Year Course Our Legacy

By Young Judaea

Our Legacy

By Talia Bodner, Year Course 2022-2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

Israel is my home
And I don’t mean just for this year and the near future while I am still here able to roam this beautiful country

 

Israel is my home because I am part of the Jewish nation
Israel is the physical construct of our liberation
It is not just the foundation for our community
It is the formation of our struggle for self-determination
It is the creation of a people who suffered years of frustration and ostracization

Let us give a standing ovation to every Jew in that came before me and you
Who pursued the fight for our ancestral land
To take command of our own legacy

The legacy me and you have the honor to maintain
It took 2000 years of our pain to get to this point
So let’s not lose it again to a moment of disjoint

We’ve been here before
The Romans tore down our temple and started a war
But we cannot ignore the infighting that was happening behind every door
Our own disunity left us done for

And even before
After King Solomon was no more
Fighting became a part of our core
Which made it easy for Israel and Judah to split
And now today we are seeing the same old shit

After everything we have undergone
And now we are fighting with ourselves from dusk till dawn
How have we let ourselves turn into an example of democracy gone wrong
In the face of our enemies we should look strong
But now we are tearing ourselves apart all on our own
Without unity in this nation I fear we’ll write our own gravestone

We cannot afford to fall apart
We have fought far too long and we are far too smart
We are a nation that shares one beating heart
So what it is going to take to help our heartbeat restart

We must not let this be another tale of our woe
We know how to undergo
Now is our time to show the world how we can grow

So, we need to remember how to respect each other
Hold onto our love for one another
Indeed we are the keeper of our brother
Does it really matter who is your mother?
Israel is a home for every Jew

We are a nation for believers and non-believers too
We fight like zealots and like pacificts do
We have gefilte fish and burekas on our menu
We are beautiful in every color, shade, and hue
We come from America, Morocco, Poland, Ethiopia, and FSU

So I think, we can be a home for people with any political point of view
It is our shared sense of peoplehood that acts as our glue
This is a moment I know we can get through
Lets put back the pieces that have gone askew
There’s thousands of years of hard work we will not be the ones to undo

We have a legacy to live up to
Israel needs to continue to be a home for me and for all of you

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