Exodus

When my partner Haviva first sent me her symbols and sayings to tell me about her country of Israel I couldn't understand her complete love for the physical land of the place. Both of her symbols had to do with the land and how it had the ability to either nourish or destroy those who inhabit it and find it to be a holy land. I couldn't understand the attachment to the physical land it's not something I could comprehend. My inability to understand was similarly incomprehensible to Haviva. We talked about it in our emails back and forth but the attachment to the land is so natural to her it wasn't something she could easily explain to me. To help me understand the history and the attachment of the people to their land she prescribed Exodus by Leon Uris. The book follows a number of characters from various backgrounds and the struggle for a free State of Israel. The characters come from all over to smuggle people into Israel via the ship Exodus as well as fighting the government in power to gain access to the land they consider home.
Through reading this book I definitely came to understand so much more their connection to land. So many of the people who came to Israel had past's involving concentration camps and other forms of mistreatment and abuse due to their religion. Each person involved in the movement had been uprooted repeatedly for years due to the Nazi invasions of their countries and the war going on across Europe. None of them had a place to call home and most had been through tremendous ordeals. Through all of this a lot of what kept them going was their faith in this fabled place of Jerusalem and Israel as a whole. Every obstacle they had to encounter, every friend they saw die, every battle they fought or episode of mistreatment they endured they focused that much more on the land. Every time they lost something the put that caring into Jerusalem, into the liberation of their land of their country and religion. They lost everything and with every loss they suffered they put that much more devotion into their land. The physical land was all that could survive the war they were fighting and it was the only thing that would live on no matter how horribly or successful their cause went.
What impresses me most about all of this is the conviction each of these children and adults never waivered in their convictions about their mission. So many people were involved in this movement and not one of them ever had to think again about what they were doing or whether they were right in doing so. It was almost the only thing they didn't have to worry about. In most historic examples of large political movements there's usually some sub-sector that rethinks what they are doing and finds some fault in the movement they're supporting and yet that didn't seem to be the case with these people.
There was no way I could understand this concept before because I haven't ever lost as much as any of the fighters in the book. Nor have I ever believed in any cause, any battle as much as these people are. Even generations later, years after the creation of the state of Israel, these people's faith has not left them. It isn't something that they lost after the battle was over as so many cultures do. Haviva's love and faith in her own land and culture is something that has only been reinforced over the years something that is so primal and natural to her that she couldn't explain it to me or understand my own ignorance to the matter. It is a faith I have never had in both their God and their land.