Julius Promised land
By Julius
Promised land
By Yahuda101
The promise was first made to Abraham (Genesis
15:18-21), then confirmed to his son Isaac (Genesis 26:3), and then to Isaac's
son Jacob (Genesis 28:13), Abraham's grandson. The promised land was described
in terms of the territory from the River of Egypt to the Euphrates river
(Exodus 23:31).
Bereishit - Genesis - Chapter 15
18 On that day, the Lord formed a covenant with
Abram, saying, "To your seed I have given this land, from the river of
Egypt until the great river, the Euphrates river.
Bereishit - Genesis - Chapter 26
2 And the Lord appeared to him, and said, "Do
not go down to Egypt; dwell in the land that I will tell you.
3 Sojourn in this land, and I will be with you,
and I will bless you, for to you and to your seed will I give all these lands,
and I will establish the oath that I swore to Abraham, your father.
Bereishit - Genesis - Chapter 28
13 And behold, the Lord was standing over him, and
He said, "I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father, and the God of
Isaac; the land upon which you are lying to you I will give it and to your seed.
14 And your seed shall be as the dust of the
earth, and you shall gain strength westward and eastward and northward and
southward; and through you shall be blessed all the families of the earth and
through your seed.
15 And behold, I am with you, and I will guard you
wherever you go, and I will restore you to this land, for I will not forsake
you until I have done what I have spoken concerning you."
Even the Qur'an says that God gave the Land of
Israel to the Jews !
It [the Qur'an] "is a guide for the
righteous, who have faith in the unseen and are steadfast in prayer"
[Qur'an: Sura 2, "The Cow", verse 2]
It [the Qur'an] is "a confirmation of
previous scriptures" (i.e., the Bible)
[Qur'an: Sura 12, "Joseph", verse 112]
"We [Muslims] believe in that which was
revealed to us [the Qur'an] and that which was revealed to you [the Torah]. Our
God and your God is one. To Him we surrender ourselves".
[Qur'an: Sura 29, "The Spider", verse 47]
"Enter, My People, the Holy Land which Allah
has assigned for you. Do not turn back, or you shall be ruined".
[Qur'an: Sura 5, "The Table, verse 21]
"We [Allah] settled the Israelites in a
blessed land and provided them with good things".
[Qur'an: Sura 10, "Jonah", verse 93]
"Pharoah sought to scare them [the Jews] out
of the land [of Israel]: but We [Allah] drowned him, together with all who were
with him. Then We said to the Israelites: 'Dwell in this land. When the promise
of the hereafter comes to be fulfilled, We shall assemble you all together [in
the Land of Israel in the End of Days]".
[Qur'an: Sura 17, "The Night Journey",
verse 103]
"it was Our [Allah's] will to favour those
who were oppressed [the Jews] and to make them leaders of mankind, to bestow on
them a noble heritage and to give them power in the land [of Israel]: and to
inflict on Pharoah, Haman, and their army, the very scourge dreaded by their
victims".
[Qur'an: Sura 28, "The Story", verses
5-6]
"We [Allah] gave the persecuted people [the
Jews] dominion over the eastern and western lands which We had blessed [the
east and west banks of the Jordan River]. Thus your Lord's gracious word was
fulfilled for the Israelites, because they had endured with fortitude; and We
destroyed the edifices and towers of Pharoah and his people".
[Qur'an: Sura 7, "The Heights", verse
137]
"To Moses We gave the Scriptures, a perfect
code for the righteous, with precepts about all things, and a guide and a
blessing, so that his people might believe in the ultimate meeting with their
Lord".
[Qur'an: Sura 6, "Cattle", verse 155]
"tell of Our servants Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob: men of might and vision whom We made pure with the thought of the
hereafter. They shall dwell with Us among the righteous whom We have
chosen".
[Qur'an: Sura 38, "Sad", verse 46]
"Glory be to Him [Allah] who made His
servants [Muhammed and El Burak] go by night from the Sacred Temple [of Mecca]
to the farther Temple [of Jerusalem], whose surroundings We have blessed, that
We might show him some of Our signs. He [Allah] alone hears all and observes
all. We [Allah] gave Moses the Scriptures and made them a guide for the
Israelites, saying, 'Take no other guardian than Myself. You are the
descendants of those whom We carried in the Ark with Noah. He was a truly
thankful servant'".
[Qur'an: Sura 17, "The Night Journey",
verses 1-3]
"We gave the Scriptures to the Israelites and
bestowed on them wisdom and prophethood. We provided them with good things and
exalted them above the nations".
[Qur'an: Sura 45, "Kneeling", verses
16-17]
"There is guidance, and there is light, in
the Torah which We [Allah] have revealed. By it the prophets who surrendered
themselves to Allah judged the Jews, and so did the rabbis and the divines;
they gave judgement according to Allah's scriptures which had been committed to
their keeping and to which they were witnesses".
[Qur'an: Sura 5, "The Table", verses
44-45]
Continuous Jewish Presence in the Holy Land
Jewish life remained active and productive in the
land of Israel. Banished from Jerusalem, it now centred on Galilee. Refugees
returned; Jews who had been sold into slavery were redeemed. In the centuries
after Bar Kochba and Hadrian, some of the most significant creations of the
Jewish spirit were produced in the Holy Land. It was then that the Mishnah was
completed and the Jerusalem Talmud was compiled, and the bulk of the community
farmed the land.
There were forty-three Jewish communities in the
Holy Land in the sixth century: twelve towns on the coast, in the Negev, and
east of the Jordan, and thirty-one villages in Galilee and in the Jordan valley.
The Jews' thoughts at every opportunity turned to
the hope of national restoration. In the year 351, they launched yet another
revolt, provoking heavy retribution When, in 438, the Empress Eudocia removed
the ban on Jews' praying at the Temple site, the heads of the Community in
Galilee issued a call "to the great and mighty people of the Jews"
which began: "Know that the end of the exile of our people has come"!
In the belief of restoration to come, the Jews
made an alliance with the Persians who invaded Palestine in 614, fought at
their side, overwhelmed the Byzantine garrison in Jerusalem, and for three
years governed the city. But the Persians made their peace with the Emperor
Heraclius. Christian rule was re-established, and those Jews who survived the
consequent slaughter were once more banished from the city. A new chapter of
vengeful Byzantine persecution was enacted, but as it happened, it was
short-lived. A new force was on the march. In 632, the Moslem Arab invaders
came and conquered. By the year 640, Palestine had become a part of the
emerging Moslem empire.
The 450-year Moslem rule in Palestine was first
under the Omayyads (predominantly Arab), who governed tolerantly from Damascus;
then under the Abbasid dynasty (predominantly Turkish), in growing anarchy,
from Baghdad; and finally, in alternating tolerance and persecution, under the
Fatimids from Cairo. The Moslem Arabs took from the Jews the lands to which
they had clung for twenty generations after the fall of the Jewish state. The
Crusaders, who came after them and ruled Palestine or parts of it for the better
part of two centuries, massacred the Jews in the cities. Yet, under the Moslems
openly, under the Crusaders more circumspectly, the Jewish community of
Palestine, in circumstances it is impossible to understand or to analyse, held
on by the skin of its teeth, somehow survived, and worked, and fought. Along
with the Arabs and the Turks, the Jews were among the most vigorous defenders
of Jerusalem against the Crusaders. When the city fell, the Crusaders gathered
the Jews in a synagogue and burned them. The Jews almost single-handedly
defended Haifa against the Crusaders, holding out in the besieged town for a
whole month (June-July 1099). At this time, a full thousand years after the
fall of the Jewish state, there were Jewish communities all over the country.
Fifty of them are known to us; they include Jerusalem, Tiberias, Ramleh,
Ashkelon, Caesarea, and Gaza.
During more than six centuries of Moslem and
Crusader rule, periods of tolerance or preoccupied indifference flickered
fitfully between periods of concentrated persecution. Jews, driven from the
villages, fled to the towns. Surviving massacre in the inland towns, they made
their way to the coast. When the coastal towns were destroyed, they succeeded
somehow in returning inland. Throughout those centuries, war was almost
continuous, whether between Cross and Crescent or among the Moslems themselves.
The Jewish community, now heavily reduced, maintained itself in stiff-necked
endurance.
Moslem and Christian records report that they
pursued a variety of occupations. The Arab geographer Abu Abdallah Mohammed --
known as Mukadassi -- writing in the tenth century, describes the Jews as the
assayers of coins, the dyers, the tanners, and the bankers in the community. In
his time, a period of Fatimid tolerance, many Jewish officials were serving the
regime. While they were not allowed to hold land in the Crusader period, the
Jews controlled much of the commerce of the coastal towns during times of
quiescence. Most of them were artisans: glassblowers in Sidon, furriers and
dyers in Jerusalem.
In the midst of all their vicissitudes and in the
face of all change, Hebrew scholarship and literary creation went on
flourishing. It was in this period that the Hebrew grammarians at Tiberias
evolved their Hebrew vowel-pointing system, giving form to the modem study of
the language; and a large volume of piyutim and midrashim had their origin in
Palestine in those days.
After the Crusaders, there came a period of wild
disturbance as first the Kharezmians -- an Asian tribe appearing fleetingly on
the stage of history -- and then the Mongol hordes, invaded Palestine. They
sowed new ruin and destruction throughout the country. Its cities were laid
waste, its lands were burned, its trees were uprooted, the younger part of its
population was destroyed.
Yet the dust of the Mongol hordes, defeated by the
Mamluks, had hardly settled when the Jerusalem community, which had been all
but exterminated, was re-established. This was the work of the famous, scholar
Moses ben Nachman (Nachmanides, the "RaMbaN'). From the day in 1267 when
RaMbaN settled in the city, there was a coherent Jewish community in the Old
City of Jerusalem until it was driven out, temporarily as it proved, by the
British-led Arab Legion from Transjordan nearly seven hundred years later.
For two and a half centuries (1260-1516),
Palestine was part of the Empire of the Mamluks, Moslems of Turkish-Tartar
origin who ruled first from Turkey, then from Egypt. War and uprisings,
bloodshed and destruction, flowed in almost incessant waves across their
domain. Though Palestine was not always involved in the strife, it was
frequently enough implicated to hasten the process of physical destruction.
Jews (and Christians) suffered persecution and humiliation. Yet toward the end
of the rule of the Mamluks, at the close of the fifteenth century, Christian
and Jewish visitors and pilgrims noted the presence of substantial Jewish
communities. Even the meagre records that survived report nearly thirty Jewish
urban and rural communities at, the opening of the sixteenth century.
By now nearly fifteen hundred years had passed
since the destruction of the Jewish state. Jewish life in Palestine had
survived Byzantine ruthlessness, had endured the discriminations, persecutions,
and massacres of the variegated Moslem sects-Arab Omayyads, Abbasids, and
Fatimids, the Turkish Seljuks, and the Mamluks. Jewish life had by some
historic sleight of hand outlived the Crusaders, its mortal enemy. It had
survived Mongol barbarism.
More than an expression of self-preservation,
Jewish life had a purpose and a mission. It was the trustee and the advance
guard of restoration. At the close of the fifteenth century, the pilgrim Arnold
Van Harff reported that he had found many Jews in Jerusalem and that they spoke
Hebrew. They told another traveller, Felix Fabri, that they hoped soon to
resettle the Holy Land.
During the same period, Martin Kahatnik (who did
not like Jews), visiting Jerusalem during his pilgrimage, exclaimed:
The heathens oppress them at their pleasure. They
know that the Jews think and say that this is the Holy Land that was promised
to them. Those of them who live here are regarded as holy by the other Jews,
for in spite of all the tribulations and the agonies they suffer at the hands
of the heathen, they refuse to leave the place.
At the height of their splendour, in the first
generations after their conquest of Palestine in 1516, the Ottoman Turks were
tolerant and showed a friendly face to the Jews. During the sixteenth century,
there developed a new effervescence in the life of the Jews in the country.
Thirty communities, urban and rural, are recorded at the opening of the Ottoman
era. They include Haifa, Sh’chem, Hebron, Ramleh, Jaffa, Gaza, Jerusalem, and
many in the north. Their centre was Safed; its community grew quickly. It
became the largest in Palestine and assumed the recognised spiritual leadership
of the whole Jewish world. The luster of the cultural "golden age"
that now, developed shone over the whole country and has inspired Jewish
spiritual life to the present day. It was there and then that a phenomenal
group of mystic philosophers evolved the mysteries of the Cabala. It was at
that time and in the inspiration of the place that Joseph Caro compiled the
Shulhan Aruch, the formidable codification of Jewish observance, which largely
guides orthodox custom to this day. Poets and writers flourished. Safed
achieved a fusion of scholarship and piety with trade, commerce, and
agriculture. In the town, the Jews developed a number of branches of trade,
especially in grain, spices, and cloth. They specialised once again in the
dyeing trade. Lying halfway between Damascus and Sidon on the Mediterranean
coast, Safed gained special importance in the commercial relations in the area.
The 8,000 or 10,000 Jews in Safed in 1555 grew to 20,000 or 30,000 by the end
of the century.
In the neighbouring Galilean countryside, a number
of Jewish villages -- from Turkish sources we know of ten of them -- continued
to occupy themselves with the production of wheat and barley and cotton,
vegetables and olives, vines and fruit, pulse and sesame.
The recurrent references in the sketchy records
that have survived suggest that in some of those Galilean villages -- such as
Kfar Alma, Ein Zeitim., Biria, Pekiin, Kfar Hanania, Kfar Kana, Kfar Yassif --
the Jews, against all logic and in defiance of the pressures and exactions and
confiscations of generation after generation of foreign conquerors, had
succeeded in clinging to the land for fifteen centuries. Now for several
decades of benevolent Ottoman rule, the Jewish communities flourished in
village and town.
The history of the second half of the sixteenth
century illustrates the dynamism of the Palestinian Jews their prosperity,
their progressiveness, and their subjugation. In 1577, a Hebrew printing press
was established in Safed. The first press in Palestine, it was also the first
in Asia. In 1576, and again in 1577, the Sultan Murad III, the first
anti-Jewish Ottoman ruler, ordered the deportation of 1,000 wealthy Jews from
Safed, though they had not broken any laws or transgressed in any way. They
were needed by Murad to strengthen the economy of another of the Sultan's
provinces -- Cyprus. It is not known whether they were in fact deported or
reprieved.
The honeymoon period between the Ottoman Empire
and the Jews lasted only as long as the empire flourished. With the beginning
and development of its long decline in the seventeenth century, oppression and
anarchy made growing inroads into the country, and Jewish life began to follow
a confused pattern of persecutions, prohibitions, and ephemeral prosperity.
Prosperity grew rarer, persecutions and oppressions became the norm. The
Ottomans, to whom Palestine was merely a source of revenue, began to exploit the
Jews' fierce attachment to Palestine. They were consequently made to pay a
heavy price for living there. They were taxed beyond measure and were subjected
to a system of arbitrary fines. Early in the seventeenth century, two Christian
travellers, Johann van Egmont and John Hayman, could say of the Jews in Safed:
"Life here is the poorest and most miserable that one can imagine."
The Turks so oppressed them, they wrote, that "they pay for the very air
they breathe."
Again and again during the three centuries of
Turkish Decline, the Jews so lived and bore themselves that even hostile
Christian travellers were moved to express their astonishment at their
pertinacity--despite suffering, humiliation, and violence-in clinging to, their
homeland
The Jews of Jerusalem, wrote the Jesuit Father
Michael Naud in 1674, were agreed about one thing: "paying heavily to the
Turk for their right to stay here. -- They prefer being prisoners in Jerusalem
to enjoying the freedom they could acquire elsewhere... The love of the Jews
for the Holy Land, which they lost through their betrayal [of Christ], is
unbelievable. Many of them come from Europe to find a little comfort, though
the yoke is heavy."
And not in Jerusalem alone. Even as anarchy spread
over the land, marauding raids by Bedouins from the desert increased, and the
roads became further infested with bandits, and while the Sultan's men, when
they appeared at all, came only to collect both the heavy taxes directed
against all and the special taxes exacted from the Jews, Jewish communities
still held on all over the country. During the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, travellers reported them in Hebron (where, in addition to the
regular exactions, threats of deportation, arrests, violence, and bloodshed,
the Jews suffered the gruesome tribulations of a blood libel in 1775); Gaza,
Ramleh, Sh'chem, Safed (where the community had lost its pre-eminence and its
prosperity); Acre, Sidon, Tyre, Haifa, Irsuf, Caesarea, and El Arish; And Jews
continued to live and till the soil in Galilean villages.
But as the country itself declined and the bare
essentials of life became inaccessible, the Jewish community also contracted.
By the end of the eighteenth century, historians' estimates put their number at
between 10,000 and 15,000. Their national role, however, was never blurred.
When the Jews in Palestine had no economic basis, the Jews abroad regarded it
as their minimum national duty to insure their physical maintenance, and a
steady stream of emissaries brought back funds from the Diaspora. In the long
run, this had a degrading effect on those Jews who came to depend on these
contributions for all their needs. But the significance of the motive and
spirit of the aid is not lessened: the Jews in Palestine were regarded as the guardians
of the Jewish heritage. Nor can one ignore the endurance and pertinacity of the
recipients, in the face of oppression and humiliation and the threat of
physical violence, in their role of "guardians of the walls."
However determined the Jews in Palestine might
have been, however deep their attachment to the land, and however strong their
sense of mission in living in it, the historic circumstances should surely have
ground them out of physical existence long before the onset of modem times.
Merely to recall the succession of conquerors who
passed through the country and who oppressed or slaughtered Jews, deliberately
or only incidentally to their struggle for power or survival, raises the
question of how any Jews survived at all, let alone in coherent communities.
Pagan Romans, Byzantine Christians, the various Moslem imperial dynasties
(especially during the Seljuk Turkish interlude, before the Crusaders), the
Crusaders themselves, the Kharezmians and the Mongols, the Ottoman Turks-all
these passed over the body of the Jewish community. How then did a Jewish
community survive at all? How did it survive as an arm of the Jewish people,
consciously vigilant for the day of national restoration?
The answer to these questions reflects another
aspect of the phenomenal affinity of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.
In spite of bans and prohibitions, in spite of the most improbable and
unpromising circumstances, there was never a period throughout centuries of
exile without Jewish immigration to Palestine. Aliyah ("going up")
was a deliberate expression and demonstration of the national affinity to the
land. A constant inflow gave life and often vigour to the Palestinian
community. By present-day standards, the numbers were not great. By the
standards of those ages, and in the circumstances of the times, the
significance and weight of that stream of aliyah -- almost always an individual
undertaking -- matches the achievements of the modem Zionist movement.
Modern Zionism did indeed start the count of the
waves of immigration after 1882, but only the frame and the capacity for
organisation were new: The living movement to the land had never ceased.
The surviving records are meagre. There was much
movement during the days of the Moslem conquest. Tenth century appeals for
aliyah by the Karaite leaders In Jerusalem have survived. There were periods
when immigration was forbidden absolutely; no Jew could "legally" or
safely enter Palestine while the Crusaders ruled. Yet precisely in that period,
Yehuda Halevi, the greatest Hebrew poet of the exile, issued a call to the Jews
to emigrate, and many generations drew active inspiration from his teaching.
(He himself died soon after his arrival in Jerusalem in 1141, crushed,
according to legend, by a Crusader's horse.) A group of immigrants who came
from Provence in France in the middle of the twelfth century must have been
scholars of great repute, for they are believed to have been responsible for
changing the Eretz Israel tradition of observing the New Year on only one day;
ever since their time, the observance has lasted two days. There are slight
allusive records of other groups who came after them. Among the immigrants who
began arriving when the Crusaders' grip on Palestine had been broken by Saladin
was an organised group of three hundred rabbis who came from France and England
in 1210 to strengthen especially the Jewish communities of Jerusalem, Acre, and
Ramleh. Their work proved vain. A generation later came the destruction by the
Mongol invaders. Yet no sooner had they passed than a new immigrant, Moses
Nachmanides, came to Jerusalem, finding only two Jews, a dyer and his son; but
he and the disciples who answered his call re-established the community.
Though Yehuda Halevi and Nachmanides were the most
famous medieval preachers of aliyah, they were not the only ones. From the
twelfth century onward, the surviving writings of a long series of Jewish
travellers described their experiences in Palestine. Some them remained to
settle; all propagated the national duty and means of individual redemption of
the "going up" to live in the homeland.
The concentrated scientific horror of the
Holocaust in twentieth-century Europe has perhaps weakened the memory of the
experience of the people to whom, year after year, generation after generation,
Europe was purgatory. Those, after all, were the Middle Ages; those were the
centuries when the Jews of Europe were subjected to the whole range of
persecution, from mass degradation to death after torture. For a Jew who could
not and would not hide his identity to make his way from his own familiar city
or village to another, from the country whose language he knew through
countries foreign to him, meant to expose himself almost certainly to
suspicion, insult, and humiliation, probably to robbery and violence, possibly
to murder. All travel was hazardous. For a Jew in the thirteenth, fourteenth,
or fifteenth century (and even later) to set out on the odyssey from Western
Europe to Palestine was a heroic undertaking, which often ended in disaster. To
the vast mass of Jews sunk in misery, whose joy it was to turn their faces
eastward three times daily and pray for the return to Zion, that return in
their lifetime was a dream of heaven.
There were periods, moreover, when the Popes ordered
their adherents to prevent Jewish travel to Palestine. For most of the
fifteenth century, the Italian maritime states denied Jews the use of ships for
getting to Palestine, thus forcing them to abandon their project or to make the
whole journey by a roundabout land route, adding to the initial complications
of their travel the dangers of movement through Germany, Poland, and southern
Russia, or through the inhospitable Balkans and a Black Sea crossing before
reaching the comparative safety of Turkey. In 1433, shortly after the ban was
imposed, there came a vigorous call by Yitzhak Tsarefati, urging the Jews to
come by way of then tolerant Turkey. Immigration of the bolder spirits
continued. Often the journey took years, while immigrant worked at the intermediate
stopping places to raise the expenses for the next leg of his journey or, as
sometimes happened, while he invited the local rich Jews to finance his journey
and to share vicariously in the mitzvah of his aliyah.
Siebald Rieter and Johann Tucker, Christian
pilgrims visiting Jerusalem in 1479, wrote down the route and stopping places
of a Jew newly arrived as an immigrant from Germany. He had set out from
Nuremberg and travelled to Posen (about 300 miles). Then Posen [Poznan] to
Lublin 250 miles Lublin to Lemberg [Lvov] 120 miles Lemberg to Khotin 150 miles
Khotin to Akerman 150 miles Akerman to Samsun 6 days Samsun to Tokat 6-7 days
Tokat to Aleppo 15 days Aleppo to Damascus 7 days Damascus to Jerusalem 6 days
Ottoman Sultans had encouraged Jewish immigration
into their dominions. With their conquest of Palestine, its gates too were
opened. Though conditions in Europe made it possible for only a very few Jews
to "get up and go," a stream of immigrants flowed to Palestine at
once. Many who came were refugees from the Inquisition. They comprised a great
variety of occupations; they were scholars and artisans and merchants. They
filled all the existing Jewish centres. That flow of Jews from abroad injected
a new pulse into Jewish life in Palestine in the sixteenth century.
As the Ottoman regime deteriorated, the conditions
of life in Palestine grew harsher, but waves of immigration continued. In the
middle of the seventeenth century, there passed through the Jewish people an
electric current of self-identification and intensified affinity with its
homeland. For the first time in Eastern Europe, which had given shelter to
their ancestors fleeing from persecution in the West, rebelling Cossacks in
1648 and 1649 subjected the Jews to massacre as fierce as any in Jewish
history. Impoverished and helpless, the survivors fled to the nearest refuge --
now once more in Western Europe. Again the bolder spirits among them made their
way to Palestine.
That same generation was electrified once more by
the advent of Shabbetai Zevi, the self-appointed Messiah whose imposture and
whose following among the Jews in both the East and the West was made possible
only by the unchanged aspirations of the Jews for restoration. The dream of
being somehow wafted to the land of Israel under the banner of the Messiah
evaporated, but again there were determined men who somehow found the means and
made their way to Palestine, by sea or by stages, overland through Turkey and
Syria.
The degeneration of the central Ottoman regime,
the anarchy in the local administration, the degradations and exactions,
plagues and pestilence, and the min of the country, continued in the eighteenth
and well into the nineteenth century. The masses of Jews in Europe were living
in greater poverty than ever. Yet immigrants, now also in groups, continued to
come. Surviving letters tell about the adventures of groups who came from
Italy, Morocco, and Turkey. Other letters report on the steady stream of
Hasidim, disciples of the Baal Shem-Tov, from Galicia and Lithuania, proceeding
during the whole of the second half of the eighteenth century.
It is clear that by now the state of the country
was exacting a higher toll in lives than could be replaced by immigrants. But
the immigrants who came shut their eyes to the physical ruin and squalor,
accepted with love every hardship and tribulation and danger. Thus, in 1810,
the disciples of the Vilna Goan who had just emigrated, wrote:
Truly, how marvellous it is to five in the good
country. Truly, how wonderful it is to love our country. -- Even in her ruin
there is none to compare with her, even in her desolation she is unequalled, in
her silence there is none like her. Good are her ashes and her stones.
These immigrants of 1810 were yet to suffer
unimagined trials. Earthquake, pestilence, and murderous onslaught by marauding
brigands were part of the record of their lives. But they were one of the last
links in the long chain bridging the gap between the exile of their people and
its independence. They or their children lived to see the beginnings of the
modern restoration of the country. Some of them lived to meet one of the
pioneers of restoration, Sir Moses Montefiore, the Jewish philanthropist from
Britain who, through the greater part of the nineteenth century, conceived and
pursued a variety of practical plans to resettle the Jews in their homeland.
With him began the gray dawn of reconstruction. Some of the children of those
immigrants lived to share in the enterprise and purpose and daring that in 1869
moved a group of seven Jews in Jerusalem to emerge from the Old City and set up
the first housing project outside its walls. Each of them built a house among
the rocks and the jackals in the wilderness that ultimately came to be called
Nahlat Shiva (Estate of the Seven). Today it is the heart of downtown
Jerusalem, bounded by the Jaffa Road, between Zion Square and the Bank of
Israel.
In 1878, another group made its way across the
mountains of Judea to set up the first modern Jewish agricultural settlement at
Petah Tikva, which thus became the "mother of the settlements." Eight
years earlier, the first modern agricultural school in Palestine had been
opened at Mikveh Yisrael near Jaffa. As we see it now -- and they in 1810 would
not have been surprised, for this was their faith and this was their purpose --
the long vigil was coming to an end.
By Julius
Ariel your Representee, | אריאל הנציג שלך, נציג אפרים ויועץ (לא רב אלא יועץ ידידותי) של בית ישראל הבינלאומי בהר הבית ולכל עם ישראל. נולדתי בהולנד והפכתי בגיל מאוחר יותר לבעל תשובה: במקור, המונח התייחס ליהודי שעבר על ההלכה ביודעין או שלא ביודעין והשלים תהליך של התבוננות פנימית כדי "לחזור" לקיום המצוות המלא. של מצוות אלוהים. לקרוא |
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