An original translation of Rav Ouziel’s “Spiritual Will to the Jewish People”
In Memory of Alfred Shasha, A”H, Baghdad-born American Patriot, Global Entrepreneur, and Sephardi Philanthropist
Sephardi Ideas Monthly is a continuing series of essays from the rich, multi-dimensional world of Sephardi thought that is delivered to your inbox on the second Monday of every month. Except when it goes out on Tuesday.
This month’s featured essay is an original, never-before-published translation of one the most moving documents in the Zionist tradition in general, and the Religious Zionist tradition in particular: Rav Meir Ben-Zion Hai Ouziel’s “Spiritual Will to the Jewish People,” written a few weeks before his death in 1953.
Rabbi Meir Ben-Zion Hai Ouziel
Rav Ouziel’s intense love of the Jewish people and his passionate devotion to Jewish unity was highlighted in last month’s essay, “To Unite, Not to Divide: Rav Ouziel’s Big Sephardic Ideas,” by Rabbi Daniel Bouskila. The first Rishon LeZion (Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel), Rav Ouziel takes leave of the Jewish people by recalling the two goals that constituted “my heart’s desire and my life’s purpose”: teaching Jews to love the Torah of Israel, the land of Israel and the nation of Israel, and bringing peace to the Jewish people, “the entire congregation of Israel, with all its branches and parties.”
Acutely aware of the all-too-human tendency to take miraculous changes in fortune for granted, Rav Ouziel further exhorts the Jewish people to continually recall “the great and wondrous merit (that) has become manifest in our present generation… when (God) gathered us in from our scattered state and brought us up to the land that is the heritage of our ancestors.”
Today, Rav Ouziel’s “Spiritual Will” is an important and visceral reminder that loving one’s nation can serve as an ennobling force, a helpful corrective to the “sophisticated” predilection to look down upon unbridled love for one’s own people. What’s more, Rav Ouziel’s call to remember the magnitude of the in-gathering of the exiles is as necessary now as it was then, and perhaps even more so, for the state of Israel is often treated as a given, a fact-of-life, and it’s difficult to imagine that 100 years ago the Jewish people were stateless and scattered across the globe.
In order to grasp the greatness both of Rav Ouziel’s personality and the times in which we live, Sephardi Ideas Monthly is proud to present, for the first time ever in English Rav Meir Ben-Zion Hai Ouziel’s, “Spiritual Will to the Jewish People.”
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