Between Ben Gurion and Bishop Benjamin

My good friend, Bishop Leon Benjamin, organizes a remarkable daily prayer call under Global Leaders United. I have participated in the past and have always been impressed by the participation and dedication of scores or more people, committing the first hour of their day in prayer together. I refer to it as a big virtual congregation. 

A few months ago when he was scheduling speakers into the summer months, I immediately grabbed May 14 as my turn to share and pray.  When I explained to him why I picked May 14, he immediately embraced it and promoted it widely. 

As the call began, I felt the overwhelming sense of something very powerful taking place. Not just rhetorically, I was honored and blessed to be part of the virtual congregation, especially today. Honestly, it became very emotional. 

I began by bringing greetings from the Judean mountains south of Jerusalem, and explained that I wanted to talk about a little bit of history, a little bit of scripture, and the modern intersection of the two. 

The prophet Isaiah (66:8) asks rhetorically, “Who has heard such a thing? Who has seen such things? Shall a land be born in one day?  Shall a nation be brought forth at once?” 

Indeed, can a nation be born in a day? The short answer is yes, and that’s why May 14 is relevant. But I also explained that as a nation, the Jewish people was born in the desert, 3500 years earlier. An auspicious setting indeed. Just out of slavery in Egypt, two million people in the wilderness. Then, poof, we become a people. 

But May 14, 1948, was different. It marked a formal milestone, a beginning of the end of our exile of nearly 2000 years (in addition to the first exile hundreds of years before that). It represented the prophetic fulfillment of the restoration Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, the third commonwealth. 

It also came on the heels of a third of the Jewish people had been slaughtered in the Holocaust. To say that the room at the former Tel Aviv Museum was heavy with history would be an understatement. 

That year, May 14 was a Friday, the eve of the Sabbath, Shabbat. The British Mandate for Palestine (no there was never an independent state of Palestine before that, ever) was going to expire at midnight. The Jewish leadership of the about-to-be-born Jewish state accepted the formula of two states in 1947, and before that in 1937 – one Arab and one Jewish – to be carved out of the remaining 22 percent of what had been all of Mandatory Palestine after the British unilaterally created the Hashemite Kingdom of (Trans)Jordan which was established on the other 78 percent of Mandatory Palestine.  

But the Arab leadership of the surrounding states all rejected it and declared a war of extermination. There was no specific “Palestinian” leadership, and the collection of local clans and the migrants who had come from other Arab lands had no agency of their own. Their Arab brethren viewed the Arabs of what was left of Palestine as part of a broader Arab nation, not a distinct ethnic or national group whereas Arabs on the East Bank of the Jordan River became Jordanians. Nor did the Arabs in the remainder of Palestine view themselves as a distinct ethnic or national group, until 1964. Facts matter. 

Despite the threats that loomed with the signing of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, following Jewish tradition and doing no form of labor on Shabbat, the about-to-be-born state of Israel was not going to be born in violation of the fourth commandment. 

While the State would only come into effect at midnight, the formal declaration of independence was made at 4:00pm local time, 9:00am in Washington, DC. Eleven minutes later, President Truman became the first leader representing the first country to recognize the State of Israel. 

As Israel prepared for Shabbat, it also prepared for War. Prime Minister David Ben Gurion looked for a safe deposit box in which to store the written Declaration, signed by 37 Israeli leaders. He knew war was coming and wanted to preserve the document itself, realizing the significance of the moment as much as having an original by Isaiah himself, asking if a nation can be born in a day. 

The war had already begun, but immediately entered a new phase with five neighboring Arab countries attacking what they expected would be a war of annihilation of the newborn Jewish state. The war would be bloody, lasting well into 1949, with armistice lines drawn but no formal borders because the Arabs rejected the very existence of the Jewish state. 6000 Israeli soldiers were killed, one percent of the Jewish population. 

After the armistice “Green Line” was drawn, Gaza was occupied by Egypt. 

Judea and Samara and ancient Jerusalem, the cradle of Judaism and Christianity – renamed the West Bank simply to describe its location on the west bank of the Jordan river – were annexed by Jordan. 

This is an essential core of the ongoing conflict, in a war that has not really ended. 

While Israel celebrates its Independence Day on the 5th of the Biblical month of Iyar, May 14 is and will always be significant. It’s a day for joy and celebration. Several of the Global Leaders joined in reciting Psalms of thanksgiving (113-118), Hallel, to mark the milestone as a virtual congregation. Powerful! 

I related how when I was in Jerusalem earlier in the day, the whole city was decked out in blue and white, Israeli flags flying everywhere. Thousands of people dressed in blue and white, carrying Israeli flags.  But I explained that since we do our Independence Day celebrations according to the Biblical calendar, they were gathered for another joyous celebration according to the biblical calendar where tonight, the 28th of Iyar, overlaps with May 14 this year, a rare occurrence. 

The 28th of the month of Iyar is the anniversary of the day during the Six Day War in 1967 when Israel reunified Jerusalem. The holy city, the center of our faiths, reunited forever, under the sovereignty of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. We are literally living in miraculous times with prophecies taking place in front of our eyes. These are impossible to ignore. 

Israel existence today, on these two milestones, is proof that God exists, that He keeps His covenants, and that He is always faithful and always will be. There’s no greater evidence to this and the veracity of Biblical and historical accounts of Israel than the return of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, along with the prophetic blossoming of the Land which is not hist about irrigation. Defying the odds of 2000 years in exile, it is proof that Israel are his chosen people. There’s no other example in history of a people being exiled from their Land for so long and coming back strong, if at all. 

Bishop Benjamin made some concluding and flattering remarks which seemed to echo the overall feeling that all the Global Leaders understood the significance of the moment we were sharing. We celebrate Israel at 78. We also celebrate the United States at 250. And we celebrate the alliance between us. 

The call began at 3:00pm Israel time, 8:00am Eastern.  As it was wrapping up, to end precisely on the hour, I realized that we were ending exactly at the time that Ben Gurion was preparing to make the historic Declaration. The weight on his shoulders, the responsibility, the history, and looking into the future must have been great. I tried to imagine what he was doing in that hour leading up to the formal declaration. Was anything going wrong? Was he also directing defensive military operations? What preparations were being made for the war that was about to ensue? 

Did he realize that he was about to fulfill the prayers and dreams of millions of Jews over millennia? Could he have imagined that 78 years to the day, to the exact hour, that one of his people would be celebrating what he did and everything that has happened since, along with scores of Christian leaders whose joy was no less than mine? I am still having a hard time getting my arms around the enormity of the moment. 

Thank you Bishop Benjamin. Thank you Global Leaders. God bless you.