AN INCREDIBLE INSIGHT ON ISRAEL!!!

AN INCREDIBLE INSIGHT ON ISRAEL!!!

 Today , here in Israel,  it  is Memorial Day and tomorrow is Independence Day…So many diverse feelings and thoughts come to mind….I would like to share with you some quotes from the Book ‘Kabbalah and Consciousness’ by the late Allen Aftermann that I feel best help to express my own personal feelings;

 THE CENTER;

“The Land of Israel is the center of the Jewish Universe….it is the center of Jewish Consciousness….. [It is the center of Universe]…Three continents meet along the narrow landmass of Israel…within it’s borders are …a multitude of habitats for an extraordinary range of plants, birds and animals.”

CONDITIONAL

 “For the land is Mine, and you are stranger’s and Sojourner’s with me” [Lev. 25;23]        “It is G-d’s land given as a conditional gift……This gift of the Land must be continually deserved. The condition is that Israel be a holy people, that the people live up to the potential of the idea of Israel….in order to achieve the eternal purpose. As commitment to this purpose fades, possession becomes less and less secure.”

 UNITY IN DIVERSITY

“Here live Jews from almost every country  on earth, speaking every major language; Ashkenazim from Europe, Sephardim from arab lands, Ethiopians from Africa, Yemenites, Indians, Australians, North Americans and South  Americans. Jews who are divided ethnically politically, economically, religiously, and yet one body, one heart and one nervous system….here every death is felt personally; everyone knows everyone, or at least has heard his name, or has a friend who knows him.”

INSECURITY

“ It is a land of intensity, of miracles and of the deepest insecurity. A land where every opinion is broadcast, every action examined: whose destiny is endlessly debated, whose right to exist is constantly challenged. Jerusalem has been destroyed more times than any other city: The people are the most destroyed people in history. The state has fought a constant war for survival sice 1948 , and the people for thousands of years, and still they face insuperable political, military and moral threats. It is a people that rises and falls with the evening news. A people desolated and half insane from the Holocaust and the murder of 1, 500, 00o of it’s children. A people who have never had a day’s peace. “  

TRANSFORMATION

“ The Jew in the homeland in the homeland is not the same person he is in Los Angeles, Abbis Abada, Leningrad or Casablanca. Here the disguises of Exile gradually become transparent; personality traits and emotions which had been suppressed or dormant come alive. And what is true of the individuals is even more true of the people. A whole people is reemerging with the characteristic energy, strengths and weaknesses recognizable in the Israelites of the Torah. …”

PARADOX

“Israel is the land that ‘devours it’s inhabitants’[Lev. 26:38]; whose problems are so complicated, whose moral dilemmas are so heartbreaking, upon whom the world’s judgment is so relentless, that one is spinning in a vortex. There is such pressure that many leave every summer just to bresthe like human beings. It is a land of fascination and revulsion, of ecstacy and depression. It is said that here the bread contains all of the pleasant tastes that exist in the world, and the tastes of all of it’s sorrows….The land of Jewish hopes and  of pilgrimage. The land to which Jews have walked thousands of miles to reach…the land that Jews have died for and struggled for and are constantly risking their own and their children’s lives for. The land of the past, the land that lives day by day, the land of the messianic future…..it is the land where ‘there is no lack of anything’ [Deut. 9].”

RECTIFICATION OF THE WORLD

“The rectification of Israel is understood kabbalistically to be a prototype for the rectification of the world. The relation of the land of Israel to other lands is the analogue of the relation of the soul of Israel to the souls of other nations….. Only here can a Jew serve the infinite purpose with his whole life, with his every thought, with his every action. This is the place of action where the truth of Israel and the meaning of it’s history are revealed. Here there are no disguises and no excuses. If the Jewish people can make it in this land, the world can make it.”

Blessings,

Reb Yitzchak Schwartz