I was listening to an interview of my daughter Lizzy Savetsky when she was asked: “What keeps you from blowing away when the winds of misfortune come your way?” Lizzy’s answer: “It’s our deep roots. We get those roots from knowing about our ancestors and the stories of how they survived adversity.” Each of us will be an ancestor; but more importantly, each of us is also a descendant. Those roots give us, as descendants, the strength to not only survive, but to thrive. We owe it to our ancestors. In this series on Family Legacy Planning, I have often stressed the importance of knowing our ancestors and their stories. Families that know where they come from have stronger family glue. Research shows that the more we know about our ancestors, the higher our self-esteem and the better equipped we are to overcome adversity. Indeed, it’s our roots that ground us and keep us from blowing away.
For the Blum family, our trip to Israel provided us a deeper connection to our roots than I’d ever imagined. As Jews, Israel is our ancestral homeland going back to biblical times. I knew the stories of King David capturing Jerusalem 3,000 years ago, and the continuous presence of the Jews in the Land of Israel since that time. What blew my mind on this trip was a visit to the City of David. When I saw that on our agenda, I questioned why I’d never been there before on previous trips. What I learned is that the archeological discovery of King David’s palace in Jerusalem is fairly new. It’s only in recent years that we now have new physical evidence that further proves the biblical connection of King David to Jerusalem. That tour didn’t exist on my prior trips to Israel.
Just south of the site where King Solomon’s Temple stood is now the City of David, the location of King David’s palace. It is an active archaeological dig. In recent years, they discovered a wall that is 15 feet wide. Given the width of the wall, it was clear it wasn’t surrounding an ordinary home. Then archaeologists located a corner of the wall, where the wall shifted from north-south to east-west. Within that wall, they discovered evidence of palace life. Then a monumental discovery occurred to identify the palace’s origins as belonging to King David and his descendants. They found a signet ring bearing the seal of King Hezekiah, a direct descendant of King David. By connecting dots, a whole history of King David’s palace was unearthed. They found a great pool (a “mikvah”) at the bottom of the hill where travelers would cleanse themselves before journeying up the road, past the palace, to the steps leading to the Holy Temple. The road is fully revealed now, as are the steps. The step heights are uneven, making it hard to scale up them at a fast pace. The teaching is that the uneven steps forced the worshippers to slow down and contemplate the significance of their ascent to the Holy Temple.
At the site of the Holy Temple, we studied stone ruins thousands of years old inscribed with Hebrew letters. The Hebrew language of that inscription is the same language spoken by our people today, a thread that connects Jews of today to Jews of the Bible. As the attached photo shows, our granddaughter Stella was able to read to us those Hebrew words, telling of the sounding of the shofar (trumpet) blasts to call Jews to Sabbath worship on Friday afternoons. Each of us could feel our roots growing deeper into that ancestral homeland as Stella read those ancient Hebrew words aloud to us.
Since the time of King David, there have been a series of conquerors who attempted to destroy the Jewish people and rob us of our homeland, but none prevailed. Even after the efforts of Ancient Egyptians, Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, Ancient Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders, and even today, Hamas, we’re still here. We’re a small people but with a powerful will to survive. We must survive. This is our home, and as Golda Meir reminded us, we have nowhere else to go. Our roots are here, and those roots run very deep. The Israel national anthem Hatikvah (a song of Hope) concludes with the hope of more than 2,000 years: “Lih-yot am chofshi b’ar-tzeinu, Eretz Tziyyon v’Yerushalyaim – To be a free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.”
This post wraps up my five-part series on our trip to Israel. It was life changing. We will never be the same. But now more than ever, our family knows our roots and the responsibility of carrying on the heritage our ancestors bequeathed to us. We come from an unbroken chain that goes all the way back to King David and the children of Israel. Laurie and I feel that responsibility, but more importantly, so do our children and grandchildren.
With the world now in a very dark place, it’s our prayer that we look upwards and find the Light that will bring us to a brighter future.
Marvin E. Blum
(1) Ira, Stella, and Lizzy Savetsky and Laurie and Marvin Blum standing at the site of King David’s palace, looking out at the south wall that surrounded King Solomon’s Holy Temple. (2) Ira, Stella, and Lizzy Savetsky, Laurie and Marvin Blum, and tour guide Yoni Zierler at the Jerusalem Archaeological Park learning about the Jews’ biblical roots in the Land of Israel. (3) Marvin Blum’s granddaughter Stella reading the ancient Hebrew inscription on archaeological ruins thousands of years old, with tour guide Yoni Zierler teaching the significance of these findings. (4) The Blum family’s tour guide Yoni Zierler today, having traded in his tour book for weaponry as he protects our homeland of Israel from yet another force that seeks to destroy us.