Inexplicable Israel - http://jerusalemwatchman.org/blog/
For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. (Jeremiah 29:11 - my emphasis)
This morning I was asked by a couple - in Israel for a short time on their first ever visit - what it is that I share when I write or talk about this land. An intellectual pair, they appeared to have concluded after just a few days here that there surely had to be human answers to this nation's 'problems.' We have seen that people of different religions can live together peacefully in this land side by side - they maintained. Look at everything that Israel has contributed to the region and to the world. Surely they are able to find a way to peace?
They were astonished to learn that, even though Israel is on record as being willing to give away to the Palestinian Arabs their most sacred national treasures - and this is something that has been done publicly, in full view of the world's press corps, if you like - it has still not been enough to get a peace agreement with the Palestinian Arabs. And despite the terrible cost in human life which Israel's pursuit of peace as dictated by the world has cost her, and the risks she has been willing to take, even with the lives of her own people, to try attain to such a peace, it has still not been enough to convince the world that Israel is not to blame for the ongoing strife. And notwithstanding the incredible gifts to mankind Israel has been willing to freely share with a multitude of nations - including some of her traditional foes - most still see Israel as one of the main reasons why there is no peace in the world today.
Some say the 'I' in Israel stands for inventiveness or innovation, and so it does. But for me it stands for 'inexplicable' - inexplicable in human terms*; without recourse to reason or logic or precedent.
Israel's history is simply unparalleled. As an ancient cradle-of-civilisation nation, and as a modern one, the Jewish people are without peer.
None of our Gentile nations can touch them. We don't even come close.
Tell me, if you refute this - or write it off as the romantic ranting of a deluded Philo-semite (and I've been presumptuously accused of being blinded by love for Israel or elevating this nation to a position of worship) - which other people can hold a candle to the history of the Jews?
How could they go from 2000 years of being persona no grata almost everywhere they went - wandering the face of the earth; exiled from their land and with no political power of their own and no goodwill on the part of other nations to help them return to it; weathering and barely surviving repeated efforts to annihilate them as a nation both physically and by trying to force them to relinquish their Jewish faith - to being reconstituted as the powerhouse nation they have become back within the confines of their original little land here in the center of the earth?
Tell me if you will, how could they go from this to this? (You'll need 3 minutes to watch the first clip and an hour to watch the second. Every minute will be an investment for those interested in the Israel story.)
Clip 1 - BBC coverage of the emancipation of the Bergen Belsen death camp in which we hear the just-rescued, barely living Jewish survivors gathering around their rabbi to sing Hatikvah - 'The Hope' - the song destined to become the anthem of the resurrected national home for the Jews. In its full modern form the words read:
As long as the Jewish spirit is yearning deep in the heart,
With eyes turned toward the East, looking toward Zion,
Then our hope - the two-thousand-year-old hope - will not be lost:
To be a free people in our land,
The land of Zion and Jerusalem.
Emaciated, dying, and surrounded by the corpses of their family members and other luckless Jews, they sang of the hope that was in them to return as a nation to their land.
This would have been one of their first acts of freedom, this lifting of voices in such a song. The BBC reporter says the effort exhausted them but they were determined to be heard. When you consider the setting, the circumstances, and the timing - still a few years away from the declaration of a Jewish homeland - this recording is an enormously poignant fragment of Holocaust history.
Clip 2 - CBN coverage of what they have achieved in just under seven decades as a resurrected nation, and how they have blessed and continue to bless the very nations that saw them as accursed and treated them as such. This documentary will move you in quite a different and very positive way.
Israel - God's Chosen People, called to be a light unto the gentiles; children of the man who was told by God that in his seed all nations of the earth would be blessed.
Inventive? No question. Innovative? Massively. Inexplicable? Yes - beyond rationale and almost beyond belief.
They should have been destroyed. They should not have survived. It is barely conceivable that they did, and then to go on from there to rebirth a country and one that has the admiration and envy (not to say hatred) of the majority of the rest of the world ...
It is as they sang behind the barbed wire, and as they sing today - Hope kept them; hope inspired them; hope restored and grew and prospered them.
And it is as their God in heaven said concerning them: There is hope in your future, says the Lord, that your children shall come back to their own border. (Jeremiah 31:17 - my emphasis)
* For those who believe the Bible there is no mystery.
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