A 1,000 Year Old Prophecy – Unfolding Before Us

There are passages in our ancient texts which we read for years without fully understanding why they are there. Then history happens, and suddenly they speak to us with an urgency that is almost unsettling.

The first Rashi on the Torah is one of them.

Rashi lived almost a thousand years ago, in a world unimaginably different from ours. There was no State of Israel, no Zionist movement, no Balfour Declaration, no United Nations. Jews were scattered and largely powerless. Yet when Rashi sat down to write what would become the most influential Jewish commentary on the Torah, the first question he addressed was this: why does the Torah begin with the creation of the world?

His answer is remarkable. Rashi says that the Torah begins with Creation because a day will come when the nations of the world will say to Israel, “You are robbers, because you took the land.”

This is the first Rashi. Before Abraham discovers God, before Moses, before Egypt, before Sinai and the Ten Commandments, Rashi anticipates a moment when the Jewish people will stand accused before the world of having stolen the Land of Israel.

Almost a thousand years later, we are living through that argument.

Only the vocabulary has changed. Today we hear of colonialism, settler-colonialism and stolen land. The Jewish return to Zion, perhaps the most sustained return of a people to its ancient homeland in human history, is increasingly presented not as return at all, but as invasion.

Recently we saw a particularly disturbing example in educational material promoted by the Islamic Curriculum Initiative through an educational community with links to Cambridge. Its material speaks of Palestine as central to the formation of children’s identity and reportedly includes teaching young children a map of “Palestine” encompassing the entire land. Israel is simply absent. The Jewish claim to indigeneity is dismissed as a “Zionist narrative.”

We should be careful not to exaggerate what this represents, nor to turn a particular educational program into an indictment of Muslims generally. That would be both wrong and a distraction. Because the deeper issue is much larger.

It is about whether the Jewish story is true.

For three thousand years Jews have carried Israel with them. They carried it when they had no army, no government and no realistic prospect of sovereignty. They faced Jerusalem when they prayed in London and Warsaw, Baghdad and Marrakesh. They mourned Jerusalem when they married. They prayed for its rebuilding after they ate. Every Pesach they said Next year in Jerusalem. The connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel was not invented by Zionism. Zionism was born because the connection had never died.

This is what makes Rashi’s answer so profound.

He says that when the nations accuse Israel of theft, the Torah’s response begins not with Abraham’s purchase of a field, nor with archaeology, nor with military conquest. It begins with the first words of Genesis: Bereishit bara Elokim — “In the beginning, God created.”

Why? Because beneath the argument about Israel lies an argument about God.

If there is no God, history is ultimately a contest of power. Nations rise and fall, borders are drawn and redrawn, and there is no covenant beyond what human beings choose to remember.

But the Bible proposes something radically different. It says that history has meaning. That humanity has moral obligations. That there is a covenant between God and humankind, and a particular covenant between God and the Jewish people. And at the heart of that covenant stands a people, a Torah and a land.

That is why the attempt to sever the Jewish people from Israel is not merely an attack on modern Zionism. It requires the rewriting of one of the central stories of the Bible.

One does not have to believe that story. A secular person is perfectly entitled to say, “I do not believe that God promised this land to Abraham.” But that is very different from saying the story never existed.

You may reject the Bible. You cannot honestly rewrite it. You may dispute the theological meaning of Jewish history. You cannot make Jewish history disappear.

And that distinction matters enormously today, because we are living through an age in which the battle is increasingly not over interpretation but over memory itself.

There is a Palestinian story too, and acknowledging it diminishes nothing in ours. Two peoples can experience the same land differently. Two peoples can carry pain. Two peoples can aspire to dignity. Peace will come, if it comes, when each can make room for the story of the other. But peace cannot be built upon erasure.

A map from which Israel has disappeared is therefore not simply a map. It represents an idea: that the problem is not what Israel does, but that Israel exists. And once that becomes the premise, no change of government, no withdrawal and no negotiated border can resolve the conflict. There is nowhere left for Israel to retreat to, because its very presence has become the offense.

Rashi seems to have understood the danger almost a millennium ago. There would come a time, he said, when the Jewish people would have to defend not merely their borders but the legitimacy of their story.

That is why this moment feels larger than politics.

It is a battle for truth: whether history is something we receive with humility or remake according to the ideology of the moment. It is a battle for memory: whether a people can be detached from the land towards which it prayed for two thousand years and then described as foreign when it returns. And for those of us who believe, it is ultimately a battle about God: whether the biblical vision of covenant, peoplehood and history still has anything to say to the world.

Rabbi Sacks often taught that Jews were called upon not merely to survive history but to testify to something through history. The Jewish people are among humanity’s great witnesses: witnesses that power is not sovereign, that morality cannot simply be determined by the majority, that memory matters, and that faith can outlive empires.

Perhaps that is why the Jewish story has always been so difficult to erase. Pharaoh tried. Babylon tried. Rome tried. Others followed. The empires became exhibits in museums. The Jews continued to tell their story. And then, after almost two thousand years, they returned to Jerusalem.

The astonishing thing about the first Rashi is therefore not that Rashi somehow foresaw the politics of 2026. He did not. Calling it a “prophecy” is poetic rather than literal.

The astonishing thing is that almost a thousand years ago, the first challenge he believed the Torah needed to answer was the challenge we hear around us today: You Jews are robbers. This is not your land.

And Rashi’s response was to take us back beyond politics, beyond borders and beyond power, to the first sentence of the Torah.

Bereishit bara Elokim.

In the beginning, God created.

Perhaps Rashi understood that the deepest battle would never really be about a piece of land. It would be about whether there is truth beyond power, whether history has meaning, whether covenant has consequence, and ultimately whether God still has a place in the human story.

The Jewish people have fought this battle before. We have seen great powers seek to silence us, ideologies seek to redefine us, and empires confidently assume that they would write the final chapter of our story. They are gone. We are still here.

That is one of the great lessons of Jewish history. Power has its moment, but truth has time. Lies can capture a generation; they cannot change what happened. Darkness can obscure the light; it cannot extinguish it.

Almost a thousand years after Rashi wrote those extraordinary words, the accusation he anticipated is being heard once again. We should neither be surprised by it nor intimidated by it.

We have been here before.

And if Jewish history has taught us anything, it is this: truth outlives lies, light outlives darkness, and the people who first heard the promise are still here to tell its story.