Now What?

The people of the book
For three thousand years have faithfully recorded
Our wondrous history
First the prophets
Their stories catalogued and inscribed in
The holy Tanakh
Then the scribes of the ages
Tracing their fathers’ footsteps
With quill and ink
So that our journey should not be lost
A journey unparalleled
That begins with a covenant
And follows an exiled people
Through alien lands
In their long struggle to survive
And maintain their pact with God
But the people found no rest
Ever pursued by their enemies
Uncertainty round every corner
Always fearfully asking
“Now what?”

Now the story approaches its culmination
Our nation stirs its ancient consciousness
Our people are returning to their father’s house
And our homeland comes to life before our eyes.
There is much cause for celebration
Yet beneath it all
Beneath the proud Israeli flag that flies above the Knesset
And the fierce tanks of Tzahal that storm across the Negev
There is a question
One asked many times before
But now in a very different context
Two words, simple yet incessant
“Now what?”

We have closed our book
With the recapture of the Temple Mount in ’67
We considered our people’s story complete
So we cast aside our quill and ink bottle
No longer in need of it
And proudly proclaimed to the world
“The Jewish nation is home!”
Yet all is not well at home.
Content with our current standing
We removed our gaze from heaven
And told ourselves all was well on earth.
We forgot our ancient roots
That lie in the land before us
– Or did we choose to overlook them? –
And now we have stalled
Lost ourselves in a sea of capitalism
Unsure of who we really are.
When the nations of the world confront us
We raise our holy book with both hands
In a bid to show that we really belong.
Why then do we fail to take up our own story
Satisfied with the current chapter
An ending glorious yet premature
Why do we insist on maintaining this desperate façade
Showing off our heritage, yet fearing it
Proudly displaying our past, yet shying from the future
An irrational stubbornness making us dig our feet into our fathers’ soil
Determined to remain implanted in the present
And resist the pull of the future
Despite the gentle tug with which it beckons us?
Why do we fail to take up quill and ink
Like our fathers
And write a story they could only dream of?

We have lost inspiration
With no goal to strive for
We meander aimlessly
Along the coastal plain
And through the Judean hills
The home we have waited so long to return to
Yet how does the people who have been homeless for two thousand years
Make a home?
It is not enough that we come home
We must know what kind of home to make it
And every day we remain undecided
And fall further behind the future
The starker becomes the question faced
By our society
Always the same question
Knocking on our doors with increasing demand
To be answered
Two words
Beating unceasingly
“Now what?”

There is an answer
Yet it requires of us courage
And the strength of our convictions.
It requires us to turn one eye back to heaven
To observe its mysteries
And learn from its ways
Whilst keeping the other firmly fixed on earth
To translate the wisdom from above
Into concrete action
That can benefit those down here.
It requires us to embrace our heritage
Wholeheartedly
And place our faith in those who walked before us.
We are the people of the book
Now we must open our book
And drink from the heavenly springs of wisdom
That flow forth from its pages
Yet even whilst we quench our thirst
We must also pour its water upon the earth
By building a country, a kingdom
And using the values of Torah
To guide its everyday existence.
This is the charge of the Jewish people:
L’takken Olam B’malkhut Shadai
Not to safeguard God’s wisdom among an elite few
Secluded in the monasteries
But to reveal him on a national scale
By running a country
Our country
According to his wishes.
Our fathers could only pass down the manuscripts
Praying for the day the visions would emerge from the pages
How can we, charged with the precious task of bringing them to life
Refuse?
Zionism has accomplished its goals
Our land is liberated, our people reawakened and voyaging home
No longer can we rest on our fifty-year-old laurels.
We must now shift to Hebrew Universalism
And shape the Jewish State into a truly Jewish state
And only then will we put to rest
The question that eats away at modern Israel
“Who are we, and where are we going?”

“Now what?”