“Blessed Is The Match That Is Consumed In Kindling Flame”*

All of us want to live fulfilling lives. That’s normal. And reasonable. That is reasonable when things around us are normal, when the world is normal. How about when that is not the case? How about then?

When the world is consumed in war, and world-wide disruption, it is normal that life is not normal. We are coerced into doing things that we would not otherwise do. Or we choose to do things that we would not otherwise do. It becomes normal to do the abnormal.

Hannah Senesch, a Hungarian immigrant to Mandate Palestine as a teenager, volunteered to be one of thirty-seven Jewish volunteers recruited by the British. Their job was to parachute into Eastern Europe in 1943, to help the partisans fighting the Nazis. Even when her companions withdrew because they considered it too dangerous, she went on. She was caught, tortured and executed just before her 23^rd birthday. In her own poetic words, “I heard the call and I went, I went because I heard the call”.

Ever since some Jews made the decision to rekindle Jewish sovereignty in their ancestral homeland, around the river Jordan, by direct action, they have faced Islamic religious intolerance and fierce opposition to the recapture of lands ever under Islamic control. Hostility from Islam against Judaism is present in Islamic history, and in its writings and sermons, chapter and verse.

The effort to rekindle that statehood has been unceasing for more than two hundred years. Jihadist sentiment that was brought home to American living rooms in 9/11, has been the Jewish reality during their struggle in that territory, and in every place where Jews have lived in theocratic Moslem countries. Most Jews were evicted from their places of birth in Arab countries, where they had lived for millennia, when the state of Israel was declared. Indeed the numbers were greater than those Arabs who left Israel in 1948.We are seeing hostility now in every place where Jews are living, enemies even in the U.S. congress.

Why is it that world sympathy is always aroused for the victims whenever Israel acts to defend itself, but there is little concern for the Jews who had to die before Israel roused itself to attack enemies in its own defense? “Blessed matches consumed in a kindling flame!”

For myself, in 1948, when the Israel War of Independence broke out, I was 15 years old. I heard the call, but I stayed in school. In 1952, at the age of eighteen I travelled to Israel for a year of study in Zionist leadership and Kibbutz work volunteering. In 1953, hitchhiking in the Negev, I was picked up by police, informed that an IDF captain had been found in a well with his throat cut, just over the hill from where I stood. I had not realized I was a combatant in a war zone.

In 1967, when Israel was attacked by its neighbors, I heard the call. Married, with three young children, I stayed at work. While I struggled with my conscience, after seven days it was over. In 1973, Israel was surprised by an attack from its neighbors. I heard the call, but at 39 years, working as an executive at a grocery company, I felt I would be a detriment rather than an asset.

In our seventies, my Bride, (who, when younger, spent four years in Israel with her children,) and I, attempted to emigrate to Israel. After two years of wrestling with bureaucratic obstacles to achieving citizenship, we gave up the struggle.

Now at the age of ninety, I have a daughter and two living grandchildren residing in Jerusalem, a great-granddaughter, and another nearly here. My granddaughter’s husband is a soldier at the front either in Gaza or Lebanon. My sister has a daughter and three grandchildren living near Tel Aviv. All adults have done their military service.

Israel now, in 2024, is in the middle of an existential struggle with terrorists, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iranian proxies, with attacks coming from  Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, and in the West Bank. Israel has just repelled two massive missile attacks directly from Iran. Israel has suffered losses and dislocation and defenseless civilians were massacred on October 7^th.We still have hostages, many executed, being held by terrorists in Gaza. No-one seems to want to remember who started it all, who thrusts civilians into harm’s way, whether it’s in Gaza or in Lebanon. Yet, as in Israel, Jews around the world are faced with a resurgence of antisemitism in their own neighborhoods. Let it be known that the world has changed. Those who harm Jews can face an inevitable response in kind.

The world has become aware of what a powerful military Israel has amassed, and how resilient its people are, like it or not. Some Arab countries would appreciate Israel shelter from their enemies. We await a response from Israel directed at the head of the snake in Iran. Israel’s allies, safely out of the line of fire, are all urging moderation, having been mostly silent for a year about the blows Israel has been suffering.

I remain with the feeling that my efforts were wanting.

Like so many of my contemporaries, we have a lot to answer for. So has the rest of the world.

*A line from a poem by Hannah Senesch, written before her assignment to help organize resistance to the Nazis in Europe.