Celebrating Israel on Yom Haatzmaut

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik told a communal Yom Hazikaron (memorial day) / Yom Haatzmaut (independence day) program on Monday night that the unity of the Jewish people was the key — together with Torah and mitzvot — to the nation’s survival over centuries and to the modern rebirth of Medinat Yisrael.

“If we are one people it’s because we were always one people and that unity lay at the very heart of Zionism,” he told a near-capacity crowd at the Young Israel of Woodmere. “You kill that and Zionism cannot stand.” The event was co-sponsored by Yeshiva University and 15 area shuls.

Rabbi Soloveichik spoke at length of his childhood hero, Menachem Begin, recounting what he described as Begin’s greatest moment — during the battle for independence against the British, when an Irgun ship smuggling badly needed arms was fired on by Ben Gurion’s Haganah, Begin refused to fire back.

“As Begin said at the time, ‘I live by an iron rule, that a Jew must never shed the blood of another Jew, never’,” Rabbi Soloveichik said, recalling that “we lost the second Temple because of baseless hatred” among ourselves.

He spoke of non-observant Jews whose connection to am Israel compelled them to join the fight for Israel’s independence.

“Whether we like it or not, as Jews we are part of a story, part of the story,” he said.

Rabbi Soloveichik, director of the Zahava and Moshael Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University, delighted his audience with a discussion of J.R.R. Tolken’s “The Hobbit.”

“It’s about a group of dwarves who once lived in a glorious kingdom on a mighty mountain,” he said. Their kingdom was destroyed and they were “disbursed, strangers in a strange land, speaking the language of those among whom they lived and only speaking their own language among themselves. But they never stopped dreaming of their own kingdom, never stropped mourning for their mountain.”