Inspiration from the Yom HaAtzma'ut Mahzor
The following is a portion of the introduction by Rabbi Doron Perez of World Mizrachi to the
The Krengel Family World Mizrachi Edition of the Koren Mahzor for Yom HaAtzma’ut and Yom Yerushalayim.
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Miracles of Biblical Proportions
The remarkable reality of a sovereign State of Israel, only three years after the ovens of Auschwitz, and a united Jerusalem in which the Old City and Temple Mount fall under Jewish sovereignty for the first time since the Destruction in ƫƤ , cannot be overstated. A handful of young pio- neers and Holocaust survivors, and their descendants, overcame impos- sible political and military odds to defeat much larger and better trained national armies – “
delivering,” twice in nineteen years, “
the many into the hands of the few.” Now, after two thousand years, Israel has become a place of refuge for millions of Jewish exiles from over one hundred countries, speaking more than eighty languages. Hebrew has been revived from an ancient and static language of textual study into the living
lingua franca of Jewish society. The Land of Israel itself has been transformed from an arid and barren backwater into a flourishing oasis of agriculture and an ecological marvel, home to a thriving and sustainable economy built from a bankrupt and starving old
Yishuv. Israel, by its very existence, has facilitated a world with perhaps more Torah learners than any other time in history. All this together creates a modern-day sovereign Israel and Jerusalem which stand at the center of Jewish religious, cultural, and political life. But perhaps more than anything, Israel has revived the spirit of a broken people, replacing despair with hope and faith, tragedy with triumph, and creating the belief in a bright future.
“Miracles of Biblical Proportions”, along with essays from today’s leading Religious Zionist thinkers, appears in the Maidenbaum & Rothenberg Essays of the The Krengel Family World Mizrachi Edition of the Koren Mahzor for Yom HaAtzma’ut and Yom Yerushalayim.
Rabbi Doron Perez of World Mizrachi
