The resilience of people in general – and the Jewish people in Israel in particular – is simply astounding. Nobody would have imagined that in today’s day and age, people could withstand hundreds of days in terrible conditions of captivity and return back to a life that resembles normalcy. Yet that is what is going on today in Israel for tens of hostage survivors from Hamas brutality.
In general, Israel is a country that has become accustomed to dealing with major attacks and attempts to destroy her and wreak havoc on its citizenry. In Israel, people know that hours after a major attack, the area of the attack will often show no signs of what had recently transpired.
The state of mind of millions of Israelis, young and old, may very well go back to the massive struggles that so many parents and grandparents endured in the generations preceding them. Even before the formation of the State of Israel, the hundreds of thousands of Jewish people who miraculously survived the Holocaust in Europe, Russia, and North Africa showed enormous resilience in rebuilding their lives. Many of these people made it to the Land of Israel before and after the State was established.
In addition, the Sephardic Jews who hailed from Arab countries were largely kicked out of Iraq, Morocco, Iran, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and Yemen. Most came to Israel with very few belongings, had large families, and were extremely poor. But they had deeply held religious beliefs that provided them with the fortitude to withstand tremendous obstacles. Today, their children are at the forefront of the leadership of every aspect of life in Israel.
More recently, more than a million Jews have come on Aliyah from Russia. They are the latest massive wave of immigrants who have also faced many obstacles, but have emerged as a major force in Israel, filling up many of the critical jobs of the hi-tech, medical and intelligence communities.
Israel is simply a miraculous country on so many levels. The psychological resilience of the population is yet another angle in the amazing story of modern-day Israel.