José Maria C.S. André
The book “God, Science, Evidence —The Dawn of a Revolution”, by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, has just been translated from French into Portuguese and Spanish. One of the chapters deals with the mysterious history of Israel, a special people among all the ancient peoples of the earth.
All the conquered peoples disappeared within a few years. Not this one.
The peoples who were dispersed and diluted throughout the world lost their original reference. Not this one.
The peoples whose citizens have lost contact with each other and with their own language also lost their identity. Except this one.
Some populations were victims of racism, or enslaved, but no people have been persecuted with comparable persistence. Israel endured centuries of harsh exile, since long before the time of Christ to the Roman Empire and the last two thousand years.
The book by Bolloré and Bonnassies illustrates this singularity by quoting famous authors: Pascal, Mark Twain, Toynbee, Jean-Jacques Rousseu, Léon Tolstoï, Nicolas Berdieaeff…
“What became of the Goths, the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, the Vandals, the Picts, the Angles, the Saxons, the Huns, the Gauls, the Franks? And in the Orient, the Persians, the Medes, the Assyrians, the Phoenicians, the Philistines, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Jebusites, etc.? Nothing remained! They all disappeared, diluted in this great machine of mixing and erasing the identity of peoples that is history, with its wars, migrations and mixtures.”
Clearly, the special feature of this people is that they received God’s revelation. For more than a millennium, they were the object of an unparalleled predilection and —a paradox that is not easy to understand— they were repeatedly unfaithful to God. They received extraordinary graces at first hand, which gave rise to the books of the Old Covenant, but they systematically ran away from God.
No ancient people took the initiative to abandon their idolatry and, once conquered, they all adopted the dominant idolatry; their cults lasted as long as their language, customs and social structure. Except in the case of this special people. In peacetime, when nothing prevented them from following tradition, they forgot their God; in tribulation, when someone wanted to impose any idols on them, they resisted.
We don’t have to agree with Bolloré and Bonnassies when they see providential signs in the success of the military operations of recent decades, the important thing is to recognize the mystery visible in millennia of history. Curiously, the founders of present-day Israel were generally atheists, and the majority of the present-day population is atheist or agnostic. If love and forgiveness are signs of God, the hatred and desire for revenge that I found in Israel when I was there (in July 2023) is deeply shocking. The cruelty with which, at that time, the government and the parliamentary majority worked to enlarge the country by expelling the Palestinians from their land seemed demonic to me and, unfortunately, the terrorist attacks of October 2023 served as an excuse to speed up the process and unleash the massacre we now witness.
What great mystery regards this people?
St. Paul wrote to the Romans that “the blindness of Israel was partial, until the fullness of the Gentiles should come in, and so all Israel will be saved, as it is written.” And further on: “As for the Gospel, they are [God’s] enemies for your sakes; but as for the [divine] choice, they are beloved because of their fathers. For God’s gifts and calling are irrevocable.”
All this is mysterious. Even more mysterious is this other, more inexplicable people, born out of Israel. This new people, the Church, transcends the multiplicity of languages and cultures, geographies, borders and confrontations of history; it survives all empires and social changes. Christ referred to the Church when he promised, “I will be with you always, to the end of the age”.
(Image caption: The wall that spreads from one end of the picture to the other is one board of the esplanade of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem. Destroyed by the Romans, all that remains is this immense empty esplanade, with a few mosques.)
Follow
