Bitter Sweetness

And the Lord your God will bring you into the Land which your fathers possessed, and you shall possess it; and He will do you good and multiply you above your fathers.
–Deuteronomy 30:5

What Eretz Yisrael means to the Jew can be felt only through the spirit of the Lord which is in our people as a whole.
–Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook - The Land of Israel

Our future does not depend on what the Gentiles will say but on what the Jews will do.
–David Ben-Gurion

We are in the month of Iyar. The first Rosh Chodesh Iyar after the exodus from Egypt found Bnei Yisrael at the waters of Marah. After wandering for a week after crossing the Reed Sea, Bnei Yisrael finally came upon water in the vast desert, only to find it undrinkable. Moshe turned to God to find out what to do, and God told Moshe that if he threw a branch of a nearby growing tree – which in itself was bitter – into the water, the water would become sweet.

There are many questions that can be asked. Why didn't God just go poof and make sweet water? Why didn't God just provide sweet water to start with? And maybe the most puzzling, how is it that something bitter (the branch) added to something else bitter (the water) makes the water sweet? And why did Moshe have to throw the branch into the water? Why didn’t God just blow it in Himself?

There are many explanations for these questions, but the one I present now is this: Sometimes, in order to achieve sweetness, we first need a dose of bitterness. And sometimes we have to get there ourselves. In other words, great things don't often come easy. 

This year, Yom HaAzmaut, Israel's Independence Day, will be difficult to celebrate.
There is simply too much hardship, too many tears, too much destruction, too many deaths.

After all, what do we have to celebrate? A failed leadership, a divided population?
How can this be רֵאשִׁית צְמִיחַת גְּאֻלָּתֵנוּ the first flowering of our redemption, as the prayer for the State of Israel states, when hate and death surround us and are rapidly closing in.

So much bitterness.

And like the weary people at the waters of Marah, we are wondering have we been led here only to die in the desert? 

It is the Rambam who tells us what the flowering of our redemption might look like; the one difference between the beginning of the Messianic age (the age of redemption) and normal times is the sovereignty of Israel. We might not be witness to great miracles, and there will not necessarily be peace, says the Rambam, but the fact that Israel is sovereign in its land will be the sign that the beginning of the redemption has come.

In fact, the great Rabbi Akiva believed that Shimon Bar Kochva was the Messiah. Bar Kochva, leader of the last Great Revolt against the Romans, was big and strong and a great and brave general and warrior, but he never performed miracles, nor was he a great scholar. Yet Rabbi Akiva believed until his death that Bar Kochva was the Messiah because Bar Kochva liberated Judea from the Roman conquerors, if only for a short period of time. And Rabbi Akiva knew that a sign of the beginning of the redemption is the sovereignty of the Nation of Israel in the Land of Israel.
But Bar-Kochva was not the Messiah, and his sovereignty didn’t last.

Shimon Bar Kochva from the Knesset Menorah

Therefore, we need to ask ourselves, what makes this time around different?

This time, we are surrounded by miracles. From the 1947 UN partition vote, when both East and West voted for the partition, through the victory of the War of Independence when our army was out-manned, out-gunned, and out-trained by five invading genocidal armies, to the Six-Day War, whose miracles are too numerous to list, to the Yom Kippur War, when the Syrian tanks retreated without a logical reason back into Syria.
And on and on. 

To be a realist, said David Ben-Gurion, you have to believe in miracles. 

The people of Israel, rising from ashes, emerging from the persecutions, the forced conversions, the slaughter that they encountered in every corner of the globe, came together, and created a miracle.

An ongoing miracle; a miracle in progress; a daily open, glorious miracle.

We became farmers, after centuries when Jews were forbidden to own land. We became architects and designers and builders and planned and designed and built cities where only sand dunes and marshes had been for generations. We became doctors and lawyers after years of quotas and closed doors. We became bus drivers and fighter pilots and tank drivers. We became generals and soldiers again after 2000 years. We became Nobel Prize winners and politicians and millionaires and inventors and experts in security. We became researchers and Web designers and engineers and cartoon artists. We became university professors and computer programmers and authors and composers. We became Olympic athletes and singers and basketball players playing for teams in cities where once Jews were forbidden to live.
We became parents, and grandparents, and great grandparents.

We are the miracle.

Despite what it looks like from the outside, we became one people with one heart.

Make no mistake.

We will endure this heartrending, unbearable bitterness.
We will yet witness more miraculous sweetness.

Because the People of Israel live.

And that is our miracle.

 

Our Father in Heaven, Rock and Redeemer of Israel, bless the State of Israel, the first manifestation of the approach of our redemption. Shield it with Your lovingkindness, envelop it in Your peace, and bestow Your light and truth upon its leaders, ministers, and advisors, and grace them with Your good counsel. Strengthen the hands of those who defend our holy land, grant them deliverance, and adorn them in a mantle of victory. Ordain peace in the land and grant its inhabitants eternal happiness.
Lead them, swiftly and upright, to Your city Zion and to Jerusalem, the abode of Your Name, as is written in the Torah of Your servant Moses: “Even if your outcasts are at the ends of the world, from there the Lord your God will gather you, from there He will fetch you. And the Lord your God will bring you to the land that your fathers possessed, and you shall possess it; and He will make you more prosperous and more numerous than your fathers.” Draw our hearts together to revere and venerate Your name and to observe all the precepts of Your Torah, and send us quickly the Messiah son of David, agent of Your vindication, to redeem those who await Your deliverance.
Manifest yourself in the splendor of Your boldness before the eyes of all inhabitants of Your world and may everyone endowed with a soul affirm that the Lord, God of Israel, is king and his dominion is absolute. Amen forevermore.