54 | MAY 11 • 2023 

T

he first reference to Israel out-
side the Hebrew Bible is on the 
Merneptah stele, a slab of black 
granite engraved in the days of Pharaoh 
Merneptah, successor to Ramses II, the 
man some scholars iden-
tify as the Pharaoh of the 
Exodus. It says, “Israel is laid 
waste; her seed is no more.” 
The first reference to Israel 
outside the Bible is an obitu-
ary. Israel’s enemies thought 
it was dead. More than 32 
centuries, half the history 
of civilization, later, we can still say “Am 
Yisrael Chai, the Jewish people lives.”
Not only Jews, but people like Blaise 
Pascal, Jean-Jaques Rousseau and Leo 
Tolstoy, saw in this survival something 
miraculous, as if an invisible hand had 
written out of the lives of Jews across the 
generations a story about human pos-
sibility, about a journey from slavery to 
freedom across a great wilderness of space 
and time to a land of promise and hope.
How did a people survive for 20 centu-
ries without a state, a home, a place where 
they could defend themselves? How did 
they sustain their identity when every-
where they were a minority? How did faith 
survive the massacres and pogroms, when 

Jews called and heaven seemed silent? 
That’s what astonished Pascal, Rousseau 
and Tolstoy before the 20th century.
But today the question is so much 
deeper. How could a people ravaged by 
the Holocaust survive that trauma and 
put their faith in life again? How could a 
nation that had not known independence 
or sovereignty for 2,000 years take it up 
again? How could they, with so little, 

build a land, a state, a society, a culture, 
that has achieved so much? 
How, under constant threat of war and 
terror, surrounded by enemies pledged to 
their destruction, could they sustain a free 
and democratic society in a part of the 
world that had never known it; create an 
economy with outstanding achievements 
in agriculture, science, medicine and 
technology; produce a culture rich in art 
and music, poetry and prose?
How out of the most diverse popula-
tion could they shape an identity? How 
could they build not only great secular 
universities but also thriving yeshivot, so 
that the words of Isaiah could come true 
in our time, that “Torah will come forth 
from Zion and the word of the Lord from 
Jerusalem.” How, so soon after the night-
mare, could they realize so many dreams?
Somehow, in ways I don’t fully under-
stand, the Jewish people has been touched 
by a power greater than ourselves, that’s 
led our ancestors and contemporar-
ies, time and again, to defy the normal 
parameters of history. Somehow heaven 
and earth met in the Jewish heart, lift-
ing people to do what otherwise seemed 
impossible. Descartes said: I think, there-
fore I am. The Jewish axiom is differ-
ent. Ani maamin, I believe, therefore I am.
It was the most haunting of all prophetic 
visions. The prophet Ezekiel saw a valley of 
dry bones, a heap of skeletons. God asked 

Read this excerpt from Rabbi Sacks’ 
“Home of Hope,” which was re-released 
to mark Israel’s 75th anniversary.

Israel:
The Home of Hope

Rabbi Lord 
Jonathan 
Sacks

SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH

Rabbi Sacks at 
the Western Wall

A screenshot of the 
new animated video 
that accompanies 
Home of Hope

“HOW COULD A 
PEOPLE RAVAGED 
BY THE HOLOCAUST 
SURVIVE THAT TRAUMA 
AND PUT THEIR FAITH 
IN LIFE AGAIN?”

— RABBI LORD JONATHAN SACKS

