'Innocents Abroad' Revisited: 1867-2007

(6 September 07) by Levi Chazen

"The latter generations will say: Your children who will come after you, and the foreigner who will come from a distant land - when they see the plagues of the Land and its illnesses with which HaShem has afflicted it...."

One of the most famous of these "foreigners" to visit the Holy Land, some 150 years ago, was Mark Twain, who wrote about his experiences in his book Innocents Abroad. Twain traveled throughout Europe, worked his way down to Greece and Turkey, then through Syria and finally to the Holy Land. What awaited him in the Holy Land was unlike anything that he had seen before in any other place.

Twain wrote: "Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its field and fettered its energies. Where Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and towers, that solemn sea now floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing exists, over whose borders nothing grows but weeds and scattering tufts of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises refreshment to parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch."

Could this be the Promised Land, the same land that the Torah tells us is flowing with milk and honey? A land that, the Talmud teaches us, flourished so greatly that when Rami the son of Yechezkel traveled to B'nei Brak, he saw goats eating under big trees, and honey flowed from the figs while milk dripped from the goats and they mixed together, and he exclaimed: "This is it - a land flowing with milk and honey"?

How, then, did the Holy Land, which so flourished in ancient times, turn into a dry and barren land where "even the olive tree and the sabra, those faithful friends of barren lands, were almost completely missing from the land"?

The Torah tells us: "And they will say, because they forsook the covenant of HaShem, the G-d of their forefathers, which He had sealed with them when He took them out of the land of Egypt, and they went and they served the gods of others, and they prostrated themselves to gods that they knew not, and He did not apportion to them."

So great was the desolation of the Land that all who saw her knew that this could only be the hand of G-d: "Sulphur and salt, a conflagration of its entire land, it cannot be sown and it cannot sprout, and no grass shall rise up on it."

Twain writes: "The spell of a curse hovers over her, which has blighted her fields and imprisoned the might of her power with shackles. The Land of Israel is a wasteland and devoid of delight. The Land of Israel is no longer to be considered part of the actual world. We did not see a soul during the entire journey, everywhere we went there was no tree or shrub." (Funny, though, that Twain did not see all of those millions of "Palestinians," the same ones that have been here from time immemorial.)

If Mark Twain would arise today, some 150 years after his historical visit to Israel, he would not believe that he is in the same place, the place that he called "not part of the actual world." Today, the Land of Israel flourishes beyond anyone's wildest imagination; with the return of the Jewish people, we have turned the desert into the Garden of Eden.

Still, this should come as no surprise, as the Talmud already told us: "Rabbi Abba said: There is no clearer sign that the Redemption is at hand than when the trees in the Land of Israel once again give of their fruits."

Looking back at this historical event, who can not stand in wonder at seeing the hand of G-d over the past 150 years in the return of the Jewish people to its land? How could it be that Jews still continue to live in the exile, seeing with their own eyes that the living G-d of Israel is bringing back His people, and that this is His will?

Not forever will the gates remain open. Do not find yourself on the other side, for what will you answer on the Day of Judgment: "I did not see; I did not notice G-d's great hand in history"?