Be Like Yehoshua and Caleb Instead of the Rest of the Meraglim!

 

by Yonatan Dobov

I translated from Hebrew!

There are times of the year when you can really feel them in the air. Like the High Holy Days with Selichot, Hanukkah with the candles, the four species in Sukkot, and also the days of salvation and redemption that we are in now – those that begin with Passover, with the great miracle of the Exodus from Egypt, and continue through Holocaust and Heroism Day, Memorial Day for Israel's fallen soldiers, Independence Day, Jerusalem Day, and even Victory Day over Nazi Germany.

Somehow, within one month, the national story of the people of Israel is concentrated, from the moment of its redemption from the 49 gates of impurity to the declaration of its independence and the redemption of the land, some two thousand years later. 

Only Divine intervention can roll and concentrate the sequence of these historical and national events in close proximity to each other, and create the Israeli-Jewish narrative, which is made up of ups and downs, difficulties and miracles, which have already succeeded in producing the insight that our story cannot be uniform and boring, but rather a crazy roller coaster that can only take place in our small plot of land – with one promise that has been fulfilled for generations: that no matter how bad the situation is, In the end, it will be good, long before Omer Adam and Yasmin Mualem sang about it. 

These days are mixed with blue and white, the blood of the Maccabees and the foam of the festivals, Holocaust and heroism, memory and revival, a deadly combination of emotions, a national manic depression that is the lot of every Jew and Israeli.

At the same time, I feel that in recent years it has become popular to return to the original sin of the spies, and to multiply it by the 8 million Jews who live here. 

Not only are the people who slander the country  every now and then, but also the people who walk on it. It seems that there is a national sport here to speak ill of the country and to blame everyone from an elected official to a demonstrator. Everyone here has something to say about the other, and it almost never includes good words, but how much the other is destroying the exemplary country that was here, and how deep the Deep State's rule is here. 

Too many people see nothing but gloom about the future of the country, writing about it on top of every fresh post and petitions that are published at the pace of a mag, and determining in them how much it is going to be doomed and all the other regular thoughts that can already be put into Chat Gifty and let it complete the lamentations. The Kaplanists blame the messianists, while they see them as arrogant and racist Ashkenazis, and so on for this path and the curse.

The National Days call us to take a moment to the balcony, to lift our heads from the sighs of pain and curses of everyday life, and to look directly at reality, from a much broader perspective. 

True, there are problems and challenges, but it is not something of a more significant magnitude than what we could have faced throughout Jewish history, from the Exodus from Egypt to the Iron Swords. 

True, there are still abductees in Gaza and evacuees from the north, but God forbid – look at where we were only a year and a half ago, and where we are now. So for a few hours we were at the bottom of the bottom, at the deepest security low point since the Holocaust, and since then we have been dealing with seven arenas at the same time, just like in the War of Independence. On October 7, the IDF had no plans to conquer and dismember the Gaza Strip, to enter Lebanon as far as the Litani, to conquer the Syrian Mount Hermon and to hike to the villages below it, to deal with hundreds of rockets from Iran, to evacuate the refugee camps in Judea and Samaria and to deal with their roots. To be more precise, at 7.10 the IDF was not there.

But in a year and a half, a period of time that does not count in historical terms, the same IDF that failed was able to prove that it is capable. The IDF is not only a formidable army, and not only the strongest in the Middle East, but one of the leading armies in the entire world. Creates plans out of thin air. For example, when the Assad regime fell out of nowhere, the IDF managed to formulate a new doctrine within hours, and to destroy the Syrian army almost completely.

And the crazy thing here is that this is not a bunch of elite Marines-style fighters or American seals, but reserve units that are made up of all the people we like to slander from the right and the left, religious and secular, Kaplanists and messianists, with families and singles, who are the fattening and fattening of this nation, and many of them are more physically fit to be fattened than to be fattened - and they, and in fact the people of Israel, make the IDF so. who faces every challenge that has turned the nightmare into a dream, and the dream into reality. It's the engineer neighbor, the lawyer cousin, and your sister who held the whole house without saying a word and baking cakes for the soldiers on the way.

And as much as people like to complain about this country, in the end we are somehow in the top 10 of the World Happiness Index. Despite the sirens, the terror attacks, the cost of living, the civil war and the end of democracy, we are still happy to live here and fulfill the vision of generations. Our complaints are their dreams, and each of us is building another layer of the open miracle called the State of Israel.

Optimism stemming from difficulty

We are happy not only because we have no other country, but because it is our land. Not in the way of negativity, but in the way of positivity. We are in the most inconvenient area for the existence of a Jewish and democratic state. We have a ring of conspiratorial enemies on the outside, and zero natural resources on the inside. Across the river are oil fields for the full eye; In our small strip called the Land of Israel, there is hardly any natural gas.

And around us is a space that also doesn't like the issue of the Jews who are stuck with them, and certainly doesn't connect to this democratic idea that they brought here, which doesn't speak to them. In order to go abroad for a vacation, you have to take a flight, because all the other countries that surround us, including those that have a 'peace' treaty with us, are not exactly happy to receive us. And yet, and in spite of everything, perhaps this is the secret of Jewish and Israeli existence.

The very fact that we are reminded every time in one creative way or another, how incomprehensible and obvious our existence is here, how fragile it is, it is precisely from this difficulty that we create optimism, creativity, resilience and the ability to look at reality a little differently. From this also comes Israeli chutzpah, because what does it matter what people think of you a moment before they try to kill you again, and you find ways to keep yourself alive and the way of course to make money from it.

This is the secret of the genome of the Israeli and the Jewish brain. It stands to reason that in each and every generation we are about to be destroyed in a variety of ways, and G-d has not been a single generation that has not tried to destroy and erase it from the face of the earth, and this is our uniqueness, of the chosen people who try to kill each time without success.

So after Holocaust Remembrance Day and before Remembrance and Independence, on this national Shabbat, I suggest that each and every one of us take it upon themselves to correct the original sin of spies and the crime of the current ratings, to slander the Land of Israel.

 Let's be Yehoshua ben Nun and Caleb ben Yafona, let's be the good and boring spies, who prefer to see the good rather than the bad. We live in a time when there is a misrepresentation in the media that we are supposedly a step away from a civil war. But in reality, on the ground, there is more and more closeness between us, and the margins are shrinking and only their volume remains high.

Don't let them continue to manage our lives and optimism, but raise the flag and hold your head high, look each other in the eye and say thank you to everyone who makes this country a little better. To the Holy One, blessed be He, who saves us from their hands every time, to the security forces who save us from their plots every minute, to family, friends, and to everyone who makes this wonderful place even more perfect, with all its shortcomings but much more than its merits.

May we all see the goodness of the land and those who dwell on it. Happy Independence Day!