Future and destiny of the Jewish people lie in Israel

Choni Davidowitz, Johannesburg

I would submit two “opinions” regarding this issue, written by two famous sages centuries ago, which have been explicitly clear and prophetic. Both opinions were written at a time when there was no Jewish sovereignty in Israel.

First: The great Rambam (Maimonides) wrote in the 11th century in “letter of Teman”, quoted in Kuzari 2:24: “The obligation of the commandments is not dependent on the coming of Mashiach. Rather, we are too busy ourselves with Torah and precepts, and to strive to fulfil everything we can…

“However, if a man will stay in a place where he sees the Torah is waning, and where the Jewish people will be lost with the passage of time, and says, ‘I will stay here until the Mashiach comes and survive where I am’, this is nothing but an evil heart, and a great loss, and a sickness of reasoning and spirit.” (What has happened to all those great places of Jewish learning in Europe?)

Second: A great tragedy results when we make Jewish life in exile (Diaspora) the goal of Jewish existence. Rabbi Yaacov Emden (Ya’avitz) writes: “When it seems to us in our present peaceful existence outside the Land of Israel, that we have found another Eretz Yisrael and Jerusalem, this to me is the greatest, deepest, most obvious, and direct cause of all the awesome, frightening, monstrous, unimaginable destructions that we have experienced in the Diaspora.

“Whether the destruction comes through pogroms, a holocaust, or day-to-day assimilation, the tragedy is the same.” (This was written by Rabbi Emden 200 years before the German Holocaust, and the present-day “holocaust” of assimilation in the Diaspora.)

In these days, when the Jewish people have sovereignty again in Eretz Yisrael after 2 000 years of punishing exile, it should be obvious that there can be no doubt as to where the future and destiny of the Jewish people lies.