There are passages in our ancient texts which we read for years without fully understanding why they are there. Then history happens, and suddenly they speak to us with an urgency that is almost unsettling.

The first Rashi on the Torah is one of them.

Rashi lived almost a thousand years ago, in a world unimaginably different from ours. There was no State of Israel, no Zionist movement, no Balfour Declaration, no United Nations. Jews were scattered and largely powerless. Yet when Rashi sat down to write what would become the most influential Jewish commentary on the Torah, the first question he addressed was this: why does the Torah begin with the creation of the world?

His answer is remarkable. Rashi says that the Torah begins with Creation because a day will come when the nations of the world will say to Israel, “You are robbers, because you took the land.”

This is the first Rashi. Before Abraham discovers God, before Moses, before Egypt, before Sinai and the Ten Commandments, Rashi anticipates a moment when the Jewish people will stand accused before the world of having stolen the Land of Israel.

Almost a thousand years later, we are living through that argument.

Only the vocabulary has changed. Today we hear of colonialism, settler-colonialism and stolen land. The Jewish return to Zion, perhaps the most sustained return of a people to its ancient homeland in human history, is increasingly presented not as return at all, but as invasion.

Recently we saw a particularly disturbing example in educational material promoted by the Islamic Curriculum Initiative through an educational community with links to Cambridge. Its material speaks of Palestine as central to the formation of children’s identity and reportedly includes teaching young children a map of “Palestine” encompassing the entire land. Israel is simply absent. The Jewish claim to indigeneity is dismissed as a “Zionist narrative.”

We should be careful not to exaggerate what this represents, nor to turn a particular educational........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)