Enjoy "This Is Our Land" in Yiddish.
WHAT IS IT ABOUT YIDDISH?
Yiddish is the Jewish experience wrapped up in a language. It embodies where we've been. It captures the unique struggles of the Jews. It portrays our passion, pain, joy, humor and worldly insights in words and phrases.
Since the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans conquered the Kingdom of Israel and Judea and scattered the Jews around the world we have had to make countries around the world our home.
When Jews left Jerusalem, often as slaves, we brought the Bible with us. Wherever Jews ended up we contributed to society and culture in important and significant ways.
Sadly, we were often met with hatred. Jews have suffered and survived many attempts to wipe us out. The Holocaust is certainly not the first attempt!! England and Spain also sought to purge their kingdoms of Jews.
Ironically, in an effort to survive armies and genocidal attempts, the greatest threat to the Jews may be assimilation. Yiddish is an example of the paradoxical combination of assimilation and trying to retain Jewish identity.
In the nick of time, as prophesied thousands of years earlier, but sadly after hope was lost for 6 million Jews, God called the Jews back to the land God Promised.
Ezekiel 37:11-12
11 "Then He said to me, “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say: ‘Our bones are dried up; our hope is lost; we are cut off—by ourselves.' 12 Therefore prophesy and say to them, thus says Adonai Elohim: ‘Behold, I will open your graves. I will bring you up out of your graves, My people. I will bring you back to the land of Israel.
The story of the Jews rise and fall and rise is the greatest and most amazing story ever told. It is called the Bible.
Commenting on a verse in Leviticus that describes the curses that will befall the land of Israel, Nachmanides wrote that the devastation of the Eretz Israel “constitutes a good tiding, proclaiming that during all our exiles, our land will not accept our enemies... Since the time that the Jews left it, [the land] has not accepted any nation or people, and they all try to settle it... This is a great proof and assurance to us.”
Nachmanides, Moses ben Nahman, commonly referred to as the Ramban, was a leading medieval Jewish scholar, Sephardic rabbi, philosopher, physician, kabbalist, and biblical commentator. The 13th-century scholar wrote that Israel will remain desolate until the Jewish People assume control. But when the people of Israel finally return to the land of Israel, the region will once again flourish thanks to Divine providence.
Mark Twain is the most famous eyewitness to the 19th-century desolation of the land that the Roman emperor Hadrian renamed Syria-Palaestina, after the Jews two traditional enemies, the Syrians and the Philistines, to punish the Jewish people for their insurrection for the Bar-Kochba Revolt of 132-136 CE.
Twain was an unwitting collaborator of Nachmanides when he penned "Innocents Abroad" and brought global attention to the sorry state of Palestine and proved it was a "land without a people" just 15 years before the very first waves of Jewish immigration. Twain couldn't have foreseen the Balfour Declaration in 1917, the Six Day War, and how Israel would rise from the ashe and flourish.
This week Israel will celebrate it's 73rd year of Independence. What Israel has accomplished with a treeless, natural resourceless, desolate land is remarkable. Nobody would believe if it wasn't true. What's equally remarkable is that it happened according to God's plan.
ONLY GOD COULD HAVE PREDICTED IT 2600 YEARS BEFORE IT ALL HAPPENED IN THE BIBLE. THE STORY ISN'T OVER . . .
HAPPY 73RD ISRAEL!!
