The four youngsters are standing on a moving sidewalk at Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, waving the shalom of greeting at a clutch of photographers vying for the most heart-melting image of the four adorable children. We cannot be sure, but it is very likely the clothes they are wearing are new, given to them by Israeli officials, either on the verge of their departure from their former home, or at the moment of their arrival at their new one.
The children – from left, Leah, Rachel, Yehoshua and Menashe – are members of the Ben Israel family. They, their parents and three siblings escaped from Ra’ina in the Omran province of Yemen in mid-February. More accurately, they were rescued by the Jewish Agency for Israel.
Their father, one of the leaders of the 230-person Jewish community in Ra’ina, had his life threatened. Trying to make good on the threat, someone threw a grenade into the courtyard of the family’s home.
In December, Moshe Yaish Nahari, a father of nine and brother of a prominent rabbi, was murdered near his home in Rida by a Muslim extremist.
Some 280 Jews live in Yemen. But extremist Muslims no longer wish to abide a Jewish presence there.
On Feb. 19, the nine-person Ben-Israel family and two other Jews from Yemen landed in Israel in successful execution of a secret, many-layered, dangerous rescue operation.
Thus, while the photo above is one of four delighted youngsters at Ben-Gurion Airport, it is also a photo that embodies the visible reach of the collective Jewish hand toward endangered kinfolk.
The reference to “collective Jewish hand” is no mere statement of maudlin mush. It is a statement of fact. Each one of us through our involvement in and support of our respective communities, each United Jewish Appeal, each federation, ties into the rescue of the Ben Israel family like a super-strong safety skein catching co-religionists before they fall or are pushed into historical oblivion.
It’s worth remembering this as we greet the New Year.
We are all individuals – autonomous, sentient beings. But we belong to a people – interconnected one to the other by common collective history, experience and memories.
It’s worth remembering this as we hold the New Year’s machzor in our hands, many of us standing in the tumult of large crowds of worshippers in our respective synagogues.
As Rabbi Philip Birnbaum wrote of the machzor more than six decades ago, “Phrased in plural form, the prayers are meant to be the voice of all Israel.” He underscored the point of the inter-connectedness of the worshippers, of the peoplehood that enveloped all who looked to the High Holiday prayers, by noting that the machzor “embodies the visions and aspirations, the sorrows and joys of countless generations. The whole gamut of Jewish history may be traversed in its pages. The machzor is a mirror that reflects the development of the Jewish spirit throughout the ages… No other book so completely unites the dispersed of Israel.”
Thus, when we hold the prayer book in our hands, it is no exaggeration to suggest, according to Rabbi Birnbaum, that we actually hold Jewish history in our hands.
But holding Jewish history is not quite like standing in Jewish history. We stand at the centre of that history every moment of every day when we proclaim in our hearts and say to the world that we do indeed belong to the Jewish People.
It is not through the gauzy mists of nostalgia that we look to our Judaism, to our sense of peoplehood. Rather, it is through the beckoning immediacy of present tense.
Peoplehood means responsibility. Responsibility means – among many other things – helping rescue the Ben Israel family from a country we have never seen for the sanctuary of a country that we will never forget nor ever let down.
This is a recurring theme that courses through the many writings of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. “We are a people defined by history,” he writes. “We carry our past with us. We relive it in ritual and prayer. We are not lonely individuals, disconnected with past and present. We are characters in the world’s oldest continuous story, charged with writing its next chapter and handing it on to those come after us.”
Even as we recite the Rosh Hashanah prayers, or skim them, or concentrate with extra focus on only a portion of them, we are indeed writing the next chapter of our history if we do so with the knowledge, gratitude and love that flows from knowing that our voices join with the voices, as Rabbi Birnbaum wrote, “of all Israel.”
May we all be inscribed for a good year.