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Yom Ha'atzmaut

Although he wasn't speaking about Yom Ha'atzmaut directly, one of the themes in Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik's theology sheds light on what Israel's Independence Day means to modern Jewry, and its significance as a newborn festival.

The fundamental drama played out by the earliest Israelites was twofold: 210 years of slavery under the Egyptian overseers in our own age, resulting in the eventual exodus to the modern state of Israel, the Passover Sedarim conducted since 1949 force us to see how the Haggadah is not just a historic text, but very much a prophetic one, particularly when we read how "...in every generation there are Pharaohs who stand up to destroy us but the Holy One Blessed Be He save us...", or the important principle that "...it's incumbent upon every person in every generation to see himself as if he personally were delivered from Egypt...." [Passover Haggadah].

During the historic Passover of 1949, both of the above verses must have reverberated with a powerful intensity given how we had just seen the dramatic rise and fall of the Jewish nation. Suddenly, we found ourselves again in biblical times, replete with miracles and the hand of G-d to be discerned in the events themselves. In his essay, "Kol Dodi Dofek" ( "The Voice of My Beloved Knocks") Rabbi Soloveitchik speaks of the two covenants in which G-d enters with the Jewish people: the covenant of coercion and the covenant of choice. The first covenant, commonly called the "Pact Between Halves" [Genesis XV], with Abraham when he's overwhelmed with fear that his only heir will be Eliezer, his servant G-d reassures him that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars, again promising the land of Israel as his possession. When Abraham wants reassurance, G-d commands that he bring a heifer, a goat , a ram, a dove and a young pigeon; the animals, except for the birds, are then split in half ( thus the name of the covenant ). Abraham falls into a deep trance and is struck by a deep dread, whereupon it is revealed to him that his descendants will be slaves in Egypt. When he emerges from the trance, a smoking furnace and a flaming torch miraculously pass between the 'halves' and G-d declares: "To your descendants I have given this land, from the Egyptian river, as far as the great river of the Euphrates." [Gen. 15:18].

Although Abraham has no children when this promise is made, the guarantee of descendants means there will always be Jews, even if they themselves reject it. Indeed, if we forget we are Jews, G-d will send an anti-Semitic leader who will remind us who we are, forcing as it were, to remain part of our nation. This is the covenant of coercion, which Rabbi Soloveitchik calls a covenant of fate. When you're born a Jew, that's your fate. You had no choice, no say; it's beyond you, imposed from without.

The second covenant is the covenant of choice, and it takes place at Sinai, in Parshat Mishpatim, the portion dealing with civil legislation. After Moses writes down all the words of the Ten Commandments and receives divine instruction, he builds an alter at the foot of the mountain, and he and the young men offer oxen as burnt offerings to G-d. Moses takes half the blood and places it into large bowls, and the rest he sprinkles on the altar. "He took the book of the covenant, and read in the hearing of all the people, and they said, 'All that the Lord has spoken we will do and we will obey.'" [Exodus 4:7]

The Jews are not coerced into accepting the Torah. Instead, they voluntarily take it upon themselves, crying out with one voice, 'We will do and we will obey' meaning that we will not be Jews merely because we were born Jews, Jews because we're descendants of Abraham, or Jews because we're used to suffering persecution. Sinai means we intend to go beyond that, making choices as to the lifestyle we want to live by, a way that draws closer to G-d, a nation unlike any other in its quest for holiness and becoming a priestly kingdom. At Sinai, fate (what a person is born into) was turned into destiny ( what emerges from the will of the person).

We find both of these covenants evident in two of Judaism's major rites of passage: circumcision and the bar or bat mitzvah. The first is foisted on the child when he's eight days old. It's the choice of the parents, thereby perpetuating this covenant of fate, and even if the infant lives to regret the parents will, in terms of fate he is a Jew from the moment this fate is 'cut' into the very organ of procreation. The symbol of this covenant is blood and pain. In his major novel, "The Assistant", Bernard Malamud describes the Jews essentially on the vases of this covenant of suffering. A Jew is a Jew because he suffers, and although his suffering will often ennoble those fated to endure it, as Malamud' s most successfully drawn characters demonstrate, it's not suffering which they necessarily ask for, in fact, in most cases they don't, but they suffer anyhow--poignantly.

The second important rite of passage occurs on a girl's 12th or a boy's 13th birthday, when for the first time a young woman or man publicly declares before the congregation of Israel that they are part of the Jewish people, accepting privileges and obligations, the 'we will do and we will obey' part of the Sinai covenant, the destiny ultimately expressed by the commandments in the Torah.

The Holocaust, a six-year long circumcision of pain and blood, is the most vivid expression of the covenant of fate. Before he hauled the Jews off to Auschwitz, Hitler didn't ask if they believed in G-d or not, if they kept the Sabbath and ate only kosher, or if they were perhaps considering conversion. Indeed, Hitler's definition of who is a Jew was extremely liberal; he had room for everyone in his death camps. But on the 5th of Iyar, 5708 ( May 14th 1948), something happened to the Jewish nation. The declaration of the State of Israel signaled the culmination of a 2,000 year old dream, quiescent for so long but finally pulsing again with life. The desires of many had made the dream real, ranging from the students of the Vilna Gaon who arrived penniless at the port of Jaffa in the 18th century, to those influenced by the writings of such seminal figures as Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Kalischer and Rabbi Shmuel Mohliver in the 19th century. And certainly the works of Herzl, Nordau, Gordon and so many ignited the spark of return in the farthest corners of the Diaspora.

But the real Aliyah could only begin after the Holocaust when the will to become a sovereign nation became so powerful that nothing could stop it. Invisible for so long on the edges of history, the Jewish people finally declared that they no longer wished to be a people joined all too often by a common fate of suffering and death. Instead they would choose a common destiny expressed in a nationhood responsible for every aspect of its existence. And this turning of fate into destiny created the state of Israel-- the underlying meaning of Yom Ha'atzmaut.

May we prove worthy of the challenge we have chosen for ourselves, our greatest challenge in 2,000 years, perhaps our greatest challenge ever.

Chag Same'ach!

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