IF
Too often I found myself saying something like, “If only I hadn’t
done this or that” and them went on to contemplate how very different
things would have been, if I had taken note of the word if,
stopped to think about what I was doing and changed direction.
The most popular poet of his day, Rudyard Kipling, even wrote a
poem called if. I can still remember some of the lines by
heart and they sum up, for me, the eternal Jewish story:
“If you can keep your head when all about you are
losing theirs and blaming it on you
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
but make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired of waiting, Or
being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating
And yet don’t look too good nor talk too wise…..
The unreasoning hatred in this world to the Jewish people is one of
the great mysteries of the human story. It is the oldest social disease and,
unfortunately, it is still virulently present in today’s society. The answer is
certainly not in assimilation – with the echoes of the Holocaust still
reverberating – when German Jews believed they were fully integrated into
German society.
Let’s face it. Jews are accustomed to remaining alone. To quote
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: “It means a people prepared to stand alone if
need be, living by its own moral code, having the courage to be different and
to take the road less travelled.”
We suffered two brutal centuries of slavery in Egypt, and still
circumcised our sons. We overcame efforts to deny us our religion in the
Hanukah story; the attempt to wipe us out in the Purim story. We watched twice
as our holy Temples burned and still kept faith with Judaism. We were marched
off to Rome as slaves, but never forgot we were Jews. For nearly two thousand
years we have lived scattered throughout the world, always as second-class
citizens subject to relentless oppression, blood libels, crusades. In 1492 we
preferred to escape in ships rather than follow the Spanish orders to abandon
our faith. In the 17th century, half a million Jews were massacred
by the Polish warlord Khmeilnitsky – which, by the way, led to the Hassidic
revolution.
Yet all these failed to destroy us, failed to remove us from the
pages of history. Miraculously, every period of persecution we endured, led to
greater things. Egyptian servitude was followed by our liberation, the giving
of the Torah and re-entering the Land of Israel. The destruction of the Temple
resulted in the creation of the synagogue and the Jewish Golden Age in the
Diaspora. The horror of the Holocaust was followed by the creation of the State
of Israel and ingathering of the exiles into the present Jewish commonwealth.
The profound if word was the one cited by Theodor
Herzl in the introduction to his book Altneuland. “If you Will ,
it is no fairytale/dream” is Herzl’s famous motto which set the stage for
the return to the Jewish Homeland. Herzl most probably wouldn’t have become an
advocate for Zionism if not
for the Dreyfus case which occurred in his time.
Israel is not the Utopia that Herzl envisaged in his book, but the
most significant part of his dream that has been fulfilled is that there is now
a place where it is okay to be Jewish. The late American poet Robert Frost
said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take
you in.” This, then, is the outcome of Herzl’s vision, and, as we look around
the world today, every Jew wherever they are, can take pride and comfort in
Herzl’s vision becoming a reality.
Comments
Post a Comment