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Did God in fact speak to Abraham and make the promise reported (in Genesis 12: 1-

3)? To biblical man and to believers today the matter was and is clear: God did speak,
and his relationship to Abraham’s children and to the land of Canaan was secured by
his promise. Many interpreters, however, would understand God’s challenge as

something Abraham believed he had heard and that consequently he acted in
accordance with this belief.

The Torah: A Modern Commentary, W. Gunther Plaut, Union of American
Hebrew Congregations, 1981, pp 91,93.

Excerpted from Eliezer Ben Yehuda
The Dream and its realization (1918)
Translation: Ori Saltes

In 1880, when I was a student in the Russian college in the city of Dvinsk, and the
Russians were battling the Turks for the freedom of Bulgarians, and all the Russian
newspapers were unanimously praising the holy war that Russia was fighting for the

liberation of the Bulgarian nation from the Turkish yoke and for the restoration of
its ancient glory – it was then that the heavens seemed to open, and a bright light, a
pure and glowing light shone before my eyes, and a great inner voice cried in my ears:
The revival of Israel in the Land of the Fathers!

And by that voice, which from that moment on rang ceaselessly in my ears day and
night, all my thoughts and all the schemes I had made for my future life were shaken.
As dreams fade away at the morning light, my visions of devoting my life to the
Russian people’s struggle for
freedom and to the advancement of
all mankind, like most of my
comrades in the middle and upper
schools in Russia then, faded away,

and after an inward struggle in my
soul, the new idea got the upper
hand and a new phrase took over my
thoughts: Israel in it’s own land…

…As my political feelings burgeoned,
I felt more and more what a
language means to a nation… Just as
the Jews cannot be a living nation

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922) without returning to the land of
their fathers, so they cannot be a
living nation without returning to the language of the fathers. They must use it not
only in books and in matters of holiness and wisdom alone… but rather by speaking it,

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