2023-10-20 18:30:47
What is really important? What touches us today – and won’t go away tomorrow? They are the things that have moved us since humans existed: happiness, love, family, relationships, time, stress, loneliness, farewell, sadness.
BILD columnist Louis Hagen*, coming from a German-Jewish family, sought answers to humanity’s eternal questions from poets, thinkers and researchers. And found a few answers that are astonishingly simple – and yet can enrich our lives.
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Israel is the Promised Land, it says in the Bible. Ancient Canaan, where Israel lies today, is also the land in which milk and honey flow in the “Book of Books”.
I come from a Jewish family, my ancestors were Sephardic Jews from Spain – many hundreds of years ago. We actually have nothing to do with Israel, no relatives live there and have never lived there.
My family was largely able to escape from the Nazis. Largely because my grandfather was murdered in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Why am I telling all this? These days people often ask me if I would go “back” to Israel.
BILD columnist Louis Hagen
Photo: Wolf Lux
This is certainly well-intentioned, at least without any bad intentions. Because German Jews – at least as the Nazis arbitrarily and racistly divided them into quarter, half and full Jews – did not and do not automatically have anything to do with Israel. Unless they were able to escape there in the 1930s – to the land where milk and honey flow.
I didn’t get to know Israel until I was in my mid-twenties. Even today (unfortunately) I hardly speak a word of Hebrew. Eretz Yisrael, the “Land of Israel,” is not my homeland. But since I was there for the first time, it has enveloped me and sucked me in, if I may say so myself.
Tel Aviv is the city of youth, I wrote when I was last there almost four years ago. When you’re there, you feel young yourself. Sandy beach on the Mediterranean and sun in December. People are full of joy for life and infect everyone with it. Tel Aviv never goes to bed.
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That’s how it was – until October 7th. Now almost all cafes and restaurants in the city are closed. I do not have to and cannot explain what Israel is feeling and suffering today. You can see this in the media every day.
All I can say is that I think without pause about this land that Jews call the “Promised One.” What you, dear readers, are currently reading is what I called “Column for Life”. And Israel is life.
And just as the Jews from Spain, among whom I count myself, survived many hundreds of years ago, Israel will survive. In this respect, today I call myself an Israeli at heart.
* Louis Hagen (76) was a member of the BILD editorial team for 13 years and is now a consultant at the communications agency WMP. His texts have also been published as a book and are available at koehler-mittler-shop.de.
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