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Egypt” (Yehoshua 5:9). In fact, they put Christian the- In the last two thousand years the Jewish people played
ology on the defensive. It is an open secret that the no role in the historical arena. Revolutions transpired,
opposition to the Land of Israel on the part of the Vat- worlds have been destroyed and rebuilt – our people
ican and enemies from certain quarters in America played no role; we lived in obscurity, in anonymity. And
actually derives from a deep awareness that if the State now, a great miracle happened that our people some-
of Israel remains a reality, part of Christian theology, how emerged from the shadows, from the anonymity
from That Man down to the great Scholastics, is void. in which it lived for so long, and is now in the center of
Take away the State of Israel, Heaven forbid, and a wave the universal stage of historical occurrence…
of assimilation and apostasy, the likes of which we have
never seen before, would inundate American Jewry. Chazal said – and it is already in the Bible that we may
find this criterion – that redemption related events
The Tituses of yesterday and today would once again
bellow: “Where is their G-d, the Rock in whom they must excite universal wondering and amazement. They
must puzzle the peoples of the earth, they must fasci-
sought refuge?” (Devarim 32:37; see Gittin 56b). And nate them and also frighten them. Many will admire,
this cry would echo from one end of the earth to the
other. The Mizrachi understood this then, continues some will envy, and some will begin to hate the Jewish
people with a greater intensity and greater fury, but
to understand it now, and does not allow itself to be
deterred or led astray. It deserves credit for this, and I everybody must be somehow involved in the great
events. “Then shall they say among the nations, ‘The
feel that my place is with it.
L-rd has done great things for them’” (Tehillim 126:2).
(Zionism and the Mizrachi from the Perspective of a Raven (Reflections on the Six-Day War, June 1967)
Head and a Dove Head, April 1954)

Rabbi Soloveitchik at his home in Boston, 1945. (PHOTO: RABBI SAMUEL STOLLMAN)

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