Tonight is really the anniversary of the creation of Israel, but the date is moved up to not coincide with Shabbat.
On this day in Jewish History
* A decree issued prohibiting the import by Russian Jews of books in any language, 1800.
* Joseph Rivlin laid the cornerstone of the first private home to be erected outside the wall of Jerusalem marking the beginning of the modern Yishuv, 1869.
* Israel was proclaimed an independent state, 1948. The first legislative act of the provisional government of the State of Israel provided for the repeal of the British White Paper of 1939, which had restricted Jewish immigration and the acquisition of land in Eretz Yisrael. The Haftara on the Sabbath following the promulgation of the law of unrestricted Jewish immigration into Israel was the ninth chapter of Amos. “And I will return the captivity of my people Israel. And they shall build the waste cities and inhabit them…and they shall no more be plucked up out of their land which I have given them, says G-d.”
The passage from Amos is striking, and leaves me wondering whether Israel (that is, the currently-existing State) should be viewed, theologically as it were, as the culmination of Jewish history. If that history chronicles a cycle of dispossession and return, can we conclude that the cycle has come to an end? Or (doing our best to discern the Almighty’s purposes) is the State but a chapter in a history that may extend millenia into the future, in which the pattern of exile and return might repeat itself?