Yemen’s Millennia-Long Connection to the Land of Israel

While it has often been assumed that the queen of Sheba mentioned in the book of Kings was an African potentate, today most scholars locate her territory in what is now Yemen. Her famous visit to Jerusalem reflects the very long history of commerce and travel between the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula and the Land of Israel. Reviewing an exhibit at Israel’s Bible Lands Museum about this relationship, Eliana Rudee writes:

Through the trade of incense and aromatic plants like myrrh and frankincense—used in Temple worship, and worth the value of gold and silver in the contemporary market—the area that is now Yemen became a key hub in ancient Near Eastern trade.

This trade route [later] made it possible for Yemenite Jews to make the journey to the land of Israel. Though the trek was 1,500 miles, which often took two whole months to complete, there was extensive commercial trade between the two lands, and the bones of Yemenite Jews were often taken to Israel to be buried.

By the end of the 4th century CE, the kings of Himyar (south Arabia’s last major kingdom before the advent of Islam) adopted a monotheistic religion inspired by Judaism and became known as the “Jewish Kingdom of Himyar.” [It] was destroyed in 525 CE by armies from the Christian Ethiopian kingdom of Axum.

Read more at JNS

More about: Book of Kings, King Solomon, Land of Israel, Yemen, Yemenite Jewry

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society