“Weizmann understood that your home offers identity, not just shelter.”
On April 26, everyone toasting Israel’s 75th anniversary – by the Jewish calendar – will be dancing through history.
The ancient love story between the Jewish people and their homeland, the Land of Israel, goes back 3,500 years to the Bible. The romantic story of Zionism reaches back a century-and-a-half. And the history of the State of Israel chronicles one of the few functional post-colonial democracies to emerge after the Second World War.
Although history has not always been kind to the Jewish people, the ongoing Israel adventure feels downright miraculous.
Invoking the Bible to explain a small hi-tech democracy that has generated 92 of the world’s nearly 1,200 billion-dollar unicorn start-ups may seem strange – but that’s the Jewish story. Beyond revealing the Jews’ deep roots in the Promised Land, the Bible explains the unique nature of Jewish identity.
Judaism is a religion, but the Jews are a people, too. That unique intertwining can produce non-religious Jews and a Jewish state that is a democracy, not a theocracy.
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