YOM HA’ATZMA’UT

Rav Yoel Schwartz

Vice-Chairman of the Sanhedrin

Head of the Court for Bnei Noach

“… and the nations shall know that I am the L-rd, says the L-rd G-d, when I shall be sanctified in you before their eyes. For I will take you from among the nations, and gather you out of all the countries, and will bring you into your own land…”

(Ezekiel 36:23-24).

The great medieval Bible commentator, Nahmanides (R. Moshe ben Nahman), wrote in his commentary on Chapter 3 of the Song of Songs, that the Jewish people would in the future return to their land, the Land of Israel, with the permission of the nations of the world, and he was supported in this opinion by no less than the legendary Rabbi Elijah, the Vilna Gaon, writing in his Kol Ha-Tor.

When we view the Almighty as the G-d of History, it is impossible to gloss over the events of the early 1920s, when the sovereignty of the Jewish people over the Land of Israel was recognized by the international community, first in April 1920, when the Principal Allied Powers in their Peace Conference at San Remo, Italy, established Palestine as a mandated, potentially independent, Jewish state, and then again in 1922, when the newly-established League of Nations ratified unanimously the Mandate for Palestine that had been awarded to Great Britain in order to prepare World Jewry for the responsibility of administering a modern state. We must similarly take note of the action taken by the General Assembly of the United Nations on November 29, 1947 in recommending the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel.

Yom Ha’atzma’ut, Israel’s Independence Day, commemorates the proclamation of the State of Israel on the fifth day of Iyar, 5766, at midnight between the 14^th and 15^th of May, 1948. At that time there lived under the jurisdiction of the State of Israel about six hundred fifty thousand Jews. There live in Israel today over five and a half million Jews out of a total population of just over 7 million. Can anyone doubt that this historical process still under way is that summed up by the Prophet Ezekiel in the words we adduced from his prophecies at the top of this page? Yom Ha’atzma’ut thus commemorates a turning-point in the history of the world, as the Jewish People returns to its historic homeland.