ON THE SURFACE of it, the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 was a completely secular, non-Torah event. It may have been the culmination of efforts that go back to the Vilna Gaon, but it was orchestrated and carried out by Jews who either did not believe in Torah, or God Himself. The American Constitution mentions God. The Israeli one does not.

YOU WOULD THINK that a nation which has seen how bad it can get for their people would become concerned if they saw even a HINT of the same kind of danger. Even a Jew who doesn’t believe in Torah, even a Jew who doesn’t believe in God, should still recall that THE enemies of the Jewish people rarely distinguish between believers and disbelievers.

I WAS SECULAR for the first two decades of my life. Until that time, I had never even entertained the possibility of being an Orthodox Jew. I’m not even sure that I knew what one was, other than the fact that they lived in the past and according to defunct ideas and rules.