“A generation of reversals,” Deuteronomy calls it. The powerful lost power. The powerless soared. With, on both sides, immeasurable suffering in between.
The Bolsheviks came into power 100 years ago this week, Nov. 7, 1917, overturning the relatively peaceful Kerensky revolution deposing the Tsar nine months earlier. The Marxist culmination of “dialectical materialism” vindicated itself . . . for a while. For seven bloody decades. The Bolsheviks triggered the Marxist-Communist mass murders, enforced famines and, at best, failed economy that enslaved, rather than equalized, “the people.”
These Bolsheviks ultimately acquired nuclear weapons and pointed them against the free world. If anyone spoke up in political dissidence, he or she was murdered or, at best, exiled to the massive gulags in Siberia. Some liberation. Some culmination. Some vindication. And yet, for all of their abject failures, the Bolsheviks did possess one thing unquestionably: the power to impose suffering. Over the decades, they came to dispel the popular notion that more people had been murdered in the name of religion than in the name of any secular ideology. Ultimately, the Bolsheviks claimed that dubious distinction for themselves.
But when their reign began, 100 years ago this week, there was another power, too small even to be called a power: the fledgling Jewish community of Palestine, no more than some 70,000 people, a mere 10% of the population. Yet, this powerless demographic possessed a different kind of power: faith, a work ethic and the force of history, the latter concretized in a one-sentence, 67-word letter called “the Balfour Declaration.” For the first time in some 1,850 years, a major world power certified the Jewish right to Palestine, authorized the Jewish settlement of Palestine and envisioned a “Jewish national home” in Palestine.
The decades that followed, though bloody for the wars waged against this fledgling Jewish rebirth, were primarily highlighted by the methods of peace: farming, industry, technology, construction, democracy, equality — a radically different vin- dication. Many more than one vindication, in fact.
A vindication of the ancient words of the Prophets of the Hebrew Bible, predicting the Jewish return to the hills of Judah and the courtyards of Jerusalem.
A vindication of the fervent prayers of countless Jews who, for far more than a milllenium, saw no answer to their prayers, yet kept praying nonetheless.
A vindication of an ancient language, confined to religious texts and commercial records, now reborn as a language spoken (eventually) by millions, displacing Yiddish, Ladino and Judeo-Arabic as the primary Jewish language.
A vindication of the dreams of Jewish independence, of a nation steeped in Torah study, in academic prowess, in economic growth, in technological creativity.
It was an upside down century, this past 100 years. The last great battle on horseback liberated Beersheba from the Ottomon Turks 100 years ago this week, Oct. 31, 1917. Now, the strongest military power in the region guards, protects and facilitates the peaceful pursuits of a state whose dimensions of achievement neither the Bolsheviks nor any other nation could have foreseen with the issuance of the Balfour Declaration, Nov. 2, 1917.
Concretize it this way: The world-famous Wissotzky Tea enterprise in Russia invested a small sum in the small Jewish community of Palestine strictly as a charitable endeavor. It was nice to help out those fabulously idealistic, utterly unrealistic Jews trying to revive the ancient homeland in the face of rampant disease, hostile local opposition and the absence of infra- structure. Boom! Bolshevism! Confiscation of all private property and business! Wissotzky Tea in Russia was no more. The proprietors headed for Palestine, their only endeavor untouched and untouchable by the communist regime. Wissotzky Tea became world-famous only because they invested in Palestine, solely as an act of charity!
The Jewish community of Palestine, then of the State of Israel, has been tracing the reversals ever since. The powerless are no more.
Yet, the dream of peace remains elusive. We hope it will not take another long century to achieve.
Copyright © 2017 by the Intermountain Jewish News
