(JNS) Between a burning Temple and a declaration read aloud in Tel Aviv, nearly two millennia of Jewish life often disappears from the story we tell.
In this one, Rome destroys Jerusalem, the Jews go into exile, and then, after the Holocaust, Israel appears. A civilization becomes a catastrophe, followed by a country.
That version is easy to remember and disastrous to defend. It leaves Jews absent from their own homeland for centuries and casts their return as an emergency arrangement made by outsiders. We then spend the rest of the conversation explaining why the arrangement should be allowed to continue.
The missing centuries are the key to writing a better story.
The Jewish people’s connection to the Land of Israel reaches back more than 3,000 years, long before Christianity or Islam. It runs unbroken from biblical Israel and Judah through antiquity, exile, return and the modern state. Conquest interrupted sovereignty; it did not extinguish Jewish presence or belonging.
Jewish life in the land did not end when Jewish sovereignty was lost. In the Galilee, Rabbi Judah HaNasi compiled the...
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