The Timeless Resilience of the Jewish People

Despite the dire curses promised to the Jewish people in the Torah if they sin, Hashem assures them in the Parshat Bechukotai and in many other places, that the Jewish people will endure: "Even while they are in the land of their enemies, I have not rejected them nor abhorred them to destroy them, to break my covenant with them." This covenant is eternal, as Jeremiah states, "Thus said Hashem: who gives the sun for a light by day, the ordinances of the moon and stars for a light by night, the waves of the sea roar, Hashem of hosts is His name: if these ordinances depart from before Me, says Hashem, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before Me forever."

The Exodus from Egypt saved the Israelites from complete loss of identity. Sennacherib's sudden downfall (also documented in Sennacherib's annals) has no natural explanation. Cyrus's declaration saved the Babylonian exiles from assimilation, an event with no logical explanation as no conqueror ever gave back land to refugees as a gift. The Maccabees defeated the Greeks despite their military superiority. The survival of the people in prolonged conflict with Rome was also beyond their capabilities. Every time a country expelled Jews from its territory, a new refuge seemed to open, as if by coincidence: with the expulsion from Spain, the gates of Holland and Turkey opened; with the persecutions in Europe, the gates of America opened; and with the destruction of the European Jewry, the gates of Israel opened. The Nazis had planned a museum in the city of Prague to showcase the extinct Jewish race, but non-natural forces stopped them at the gates of Israel.

The rescue of Jews from their oppressors has no natural explanation. As Jacob and his descendants were saved at the last moment from annihilation by Esau, so in every generation, when the sword was at the throat of the spiritual center of the people, some form of salvation manifested. Already 2800 years ago, the enemies of Israel said: "Come, let us destroy them as a nation so that the name of Israel will be remembered no more" (Psalms 83:5), but all these enemies of Israel: "the tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites, Moab and the Hagrites, Gebal, Ammon, and Amalek, Philistia with the inhabitants of Tyre, and Assyria joined them", they vanished as if they never existed, and their names are mostly remembered because of their mention in the Tanach, while the name of Israel remains, standing firm, in its land and in its character. In archaeological inscriptions, we find: "Israel has been destroyed, its seed no longer exists" (Merneptah Stele), "Israel is lost, it is no more" (Mesha Stele), but Mesha and Merneptah indeed vanished, as did their people and seed, and yet Israel is the one that did not perish.

It is told of King Frederick the Great of Germany that he asked the French Prince Jean Baptiste de Boyer for "a clear proof of God's existence", and he immediately replied: I have for His Majesty a striking and irrefutable proof, a proof with one word: "The Jews" (Werner Keller, Und wurden zerstreut unter alle Volker. p. 15).