Reading Isaiah on
Israel Independence Day
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Rabbi Zvi Aviner
2025
The celebration of Israel State Independence Day goes through three phases, three successive days:
1: Holocaust Memorial Day
2: Memorial Day for Fallen Israeli Soldiers
3: Israel State’s Independence Day
The Holocaust Memorial Day is dedicated to the memory of six million Jews murdered in Europe, as the result of the long-standing Christian, anti – Judaic teaching.
In the second Memorial Day for the fallen Solders we remember 25,000 Israeli solders perished in successive wars with the Arabs.
According to both religions, the state of Israel should not have arisen. A standing, independent Jewish State is a direct challenge to their faith.
That posture of Christianity was established by St. Augustine in the year 424 who wrote:
“Jews must be allowed to survive, but never to thrive.
Their back must be bent down always, their homelessness
and misery are the roper punishment for their refusal
to recognize the truth of the church’s claims. And more –
their misery is yet another proof of those claims.”
(St. Augustine 425 AD, quoted by James Carroll
Constantine Sword, p 218)
According to St Augustine, Jews must live outside society, only a meager life with limited occupations, to bear witness for the victory of Christianity. Of course, a Jewish State is unthinkable.
But that license to live outside society has gradually been transformed into a vicious denial of any Jewish life under the church. If at St. Augustine time a Jew could convert and be accepted into society, that changed under the Spanish Inquisition who regraded suspiciously any convert. Jews are such a rotten RACE that nothing can help them to accept Jesus’ truth. A converted Jew remains a Swine, a Morano, a rotten creature that should either be expelled or exterminated. The road to Auschwitz was opened by that teaching. In his book Constantine Sword, James Carrol described the road from Augustine to the Final Solution of Auschwitz. Certainly, an independent Jewish state is unthinkable under such Church teaching.
A similar process has also taken place in the Islamic Arab world. It was Muhammad himself who perpetrated the first mass killing of Jews, the first Holocaust, according to Eli Wezel. In the year 1948, immediately after the declaration of the establishment of State of Israel, recognized by the UN general assembly, no less than six Arab armies invaded the newly state from all side. The Arabs objected the establishment of any state of Infidels on what they see an Islamic land, Dar All Islam. Secondly, they regard the extermination of Jews as a religious obligation, no different than the Nazi belief. In fact, there were many connections between Arab leaders and the Nazi government. Even today a vast antisemitic Nazi literature if found in every home in Gaza strip.
If St. Augustine preached to humiliate the Jews, the Muslims followed with no less animosity. A jew could live under Islam but only in humiliated way -he should not use the side walk but stay in the middle of the street with all the trash, he shouldn’t ride a horse and he have to pay extra text above all other citizen. Certainly, an independent Jewish State on the Holy Land is. unthinkable in the Muslim’s eyes,
The invading Arab armies in 1948 pledged to “finish the good work of Hitler.” By a miracle, the small, bsdly equipped Israeli Defense Forces prevailed, but not without a tremendous cost. More than 25,000 solders paid with their lives in successive chain of wars.
The nature of the miracle off the establishment of the Jewish State is seen starkly when you consider who comprised the nascent Israeli Defense Forces.
Many were Holocaust survivors, who came out of the Hell called Nazi extermination camps. Each survivor had lost his family, his community, and each one lived through the horrors of the camps – including daily beating, hanging, dog barking, extreme hunger and death everywhere. Many lost any faith in humanity. To think that such a crowd of broken people – ״an amber saved from a fire” (Zechariah 3: 2) would rise against six Arab armies and win , would be an impossible dream. And yet it did happen.
We therefore move from the holocaust Memorial Day to the Israeli Memorial Day of the Fallen Soders, to the Israel State Independent Day. We see the three days as one story – how survivors of the European atrocities had to face the attack of Arab Nazism to survive and establish the State of Israel – despite all odds, despite of thousands years of objection by the two major religions on our planet.
The question is – how could the gentiles correct the atrocities of the past? How can they join Israel in celebrating our independence?
Christianity has indeed taken the first step.
In 1964, the Second Vatican Council
“repudiates the centuries-old deicide charge against Jews, affirming an eternal covenant between God and the People of Israel and calling for dialogue and mutual understanding.” (Vikipedia.)
Subsequently, in 2000, pope John Paul the II visited Israel, including the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. As it is customary, he left a in a note of prayer in a crack between the stones. It reads:
The Pope’s Note
“God of our fathers,
You chose Abraham and his descendants
to make Your name known to the nations
We are very saddened by the behavior of these people
who throughout history have caused suffering
to your sons and ask for your forgiveness
We wish to dedicate ourselves for true fraternity
with your covenant people
Is the note enough? The pope speaks about bad people, who had committed atrocities against the Children of Abraham, but he carefully evading the fact that it is the Church teaching which is responsible for the existence of those bad people.
What should be the real remedy of the gentile’s posture against Judaism?
Let’s read Isaiah.
In the first reading , Isaiah defines for us very clearly who is Hashem’s Slave:
Israel: Hashem’s Slave
“Remember these things, Jacob,
for you, Israel, are my slave.
I have made you. You are my slave;
Israel, I will not forget you.
I have swept away your offenses like a cloud,
your sins like the morning mist.
Return to me,
for I have redeemed you.” (Isaia 44: 21-22)
Isaiah follows Abrahams’ teaching that Hashem “Owns the Heavens and the Earth” (Genesis 14: 19). Hhe “owns” it because He had made it. Hence I and my seeds are His Slaves and He I sour “Master” AaDoNai. The circumcision is “the emblem o four Master in our flesh” (seforno.)
Hence Isaiah’s words – “For you, Israel, are my slave, I have made you, you are my slave!” Therefore I will never forget you!
The second reading from Isaiah is Chpter 53 thaat speaks about the bad shape of Hashem’s slave:
The Suffering and Glory of Hashem’s Slave
Isaiah 53
1
Who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of Hashem been revealed?
2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
3 He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Isaiah describes Hashem’s slave – Israel, as we’ve just seen – looking extremely bad, with no beauty or majesty to attract the nations to him. He is despised and rejected by all Mankind, associated with history of suffering and pains.
2
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,”
Isaiah continues to describe the gentile’s attitude towards Hashem’s slave, Israel. We considered him punished by God, but in fact his misery is the work of our own hands!
“ and by his wounds we are healed.
We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way;
and Hashem has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before its shearers is silent…”
Only by speaking out these words of repentance, the nations may achieve an attornment for millennia of mistreating Israel, distorting the words of the prophets and accusing Israel falsely.
Finally let’s read a positive message of Isaiah –
Isaiah 2
The Mountain of the Lord
This is what Isaia son of Amoz saw concerning Judah andJerusalem:
In the last days,
the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established
as the highest of the mountains;
it will be exalted above the hills,
and all nations will stream to it.
Many peoples will come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the temple of the God of Jacob.
He will teach us his ways,
so that we may walk in his paths.”
The law will go out from Zion,
the word of Hashem from Jerusalem.
He will judge between the nations
and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
nor will they train for war anymore.
Come, descendants of Jacob,
let us walk in the light of Hashem.”