That Which Can Be Created, Can Be Destroyed

I just finished reading Max I. Dimont's The Jews, God, and History and Will and Ariel Durant's The Lessons of History. I'm exhausted!

I've always believed that Jewish civilization has survived because it was landless, in diaspora, the theory being that anything that can be created, can—and will—be destroyed. The State of Israel will, like all landed countries, vanish one day. "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever."

Yet, perhaps the Jews will endure: a survival anomaly. The two books I mentioned above underscore my diaspora-means-survival theory.

In the London Review of Books article Benefits of Diaspora, Eric Hobsbawm writes, "Nevertheless, there are those who wish to withdraw from it into the old segregation of religious ultra-Orthodoxy and the new segregation of a separate ethnic-genetic state-community. If they were to succeed I do not think it will be good either for the Jews or for the world."

Amen.