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War - The Miracle of Jewish History - Four Thousand Years of Jewish History - American and Jewish Values
And immediately it was plunged into war as five of the neighboring Arab states attacked. These Arab states had previously voted against the UN partition of Palestine and now simply refused to recognize that historic and democratic vote. (See Part 65 for more on this subject.) Little Israel, which had virtually no heavy artillery, no tanks, no airplanes, had to defend itself against Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq! That's 600,000 Jews against 45 million Arabs, while the United Nations did nothing. And yet the Jews won. It was nothing short of a miracle. But the victory was bittersweet. The Old City of Jerusalem -- including the Jewish Quarter and access to the Kotel, the Western (Wailing) Wall -- fell to the Jordanians. The Jews were driven out of the Old City, and their homes and synagogues looted and destroyed. Jordanians barred Jewish access to any holy sites within the Old City, and the world again did not lift a finger to protest that the religious rights of a people were being violated. (For fascinating details about the War of Independence, see The Pledge by Leonard Slater.) NEW BORDERS The War of Independence had lasted 13 months. Some 6,000 Israelis died or a full 1% of the Jewish population at that time. (If that had happened in America, proportionally, 2.5 million people would have died. As upset as America was about the Vietnam War, it lost 52,000 soldiers in that war.)
Mt. Herzl, the national cemetery, is full of graves without names. These are graves of Holocaust survivors who made it to Israel only to be handed a gun in order to fight for the survival of the Jewish nation. No one had time to get to know their names. They went down in history only as Yossi or Hershel or Moshe. It is a tragic thing to see all these graves marked "Plony" (which is the Israeli version of "John Doe.") The War of Independence was Israel's costliest war. The end of the war defined the borders of the new State of Israel in a radically new way. The borders were not the ones that the UN defined in their partition vote. In sum total, Israel got more land, though it lost the Old City of Jerusalem.
POPULATION Already, at the time of the UN partition vote, Arab residents of Palestine began fleeing in anticipation of war. The first to go were the 30,000 of the wealthiest. By January 1948 the Palestine Arab Higher Committee asked other Arab countries to bar entry of refugees because the Arab exodus from Palestine was so alarming. At the time of the declaration of the State of Israel, 472,000 Arabs fled as war broke out. At the same time, 820,000 Jews were forced to flee Arab lands such as Syria, Iraq, Iran etc. Most of the property of these Jews, many of whom were wealthy people, was confiscated, never to be returned. (Of these Jews, 526,000 settled in Israel.) Once the war was over, the population began to rise by leaps and bounds with Jewish immigrants coming not only from Arab countries, but also from other states and more recently from Ethiopia and Russia.
The population of Israel, since the founding of the state, has increased many-fold. This increase had presented a special challenge, because of the huge economic burden of absorbing such a huge number of newcomers. However, while it was a burden, the population growth has also been a big blessing. Immigration has done tremendous things for the country. The standard of living in Israel -- which in 1948 was forced to ration food -- has gone up tremendously in the last two decades. Was this a miracle? Clearly. But it was also a fulfillment of prophecy.
But Israel has not only been able to absorb huge masses of people, it has not only survived living in a constant state of war, it has grown economically. And this despite various trade boycotts instigated by Arab nations. (For example, Pepsi Cola didn't sell in Israel for years because of the boycott. For many years, Subaru was the only Japanese car manufacturer to sell here.) Keeping this in mind, it is absolutely miraculous what Israel has been able to do. Not only did the "desert bloom," but in a relatively short time the once barren land was producing a surplus! This surplus was then exported to other, far more "lush" countries, like the U.S. Another fulfillment of prophecy:
In 1997 the International Monetary Fund took Israel off the list of developing countries, because it is now fully developed. It has the 19th highest standard of living in the world, just behind that of England. SIX DAY WAR The Arab countries did not easily accept their defeat in 1948. All the while they were plotting a comeback. On May 22, 1967, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970) declared the Strait of Tiran -- that is Israel's sea access to Eilat -- was closed to all Israeli ships and any other ships bound for Israel. This attempt at economic strangulation would have been an act of war to any other country, but initially Israel did not react, attempting to find a political solution. Meanwhile, Nasser became more and more aggressive in his verbal attacks on Israel. On May 27, 1967, he declared: "Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel. On June 1, 1967, Iraq's president Abel Rahman Aref declared: "Our goal is clear -- to wipe Israel off the map."
Egypt and Syria already had a pact combining their armies and now Egypt made a similar agreement with Jordan. It was clear that war was imminent. On June 5th, 1967, Israel, realizing that the entire Arab world is about to attack, launched a preemptive strike. It was one of the most brilliant preemptive strikes in history. In one fell swoop, Israeli planes bombed the entire Egyptian Air Force still sitting on the ground, and a day later did the same thing to the entire Jordanian Air Force. Why didn't the Jordanians react after the Egyptians were bombed? Because the Egyptians were broadcasting that they had achieved a tremendous victory (when they were completely crushed). Not knowing what was truly happening, the Jordanians believed the propaganda and thus were unprepared. In just six days, Israel captured huge chunks of territory and won what is generally considered to be one of the greatest military victories in history:
REUNITED JERUSALEM For 19 years, Jews had not been able to enter the Old City or pray at their most holy of sites, the Temple Mount or the Kotel (the Western Wall) of the Temple Mount. Many of the soldiers fighting the war had not been born yet when this site was lost to the Jewish people. They had only seen it in photographs. Entering the Old City, they did not know where to go, and when they found it, they openly wept. On the radio, the paratrooper, who was leading the Old City forces, announced: "Har HaBayit b'yadenu -- The Temple Mount is in our hands." People were jubilant. They couldn't believe the miracle that had happened. It must be stressed that the Jewish behavior in victory was in stark contrast to the Arab behavior after their victory over the Old City in 1948, when five dozen synagogues were looted and destroyed. Jewish soldiers did not dynamite the Dome of the Rock or any other mosque in the Old City and access to these sites for Arab has continued uninterrupted. PLO The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded in January 1964 by Ahmed Shukeiry as a representative organization of the Arab refugees of the 1948 war. It was never a peaceful organization, however. In fact, Shukeiry once predicted an Arab victory over Israel, saying: "Those [Jews] who survive will remain in Palestine. I estimate that none of them will survive." The first and consistent aim of the PLO was the elimination of the State of Israel and its replacement by the State of Palestine. (It is important to note that a State of Palestine had never existed in history. The Arab people living in this land during the days of the Ottoman Empire were simply Arabs with no national identity. After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, in the days of the British Mandate, both Jews and Arabs were considered "Palestinians" by the British.) Egyptian-born Yassir Arafat (1929-) was the head of Fatah, the PLO's terrorist group, and after the Six Day War, he took over the entire organization.
One of the most infamous acts carried out under Arafat's direction in the early days was the kidnapping and murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. It is important to remember that the world again stood silent. The Olympic Games went on, while the terrorists were holding the Jewish athletes. The Israelis wanted to intervene but the Germans refused their help. In the end, the Germans totally botched the rescue attempt which led to the deaths of all the athlete hostages. Israel later hunted down and killed many of the terrorists responsible for Munich. The PLO has since carried out literally countless numbers of terrorist attacks against Israelis. To list them all would take a book in itself. Indeed, it is beyond the scope of this Crash Course in Jewish History to attempt to outline the turbulent history of the State of Israel in the last 30 years which includes at least two major wars -- 1973, the Yom Kippur War, and 1982, the Lebanon War -- as well as the attacks by Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. As for this writing, the Palestinian Authority, headed by Yassir Arafat, is conducting a terrorist war which began in September 2000. It is clear that Arafat and many other Arab states have still not abandoned their dream of destroying Israel. |
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SUPERNATURAL When we look back at the history of the Jewish people which we have just examined at lightning speed in this series, we have to keep one key thing in mind: The very survival of the Jewish people through recorded time is nothing short of miraculous. The very fact that Jews exist as a nation today stands in testimony to the existence of God who acts in history. By any historical measure, the Jewish people should have disappeared long ago.
The person who summed this up best was David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of the State of Israel. He said: "A Jew who does not believe in miracles is not a realist." Why did he say that? Because miracles are the only possible explanation for the existence of the Jewish people. Over 300 years ago King Louis XIV of France asked Blaise Pascal, the great French philosopher, to give him proof of the supernatural. Pascal answered: "Why, the Jews, your Majesty -- the Jews." An astonishing answer. The best proof of the supernatural that Pascal could think of was: "The Jews." We don't have to speculate what Pascal meant when he gave this answer, because he took the trouble to spell it out. (See Pensees, para. 620, p. 285.) Pascal said that the fact that the Jewish people survived until the 17th century -- to the time period when he was living -- was nothing short of a supernatural phenomenon. There simply was no logical explanation for it. As we have seen from this series, Jewish history simply doesn't comply with the rest of history; it does not make sense. Many scholars and historian have noticed this and remarked about it. Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens), the great American writer, who was an agnostic and a self-acknowledged skeptic, penned this in 1899 in Harper's Magazine:
Leo Nikolaivitch Tolstoy, unlike Twain, was not an agnostic. He was a very religious, Russian Orthodox Christian. He is also a very famous Russian author from the last century, perhaps best known for his War and Peace. He wrote this in 1908:
KEEPING THE FAITH There is another reason why the Jewish people survived as a nation through all this time and through all the persecutions that we have barely touched on in this series -- they have clung to their religion. "More than the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews." The great lesson of Jewish history is that the more the Jews have been connected to Judaism -- in lifestyle, in education, etc. -- the more likely that their children and grandchildren would have remained Jewish instead of assimilating into oblivion. Today there are approximately 12-14 million Jews in the world, where there should be 500 million. The reasons why: 1) persecution, and 2) assimilation.
The greatest strength of the Jewish people is also their greatest weakness. Jews are a "stiff-necked" people. They have stubbornly clung to their beliefs and as a result outlasted all of the ancient empires of history while changing the way the entire world looks at morality and the concept of God. Jewish ideas -- of one God, of a loving God, of a universal vision for humanity -- have been at odds with the philosophies of all these empires, and to hold up that vision has required an unbelievable strength of character. And yet, what is the greatest weakness of the Jewish people? Their stubborn individuality makes them unbendable. Every Jew thinks he/she is right. The hardest job on earth must be to unify and lead the Jewish people. Of course, when unified, the Jewish people are an unbeatable force in human history. THE MISSION Jewish history is like a 6,000-piece puzzle. At the beginning you dump the pieces on the table and it makes no sense. But as we assemble piece after piece, a picture emerges. A picture that records the action of God in history. And there's no chance or randomness here. Everything happens for a reason. By Jewish reckoning we have assembled 5762 of these pieces and have 238 to go. History is moving toward a conclusion, its final destination. That final destination was described by Prophet Isaiah in these words:
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We have now reached the conclusion of this series and before we wrap up it is fitting for us to put into perspective the ground that we have covered. Note that we are following the Jewish calendar for these events (and not the Gregorian calendar which is at times 150 years at odds with Jewish computations). For more on this issue see Part 21.
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What happened to the 10 lost tribes? Find out in this video feature direct from Jerusalem.
The 10 Lost Tribes
(1 min 52 sec)
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If you cannot see the video above, use the links below to open the video directly in the Windows Media player: The 10 Lost Tribes (1 min 52 sec)
Published: Sunday, April 21,
2002
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The Islamic connection begins in the 7th century, thousands of years after the original Jewish connection.
What is the Islamic
connection to Jerusalem? (1 min 53 sec)
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If you cannot see the video above, use the links below to open the video directly in the Windows Media player: What is the Islamic connection to Jerusalem? (1 min 53 sec)
Published: Sunday, April 28,
2002
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Jerusalem is a holy city for all religions; it's the holiest city in the world only to the Jews.
The Jewish connection
to Jerusalem
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f you cannot see the video above, use the links below to open the video directly in the Windows Media player: The Jewish connection to Jerusalem (1 min 40 sec)
Published: Sunday, June 02,
2002
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What happened to the Ark and where is it
The Ark of the
Covenant
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If you cannot see the video above, use the links below to open the video directly in the Windows Media player: The Ark of the Covenant
Published: Wednesday,
February 12, 2003
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The United States was the first country to be created, from its inception, as a democracy. And the Bible played a major role in the process.
An excerpt from WorldPerfect: The Jewish Impact on Civilization The creation of the United States of America represented a unique event in world history. Unlike other countries where democracy evolved over a period of hundreds of years, the United States was the first country to be created, from its inception, as a democracy. And the Bible -- and Jewish values -- played a major role in this process. Many of the earliest "pilgrims" who settled the "New England" of America in early 17th century were Puritan refugees escaping religious persecutions in Europe. Over the next century, America continued to be not only the land of opportunity for many people seeking a better life but also the land of religious tolerance. By the middle 1700's, the east coast of America was settled by a virtual "Who's Who" of Christian splinter sects from all over Europe. Among them were:
These were just some of the numerous groups who arrived in America in search of religious freedom.
The majority of the earliest settlers were, of course, Puritans. Beginning with the Mayflower, over the next twenty years, 16,000 Puritans migrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and many more settled in Connecticut and Rhode Island. Like their cousins back in England, these American Puritans strongly identified with both the historical traditions and customs of the ancient Hebrews of the Old Testament. They viewed their emigration from England as a virtual re-enactment of the Jewish exodus from Egypt. To them, England was Egypt, the king was Pharaoh, the Atlantic Ocean was the Red Sea, America was the Land of Israel, and the Indians were the ancient Canaanites. They were the new Israelites, entering into a new covenant with God in a new Promised Land. Thanksgiving -- first celebrated in 1621, a year after the Mayflower landed -- was initially conceived as day parallel to the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur; it was to be a day of fasting, introspection and prayer.
In England, the Puritan identification with the Bible was so strong that some Puritan extremists sought to replace English common law with Biblical laws of the Old Testament, but were prevented from doing so. In America, however, there was far more freedom to experiment with the use of Biblical law in the legal codes of the colonies, and this was exactly what these early colonist set out to do. The earliest legislation of the colonies of New England was all determined by Scripture. At the first assembly of New Haven in 1639, John Davenport clearly stated the primacy of the Bible as the legal and moral foundation of the colony:
Subsequently, the New Haven legislators adopted a legal code -- the Code of 1655 -- which contained some 79 statutes, half of which contained Biblical references, virtually all from the Hebrew Bible. The Plymouth Colony had a similar law code as did the Massachusetts assembly, which, in 1641 -- after an exhortation by Reverend John Cotton who presented the legislators with a copy of Moses, His Judicials -- adopted the so-called "Capitall Lawes of New England" based almost entirely on Mosaic law. A very significant political evolution was taking place in the New World. Unlike the Puritans in England who, of necessity, lived under English common law and were ruled by a King and Parliament, the Puritans of America had no central authority or national governing body. Yet, they did not lapse into anarchy. Instead, they created communities governed by elected councils of elders similar to the "presbyters" of England. Their communities were both stable and prosperous, with mandatory school systems modeled after the Jewish ones. This unique political evolution goes a long way toward explaining the strong sense of independence shared by the colonies and the early success of democracy in America. The Puritans felt that God was watching them, and fear of heaven was a thousand times stronger than fear of the crown. It almost seems as if these early settlers had recreated the Biblical period of the "Judges," when, following the conquest of Jericho and settlement of Canaan, Israel had no king or central authority and "every man did what was right in his own eyes." (Judges 21:25) What was right in Puritan eyes, of course, was what the Bible said. But what did it say exactly? So much of it could be subject to interpretation of the reader. Without the Jewish Oral Law, which helped the Jews understand the Bible, the Puritans were left to their own devices and tended toward a literal interpretation. This sometimes led to a stricter, more fundamentalist observance than Judaism had ever seen. For example, the Jewish Sabbath is a day of refraining from work as the Bible mandates. However, "work" -- in Hebrew melacha -- is defined by Jewish Oral Law as cessation of all creative activity that was in progress when the Tabernacle was being built and which, the Bible states, ceased on the Sabbath. But the Puritans took the commandment to cease work as unconditional. And their prohibitions were actually more restrictive than what the Jews had themselves practiced. Even household chores such as sweeping floors, making beds, or feeding animals were not allowed for the twenty-four hours of the day of rest. Adherence was enforced by fines and public floggings. While we stress the importance of the Hebrew Bible to the early American settlers, it is important to note that, of course, the "New Testament" was revered as well. However, the Hebrew Bible was seen as the original and pure source of Christian values, and also as a legalistic and ritualistic guide, something which the New Testament was not. In addition, there was a political agenda involved in this special focus in the Old over the New Testament. Many New Englanders viewed the New Testament as an instrument of justification, used by powers-that-be in Europe, to preserve the existing order. Had not Paul written in his letter to the Romans (13:1-2):
That sure smacked of the divine right of kings and condemnation of the rebels of the Puritan revolution. No wonder that the Hebrew Bible, with its message of obedience to God alone, of personal responsibility, and of freedom from tyranny, was far more in tune with the mindset of these Protestant splinter sects of America. Focusing even further on the issue of individual responsibility, the Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted legislation requiring parents to teach their children to read and understand the basic principles of religion and capital laws. All towns in New England with a minimum of 50 households were required by law to establish schools and appoint teachers. In 1670, British commissioners making a survey of conditions in the American colonies reported that in Connecticut fully one-quarter of the annual revenues were set aside for free public education. Universities were established (the first being Harvard University founded in 1636 as training school for Puritan ministers), and many printing presses were imported for the printing and dissemination of books.
In insisting on education for all, the Puritans were following Jewish law. (Had not the 12th century Jewish philosopher Maimonides admonished: "Appoint teachers for the children in every country, province and city. In any city that does not have a school excommunicate the people of the city until they get teachers for the children.") Education for all thus became a hallmark of early America and not just New England. In addition to Harvard, many other colleges and universities were established under the auspices of various Protestant sects: Yale, William and Mary, Rutgers, Princeton, Brown, Kings College (later to be known as Columbia), Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth etc. The Bible played a central role in the curriculum of all of these institutions of higher learning with both Hebrew and Bible studies offered as required courses. (See Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience 1697-1783, p. 16.) Many of these colleges even adopted some Hebrew word or phrase as part of their official emblem or seal. Beneath the banner containing the Latin Lux et Veritas, the Yale seal shows an open book with the Hebrew Urim Vtumim, which was a part of the ceremonial breastplate of the High Priest in the days of the Temple. The Columbia seal has the Hebrew name for God at the top center, with the Hebrew name for one of the angels on a banner toward the middle. Dartmouth uses the Hebrew words meaning "God Almighty" in a triangle in the upper center of its seal. So popular was the Hebrew Language in the late 16th and early 17th centuries that several students at Yale delivered their commencement orations in Hebrew. Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Pennsylvania taught courses in Hebrew -- all the more remarkable because no university in England at the time offered it. Many of the population, including a significant number of the Founding Fathers of America, were products of these American universities -- for example, Thomas Jefferson attended William and Mary, James Madison Princeton, Alexander Hamilton King's College (i.e. Columbia). Thus, we can be sure that a majority of these political leaders were not only well acquainted with the contents of both the New and Old Testaments but also had some working knowledge of Hebrew. Notes Abraham Katsh in The Biblical Heritage of American Democracy (p. 70):
Their Biblical education colored the American founders' attitude toward not only religion and ethics, but most significantly, politics. We see them adopting the biblical motifs of the Puritans for political reasons. For example, the struggle of the ancient Hebrews against the wicked Pharaoh came to embody the struggle of the colonists against English tyranny.
Numerous examples can be found which clearly illustrate to what a significant extent the political struggles of the colonies were identified with the ancient Hebrews. The first design for the official seal of the United States recommended by Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas in 1776 depicts the Jews crossing the Red Sea. The motto around the seal read: "Resistance to Tyrants is Obedience to God." The inscription on the Liberty Bell at Independence Hall in Philadelphia is a direct quote from Leviticus (25:10): "Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof." Patriotic speeches and publications during the period of the struggle for independence were often infused with Biblical motifs and quotations. For example, Benjamin Rush, in his editorials denouncing the Tea Act, drew on inspiration from the Hebrew Bible:
Likewise, Thomas Paine's anti-monarchial pamphlet Common Sense cited the Hebrew Bible and words of the Prophet Samuel concluding:
Even the basic framework of America clearly reflects the influence of the Bible and power of Jewish ideas in shaping the political development of America. Nowhere is this more evident than in the opening sentences of the Declaration of Independence:
Whereas, these words echo the Enlightenment's -- specifically John Locke's --idea of "the ineliable rights of man," without a doubt, the concept that these rights come from God is of Biblical origin. This and the other documents of early America make it clear that the concept of an God-given standard of morality is a central pillar of American democracy. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in his The State acknowledges the obvious:
Thus we see that it is with the birth of American democracy that we have the next milestone in the process of the spread of Jewish ideas in civilization. For the first time in history, Jewish ethical ideas were legally enshrined into the laws of a non-Jewish nation. That country, the United States, would, in turn, become a powerful model to be emulated by numerous countries around the world. |
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Lessons 1 - 5 Lessons 6 - 10 Lessons 11 -15 Lessons 16 -20 Lessons 21 -25 Lessons 26 -30 Lessons 31 -35 Lessons 36 -40 Lessons 41-45 Lessons 46-50 Lessons 51 -55 Lessons 56 - 60 Lessons 61 - 65 Lessons 66 - 73 |
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