My daughter graduated high school this year, and she asked me for one thing. She wanted to travel in Europe for a week or two with her friends.
She earned that trip. When we moved to Israel, she rebuilt her entire life in a new country and a new language, and she had to work far harder than classmates who grew up here, studying high level math in a language she was still learning. She succeeded at every part of it. Also, I trust her completely, so I wasn’t worried that she would do something foolish or dangerous.
I said no anyway. It was one of the harder conversations I have had with one of my children, because I could not point to anything she had done wrong or anything she had failed to earn. I felt badly about it, but it was the right decision.
My daughter was not the issue. Europe is the issue, and in her case, Greece, which is where she and her friends wanted to go.
Greece is close to Israel, affordable and beautiful, and every summer it fills up with young Israelis fresh out of high school and the army. It is the obvious first trip for an eighteen year old from Jerusalem, and for years it was perfectly safe.
Not this summer.
This summer, Greece held a nationwide day of anti-Israel demonstrations. Thousands of people marched in Athens and Thessaloniki and out on the islands where Israeli families vacation, screaming hatred of Israel and Jews. Israel’s Foreign Ministry warned Israelis in Greece to stay away from crowds, to avoid posting their location on social media, and to hide anything that might identify them as Jews.
So my daughter spent the week at the beach in Israel with her friends instead. They had a great time, and I was able to sleep at night.
But here is what makes no sense about all of this. Greece is one of the greatest beneficiaries of the State of Israel anywhere in the world.
Greece recently signed a $4 billion agreement with Israeli defense firms to build a multi-layered air defense system protecting Greek skies from missiles and drones. Israeli companies run the flight training center for the Hellenic Air Force in Kalamata, which means Israel trains Greek pilots. Trade between the two countries has passed $1.3 billion, more than 500 flights a month connect Israel and Greece, and hundreds of thousands of Israeli tourists fill Greek hotels and restaurants every summer, a huge boost to the Greek economy. Greece sits across the Aegean from Turkey, a country with eight times its population and an army to match, whose government has spent years challenging Greek sovereignty over the islands. Greece turned to Israel for protection, and Israel delivered.
No country in Europe gains more from the State of Israel than Greece, and yet Greeks are spraying “Death to the IDF” on their walls and hunting Israeli tourists to beat up in the streets.
Where is this hatred coming from? Why would a nation that gains so much from Israel turn on us?
The answer is as old as the Bible itself.
After ten plagues devastated Egypt, after his country lay in ruins, after he buried his own firstborn son, Pharaoh did not merely release the Israelites. He demanded that they leave Egypt – immediately.
But only a few days later, he changed his mind:
What made Pharaoh change his mind?
Nothing had changed. There was no new plague, no provocation, no threat from the Israelites, who were walking into the wilderness with their sheep and their children. What changed is that Pharaoh saw Israel free and beyond his reach, and he simply could not stomach the sight of it. The reality of Israel being free of his control was too much for him to bear. So he assembled six hundred chariots and chased this nation of former slaves across the sand to drag them back into Egypt.
Pharaoh’s decision was a catastrophe for Egypt. God split the sea for Israel, and when the Egyptian cavalry followed them in, the waters came crashing down and Pharaoh’s entire army drowned. The greatest military power in the world lost its army in a single morning.
But the consequences of Pharaoh’s decision reached far beyond the destruction of his army. Egypt lost its opportunity for salvation.
Throughout the story of the Exodus, God did not only communicate with Moses and the people of Israel. All of the plagues, all of the miracles, were also intended as a message to Pharaoh and the Egyptian people.
This promise repeats throughout the account of the plagues.
God was using the redemption of Israel to teach the most powerful empire in the world that He exists, that He rules history, and that human beings are not trapped in a meaningless universe.
The Egyptians were supposed to learn something from all of this. Israel walking out of slavery was proof, offered to Egypt, that no nation is stuck where it is. As Abraham Livni, the twentieth century French Jewish thinker, writes, “It suffices for the nations to recognize Israel in order for them to be drawn into the wake of the greatest liberation in history. Unfortunately, Pharaoh denied himself this deliverance; he obstinately persisted in viewing the world as a closed universe.”
God offered Pharaoh the truth about the world, and Pharaoh answered by chasing God’s chosen people with six hundred iron chariots.
In a careful reading of the biblical text, the Sages found a hint to the failure of Pharaoh and Egypt to heed God’s message. The account of Israel’s departure from Egypt opens with the Hebrew word vayehi, which simply means “and it came to pass.” But the Sages teach that wherever Scripture opens with vayehi, the verse is announcing sorrow. It is a sign that something sad is about to happen. They point out that the first syllable of the word, vay, means “alas.”
Alas? Israel had just walked out of Egypt in broad daylight after four hundred years of slavery. The Exodus is one of the most joyous events of all time! What sadness is there to mourn in the greatest redemption in human history?
For Israel, the Exodus was a triumph. For the nations of the world, it was a heartbreaking failure. God put on the greatest display of His power in human history, and He did it in front of the most powerful empire on earth so that Egypt would finally understand who rules the world. Pharaoh watched ten plagues tear his kingdom apart. He buried his own son. He released a nation of slaves with his own mouth. And yet he learned nothing. The moment Israel was out of his sight, he hitched up his chariots and went after them.
That failure cost the world dearly. Because Egypt refused the lesson, the work of the Exodus was left unfinished, and Israel would have to be exiled and redeemed again and again until the nations finally understood. Babylonia, Persia, Greece and Rome. As Livni writes, in order “to bring to completion the Exodus from Egypt, and make up for what it lacked, Israel had to endure, over its long history, four other exiles.”
And the price was not paid by Israel alone. The nations of the world lost far more. Egypt was offered the knowledge of God, and when Egypt refused it, humanity was left to grope through thousands of years of darkness and confusion, worshipping idols and building empires on cruelty, without the one truth that would have set them free.
Vay. Alas. Pharaoh’s blindness cost humanity thousands of years.
Today, God is offering the world that same proof all over again. Israel came home, exactly as the prophets said we would. We revived a dead language, made a wasteland bloom, gathered in millions of exiles from a hundred countries, and built one of the strongest armies on earth. The nations are watching a people rise from the ashes of Auschwitz to sovereignty in just a few short years, and there is no natural explanation for any of it. God is at work in history, calling out to the nations of the world: “pay attention!”
Greece needs God’s message more than most. This is a country living in the shadow of its own ruins. Greece gave the world philosophy, mathematics, drama and democracy, but today it is one of the poorest countries in Western Europe, buried in debt, and unable to defend its own skies against Turkey without Israeli help.
Israel came to Greece offering exactly what Greece lacks: Air defense, pilot training, trade, tourists, and investment. Israel offers friendship and partnership, and the Greeks need it desperately.
But the deepest thing Israel offers Greece cannot be measured in euros or missile batteries. Israel offers hope. A poor nation still living off the glory of its ancient history, watching its children pack their bags for Germany and the Netherlands, can look at the Jewish people and see that decline is not destiny and that a nation can be reborn. And Israel offers meaning, the knowledge that history is going somewhere, that a God who redeemed slaves from Egypt and brought His people home after two thousand years is still at work in the world.
Israel’s return could be the beginning of Greek renewal, living proof that a small nation with a glorious past can rise again. Instead, young Greeks march through Syntagma Square demanding the destruction of the country that guards their skies, and they paint death threats on walls in a city that survives on Israeli tourism.
Greece is making the same foolish mistake Pharaoh made. The Greeks are not responding to anything Israel has done to them. Like Pharaoh, they cannot tolerate what Israel is, and like Pharaoh, they are throwing away their own redemption in order to spite ours.
Yet the tantrums of the Greeks will not faze us. As Livni writes, “The people of Israel have, once more, gone up out of Egypt. As for the new Pharaoh, there is no doubt that he will suffer the same fate as his predecessor who drowned in the Red Sea if he, too, should attempt to thwart Israel’s liberation movement, which is now irreversible.”
My daughter will get her trip one day. Maybe not this year, and maybe not to Greece, but the hatred of this sad little nation for the people of Israel will not harm us. We will not lose sleep over a country that would rather curse us than be blessed by us.
We have a redemption to finish.
