WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Steve Feldman wrote a JNS article this week advocating Diaspora Jews’ joinder in Israel’s annual observance of Herzl’s birth, that it would enhance our knowledge and appreciation of our history, heritage and homeland. I agree and have a further reason for us honoring Herzl – his relentless refusal to succumb to others’ derision that he was naively pursuing an impossible dream.
A Reminder This Week: “If You Will It, It Is No Dream”
My friend Steve Feldman, Executive Director of the Greater Philadelphia Chapter of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), whose understanding and appreciation of both the historical and religious aspects of Jewish life are wide and deep, had a JNS article this week, Time To Honor One of Our Own. Acknowledging that Israel annually observes Herzl’s birth date, May 2, 1860, on its Hebrew calendar date, the tenth of Iyar (May 11 this year), with memorial services and educational activities throughout the Jewish state, Feldman argues that Jews worldwide should formally join in this observance:
“So much of the Jewish community is under-informed and/or misinformed about Zionism and Israel. A day dedicated to Zionist and Israel education throughout the world would vastly improve Jewish knowledge about our history, our heritage and our homeland.”
I agree, of course, with Steve, but I have as well my own further reason for believing we Diaspora Jews should draw great inspiration from Theodor Herzl’s life and works. More than one faithful reader of these weekly epistles, now numbering a thousand and ninety-five, has called me in effect naïve for “dreaming” that Israel can long withstand international pressure to succumb to surrendering its most militarily defensible Judea-Samaria hill country heartland and historic Jerusalem, its most Jewishly meaningful core, in the name of a western Palestine “Two-State Solution.” A naïve, impossible dream of mine? I call one witness – Theodor Herzl.
It seems to me inconceivable that any Diaspora Jew of our time, driven by curious wonder if not Zionist fervor, cannot at least have browsed through Herzl’s Jewish State. Indeed, Hess’ Rome and Jerusalem and Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation both preceded it, but it was Herzl’s little book, part “almost incredibly naïve,” as Dr. Weizmann put it in his Foreword to the edition I have, that reverberated “in every Jewish community in the East and the West.” Herzl’s little book is the one that launched a thousand ships, albeit most of them British destroyers. How could this be?
Dr. Weizmann’s answer was that “the most potent cause was the personality of its author which already [this was Herzl’s first Zionist work] pervades the pages of ‘The Jewish State,” that “he seems to have been possessed by a sense of mission and vocation – already bowed under the burden which he was to bear until his last day.” I undertook years ago, only begun as a test of commitment to Zionism, reading Marvin Lowenthal’s translation of Herzl’s Diaries (not a thin little book). It is indeed the diary of a non-naïve man driven by a sense of mission imparted to his followers and successors.
The passage of passages in Herzl’s Diaries is what he confided to it in 1897, following the First Zionist Congress he had convened in Basel, Switzerland.
“If I were to sum up the Congress in a word – which I shall take care not to publish – it would be this: At Basel, I founded the Jewish State.
“If I said this aloud today, I would be greeted by universal laughter. In five years, perhaps, and certainly in fifty years, everyone will perceive it.”
Fifty years to the year, with the United Nations General Assembly’s adoption in 1947 of its resolution recommending Palestine’s partition between its Arabs and its Jews, everyone did.
On Friday, May 14, of the following year, David Ben-Gurion, standing in a Tel Aviv museum beneath a portrait of Theodor Herzl in the lengthening shadows of Erev Shabbat, read out the declaration proclaiming re-establishment of sovereignty of the Jewish people’s homeland, after a political but not physical presence hiatus of eighteen hundred years, as the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea.
I would have you reflect, Gentle Reader, on the seeming impossibility of what the Jewish people had achieved during those fifty years. Read particularly, if you will, of the Aliyah Bet, Palestinian Jews and American volunteers sailing barely seaworthy wrecks into the teeth of the anti-Jewish British blockade, that time’s largest naval force in the Mediterranean Sea, bringing home to the homeland survivors of history’s worst destruction of Diaspora Jews that had ended in Europe just two years before. I would have you read in particular Yoram Kaniuk’s biography of Yossi Harel, Commander of the Exodus, Gordon Thomas’ Operation Exodus, and Nissan Degani’s Exodus Calling, each of them delving, often in the participants’ own words, into their impossible dream-fulfilling Holocaust and continuing tenacious survival experiences, not least their unstoppable drive to escape Europe to Israel.
Read also, if you will, Steven Pressfield’s The Lion’s Gate, “in the cockpit, inside the tank, under the helmet” first-person-speaking account of the Six Day War, particularly on the meaning to Israelis of Israeli soldiers’ liberation of historic Jerusalem.
All of these achievements in the face of such powerful pervasive opposing forces, even in retrospect, seem fulfillment of impossible dreams. So is it a naïve impossible dream for Jews today in America to join with Israelis in their determination to retain the core of our homeland – the defensible Judea-Samaria hill country heartland (where Israelite presence first appeared in the second millennium BCE) and core of the core historic Jerusalem, liberated in 1967 – in the face of the world demanding its relinquishment in a “two-state solution” with Palestinian Arabs already possessed of 78% of the Palestine Mandate, Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan?
A naïve dream? Ben-Gurion’s statement beneath Herzl’s portrait included: “Our call goes out to the Jewish people all over the world to rally to our side in the tasks of immigration and development, and to stand by us in the struggle for fulfillment of the Dream of Generations for the redemption of Israel.” At the end of his Old-New Land, Herzl himself had put it this way – “If you will it, it is no dream.”