I found well written and content, educational too regardless of side you are on, take time to read & listen! By Douglas Murray; "Things Worth Remembering: Jonathan Sacks on the Improbability of Israel

The Jewish state’s very existence proves that survival is possible against all odds." I present anything I find interesting and well written & I am against the antisemitism now we see around us

‘Things Worth Remembering: Jonathan Sacks on the Improbability of Israel

The Jewish state’s very existence proves that survival is possible against all odds.’

Things Worth Remembering: Jonathan Sacks on the Improbability of Israel | The Free Press (thefp.com)

‘Tomorrow, Israel will commemorate the first anniversary of the most brutal, most destructive pogrom since the Holocaust.

It would be understandable to feel despair, at this moment.

The attacks on Israel are only mounting. On Tuesday, more than 100 missiles were launched from Iran, with the aim of ending more Jewish lives. They failed, but one Palestinian lost his life. 

That very day, I sat down with Bari in New York City, and we discussed the other assault on Israel, which continues across the West: the rhetorical assault. Recently, just 40 blocks away at Barnard College, students had been chanting for an intifada. Manhattan had also, as I wrote in my last column, been playing host to the United Nations General Assembly, which many global leaders saw as an opportunity to demonize the world’s sole Jewish state.

All the while, the United States offered the most feeble defense imaginable.

The Jewish people have been betrayed, again. But amid this week’s attacks, the celebrations of Rosh Hashanah took place; it is a new year in Israel.

Today, I am not going to write of despair. I am going to write of hope.

To do so, I will lean on my late friend Jonathan Sacks, who served as Chief Rabbi in the United Kingdom between 1991 and 2013. The year he retired, he gave a speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference in Washington, D.C. I was fortunate enough to be present, and I have recalled his words often in the last year.

Jonathan was born in London in 1948. He confesses in his speech that, as a child, he had never understood the line in Jewish scripture that says, It is not only one enemy that stands against us. “I used to say: That belongs to my parents’ generation, not to us—not to us born after the Holocaust.”

Living in London, Jonathan said, “I never experienced a single incident of antisemitism. Until 11 years ago.”

In 2002, he explained, “Our youngest daughter, who was studying at a British university, came home in tears. She had been at an anti-globalization rally, which quickly turned into a tirade—first against America, then against Israel, then against Jews.

“And with tears in her eyes, she said: ‘Dad, they hate us.’ ”

Antisemitism, Jonathan said, was on the rise across the West, citing various recent incidents that would sound disturbingly familiar to anyone who has read The Free Press in the last year. “Last Wednesday, the Turkish president, Mr. Erdoğan, called Zionism ‘a crime against humanity,’ ” said Jonathan in 2013. At the UN two weeks ago, in 2024, the very same Mr. Erdoğan compared Israel’s prime minister to Adolf Hitler.

“What we grew up with—‘never again’—is starting to sound like: ‘ever again.’ And at the heart of it is hostility to Israel,” said Jonathan. “Anti-Zionism is the new antisemitism.”

Having described the attack, Jonathan launched his defense.

“Mr. Erdoğan,” he thundered, “it is anti-Zionism that is the crime against humanity.”

At this point, much of the audience at the AIPAC Policy Conference got to their feet. I well remember the astonishment of the people in the hall afterwards. That night, there had been many speakers with many prepared remarks. Jonathan, too, had carefully planned what he would say. But he spoke as if he were finding words for his thoughts at the very moment he expressed them. After he left the stage, everybody present looked around, as though they had realized: Here was oratory of a vastly different order.

There is one man who was in the room that day who seems to have forgotten his words, however: the then-vice president of the United States, Joe Biden. In his old age, he also seems to have forgotten his own words. Standing before AIPAC in 2013, Biden said that America’s defense of Israel is not only a moral imperative but also in the best interests of the United States.

A close friend of mine once told me that her father—a cantor—said he feared Jonathan would die young, because he put every bit of himself and his emotions into every word that he spoke. He was not one of those people who just stood in front of a room and riffed. He sweated for his words.

Jonathan died in 2020 at the age of 72—too young indeed, and too suddenly; he had been diagnosed with cancer just a month before. Yet in the last year, he has felt present to me. As Israel has weathered rhetorical attacks from all corners of the West, I have thought of the words Jonathan would use to counter them.

Faced with despair, he would choose hope.

That day, in Washington, D.C., it seemed for a moment as if he would end with a joke. British atheists, he told the audience, had “paid a fortune for London buses to carry a logo” which read: “There’s probably no God.  Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” A more traditional religious leader might have formally countered this idea. Jonathan decided to play with it. First, by laughing at the slight weasellyness of that “probably.” Then by spinning something golden out of it.

Here is how he concluded his speech:

“How probable is it that the universe should exist? How probable is it that life should exist? How probable is it that out of all the 3 million life-forms on planet Earth, only one—us—is capable of asking the question: Why? Nothing interesting is remotely probable.

“Think about the Jewish people. How probable is it that one man—Abraham, who commanded no empire and ordered no army, performed no miracle, delivered no prophecy—should today without doubt be the most influential man who ever lived, who’s claimed as the spiritual ancestor by 2.4 billion Christians, 1.6 billion Muslims, and most of you in the room today?

“How probable is it that this tiny people—the Jewish people—numbering less than one-fifth of 1 percent of the population of the world, should have outlived the world’s greatest empires. . . How likely is it that, after 2,000 years of exile, our people should have come back to our land and there—having stood eyeball to eyeball with the angel of death in Auschwitz a mere three years earlier in 1948—said, despite the worst crime of man against man, lo amut kiechyeh. I will not die but I will live.

“Israel is the greatest collective affirmation of life in the whole of Jewish history.

“Friends, Judaism is the defeat of probability by the power of possibility. And nowhere will you see the power of possibility more than in the State of Israel today.”’

___

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