israel today, it remains only to imagine what Israel would have been founded without the devastation and horror of the Nazi extermination.

In these 71 years of recent history, the modern and dynamic State of Israel is a symbol of conviction, dreams made, promises kept, deep acts of love, patriotism and pride. Built from the ashes of Auschwitz, he turned his deserts into gardens and this arid land into an Eden. Like all the countries of the world, like our Argentina, our United States or our Russia, like Spain or Venezuela, with its successes and its errors. But with an undeniable attachment to the millenarian values ​​of his people: democratic height, respect for minorities, gender equality, commitment to education, technological innovation leader, respect for the sacred sites of all. religions and source of spiritual inspiration. , literary and cultural.

As the poet said: "The oldest of the nations She is also the youngest. "

The eternal Jorge Luis Borges dedicated this poetry to the young state of Israel in 69.

I was afraid that in Israel I would hunt
with an insidious sweetness
the nostalgia that lay diasporas
they have accumulated like a sad treasure
in the cities of the infidels, in the Jewish neighborhoods,
in the sunsets of the steppe, in dreams,
the nostalgia of those who waited for you,
Jerusalem, near the waters of Babylon,
What were you else, Israel, if not this nostalgia,
but this will to save,
between the unstable forms of time,
your old magic book, your liturgies,
your solitude with God?

Not like that The oldest of nations
She is also the youngest.
You have not tried men with gardens,
with gold and his boredom
but with rigor, ultimate earth.
Israel told them without words:
you will forget who you are
You will forget about the other you have left.
You will forget who you were in the land
who gave you their afternoons and their mornings
and to which you will not give your nostalgia.
You will forget the language of your parents and learn the language of paradise.
You will be an Israeli, you will be a soldier.
You will build the country with peat bogs: you will raise it with deserts.
Your brother will work with you, whose face you have never seen.
One thing we promise you: your place in the battle.

The author is a rabbi of the Amijai community and president of the Latin American Rabbinical Assembly of the Masorti Movement.