This year, as in all non-leap years, the two parashot Tazria and Metzora are combined. And as in all non-leap years, the double parashah Tazria-Metzora falls close to Yom ha-Atzma’ut, Israel Independence Day.
Yom ha-Atzma’ut falls on the 5th of Iyyar, the day that Israel became independent of the British Empire in 5708 (1948). However the day of the celebrations is often brought forward a day or two or postponed by a day in order to avoid clashing with Shabbat. Thus this year 5785, the 5th of Iyyar falls on Shabbat Parashat Tazria-Metzora, and we celebrate Yom ha-Atzma’ut two days early, on Thursday 3rd of Iyyar.
As with almost all double parashot, we read the Haftarah for the second parashah – in this case, Metzora (2 Kings 7:3-20). The Haftarah for Parashat Metzora appropriately enough recounts the episode of the four lepers [1] who had been banished from the city, in accordance with the procedure in the parashah (Leviticus 13).
Despairing of their very lives, fearing to die of starvation, with nothing to lose, they resolved to throw themselves onto the mercy of the Aramæan Army:
“What – shall we sit here until we die? If we suggest that we go to the city – there’s a famine in the city and we’ll die there! And if we sit here – we’ll die! So now, let’s go and fall into the camp of Aram: if they keep us alive we’ll live, and if they put us to death, we’ll die” (2 Kings 7:4).
So these lepers approached the Aramæan camp by night, and found it deserted: G-d had miraculously made the Aramæans hear a mighty army, horses and chariots, and they thought that an alliance of Israelites, Hittites, and Egyptians were attacking them.
In their panic the Aramæans fled, leaving behind all their supplies, including their food.
The four lepers entered the deserted Aramæan army camp, ate and drank, then returned to the city gate to inform the watch of this miracle. The news spread rapidly, and the Israelites in the city were ecstatic at being reprieved from the Aramæan siege.
I suggest that there is tremendous significance for Yom ha-Atzma’ut in the episode which our Haftarah relates:
Israel seemed to be on the verge of collapse, both from the enemy and from the natural disaster of famine that had devastated Israel. The Prophet Elisha had prophesied imminent salvation from both, but that seemed impossible.
Yet it happened exactly as the Prophet prophesied.
And who announced the news of this sudden and unexpected – indeed impossible – salvation?
– Four lepers. Four men who had been afflicted with a disease which banished them from the camp. It was precisely the outcasts of society to whom G-d granted the honour of heralding His miraculous salvation to Israel.
This gives us an insight into the sudden and unexpected – indeed impossible – salvation of our generations. Thousands of years ago, our prophets prophesied, countless times, that after a long and wearying exile, we would return home to Israel.
Prophet after prophet, from Moshe, “the father of all prophets” [2], to Malachi, the last of all the Prophets, had prophesied eventual salvation; but for a nation exiled and scattered, powerless and persecuted, with the Land of Israel occupied by some of history’s mightiest empires, that seemed like an impossible event.
Yet it eventually happened exactly as all the Prophets prophesied.
And it was the “outcasts” of Torah, some of the most aggressively secular Jews of the generation, to whom G-d granted the honour of heralding His miraculous salvation to Israel.
The idea of the entire Aramæan army fleeing and deserting because G-d deluded them into imagining that a mighty Israelite-Hittite-Egyptian alliance was attacking them sounds like some barely-believable supernatural miracle.
And yet…
…and yet this precise scenario happened over and over again during Israel’s War of independence. Not in some mythical scenario, but in fully-documented battles.
Britain’s mandate to rule Israel (still bearing the old colonial name “Palestine”) was drawing to its close, and British forces were rapidly evacuating the country. Britain was still the legally-recognised sovereign, but they only still controlled small parts of the country – Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Lydda (Lod) with its vital international airport and railway junction, Haifa with its vital sea-port and railway depot, a few major intercity roads and junctions, and a few other strategically-important locations.
Britain had already announced its decision to leave entirely on the 15th of May, the day that their mandate to rule expired. The Jewish community in Israel was preparing to declare independence and sovereignty; the Arab community had no such plans.
All seven independent Arab countries – Trans-Jordan (today called Jordan), Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen – had announced their determination to invade and to exterminate the fledgling state and all the Jews therein. The Arabs of the soon-to-be State of Israel waited expectantly for the surrounding Arab armies to crush the Jews.
When the British military withdrew from the Upper Galilee, including Tzfat, on 16th April, they warned the Jews there that the Arabs would massacre them all, and offered them safe conduct out of the city. The British gave the Jews just eight hours notice, confident that the Jews would panic and seize this “generous” offer.
In the event, not a single Jew chose to evacuate.
To defend the nascent state from the Arabs’ invasion and attempted genocide, the Jewish leadership adopted Tochnit Dalet (“Plan D”): Jewish forces began to be deployed in the Galilee during Chol ha-Mo’ed Pesach 5708 (28th April 1948).
On paper, the Jews had no chance: in Tzfat itself were some 12,000 Arabs and 1,200 Jews. In the villages of the entire region, some 80,000 Arabs surrounded 3,000 Jews. The combined Syrian and Iraqi forces in and around Tzfat held the British fortress on Mount Canaan – an all-but impregnable position which dominated the entire region.
The Jewish forces were desperately under-equipped; only two-thirds of Jewish troops even held rifles. The unspoken rule that everyone knew was: The soldiers who held rifles advance in the front lines. When they fall in battle, the soldiers behind them take those rifles.
The Jewish forces in Tzfat had an improbable weapon, the Davidka – an improvised mortar, named for its designer, David Leibowitz. Only six were ever manufactured, three of which are still on display: The one used in Operation Yiftach stands in the town square of Tzfat, another stands in the centre of Jerusalem (Kikar ha-Davidka, or Davidka Square), and another in the Givati Museum in Metzudat Yo’av (about half-way between Ashkelon and Kiryat Gat)
As a weapon, the Davidka was hopeless: inaccurate, unreliable, limited range, its shells weak.
But it had two redeeming characteristics:
As the shell flew through the air it made a loud shriek, which sounded (sort of) like the war-cries of thousands of people.
And although the shell’s explosion wasn’t very powerful, it was exceptionally loud.
The Yiftach Battalion deployed the Davidka on the night of Rosh Chodesh Iyyar 5708 (9th-10th May 1948). In the dark of the moonless night the troops attacked uphill towards Tzfat. Critically short of ammunition, the Haganah forces fired just four shells from their Davidka during the night.
In the darkness, the Arabs – soldiers and civilians alike – heard what sounded like the screams of thousands of Jews attacking. The Haganah had committed just 290 soldiers to the battle; the combined Arab forces (Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi, and Arab Liberation Army) numbered between 700 and 3,000 soldiers (numbers from the time are notoriously unreliable).
They had no idea where these “thousands” of Jewish soldiers came from – but they were utterly demoralised.
And then they heard the unbearably loud explosions of the Davidka shell. The explosions were barely strong enough to knock a man off his feet – but the Arabs didn’t know that.
And then, immediately after those explosions came an entirely unseasonable rainstorm. As the ground turned rapidly into mud under the torrential rain, Haganah troops climbing the Galilean hills in the dark found themselves sinking into the quagmire and sliding down the hillsides. It seemed to them as though the weather itself was conspiring against them.
But above them, in the Arab areas, demoralisation was complete. The sole weapon the Arabs could think of that could generate such a loud explosion was the atomic bomb. Rumours spread wildly that atomic explosions cause rain, reinforcing their panic.
After all, the Arabs had heard of the atomic bombs that the USA had used against Japan just three years earlier, and they knew that so many of the scientists who had developed them were Jews.
Convinced now that the Jews in Tzfat were using atomic bombs, Arab soldiers and civilians alike turned and fled northwards into the darkness.
G-d had miraculously made the Arbs hear a mighty army, thousands of Jews, and they thought that those Jews were attacking them with atom bombs.
In their panic the Arabs fled, leaving behind much of their weaponry.
When the Jewish forces entered Tzfat at first light, they found the town and the entire region deserted – as deserted as the four lepers had found the Aramæan camp thousands of years earlier.
Indeed, it was no mere coincidence or happenstance that our Sages selected this reading from the Prophets for the Shabbat which, in our time, immediately precedes Yom Ha-Atzma’ut.
Endnotes
[1] Hebrew מְצֹרָעִים, men stricken with צָרָעַת, tzara’at. This is often translated as “leprosy”, and indeed in modern Hebrew has been adopted for leprosy. However this is technically inaccurate: the tzara’at of the Tanach may display some of the same superficial symptoms as leprosy, but has no more than that in common with it. Nevertheless I use the admittedly inaccurate translations “lepers” and “leprosy” here, purely for convenience.
[2] The Talmud (Avot de-Rabbi Natan 1:4) and the Midrash (Vayikra Rabbah 1:15, Devarim Rabbah 3:9, et al.), calls Moshe thus. The Rambam (commentary to Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1) includes this as one of the thirteen Principles of Faith.