The Jewish Connection to Israel, the Promised Land , livre ebook

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To the millions of Jews throughout the millennia who dreamed of Zion but were never privileged to live there.
And to Christians everywhere who understand the meaning of the Holy Land to the Covenant of Abraham.
CONTENTS
List of Maps and Illustrations
Introduction
Part I: The Biblical Dream
1. Land and Covenant: The Bible and the Birth of the Jewish People 3
2. National Life, Holiness, and Politics: Jewish Destiny and the Covenantal Dream
3. Jewish Sovereignty in the Ancient World
Part II: A People and Its God in Exile
4. Loss of Place and Life in the Diaspora
5. Modern Promises, Stirrings of Return, and the Holocaust
Part III: Returning Home
6. Statehood and Young Israel
7. Israel Today
8. Israel and Her Arab Neighbors
Part IV: The Future and the Hope
9. Israel of Tomorrow: The Meaning of Israel for World Values and Culture
Notes
Suggestions for Further Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Also Available
About Jewish Lights
LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
The Kingdoms of David and Solomon: 1077-997 BCE
Kingdom of Herod: 30 BCE-70 CE
The Street of the Jews, Frankfurt, Germany
The Voyage of the St. Louis May-June 1939
The Nazi Extermination of European Jews
1949-1967 Armistice Lines
Refugees to Israel from Muslim Countries
Ethiopians Jews of Israel
Israel and the Surrounding Region
Events Leading to the Six-Day War
June 10, 1967: Israel After the Six-Day War
Sinai Redeployment 1980-1982
Israel s Narrow Waistline
Map of the Palestinian State according to Clinton s Ideas at Taba Negotiations

FROM D ECLARATION OF I NDEPENDENCE OF THE S TATE OF I SRAEL , M AY 14, 1948
Eretz-Yisrael [the Land of Israel] was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious, and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.
After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.
Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent decades, they returned in their masses. Pioneers, ma pilim [immigrants coming to Eretz-Israel in defiance of restrictive legislation] and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country s inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood.
This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.
We appeal to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of Eretz-Israel in the tasks of immigration and building and to stand by them in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream-the redemption of Israel.
The Lord said to Abram,
Go forth from your native land and from your kin and your father s house to the land that I will show you.
I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great and you shall be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you; and all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you.
Abram went forth as the Lord commanded him . When they arrived in the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land as far as the site of Shechem, at the terebinths of Moreh.
The Lord appeared to Abram and said, I will give this land to your offspring.
-G ENESIS 12:1-7, CIRCA 1700 BCE
INTRODUCTION
I SRAEL IS A WORLD STORY . It is a geographically small country with only seven million citizens, yet it is the focus of endless reporting in the international media. It captures the attention of billions of people all around the world. Israel is a place of great contradictions: a secular country but one with deep religious meaning; a vibrant modern culture where the past beckons every moment; a home to the Jewish people yet a democracy for all persons; a Jewish country seeking acceptance in a region that tolerates only Islamic authority. Perhaps Theodor Herzl best captured the paradox at the end of the nineteenth century in the title of his book, Altneuland ( Old-New Land ).
The State of Israel was established in 1948, but its spiritual and cultural roots go back more than three thousand years. The historical experiences of the Jewish people, Jewish religion, and Jewish culture are all deeply connected to the Land of Israel. Since the beginning of Jewish history, the Jewish people have had a romance with the land promised them by the Bible, 1 and the modern country of Israel is the expression of that long historical drama. Today, Israel stands at the center of Jewish selfperception-how most Jews see themselves individually and collectively as a people. Israel is the stage on which Jewish life and peoplehood is playing out most vividly in the present, and the key to Jewish spiritual hopes for the future. In other words, Israel is the place that most intimately connects the Jewish past, present, and future. Grasping the reality of Israel and the Jewish people s profound attachment to the Jewish State, then, means appreciating the Bible s dream of the ideal covenantal Jewish society on the Promised Land, the Jewish people s origins on the Land, the harsh Jewish experience in exile from the Land and the Jewish people s heroic struggle for survival. Conversely, if we are to understand Jews and Judaism today, we must be aware of the hopes, dreams, and experiences that are located in contemporary Israel.
From whichever vantage point one views the Jewish State, it is clear that Israel carries two essential meanings for the Jewish people and the world. Israel is an indispensable part of the Bible s ancient challenge to Abraham s children to be a partner with God in a sacred covenant, in which the Jewish people are called to be a free self-determined people and to live as a kingdom of priests and a holy people (Exodus 19:6). As a sovereign Jewish homeland, Israel provides the Jewish people with a home for Jews fleeing persecution anywhere in the world. Sovereignty ensures that Jews will never again be forced to search for safety and acceptance. This is why only the reality of Israel can give real meaning to the Jewish people s hope that their future will be more secure than their past.
Unfortunately, Israel has been wracked by war for much of its short life, since it was established in 1948. Even today, too few of Israel s Arab neighbors have accepted the right of the Jewish State to exist. Transcending politics and economics, this ongoing conflict has exploited history, the Bible, theology, and national identities to produce polemical debate. As is often the case when ideology and rhetoric flourish, truth and understanding are the losers. As a result of the polemics, there is confusion regarding the political and religious realities of Israel.
Because Israel is at the center of Jewish life and identity, the Jewish State is crucial to relations between Jews and Christians. As we will see, the idea of Jews returning to their biblical homeland has long troubled Christian theologians. Some Protestant religious thinkers have difficulty connecting religion with sovereignty or national politics. Many Christians today see Israel as devoid of religious value, as a secular polity whose justification is no different from any other people s: Jews deserve a country only because all people have a universal right to self-determination. Some nontraditional Jews also understand Israel only in political terms-as a well-deserved Jewish refuge after thousands of years of persecution and exile culminating in the Holocaust. Some contemporary Christian liberation theologians go to an extreme and refuse to acknowledge even this. They have teamed up with extremist postnationalists to reject the idea of a Jewish homeland and to deny Israel s right to exist.
Neglecting the spiritual significance of Israel and seeing the country in exclusively political terms tends to polarize people who identify with the Jewish people against those who feel closer to the Palestinian people and the Muslim world. In the opposite direction, some evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews view Israel in fundamentalist terms filled with messianic scenarios. So we arrive at a popular divide between some Protestant and liberal political leaders on the one hand, and Jews and conservative Christians on the other. This is still another tragic dimension of misunderstanding Israel. As Israel s Declaration of Independence makes clear, from its very birth Israel saw no need to choose between her well-being and that of her Arab neighbors. In fact the opposite is true: Most Israelis know that peace and prosperity will only be achieved when Israelis, Palestinians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Jordanians, and Syrians accept one another s right to live alongside their neighbors in safety and se