WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Let’s take a needed break this week from countering canards and affirmatively assert our claims to our homeland of Jews. We see the Hand of God in history, not exclusively in biblical times. And apart from religious connection, we have the strongest connections based on continuous three-millennia physical presence and the post-Ottoman Empire League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate with its Jewish national home.
This Week: “Jews, God & History” in the View of One Secular Jew
I dreamed last night that we Jews had weekly Confession like Catholics, and that I had go there this week to confess I’d eaten a cheesesteak (true) [Christian subscribers, Jews more observant than me don’t mix milk and meat in the same meal]. In the Penalty Phase, I pleaded Peer Pressure – Look, I’m a Cheesesteaks-Are-Us Philadelphian, as well as a Jew. I don’t know what was my penance, I woke up. Now that I’m back to virtually clipping stuff on the internet for today’s #1204, most of what I’m seeing is treating Israel and Jews more contemptuously than Trump in New York. Doubtless, you’ve had your fill of this too, so let’s take a break this week and let me regale you with what drives the commitment to massively-maligned Israel of a cheesesteak-consuming Philly Jew. Perhaps, this also expresses your views.
The Hand of God in History?
As Max Dimont pithily put it, we believe in “Jews, God & History,” that the Almighty steers macro human events toward a more righteous world, and that Abraham’s descendants, not least us Jews, were picked for a role in it, specifically bearers of the Decalogue with its universally applicable Commandments for righteous living. We bore its tablets in the Ark of the Covenant through our wilderness wanderings and arrival in our Promised Land, Solomon ultimately resting it in the First Temple’s Holy of Holies, with our involvement continuing, on occasion with Divine intervention for our deserved good or ill, as recounted in the Hebrew Bible. The prophets’ writings drive home that mixed history’s moral lessons for more than just us.
As a physical object, the Ark of the Covenant disappeared after First Temple times, and the Holy of Holies in which it had stood with the Second Temple’s destruction. But the Foundation Stone, the summit of Mount Moriah, which both Temples’ Holy of Holies’ walls had enclosed, was still there, and I believe the case can be made that Divine intervention in its fate didn’t end with the ending of Biblical times.
For half a millennium following the Second Temple’s destruction, Roman and then Byzantine Holy Land rulers kept the Temple’s site disdainfully heaped in debris. Then came the Muslims, zealous protectors of their own holy sites, who built over Mount Moriah’s summit, the Foundation Stone, es-sakhra, a magnificent structure, the Dome of the Rock. From an internal elevated circular walkway, one can look down at Mount Moriah’s summit, the Rock. Then the European Crusaders came, turning the Dome into a church. They chipped away at the summit, selling pieces in Europe for gold. They hadn’t quite reached the top, where there’s a man-made slot, when Saladin defeated them and restored the Dome to Islam. The Rock has remained unmarred ever since.
Following the Six Day War, archeological architect Leen Ritmeyer was deeply involved in Temple Mount area excavations, from which he drew some astounding conclusions, including where the First Temple’s smaller 500 square cubit Mount had stood, where the First and Second Temples had stood on their Mounts, and where their Holy of Holies, encasing Mount Moriah’s summit had lain. And centered on the floor of that Holy of Holies’ that encased that summit is a man-made slot as long and slightly wider than the Ark of Covenant, which he argues quite convincingly was cut by Solomon for the Ark of the Covenant to rest. Without excessive imagination, can you see the Almighty’s hand in preserving that slot where the Ark of the Covenant had stood, through all the Holy Land’s turmoil for three thousand years? I can.
And today, can you see our Jewish people, Israelis and all, meekly walking away from our Temple Mount, Western Wall, Old City, City of David, etc., in a historic Jerusalem-excluding “two-state solution along the 1967 [1949] lines with mutually agreed territorial swaps”? I can’t.
Historical and Legal Claims
Not just the Foundation Stone and visible Western Wall but much of the Temple Mount and other ancient Jewish presence remains are still there today in the Old City, City of David and elsewhere in Jerusalem, and all through Judea and Samaria, vividly shown in Mike Pompeo and David Friedman’s moving film, Route 60, The Biblical Highway, seen by more folks in its first two nights last fall than any other American theaters film.
We weren’t exiled by Rome and we remained in the land, as historian Parkes put it, in sufficient organized, openly Jewish, homeland-claiming presence, in spite of repeated foreign empire rulers’ persecution, including repeated slaughters, expulsions and entry bars, to have written today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.” “The Palestinians” [btw, the majority population of Jordan, eastern Palestine, sitting on three-quarters of the Palestine Mandate’s land] have never ruled Palestine. During the centuries between Judaea’s final fall in CE 135 and today’s Israel’s independence in 1948, every Palestine ruler was a foreign empire invader, and mostly non-Arab at that, and today’s Israel is western Palestine’s, land of Israel’s, next native state.
And there’s this. The Holocaust was not an anomaly. Over the centuries, every device of ethnic cleansing – Pale of Settlement, Ghetto, Holocaust, Inquisition, Pogrom – was devised in Chistian Europe, heartland of Western civilization, expressly for Jews. And during this time, Jews were persecuted dhimmis in Muslim lands.
For four hundred years preceding the League of Nations’ post-WW I Palestine Mandate, Palestine had been an undifferentiated part of the non-Arab Ottoman Empire, and for longer than two hundred years just before that, had been part of the non-Arab Mamluks’ empire. Foreign Arab dynasties had ruled Palestine only between 638 and 1099, and much of that under the thumb of the Turks. Before that it had been ruled by European Byzantines, heirs of European Romans who’d won it from twice-sovereign there Jews.
Our Jewish people has the strongest historical and legal claims to western Palestine, the land of Israel. And the history of our Christian and Muslim lands’ Diasporas makes vividly clear, at least to us, that we have to have it. It has to be Jewishly meaningful (i.e., including historic Jerusalem, capital of three native states, Judah, Judaea and Israel, all Jewish, in history, and biblical hill country heartland Judea-Samaria) and militarily defensible (i.e., including Judea-Samaria with Jordan Valley and Jerusalem-including central ridge). Palestinian Arabs, who are no more Palestinian than us, can have eastern Palestine, Jordan, and Gaza, and, under the Trump plan, internal autonomy (i.e., security-wise “less than a state”) in a big chunk of Judea-Samaria, not including the Jordan Valley.
PS: “Project Vigilance”: Greater Philadelphia ZOA is urging members of our community to be our eyes and ears in monitoring school districts and colleges, local governments, community newspapers, social media, etc., for anti-Israel and anti-Jewish occurrences. We cannot avert our eyes. Be alert and if you encounter such instances, inform Philly ZOA, office@zoaphilly.org.