Adina Roth – Head of Jewish Life

This is the speech I shared with High School students to launch Yom Ha’atzmaut this week. You may find some very interesting trivia in it concerning the Israeli Declaration of Independence. I chose to underscore this story and discuss the Declaration of Independence because of the current protests and uprisings around democracy in Israel. It’s a bit longer than my usual speech but I encourage you to pour yourself a glass of wine and read away:

On Friday 14 May 1948, David Ben Gurion, arguably the most influential Jewish leader since Moses, woke up feeling very nervous. Ben Gurion wasn’t nervous about what he was going to have for breakfast. You see, Paula his lovely wife forced him to eat apple sauce and sour cream for breakfast every day of his married life. She even gave it a special name, Kooch-Mooch. So he already knew what was on the breakfast menu. David Ben Gurion was nervous because he planned to establish a state for the Jews that very afternoon. It’s not every day you wake up, eat kooch-mooch in the morning and then declare a state in the afternoon. But that was this kind of day. At the same time as Israel was being born, the Jewish soldiers of the settlement were defending Israel from attacks from Arab people in the land of Israel. Israel was at war and Ben Gurion knew that after he declared a state all the surrounding countries would attack Israel as well.

And that is why Ben Gurion was nervous because by 4.00 pm that same afternoon, he needed to read out the Declaration of Independence for the State of Israel. And it hadn’t been finalised yet! It’s not that he was a last minute kind of guy. It’s just that 37 Jewish people needed to agree on the terms and sign it. And everyone had a different opinion. In the Declaration we sought to tell some of the Jewish story and history, we needed to explain why we needed a state of our own and we had to express some of the aspirations for and values of our state. There’s a joke that if you have two Jewish people in the room, you have three opinions. How would we get 37 strong minded people to agree on the Declaration of the State? And these people were different, there were secular and religious, communists, socialists and capitalists, people from kibbutzim and city folk, and men and women…In truth there was only two women, but still.

It was just three weeks earlier that a man called Mordechai Beham was tasked with putting together a draft for the Declaration. He was instructed to keep it clandestine. So Beham had ‘just’ told his family and a Rabbi Rabinovich who incidentally had translated Shakespeare into Hebrew. Together, they crafted a flowery expression of the Declaration including many ‘heretofore’ and ‘inasmuchs’ (much of this flowery language was cut out by Ben Gurion in the end).

While Ben Gurion was eating his kooch-mooch and mulling over the day ahead, another character woke up early and started to plan their outfit for the afternoon. This character had it on special advisement that they were going to be included in the Declaration of Independence. That character was God. What God didn’t know is that God’s presence in the declaration was somewhat contentious. Beham had worked on a draft which included God’s name as Elohei Yisrael. However, he and Rabinovich realised that among those 37 people some were devout while others were atheists. Not everyone wanted God in the declaration of the new state. So they decided to use a name for God that everyone would find agreeable, the Rock of Israel or Tzur Yisrael.  It isn’t God’s most famous name. But it meant the religious people would think God was ‘in’ and the atheists might think we were talking about the rocks of Israel. 

Another hopeful guest also woke up that morning singing songs and super excited about the Declaration of Independence. That guest was Democracy! ‘I want to wear my very best Blue and White for the occasion,’ she said. She was convinced that Israel, with its clear democratic aspirations, would definitely have the word Democracy in the Declaration. She imagined that as the word ‘Democracy’ was mentioned, she would strut out in her blue and white boa and bow before the crowd. Democracy was also in for a little bit of a disappointment. Many democratic ideas came into the Declaration but after Sheham the draft of the Declaration continued to do the rounds among Jewish leadership. Just two days before Friday 14 May, it went to a man called Moshe Shertok and he took out the word democracy. Gone!

Ben Gurion was especially nervous because he still had a meeting that Friday with those 37 signatories. They were declaring the State at 4.00 pm that afternoon and a couple of somewhat important things remained undecided, such as the name of the fledgling state!

Some people thought it should be called Judah. Some said it should be called Zion. Others advocated for Eretz Yisrael, harking back to the biblical Land of Israel. Ben Gurion was keen on Israel which eventually won with a vote of 6-3.  

It was all happening all at once. As Ben Gurion tried to generate consensus among this opinionated group, invitations were dispatched to important guests. Come to the Tel Aviv Museum at 4.00 pm this afternoon. The invitation added an amusing request. ‘Don’t tell anybody.’ Do you think anyone could keep such a thing a secret?  A crowd gathered on the Rothschild Plaza outside the museum. The declaration was finalised at 3.00 pm. There was not even time to write it on the official parchment. Everyone signed an empty page of parchment and rushed home to dress for the occasion.  

I mentioned there were two women who signed. One was Golda Meir, who was to become one of Israel’s Prime Ministers and one was a lady called Ruth Cohen Kagan. Ruth Kagan recalls that the invitation was addressed in the masculine, ‘Dear Sir,’ it said,  ‘Please come to the Tel Aviv Museum.’ Her name tag for the event said Mr on it and she had to cross it out and write Mrs in its place. The leadership of the new state may have cared about equality but it also had a long way to go.

At 4.00 pm everyone gathered inside the Tel Aviv Museum, while outside stood thousands of people who had heard via the grapevine about the occasion. Ben Gurion began by knocking a gavel and read out the Declaration. People in Israel and around the world listened on the radio to his crackly voice.

As David Ben Gurion spoke, God was waiting in the wings and Democracy was waiting in the wings.

And Judah and Zion were also waiting in the wings. As they listened, God didn’t hear God, Democracy didn’t hear democracy and Judah and Zion didn’t hear their names.

But as they listened, they felt a little better. They heard Ben Gurion say:

• By virtue of our natural and historic right we hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in the land of Israel, this is the State of Israel.
• The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and the ingathering of the exiles, it will foster the development of the country for all its inhabitants, based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel, it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion race, or sex
• It will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture
• It will safeguard the Holy places of all religions, and it will be faithful to the principles of the charters of the United Nations with the support of Israel…
• Placing our trust in the Rock of Israel, Tzur Yisrael.

The country of Israel, the modern state, was born 75 years ago, while Israel was already at war, a few years after the Holocaust, 2000 years after Jewish people had been waiting and longing in exile. God and religion made it into the Declaration of Independence as the Rock of Israel. Democracy made it in as freedom and equality for all.

Today we have a Jewish state, with religious people and secular people, with socialists and communists and capitalists, people from the farms and people from the city, with men and women and with rights for LGBTQIA+ people. Just as those 37 people signed it, it is up to us to keep its values alive and champion its assertions. And today, we care more about this document than ever before as Israelis, young and old, are marching and rising up to protect democracy in the land of Israel and to make sure that all the important words and values of our Declaration are alive in our Jewish homeland.