The Dry Bones Come Together
The Jewish people illustrate their collective return to Israel when they celebrate the Passover feast each year. The Torah commands Jewish people around the world to gather their families on the 14th day of the first month (Leviticus 23:5, 7). When the Seder concludes, they cry out, “Next year in Jerusalem!” This statement is a biblically based hope that one day all the Jewish people—no matter where they have been scattered—will celebrate the feast in their homeland, Israel.
The most familiar biblical passage regarding the hope of a reconstituted Israel is Ezekiel 37. God gave the prophet Ezekiel a vision of dry, scattered bones and asked him, “Can these bones live?” (v. 3). The answer normally would be no, but in this case, Ezekiel knew the Person asking the question, and he responded accordingly, “O Lord Gᴏᴅ, You know” (v. 3). God asked Ezekiel this question at a time when the Jewish people were exiled in Babylon. Like the dry, scattered bones, these captives had no reason to hope of ever regaining nationhood. Yet in verse 7, the bones (the whole house of Israel, v. 11) started to rattle and make noise as they came together.
That process has taken shape throughout modern Jewish history. The rattling began in 1897 when Theodore Herzl, a journalist from Vienna, led the first Zionist Congress to discuss the necessity of a Jewish homeland. It seemed like a dream. But it was no dream. Although the dry bones coming together seemed impossible, hundreds of thousands of Jewish people made aliyah (returned) to their land over the next 51 years. That land, largely deprived of its people for nearly 2,000 years, was finally seeing them come home.
Since then, Israel has survived four major wars: the 1948 War of Independence; the 1967 Six-Day War; the 1973 Yom Kippur War; and the current war with Hamas, the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Iran. It lived through two intifadas: 1987–1993 and 2000–2005. Yet here it stands in fulfillment of biblical prophecy, reconstituted, but with no breath in it (Ezekiel 37:8). American author Mark Twain said it best: “All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”
No comments:
Post a Comment