The Power of God: Thoughts on the Last Two Years

1. The Power of God in His Land

Zhou Enlai, the Foreign Minister of China, was reportedly once asked his opinion about the French Revolution, which had taken place two centuries earlier. “It’s too soon to tell”, he responded. We sit now more than two years after October 7th, with the war ostensibly over. It may very well be “too soon to tell” how the outcome will affect Israel in the coming years. And yet, we live in the present moment, and can’t predict the future. We have to try and assess as best we can with the facts that we have now. Let’s begin by rewinding two years, to when that terrible dark day took place.

On Shemini Atzeret, the holiday on which the October 7th massacre took place, Jews around the world begin to insert the line “Mashiv Ha’Ruach U’Morid Ha’Geshem” into the second blessing of the daily Amida prayer. This phrase praises God as He who “Causes the Wind to Blow and Brings Down the Rain”. Contrary to popular belief, this is not an actual prayer for rain. The petition for rain is inserted into the eighth blessing of the Amida (V’Ten Tal U’Matar L’Vracha – “and cause dew and rain to come for blessing”), and is recited at different times in the Land of Israel vs. the Diaspora, depending on when each locale is seen as requiring rain.

Mashiv Ha’Ruach, on the other hand, is recited by Jews in both Israel and the diaspora at the same times, between Shemini Atzeret and Pesach, and is linked to when the rainy season begins in Israel specifically. For this piece of our liturgy, even diaspora Jews praise God based on what is happening in Israel. This line is inserted into the blessing in which we praise God for having the power to revive the dead. The power to bring wind and rain are akin to the power to revive the dead. Wind and rain represent transformative power: the storm, the whirlwind, the deluge; like the Flood of Noah.

The Talmud (Berakhot 58b) records that someone who hasn’t seen a loved one in more than twelve months should also recite the blessing of mechayeh meitim, in abridged form: “Blessed are You Lord our God King of the Universe Who Revives the Dead”. R. Yosef Zvi Rimon, the leading Modern Orthodox/Religious Zionist halachic authority in Israel today (to my mind, at least), has ruled that the relatives of released Israeli hostages should not actually make this blessing, because it is only to be recited when one was unsure if their loved one was still alive. But Israeli intelligence has known all along which hostages were still alive. Instead, he ruled, the loved ones should make the blessing of Shehechyanu, thanking God for keeping us alive and sustaining us to be able to reach this special moment. And indeed, there are beautiful videos of the relatives of freed hostages reciting the Shehecheyanu blessing.

The future and literal revival of the dead will be centered in the Land of Israel. Jewish tradition teaches that Jews buried in the Land of Israel will only have to wake up out of their coffin, “stretch their arms and legs”, so to speak, and watch the End of Days unfold from their front row seat. For Jews buried outside of the Land, on the other hand, their bodies will have to roll hundreds and thousands of miles under the earth, and under the ocean bed, before arriving and being resurrected in the Land of Israel! The power of rain and the power to revive the dead are each centered in Eretz Yisrael.

And so, Shemini Atzeret is the day that Jews around the world recognize the power of God in the Land of Israel. I only realized this terrible irony this past Shemini Atzeret.

Isn’t that cruelly ironic? This was, after all, the day on which God appeared silent and or powerless to stop the greatest single massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. But that is just a temporal, if altogether understandable, human perspective. God exists outside of time. On that day, God might well have said to us: I might seem powerless today. But watch what will unfold over the next two years.

My ancestor the Bnei Yissaschar points out that the commandment in the Torah to light the menorah comes immediately after the commandment to celebrate Sukkot and Shemini Atzeret for eight days. This is a divine hint that Channukah would also last for eight days. Perhaps we can add that only a few weeks after Shemini Atzeret, when Channukah commences, can we look back and understand the events of the past Sukkot. It was this past Sukkot that the cease fire and the ostensible end of the war in Gaza began to be implemented. It’s an apt time now to stop and assess how things are going.

2. Miracles and Modernity

It was 200 years ago that the students of the Vilna Gaon (The GRA) began to move to the Land of Israel in large numbers, to prepare for the coming of the Mashiach. Imagine trying to explain to these people the events of the past two years. To start with the horrifying fact of our enemies attacking us with machine guns, grenades, rockets and missiles, and flying down from the sky with hang gliders. But then explaining that the Jewish State has the strongest per capita Army in the world to fight back. Explaining the F16 and F35 fighter jets that can reach Iran and Yemen, or the audacious trojan horse pager attacks which crippled Hezbollah, and which led to the fall of the Assad regime in Syria; or the Arrow 3 projectile intercepting Houthi missiles above the stratosphere, the first ever example in world history of combat in outer space https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a45862545/first-combat-in-space/; or the planes which flew to Persia to extinguish weapons systems which can destroy entire cities.

On October 1st 2024, my aunt Dina took a surreal video from her balcony of the Iron Dome/David’s Sling/Arrow 3 missile defense system in action during Iran’s mass ballistic missile attack (a defense system which her husband, my uncle Yair, a descendant of the students of the GRA who moved to Israel two centuries ago, helped to invent). On her homemade phone video, Dina quotes from the prophetess Deborah, who lived mere miles from her own home in northern Israel: “The Lord wages war from the sky”. Dina and Yair’s sons fought on all fronts these past two years, as did my cousins from my mother’s side from Ramot and Tekoa, and they are all my personal heroes, and heroes of the Jewish People at large.

As of two years ago, Iran had spent hundreds of billions of dollars and multiple decades building a ring of fire around the tiny State of Israel. The common projections were that if Hezbollah and Hamas and their allies were to attack at the same time, Israeli territory could be overrun, and that the Iron Dome/Arrow systems would fail to stop the thousands of rockets and missiles which would fall and kill thousands of people. That was a standard, mainstream prediction in the Press for many years. These forecasts kept me up some nights.

Instead, after October 7th, Israel went on to systematically destroy this ring of fire in ways that no one ever thought possible. I call that a miracle. My main theological lesson from October 7th is as follows: We can never allow ourselves to take the miracle of the existence of the State of Israel for granted ever again.

3. Ashes of the Holocaust Framing – Rejuvenated

The aforementioned Rav Rimon is a top student of R. Aharon Lichtenstein, who was a son in law of R. Yosef Soloveitchik (The Rav). In 1956, on the State of Israel’s eighth anniversary, The Rav wrote poetically as follows:

“Eight years ago, in the midst of a night of the terrors of Majdanek, Treblinka, and Buchenwald; in ‎a ‎night of gas chambers and crematoria; in a night of total divine self-concealment; in a night ruled ‎by ‎the devil of doubt and destruction who sought to sweep the Lover from her own tent into ‎the ‎Catholic Church; in a night of continuous searching for the Beloved — on that very night ‎the ‎Beloved appeared. The Almighty, who was hiding in His splendid sanctum, suddenly appeared ‎and ‎began to beckon at the tent of the Lover, who tossed and turned on her bed beset by ‎convulsions ‎and the agonies of hell. Because of the beating and knocking at the door of the ‎mournful Lover, ‎the State of Israel was born”.

One of the Rav’s top living acolytes is a treasured teacher of mine, Rabbi JJ Schacter. At a rabbinic convention a number of years ago, I heard Rabbi Schacter critique his mentor’s popular linkage of the birth of the State of Israel to the Holocaust. This is the popular narrative in our circles, Rabbi Schacter said, but have we really thought it through theologically? If the State of Israel is a miracle from God, then shouldn’t the Holocaust be a curse from God? We try and have it both ways: we attribute the horrors of the Holocaust to human free choice, but we say that the State of Israel was God reappearing into history. Well, does God act in history, or does He not? He challenged us to grapple with that question.

A number of years ago, during the pandemic, I came up with an answer. I noticed that when the Covid vaccine came out, pundits were referring to it as a medical miracle. They weren’t even using the term miracle in a theological sense. Definition of the word miracle: “a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency”. The secular definition of miracle only needs to invoke the first half of that sentence: “A surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws.”

If the Covid vaccine was called a miracle, then why wasn’t the virus itself referred to as a “curse”? Because the sad reality is that a divine curse, like a miracle, would have to be something out of the ordinary. And, in our brutal animal existence on this planet, disease, wars, and massacres are not at all out of the ordinary: they’re what you’d expect from us as mammals. It’s our capacity to transcend and overcome those circumstances which does indeed constitute a miracle, even in the secular sense of the word, as “a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws”.

The Holocaust, October 7th, and other acts of terror and savagery are sadly par for the course for the human animal. The human capacity to overcome such tragedies, on the other hand, speaks to a human soul which transcends our animal nature, and points to the Divine, the miraculous. That’s what the State of Israel rising from the ashes of the Holocaust represents, even from a secular perspective. Bibi Netanyahu’s opening line of his book “A Place Among the Nations”: “The return of the Jews as a sovereign people is an event unprecedented in world history”.

An old joke: a Jewish grandmother is walking on the beach with her grandson…Suddenly, a rogue wave comes in and sweeps the grandson out to sea. Distraught, the grandmother looks to the sky and says, “Oh God, I have always been true and faithful to you. Please bring my grandson back.” And with that, another wave comes in and deposits the grandson safely on the shore. The grandmother once again looks to the sky and says, “He had a hat!”

We cannot be the people who look to the sky after the events of the past two years and say “he had a hat”.

4. Israel and its Meaning Today

Close to half the world’s Jews now live in Israel. The verse on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia reads (Vayikra 25:10): “Proclaim liberty throughout the Land to all of its inhabitants”, referring to how slaves go free in the Jubilee Year. In the Land of Israel today, the Sabbatical year is still observed every seven years, but there is no longer a Jubilee year every fifty years. Why not? The Talmud (Arachin 32b) infers from the verse above that the Jubilee is only operative when a majority of world Jewry lives in the Land of Israel. “Proclaim liberty to all of its inhabitants” – meaning, only when all (or most, which is legally tantamount to “all” – Sefer HaChinuch 385) of its potential Jewish inhabitants are living in their Land.

We are very close to that situation right now. About 45% of world Jewry lives in Israel. However, the Talmud also imposes another condition: it also needs to be that the Twelve Tribes of Israel are dwelling in their own tribal territories. That is a reality which, for various technical reasons, will not be realized until the Mashiach comes.

And so, it turns out that having the majority of world Jewry living in Israel is a necessary but not sufficient condition to realizing the Biblical Jewish ideal. And we are likely to realize that necessary condition in our lifetimes, as Israel’s Jewish population rises, and much of Diaspora Jewry sadly continues to assimilate. How will Antizionists claim that Antizionism is not anti-Jewish when most Jews are living in Israel? Interestingly, there are about a million or so Israeli citizens living abroad in the diaspora. And so, it already is the case that the majority of the world’s Jews are Israeli! This occurred to me recently, and I haven’t seen anyone else point it out. It also seems to me that the vast majority of the world’s fully Jewish households already reside in Israel today.

Yechezkel 37:

יא וַיֹּאמֶר֘ אֵלַי֒ בֶּן־אָדָ֕ם הָֽעֲצָמ֣וֹת הָאֵ֔לֶּה כָּל־בֵּ֥ית יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל הֵ֑מָּה הִנֵּ֣ה אֹֽמְרִ֗ים יָֽבְשׁ֧וּ עַצְמוֹתֵ֛ינוּ וְאָבְדָ֥ה תִקְוָתֵ֖נוּ נִגְזַ֥רְנוּ לָֽנוּ:

11 Then He said to me, “Son of man, these bones are all the house of Israel. Behold they say, ‘Our bones have become dried up, our hope is lost, we are clean cut off to ourselves.’

יב לָכֵן֩ הִנָּבֵ֨א וְאָֽמַרְתָּ֜ אֲלֵיהֶ֗ם כֹּֽה־אָמַר֘ אֲדֹנָ֣י יֱהֹוִה֒ הִנֵּה֩ אֲנִ֨י פֹתֵ֜חַ אֶת־קִבְרֽוֹתֵיכֶ֗ם וְהַֽעֲלֵיתִ֥י אֶתְכֶ֛ם מִקִּבְרֽוֹתֵיכֶ֖ם עַמִּ֑י וְהֵבֵאתִ֥י אֶתְכֶ֖ם אֶל־אַדְמַ֥ת יִשְׂרָאֵֽל.

12 Therefore, prophesy and say to them, So says the Lord God: Lo! I open your graves and cause you to come up out of your graves as My people, and bring you home to the land of Israel.

The prophet uses the words “Avda Tikvateinu”, which would, centuries later, appear in Hatikva in the negative: Od Lo avda tikvateinu, our Hope is still not lost..the hope of two thousand years..

In the movie Pulp Fiction, the character of Jules, played by Samuel L. Jackson, survives a near death experience, and he finds God. He foreswears eating pork, and John Travolta’s character Vincent asks him if he’s Jewish. “I ain’t Jewish, I just don’t dig on swine”, is Jules’s reply. After surviving his brush with death, Jules yells something at Vince which is too vulgar to repeat, and so which I’ll paraphrase here in gentler language: “What happened here was a miracle, and I want you to [darn well] acknowledge it”. (I recommend the more kosher edited for TV version of the movie!). That is my message to my fellow Jews about the past two years: “What happened here was a miracle, and I want you to [darn well] acknowledge it.”

It’s the miracle of the now iconic image of freed hostage Emily Damari, with her two middle fingers blown off, raising up her remaining fingers in joy and in triumph. And it’s the miracle of the image of freed hostage Evyatar David. Evyatar was seen in a Hamas propaganda video looking like a human skeleton and being forced to dig his own grave, with his bones almost protruding out of his skin. God placed flesh upon his bones, and returned him to his Land. Evyatar is a living metaphor for all of Israel and world Jewry in the two years since October 7th.

Israel was able to shake off the dust of the horrors of the October 7th massacre and to arise and systematically defeat all of Iran’s proxies, and then to defeat Iran itself in the remarkable 12 Day War. The entrenched Orthodox ethos of Yeridat HaDorot (the decline of generations) has always inculcated a sense in me that my generation, and that of my kids, cannot hold a candle to the Greatest Generation, the cohort of Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans, in terms of character, resilience, and heroism. Young people today are considered to be lazy and spoiled in comparison to their grandparents. And yet, since October 7th, I’ve come to believe that this young generation of Israelis is just as impressive as The Greatest Generation on every level: in terms of their character, their strength, their resilience, and their heroism. The freed hostages remind me precisely of the resilience and heroism of the Holocaust survivors. The State of Israel’s bucking of the ancient trend of Yeridat HaDorot is yet another miracle of Zionism.

Let we who are remaining in the diaspora for now at least resolve to never again take the miracle of the State of Israel for granted. Let’s pray for healing for the freed hostages and their families, for the fallen and wounded soldiers and their families, and for peace between Israel and its neighbors, in the vein of the verse on the Liberty Bell, wishing freedom for the Land and all of its inhabitants.