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Is history something we create by our acts, or an immense wave that sweeps us all up? The history of our people begins with a key story about the father of the nation who hears a call to leave everything he knew and go to another land: "Go forth from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you" (Genesis 12:1). Where to? Get going, don't stay here. Going has its own dynamic. It is the opposite of remaining frozen in place. It is motion. It gives us the power to form a family, a tribe, and a nation. Doing so in response to a call also creates a new faith. Where to? By the very act of going, you are already in the Promised Land.
When you really want to get to know a person, you can't depend solely on external data. It's important to learn about their history, their family, their dreams, their loves and hates; their passions and beliefs. The part that is hidden, which lies behind social and personal coverings and in the depths of the unconscious is many times more important than what we think we see. Psychoanalyst Karl Jung compared the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious to the relationship between an island and the ocean.
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The same holds true in the case of peoples. History, culture, faith, and origin stories are a more reliable calling card of a nation than its current actions and modern-day political conduct. A story of origin is one that is retold over and over. In our case, we retold our five basic books week after week, year after year, for thousands of years. That is not an exaggeration: for thousands of years, in all Jewish communities, throughout the various changing conditions of history - in both moment of calm and distress – Shabbat would arrive, and with it the weekly Torah portion.
It's no coincidence we are known as the "People of the Book." Sometimes that term was used with contempt, but for us it was an epithet of life. Since we were exiled from our country, we lived in the book; it was our portable homeland. If you want to get to know the Jewish people, talk about them, and discuss their future, get to know their formative book. Our base. Not just the basis of our existence, but also the base of our conduct throughout history, in the valley of the shadow of death among different peoples and nationalities, in war and peace, destruction and redemption.
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Our people's entire book of origin – Genesis – teaches us to view history cautiously. In the very first section, we learn that God created the world in six days. Why not in a single moment? If God is omnipotent and created the world, why not just say, "Let there be a world!" Still, creation was divided into six days and progresses gradually until it is complete and contains everything: "Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array" (Genesis 2:1). Development, rather than upheaval. Evolution, not revolution. The end of the process, its apex, is a day entirely devoted to rest, which is also part of the process.
Man is placed in the garden of Eden only briefly. History – a series of events and occurrences – begins the moment knowledge is gained, the forbidden consumption of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, after which man is expelled from Eden and humanity begins. Just before the expulsion, God punishes Adam and Eve. The man is sent to work the land, "In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life. … By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread" (Genesis 17:19).
The process is based on the principle of instructive punishment: he will need to invest effort and cultivate patience until seeds become crops and yield fruit, and even then he will have to reap and thrash and bake before he has bread to eat. Earlier, the woman was told something similar: "I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children" (Genesis 3:16). And what is pregnancy, if not a process that involves effort and pain until the longed-for fruit is borne? Development. Evolution, not revolution.
The same idea persists throughout the book. From a single person, as great as he was, we became a family and a tribe, until we were absorbed into Egypt's womb, where we waited hundreds of years to be birthed by a strong hand and an outstretched arm, as a free people on their way to their ancestral Land. The Promised Land was never a done deal – for most of our years of existence, we have lived outside it – and still, we clung to it, dreaming of returning and living here once again. Our people's history is full of countless events, each one of which requires description and explanation and from which meaning must be distilled. But years later, we can see that what we dreamed of at far-off moments in history took place at another time, a short time or a long time later. From the failure of the Bar-Kochba Revolt, we waited 1,813 years to restore our national independence. A long time. On the other hand, we waited "only" 19 more years to return to Jerusalem. "Three things come unexpectedly: the Messiah, a 'find,' and a scorpion," Talmudic sages said when discussing thoughts about calculations of the end of history and the redemption.
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A man of Jerusalem at the end of the eighth century BCE, the prophet Isaiah the son of Amotz, saw ahead and predicted our national and spiritual dawning ("Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you"); the ingathering of the exiles ("Lift up your eyes all around, and see; they all gather together, they come to you; your sons shall come from afar, and your daughters shall be carried on the hip"); foreign nations accepting our return to history ("Foreigners shall build up your walls, and their kings shall minister to you"); that we would stand up as a nation and smash our diplomatic isolation ("Powerful kings and mighty nations will satisfy your every need"); defend ourselves ("Violence shall no more be heard in your land, devastation or destruction within your borders") and the demographic graph that Israel alone would see rise and flower ("The least one shall become a clan, and the smallest one a mighty nation") (Isaiah 60:1-22).
But the prophet then qualified, adding: "I am the Lord; in its time I will hasten it" (Isaiah 60:22). Our sages point this out as two kinds of historical processes: those that arrive in their time, and those that arrive suddenly and take place in haste (Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 98a). They also said that history takes relatively few leaps forward, since history is for the most part comprised of slow processes that form like a fetus in its mother's womb. The Jerusalem Talmud tells the story of a nighttime walk that two Mishnaic scholars – Rabbi Hiyya the Elder and Rabbi Shimon Ben Halafta – took in the Arbel Valley in the Galilee in the second century CE toward the end of the night, "They saw the dawn break." The rays of dawn breaking through the darkness prompted Rabbi Hiyya to tell his friend, "Such is Israel's redemption. At first, it comes slowly by slowly, and as it progresses its light increases" (Jerusalem Talmud, Brachot 1:1). In other words, they should not lose their heads and should wait patiently until the light is shining. We took that insight with us on our journey among the nations of the world, until we returned to our land.
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It isn't easy to implement that vision in an era when the time ideas or inventions come amazingly quickly, but that is why we go back to this book every week. The state of Israel was not born in an upheaval. Theodor Herzl wasn't operating in a vacuum; many good people before him laid the foundations that lead to implementing the idea of returning Zion with a political and national plan. Israel is the product of many generations who put their entire lives into preserving our national and religious legacy, who kept alive the memory of the Land of Israel in general and Jerusalem in particular, who insisted in making aliyah in a slow stream, until the drops turned into a rushing stream that became a rising sea. If we have learned any lesson from our many years as a people, it's that haste is a trap, including quick solutions to various problems. We need to have patience. And faith.
