WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Indulge me this week’s #995, Gentle Reader. I have a millstone birthday this coming week. Not a typo – 20, 40, 60, maybe even three score years and ten, may be milestone; four score is millstone. Comes with a blessing and a curse. Curse is the number of times you wake up at night to relieve yourself. Blessing is you wake up. So here’s what I dream about in my Old Age between wakings up.
This Week: An Old Man’s Interrupted Night Dream
Of all the biblical images we imbibe as a child, the one that has come back to haunt my dreams is that of our prophet Moses on the day of his death, standing on a mountain in Moab, gazing at The Promised Land afar off. The older we get, the more we want to be Moses, in a generational not geographic sense, and gaze at our future. Our old saying that one should live to see the births of his grandchildren no longer goes far enough. One should see his grandsons grow taller than he is. I’m six zero and my older grandson is there already and my younger is catching up. The last image I have of my father is his sitting on a stool for an hour in my then month-old first born’s room, gazing into his crib. Sat on a stool? I understand now, stood on a mountain.
I asked once in these weekly emails, when would you have picked to live in our people’s three millennia history? Would you have stood with Moses at Sinai, marched with David into Jerusalem, been there with Solomon at the First Temple’s dedication, fought with the Maccabees against Alexander’s Seleucid successors? The response I’d hoped for (and didn’t get) was “now.” I was eight years old when Ben-Gurion, still standing beneath Herzl’s portrait after proclaiming Israel’s independence, called on the Jews of the world to stand by Israel in the great struggle for fulfillment of the Dream of Generations for our homeland’s sovereign redemption. It was years later before I recognized that he was speaking to me.
After re-falling asleep after my second or so bathroom trip, Moses is no longer standing there alone on the mountain. He’s been joined by every Jew who in the past two thousand years has died in a foreign land “Al Kiddush Ha-Shem” – beautiful-sounding Diaspora Jew-speak for murdered, merely for being a Jew, in a holocaust or pogrom. I ask them, in their last terrified moments, how they’d relate to today’s State of Israel if they could exchange places with me.
We Jews say we see the Hand of God in history. Sometimes I believe it. Take, for instance, that Cursed Continent – Europe. The Holocaust was a culmination, not an anomaly, in its two-millennia mistreatment of us. Every device of ethnic cleaning – Pale of Settlement, Ghetto, Holocaust, Inquisition, Pogrom – was devised over the centuries in good old Christian Europe, heartland of Western Civilization, expressly for us. By me, the Almighty has Spoken in our time to the Europeans: “So you didn’t like Jews living amongst you for two thousand years? Watch this!” I see in my dream the last Christian in Europe handing over the keys to the last church in Europe to a Muslim to be turned into a mosque. “You know,” the last Christian ruefully says to the Muslim, “this is all the fault of the Jews.” The Muslim (pocketing the keys) smiles and replies, “Yep, you’re right.”
I don’t talk to Moses, or to those millions (not an exaggeration) of murdered Jews, up there on the mountain in my dream. I talk instead, nine hundred ninety-five times now, to us. I plead two points:
[1] We Never Left. I wrote a book about it (Israel 3000 Years, Amazon), striving to document historian James Parkes’ assertion in Whose Land (p. 266) that the continuous, tenacious, organized, openly Jewish, homeland-claiming Yishuv, all through the long dark post-biblical centuries, in spite of every discouragement, wrote the twentieth century Zionists’ “real title deeds.” Parkes bitterly criticized us Jews for not forcefully making this point, instead dwelling, romantically if counterproductively, on “exile & return.”
It’s true. We were beaten down to a pummeled minority, massacred time and again (e.g., by Byzantines and Crusaders) but we clung to the land and homeland claim. Every ruler in between Roman destruction of Jewish Judaea in 135 to Israel’s independence in 1948 as the land of Israel’s next native state was a foreign empire invader, and mostly non-Arab at that. When did “the Palestinians” ever rule Palestine? Never.
[2] Under international law, the land of Israel is ours. In a most cogent column this week, albeit with the baffling title Uti Possidetis Juris, Arlene Kushner (ArleneFromIsrael.info) quotes experts Kontorovich and Bell that in international law Israel inherited the boundaries of the Palestine Mandate, with its “Jewish national home” and “close settlement of Jews on the land,” as of May 1948 – i.e., Palestine west of the River, left from the earlier excision of the 78% of Palestine east of the River as Arab Transjordan. This includes historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, and borders infinitely more secure than those of “the two-state solution on the 1967 borders,” so beloved, not just by Arabs, but the UN, EU and, shamefully, American Jews.
So that’s my dream and my pitch. How am I doin’? By me, I’m one up on Moses. He saw The Promised Land from afar off. I’ve seen it up close.
Wish me a Happy Eightieth,