JewsByChoice.Org

Pesach is over now, and Israeli motorists have begun attaching Israeli flags to their cars in honor of Israel’s upcoming 60th birthday.

To honor the 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence, Britain’s chief rabbi, R’ Jonathan Sacks, has compiled a double CD of readings (read by R’ Sacks himself) and songs celebrating the millennia-old attachment of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. Jerusalem Post editor David Horovitz published an editorial on Friday, 4 April 2008, announcing the soon-to-be-released CD.

To put Israel’s significance to the Jews and the rest of the world in some context, here is some of R’ Sacks’s text from the CD:

Judaism is twice as old as Christianity, three times as old as Islam. Yet there are 82 Christian nations, 56 Muslim ones, but only one Jewish state. A country smaller than the Kruger National Park, less than one quarter of one percent of the land mass of the Arab world, Israel is the only place on earth where, in 4,000 years of history, Jews have formed a majority. The only place where they’ve been able to rule themselves and defend themselves. The only place where they have been able to do what almost every people takes for granted: live as a nation shaping its own destiny, and create a society according to its own values.

Only in Israel can a Jew speak the Jewish language, see a Jewish landscape, live by the Jewish calendar, walk where our ancestors walked and continue the story they began.

Yet still it has to fight for the right to be.

… Why, after everything, is it still so hard for the nations of the world to grant the Jewish people a place to live without fear? Israel is the West’s oldest nation. Its religion is the West’s oldest faith… Why must the people who first taught the world the sanctity of life so often be made to walk through the valley of the shadow of death?

We live in a time when there is widespread effort to discredit the connection between the Jewish people and the land of Israel. Many see the return of Jews to this part of the world as at best a consolation prize for the Holocaust (which, according to many who believe this, never actually happened), and at worst, a totally illegitimate land-grab by a pack of Western colonialists with no prior history in this region. The purpose of this compilation, in Horovitz’s words, is “to retell the unique, extraordinary story of the Jewish people’s attachment to its land, and its miraculous return home, ‘to a whole generation, or two, of Jews who were born after the epic events and take Israel for granted.’”

What’s on it? According to Horovitz, “The primary focus, and the major proportion of the two compact discs, is the music—an eclectic selection featuring not only the most traditional of Hebrew texts and the most popular of modern Israel’s patriotic standards, but also tracks and artists so diverse that few first-time listeners will be familiar with all of the material.” Complete liner notes are available here at the Home of Hope website.

Where can one buy it? I looked on the Web to see where it’s being sold, but was unsuccessful. However, the Israel: Home of Hope website has a page where almost all of the tracks can be downloaded. If anyone succeeds in finding a commercial outlet for the CD, please post it in a comment.

The overall message of the collection seems to be one of hope, and of caution. While R’ Sacks notes that despite the mighty empires that have attacked and conquered Israel over the centuries, “all those empires have ‘been consigned to the dustbins of history while Am Yisrael Chai, the people of Israel lives.’” R’ Sacks notes that the various exiles of the Jews from their land “came about because of the inability to live peacably with each other. This divisive tendency is the single most recurring danger in Jewish life. There’s only one people capable of destroying the Jewish people, God forbid, and that is the Jewish people.” Following a theme that has appeared several times recently on this blog, We have seen the enemy, and it is us.

David Horovitz ends with an additional hope for R’ Sacks’s work:

[R’ Sacks] should … utilize [the discs] to kickstart a new invigoration of Diaspora Jewish outreach. Diaspora Jews must be challenged not to remain seated, listening passively to his astute sermonizing. He needs to urge them to use his rhetorical ammunition to determinedly fight for Israel, and for their own status, by spreading this honest Israeli narrative in the court of global public opinion. For more empathetically, accurately, movingly and persuasively than most any other attempt, Sacks’s self-styled “unusual project for a chief rabbi” captures the profundity of our connection to Israel, the insistent maintenance of our identity through centuries of bleak and bloody exile, and the dizzying “affirmation of life” that enabled us to rebuild our homeland after the unspeakable evil of the Holocaust and through the past six decades.